Where Creativity Resides: Making Space For Your Essential Creative Self

What are we missing because of our rational conditioning?

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

(This is a follow-on post to last week’s. I guess I just wasn’t finished with this topic!)

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how our socialization into the rational paradigm of understanding the world results in negative outcomes that we’re largely unaware of. In last week’s post, I looked at how our societal preference for rational cognition can impede creative thinking. The reasons for this have to do with how different, even contradictory, rational and creative modes of cognition are. For those who are very entrenched in the logical, analytical, causal model of rational thinking, the ambiguous, often even paradoxical, nature of creative thought goes against everything they’ve been taught about how the world works and what comprises intelligent understanding. Today I want to explore another pitfall of exclusively using the rational paradigm to understand the world: an associated tendency to overlook information that cannot be understood via a rational approach.

This is an ironic pitfall, because what I’m talking about here is a version of the confirmation bias, a type of cognitive bias that rationalism is very keen on eliminating. A confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out or only recognize information that confirms previously held beliefs. A rational approach to creating knowledge about the world has failed if it falls prey to confirmation bias. The problem is that the rational approach is itself a biased perspective, so inevitably it can only be used to understand phenomena that adhere to rational standards. Not everything does.

We know this already, of course. Scientific approaches to understanding human behavior, for example, are imperfect, because human beings can be irrational. Behavioral economics is a field that arose because older models of humans as rational “utility maximizers” were failing to be sufficiently explanatory. It is possible to study irrational aspects of our world through a rational approach. What concerns me, however, are the things we are not even aware of because of our rational cognitive bias. We tend to dismiss out of hand anything that cannot be rationally explained. And no, I’m not talking about paranormal or similar phenomena here. I’m talking about what our intuitive, creative natures already understand: that reality is pure potentiality and paradoxical. As conscious beings we live in a world that we must at least partly understand rationally, but our creative selves reside in that plane of pure potentiality and paradox.

Creativity exists outside of time. It is nonlinear and anti-analytical. Sure, we can practice creativity within a rational framework, but it will only be a shadow of itself, a projection on a screen, a second-hand version. If you feel like you are forcing your creative practice, it’s because your rational mind has you in a stranglehold. Creativity can feel free, easy, and joyful. It can feel life-giving, life-sustaining. It can heal. But it needs free reign to do that.

The rational mind likes things to be onerous, because rational thought is itself effortful and time-consuming. But creative thought is light and lighting fast. It works by flashes of inspiration, not linear, progressive reasoning. For those flashes to occur, there must be space. You must let your creative self reside in that plane of pure potentiality, the place of nonsense and no-time. And that’s scary. It goes against everything we’ve been taught is right, correct, sane, beneficial, rational. The good news is that you don’t have to make all the space for creativity to shine. Just a little bit of space. A crack. Creativity is like water or light – it is irrepressible, and it will find that crack. But these cracks aren’t where creativity gets in. It’s where the creativity that already resides in you gets out, and shines its light into the world.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams. Lightman is a theoretical physicist who was one of the first people to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and humanities at MIT. Einstein’s Dreams is a collection of mini-essays about the nature of time, and each one describes a dream Einstein has about a world where time works in unique and sometimes non-rational ways. In one, causality gets mixed up. Cause and effect are erratic and random, effect sometimes occurring before cause.

Einstein dreams: In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

In this world, Einstein dreams, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective… It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.