On our 5 day retreats we help our guests explore their personal creativity and potential for self evolution. Whilst facilitating creativity sessions we have discovered that some people can be nervous about being put on the spot to come up with ideas and will interpret their own reluctance as a sign to themselves that they are not creative.
So we make sure that we never put people on the spot during our coaching and training sessions.
However it’s a well-known cliché that the one-thing professional ‘artists’ fear most is the blank canvass (or if you’re a writer the blank page).
For artists this is really about the fear of the inability to think of anything to put on the canvass. In other words – painters’ or writers’ block.
When people expect you to come up with a solution or idea, the despair of not knowing if anything will inspire you can be debilitating. And a big part of that is to do with the fear of not meeting expectations, both those of other people and your own. In other words-the fear of getting it wrong.
During our eclectic careers we have both made a living at some point by writing, composing or creating performances and have faced this dilemma on several occasions. In our experience there are two situations that lead you to the blank page.
A. You are going to reproduce something you have already expressed and you know how it will look, sound, taste or feel. You have a pre-designed piece of work so to speak.
B. You have something you want to express but this will be the first time you’ve tried to express it.
If it’s option A there should be little fear, as you know what to do having done it before.
Option B however is a grope into the unknown and that comes with the risk of a psychological block.
This led me to think of the ultimate creation on the first blank page and what would have happened, or not, if the originator of the ‘Great Work’ had had writers block. I’m talking about the moment before Genesis. Not the ‘prog rock’ band responsible for the career of Phil Collins but rather the nothingness from which time and space emerged at the moment of the big bang.
My understanding is that the entire universe is a creative and more over self-creating affair. My reasoning, I believe, is both philosophically sound and easily comprehendible.
It goes like this.
When time, space and creation began, science tells us that everything was contained in the potential of a singularity. A point no bigger than a tennis ball. But what was happening before the universe began to expand and what is it now expanding into?
I guess we might say that before time and space there was spaceless and timeless...ness. And the potential universe was contained in that.
A big blank page!
Some might say that the original spacelessness and timelessness was a sort of perfect bliss state. Heaven or Nirvana if you will.
But if the universe was originally in some perfect state of heavenly bliss why did it change and become a chaotic process of creativity. Why did anything else need to happen at all?
Just for fun? For a laugh...ha ha ha ha? Some might say that, yes!.
However, weren't we having enough fun in our perfect state of bliss?
Clearly not.
Others might say we're here to learn. But what could a being in a perfect state of bliss need to learn? Wasn't everything already perfect as it was?
Once again, clearly not.
If there were such a thing as a creator god who is perfect and all knowing, what need would it have to create something so imperfect as the known universe and mankind in particular? The devout will surely say that humans do not have the capacity to know the mind of the creator and that I am arrogant to even think that I can understand what god is let alone imagine what’s on its mind.
But that doesn’t explain why a perfect being in a state of perfect peace has any need to do anything at all and if what it is doing has produced us then I think we can all agree it’s intentions are probably neither perfect nor permanent.
Following this we might also assume that if there was ever a condition in the universe that was both perfect and permanent then we would be in that condition right now. As we are involved in, and the result of, an ever changing and evolving process, I think it would be fair to say that there is nothing permanent or perfect about the universe - other than its impermanence.
As far as we know, for the last 14 billion years the universe appears to have been, paradoxically, randomly creating order out of chaos. So we can deduce that there has not yet been a stable, permanent state of being in the Cosmos to date.
Therefore there can be no blue print or plan.
It hasn’t happened yet so whatever process or intelligence is currently behind creation clearly has no idea what it’s doing. It’s simply creating, trying things out.
The starting point of creation was no bigger than a tennis ball and yet it contained the potential for everything we see, hear, touch, taste and smell around us today. Every possibility was present in that moment as an impulse to become. And that impulse continues to evolve the world around us. We human beings are a product of this process and our self-consciousness has afforded us the ability to consciously create the world in our own image.
You might say that we are the random process of creation become conscious of itself.
Therefore, next time someone asks you for an idea, don’t be afraid of the blank page, because you are an expression of the original creative impulse. You have the creative power of the whole Cosmos within you.
So…what do you think?
Tom
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