Introduction (Part 1)
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
The book Creators
On Creating (1990), edited by Frank Barron, et al., cites the recent
years of rapid and radical social change, its destabilizing effect on individuals
and the outward affects on all aspects of our society. Not only is the destabilizing
effect felt in our society, but individuals are also reflecting that back
into society, into its organizations, businesses and institutions. The authors
assert that creativity is of compelling importance in solving individual
and societal problems. In an uncertain future, “…creativity
can only increase in value. It opens doors and historically produces change
for the better in the material condition.”
Creativity is a magical and supremely practical key, rarely recognized or
used either by the individual or society. How much better off would we be
if government were more creative in dealing with the issues it faces? Established
religions could shake themselves loose from creed and ritual and bring a
more personal realization of God to the faithful. Health care and public
education would open themselves to more creative collaboration with their
clients and use of their knowledge base.
The individual, who is the catalyst for and the force of all change and
creativity, would benefit immensely because he or she would be both the
active protagonist and the active beneficiary of such creative change. Personal
happiness would increase because individuals would find value and importance
in creating solutions that would benefit themselves and others. Society
would improve because of the active interest and stake in making these solutions
work practically. Society would improve because its service would now be
[once again] directly linked to preserving the individual. The individual
would improve because he/she was now the benefit of society.
But what is creativity? Though it’s been studied, analyzed dissected
discussed and documented as if it were a tangible thing, we have no generally
accepted definition of creativity—no agreement on precisely what it
is. The Dictionary? It defines creativity as “the ability to create.”
We tend to immediately link creativity to the arts, and perhaps in our current
mindset it is most apparent there because that is where it fits most precisely
with our hazy definition of it. “The ability to create?” To
create what? Things that didn’t exist before, or didn’t exist
the same way before they were created. They are the invisible, intangible
things of thought until they are actually created. And that, for the most
part, dwells comfortably within our culture and society as “art,”
mostly because of our cultural ignorance of art. The cultures of Europe
and Asia infuse an appreciation of art into their everyday lives, artists
are looked upon much as craftsman, skilled and filling a place in society.
In our Anglo-Western society, the place of art has been unsettled. It is
a frivolity, an amusement of the rich, an impractical and sometimes immoral
profession. We have for the most part ignorantly consigned “art”
to the realm of the unknowable. And in the realm of the “unknowable”
resides creativity.
Society trains us to obey the rules in jobs, in families, and life
in general. It is how society works. Eventually we become experts who have
mastered the rules and perform well inside their confines, meeting the expectations
of the status quo. As we do this, we begin to accept a status quo,
and the “rules” which started out as a generally good idea for
the organization of activity become blindly and blandly accepted “laws”
that govern and restrict the very thing they were established to do, which
is to encourage and maximize mental and physical activity. When these laws
remain unchallenged, especially in our individual thinking, they lead to
unproductive and sometimes bizarre ends.
Take, as an example, our railroad system. Trains run on something called
“standard gage,” which is the dimension of the train rails.
It runs on “standard gage” because Britain runs on standard
gage, and Britain initially built the first train cars for us. Britain made
the train cars a certain size, because the axels had to be a certain size.
They made their axels that size because their trains started out on roads,
and the roads were initially the width of the ruts in the roads—ruts
originally made by Roman chariots, which had two horses. So our trains are
the width of a Roman chariot. Now while this may not necessarily be “bad,”
it almost certainly could have been better. However, events just kept evolving
and no one questioned the wisdom of continuing to do things a certain way,
because they had always been done that way.
Books abound on the subject as seekers pursue a concept that eludes and
recedes as surely as we grasp and advance in an effort at understanding
it. Creativity. We all seem to recognize it when we see it. We admire it,
and perhaps envy it in others. But we do not know it—even when it
lives within us. Certainly even the primitive cave men who daily faced death
and survival created crude drawings that were more than mere histories and
factual data. The answer must be that creativity and imagination, the elements
essential to creating, are a basic part of every human being.
Creativity and innovation lie at the heart of our humanity. We prize creativity
because, in a sense, civilization has created itself and continues to create
itself. Yet a certain carelessness exists in regard to our cultivation of
creativity. Though we prize it and recognize its great merit, we also casually
disregard the cultivation of it in everyday life. Yet it is this freedom,
perhaps above all others, that enriches and gives meaning to the existence
that is otherwise merely a tracking of scheduled activity within non-creative
boundaries.
“Studies of creativity usually recount the actions of genius.”
Fritz (1991). The triumphs and the lives of those such as Kepler, Copernicus
and Einstein are recounted in explanations of creative innovation. But the
common man must shrug and think to himself, “But I am no Einstein.”
So the challenge becomes to specify the creative genius in relation to the
daily travails of the common man, illustrating more perhaps of those days
when even Einstein was “common,” when he arrived at nothing
more than careless doodles on a paper.
Lynn Levesque, in Breakthrough Creativity states, “…creativity
is the ability to consistently produce different and valuable results. For
creativity to be useful and valuable it must be constant and intentional
in its application.” This is not to say that spontaneous moments of
unprovoked creativity may occur through sudden insight, but that for creativity
to be a tool to us, we must learn how to bring it into play constructively
and consciously.
An anecdote of a Hollywood executive recounts his weekly “creative
meetings” where he would sit with designers and writers and invariably
ask for everyone to throw as many ideas into the pot as possible, with the
goal of taking the “top 50” ideas and pasting the most-liked
elements together in order to get the best possible creative expression.
But he didn’t last long. He was not creative and neither were his
meetings. There was no creative application. He was making soup not only
without a recipe or regard for the ingredients, but without regard to a
goal of a particular kind of soup.