Spiritual concepts
Creativity and imagination
Creativity and imagination go together, to be creative you need imagination. Having said this there is no commonly agreed definition of creativity!
Creativity is not just the invention of ‘useful’ things by engineers or architects, for example. It includes the creativity of every artist and poet and author of fiction, every clothes designer, every creator of gardens and fine buildings, every breeder of new plants, every chef, every interior designer. They create, but they create beauty and enrich our lives by adding new creations which are not necessarily ‘useful’, they are just good for the soul, they lift us up to higher plains. These should make our life more enjoyable, pleasurable, and uplifting.
Thus perhaps creativity is better defined as the ability to create something which is new and possibly useful, which may enrich our lives or the lives of other members of the planet and which may also be a thing of beauty. And as such creativity may involve, for example:
- Painting, sculpture and drawings
- Books, poems
- Music
- Buildings/architecture
- Building interiors – offices and the home
- Furniture
- Gardens and plants
- Clothes
- Meals
- Inventions that are mechanical, electrical, chemical or otherwise
‘Art’ is not about the expression of talent or the making of ‘pretty’ things, it is about the preservation and containment of something of the eternal or alternatively something of us. It is about arresting life and making it available for contemplation.
If you see a painting someone has done where they have used their imagination to the full, you see into their soul, you see them. It is why creation of an art object is such a traumatic experience for any artist who puts their work up for display or for sale. Rejection of the work is like a rejection of self. But just as much rejection can be felt if you try to decorate yourself and the image you present is rejected, or you decorate your house and people don’t like it – they have rejected you, not just your decoration.
Conversely if you love a person’s house and its decoration or the body decoration of a person and get special feelings about it, then you are effectively loving them
True art captures the eternal in the everyday and it is the eternal that feeds the soul.
Observations
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- Agassiz, Louis – Essay on Classification – The unity of plan in otherwise highly diversified types
- Avicenna - The Canon of Medicine - The unbalanced mind
- Beethoven - Für Elise
- Cartwright, Sir Fairfax Leighton - The Mystic Rose - The Gardeners
- Chesterton, G K - Orthodoxy - The desirability of an active and imaginative life
- Custance, John - Wisdom, Madness and Folly - The 'fully alive' state of mania
- Dante - Purgatorio - Canto 17
- Descartes, Rene - Why some people are unable to conceive of the existence of a spiritual realm
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Intellect - On inspiration
- Hazlitt, William - The Indian Jugglers
- Hobson, Dr Allan - Dreaming and its use in creative pursuits
- Jung, C G - The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature - Imagination and inspiration
- Khan, Hazrat Inayat - Misc. Quotes - On art & diversity
- Khan, Hazrat Inayat - The Art of Being and Becoming - On the inspiration for art
- Koestler, Arthur - Janus - Creative thought
- Koestler, Arthur - Janus - Learnt function
- Koestler, Arthur - Janus - The nature of genius
- Masefield, John - Shakespeare and spiritual life
- Ouspensky, P D - Tertium Organum - On love
- Schopenhauer, Arthur - The World as Will and Idea - Imagination and genius
- Sensory deprivation, inspiration and creativity
- Shaivism - Concepts and symbols - Reincarnation and Destiny
- Socrates - Plato Phaedrus - On divine madness
- Stockham, Alice Bunker - Karezza - And Infertility
- Stockham, Alice Bunker - Karezza - Harnessing sexual energy to produce creative energy
- Stockham, Alice Bunker - Karezza - Listen, listen to the voice
- The Cloud of unknowing