How do we incorporate creativity and consciousness into our daily life? By being truly alive. It seems to me that to be human is to be creative. Any other approach to life, such as living mechanically, seems alien to me.
When I sit down to write articles for this website, I often start without a topic. I’ll wait and wait until an idea comes to me. And then I’ll start writing. If I can get beyond my mind, the writing will be informative not only for my readers, but for me. I will discover insights as they unfold from my consciousness, from beyond my mind. Where once there was nothing, an article comes to form. Each time this happens it enables me to feel oneness with the universe.
Creativity and consciousness connects me with the source of all. Through creativity, I become acutely aware that everything in the universe comes from an unmanifested state of existence. You can call it our source of being, God, Brahma, or Allah. It doesn’t matter to me. I just know that it is consciousness, unbounded oneness, from which everything comes and to which everything goes. Physicist David Bohm describes this process as an eternal unfolding and enfolding between an implicate order of formlessness and an explicate order of form. To participate consciously in this dance between these two worlds of form and formlessness is enlivening, to say the least.
In everything we do, we have thus two choices, to do it creatively or mechanically; with consciousness or without consciousness. When we bring our awareness, creativity and consciousness into what we do, our life becomes a creative act.
Creativity and Consciousness is always seeking avenues of expression.. It can be expressed in not only the arts, but in daily life. By aligning creativity and consciousness, we can speak in ways that uplift people; we can be expressive in our body language that communicates warmth and acceptance, we can perform our work with a dignity that inspires and uplifts people, and we can make a creative work out of our own life, leaving a legacy of truth, brotherhood, compassion and honesty. Creativity and consciousness, when blended together, can create such a splendor of an inner life that it is possible for it to communicate from within us to awaken others.
On September 11, 1893, a classic example of that took place at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Vivekananda, a disciple of Ramakrishna, took the stage and looked out on the crowd of seven thousand people who were curious as to what he would say. This was a first. Most of these people had never heard or seen a Hindu monk before. But when he addressed them with the words: “Sisters and Brothers of America…” the whole audience went into an unexplainable divine ecstasy–a standing ovation that lasted for more than three minutes.
There were more than words being communicated when he spoke. It was the power of his presence and his power of truth behind his simple words, “Sisters and Brothers of America.” This inner power of Vivekananda was created not by a mechanical approach to life, but by a creative one, by being open to the creative forces of consciousness. He participated with universal creativity and consciousness in shaping his inner life (as do all mystics of higher consciousness) by a creative combination of perception and receptivity and a sincere desire to experience oneness with others. For the audience, sisterhood and brotherhood became a self-evident truth. That was creativity at its most sublime.
Along these lines, the simple act of saying “I love you” is a form of creativity and consciousness, for it is a perception of the Beloved and an expression of it. To say “I love you” is to say “in you I feel oneness, I see beauty, truth, wholeness, and harmony and I am uplifted to a higher state of being for having recognized that in you.”
So we have the opportunity to be creative every moment, for every moment we can with our perception see the oneness of existence and express that with love. Consciousness is both perceptive and creative. All of evolution is creativity and consciousness seeking higher and higher forms of expression. And the highest creative act is the seeking of our self beyond form as consciousness itself. That is the highest form of perception and the expression of that would be the highest form of creativity.
And that is the same type of creativity and consciousness enjoyed by the greatest of painters. For instance, impressionist painter Paul Cezanne said of Claude Monet, “He is just an eye, but my God, what an eye.” With his eye, Monet saw the sacred reality behind the form. In the book, In Quest of the Face of God, the late painter Lyn Ott said, “Monet ignored the form and saw only the light itself.” That’s creativity-seeing beyond form, into essence, which is consciousness itself, and expressing that in the world of form.
When we are mechanical, we are not releasing the creativity and consciousness of our present moment. We will not have the alertness that is essential to perceive subtle beauty. We will be more likely to be thinking about the past or worrying about the future.
But in the creative act we lose our sense of past and future and are fully engaged in the present moment. We are in a state of receptivity, of allowing life to unfold within us. Thus the act of being creative is the breeding ground of more creative activity. And the opposite is true as well; a mechanical approach to life is the breeding ground of robots, evidenced by the fact that automation is replacing workers around the world.
Some people think that the expression of creativity and consciousness is reserved only for the artists, inventors, musicians, and writers. But everyday life requires creativity of everyone. As Einstein said, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” We need to go beyond thought, into the realm of oneness and consciousness. There you can always find creative solutions waiting to be discovered.
