Do you want to be creative?
By: Chandrahas Joglekar
Tags: Innovation, Creative, Creative Process, Personality, Creativity

What is being creative? Can we be creative? ‘Creativity’ has been variously defined and classified also! The act of creation is very abstract; Any attempt to ‘define’ it is not only futile but ridiculous, because there cannot be a ‘science’ of creation or ‘training’ in creativity. Creativity is epiphanic, like the spiritual experience: It can be described, not defined and there can be many descriptions.

How is creativity determined? Something is creative only when it is compared with something else. This means creation cannot exist on its own or there is nothing inherent about creation and it can be judged as creative or not creative only on the basis of the nonexistence of something similar from the same category. If we say Picasso’s Guernica or Michelangelo's David, Newton’s Gravity, or Einstein’s Relativity, are creative masterpieces or great scientific inventions, what it really means is that no other similar painting, sculpture, or concepts existed before their creation. Uniqueness is the hallmark of creativity.

Guernica by Pablo Piccasso (1937) | Keystone/Getty Images

Who will decide if something is unique or not? The simple answer is — the tradition that will determine uniqueness. In this sense, creativity has to be judged against the relevant traditional ways of thinking or doing. In other words, creativity breaks traditions and opens up new paths and avenues.

However, mere newness or freshness of approach may not result in creation. Hitherto unknown combinations of things or enhancements of products may at best be called innovations, because innovations are often planned or designed on the basis of some criteria, such as need identification, feedback, or suggestions. Creation is unplanned, undesigned and its source is unknown. That’s why a lot of mystery is associated with the process of creation.

If we try to study the process of creation, the main difficulty is that the creator is unable to explain how an idea came to his or her mind or how he or she did something in a particular way. Creativity happens; It cannot be anticipated and therefore, no preparation or planning is useful. There is no place, time or condition for creation.

The real question is if creativity is a ‘happening’, what is its source? From where it emanates? Surely creative ideas come from the human mind — and if the process is unknown or unexplained, it has to be the unconscious mind.

Psychologists have theorized that the unconscious is a reservoir of all individual experiences: Anything and everything experienced goes to the unconscious mind and it is like a huge garbage bag. Experiences stored or rather dumped in this bag are difficult to locate or retrieve because of the lack of any systematic organization of the storage.

It is often believed that in order to be creative, the creator must not be conscious of the act of creation in the sense that the creator must be completely neutral, uninvolved, unbiased, and non-intervening in the process. This belief probably led to the misconception that in order to create, the creator may get intoxicated or drugged.

Consciousness means cognition of and responsiveness to the surroundings. It is connected to our personality because we tend to cognize the outside world according to our learning and inclinations. But what is personality? It is merely an accumulation of characteristics that either a person has acquired, approved, or claims or poses to have possessed. Personality is thus cultivated, unnatural and unreal, generating ego, trapping a person into a self-created image, and making it difficult to escape from itself. Therefore, personality is the greatest hindrance to creation.

The process of creation can be easily likened to the process of meditation, which, in essence, is supposed to attain an egoless, thoughtless state of mind that can easily witness the internal happenings with enhanced perceptiveness. This ability to communicate with the deeper self or the unconscious mind is necessary for creation.

Spiritualists like Osho and Krushnmurti delineate creativity as non-purposive and non-utilitarian action. Innovation and production are clearly purposive and utilitarian activities, therefore, according to them, these cannot be called creations.

To conclude, in order to be creative, you must learn to submerge your ego, remove self-consciousness, escape from your own personality, and must be able to act without any purpose. In other words, your actions must be totally self-contained, i.e the end in itself. If you can work in this manner, creativity will happen to you.