fbpx

I spent the weekend doing one of my favorite activities in Chicago: roaming the city with my wife Laura, book and computer tucked in my backpack, no particular agenda. A perfect summer weekend of exploring, discovering, reading, and for me, the thing that brings the most joy, ‘creating’. We perused the Grant Park art fair in downtown Chicago and strolled through Pride Fest in Boys Town (a part of the Lakeview area with a large LGBT population). I also found time to read a few chapters of Michael Pollan’s wonderful new book “How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence”. The sheer diversity of art and artist at the art fair, the unique expressions of attire, dance and music at Pride Fest, and the lingering thoughts from Pollan’s new book, all seemed to converge and lead me to this blog on ‘creativity’.

Where does creativity come from and how does it arrive?
For me there is usually a convergence of thoughts or events that seem to organize in my mind in such a way that those thoughts and events reveal something new or stimulate imagination in such a way that previously unseen dots are connected into new novel patterns. The Art Fair, the Pride Fest, and Michael Pollan’s new book all converged in my personal stream of consciousness in such a way as to provide the raw material in the form of connected abstract imagery, thoughts and feelings for this blog post. For me, the insight isn’t real until it is given shape in the world. Once the raw material is in awareness it must be acted upon if it is to be made manifest. In this case, the translation of those novel patterns in the mind into these symbols (words) that convey some of the novelty to you…

I hope.

All creativity comes out of one’s imagination, that is, out of the mind, and in my mind today was this thought: the very first creative act came out of the Mind of God some 13.8 billion years ago as the ‘Big Bang’. It was then that the source (Mind of God) created space, time, matter and manifestation and all the raw material ever needed for every creative act that would follow. That was a bold thought, I thought, and then I was sure that I am now—13.8 billion years later—the leading edge of that same creative act that came out of the source. And so are you.

I am (as are you) inseparable from the same Mind of God and the same creative act that birthed the universe. And then it hit me; I source my personal creativity from this same source (as do you), the same ground of being, the same Mind of God, the same causeless cause that brought forth the first creative act billions of years ago. This is where all creativity comes from.

If we are one with the source of creation, why isn’t creative breakthrough always available in our personal life?

It is…but…

The survival mechanism of the lower human brain operates in your life within a closed loop. It tries to minimize risk and reduce access to anything that does not promote its primitive approach to safety. It does this through the habituation of familiar patterns, i.e. Sameness = Safety. This habituated loop of defense leads to rigidity in the brain and mind, and closes the access valve to the unknown, shutting down the flow of creativity. Anything ‘new’ that does not immediately need to be known for your survival is closed off. And of course, creative emergence is that act of something new and previously unknown coming into being. Through these last million years or so of human evolution, this closed lower brain survival loop was only disrupted when catastrophe occurred and we were forced to experience or learn something new. Ice ages, famines, wars, etc., destabilized the lower brain loop and forced creativity. It is also in our personal lives (today) that the lower brain repeats the same patterns in our lives until crisis forces us into new thoughts, behaviors, and even sometimes forces evolution into new world views. But we don’t have to wait for crisis any longer…

“Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude.” – Mathematician and Process Philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead

Preparing the brain for creative breakthrough…

To ‘consciously create’ you MUST prepare your brain FIRST for creative insight. You can attempt to induce creativity by thinking positive thoughts, exercising, meditating, doing yoga or putting yourself in stimulating environments—all approaches that I encourage—but creative breakthrough requires that your physical brain tune itself to the frequency of creativity. This is the missing piece; we must change the brain FIRST.

We now know the specific brain physiology that underpins creativity and we know how to create that physiology. Science informs us that creativity, insight and intuition leap from an energized coherent Higher Brain that is flooding with alpha waves. This high amplitude, high alpha wave, Higher Brain state creates the physiological condition for creativity and is consistent with the brain changes we see during Higher Brain Living®. This was one of the findings that lead to the creation of Source Code Meditation™, the brain first meditation revolution. When we access this specific Higher Brain state we can open our minds to the source so creative emergence can come through us. In this high energy, high alpha wave, Higher Brain state, events, occasions, thoughts, feelings and sensations converge in our consciousness and give rise to sudden and dramatic new novel ways to see our life and see the world.

Lower brain, survival-based stress physiology closes the ‘valve’ to the transcendent source of all creation. How do we keep ourselves open to the ‘Mind of God’ so that we can receive the divine spark of personal creativity? High energy, high alpha wave, Higher Brain states open that ‘valve to the source’ so that ‘creative leaps’ spontaneously and effortlessly flow into your awareness and can be acted upon. We have the ability to rapidly and deliberately promote the precursor in your brain for creativity. Source Code Meditation preps the brain for creativity, so the simple creative solutions on the other side of complexity and overwhelm emerge in your mind. This is how our personal problems become opportunities and how the world’s ‘wicked problems’ become solved.