philosophy and psychology of creativity

[Adam Blatner]

The philosophy of creativity is radical, because it requires a fine tuning of a particular variable.
    To be spontaneous, one of the components that gives rise to creativity, one must open, and believe that there is something to which one opens, a kind of "there," a muse, a god, a spirit, an unconscious that can be creative, whatever it's called, it's trans-personal, beyond the ego and its controls or even the capacity to talk about or define what is opened to. It's a kind of surrender.

    And yet there is a tendency in the psyche to grasp that which one has opened to, to name it, try to define it, language it (language here being used as a verb!), know what it is. Yet as soon as one crystallizes that which one opens to, it becomes a bit of a cultural conserve, and interferes with further opening. 

    So the trick is to "believe" enough to open, to allow that connection with whatever mysterious source it may be to operate; yet not to believe so much that you begin to believe that you know what you're believing in, because whatever you think it is, it's more, and it's different from your limited understanding. 

      My tentative solution is to cultivate imagination as an intentional act, to know you're playing, imagining, to have that extra surplus reality "frame" around it, to put it into virtual parentheses, a working model, a scaffold for intuition. Yet, though you use it, you're more than ready to deconstruct the scaffold in the service of building another one, a different possibility, allowing for creative deconstruction and re-construction, re-opening. 

     Still, this model itself is tentative, and I'm open to feedback as I wrestle with what seems to me to be some paradoxes of creativity. 

    Warmly, Adam
Adam Blatner, M.D.
   website: www.blatner.com/adam/   
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