CHAPTER EIGHT

MEDITATION FOR CREATIVITY

The Creative Power of the Mind

The creative power of the mind is virtually limitless. At a physiological level, we only use a small percentage of the brain’s capacity for thinking and problem-solving, while at a psychological level, with the right stimulation and guidance, we are capable of original and effective productions in most branches of the arts and sciences. The mind is a well of untapped potential.

Much of our creative ability is stifled in the early years by the conscious mind. Creative impulses arise from the unconscious (we are still unsure of the exact mechanisms involved), and are then submitted to scrutiny by the conscious mind. But all too often the conscious mind becomes over-critical. Children are taught by others that they are ‘no good’ at drawing or at music or at painting or writing poetry, and their creative impulses are discouraged and devalued. In this way, inhibitions increasingly come between them and their creativity. Barriers are erected between the conscious and the unconscious levels of the mind, and children are literally educated out of their creative abilities.

Psychologically this is intensely damaging. Children are born with a fundamental drive to create. Through creativity, inner energies that long for expression throughout life are satisfied, energies which have been behind not only humanity’s achievements in the arts and in the sciences, but behind the practical business of utilizing natural resources in order to survive. Without creativity, the human race would not have made it through the long centuries of evolution up to the present day.

Any such energy which is not channelled into socially acceptable forms and given full expression is likely to cause psychological problems. The mind feels restless and unfulfilled, searching for something without knowing quite what it is. There is a feeling that some undefined potential is going to waste, and that something precious is being denied the light of day.

In addition to its innate energy, creativity has a further function in that it allows emotions and feelings to be expressed in satisfying and healthy ways. Singing, dancing, painting, writing and sculpting have from the beginnings of recorded history served as channels for humanity’s deepest hopes, fears and insights. They serve as outward revelations of our inner states of mind, help us communicate with each other, and draw men and women together into shared expression of feelings. Creativity, in a real sense, serves as the voice of the community, articulating harmonies and tensions, and helping to make us comprehensible to each other.

All young children love to create. Two of the first actions of the very young are to sing and to scribble. Throughout the primary school years, art remains the activity most children best enjoy, followed by physical movement. Only later, as they grow older and become examination-orientated, and convinced either that there is no ‘future’ in artistic ability or that they lack the necessary skills, do they turn away from these ‘non-serious’ subjects and deny an integral part of their birthright. Creativity is the ability to go beyond the known and the customary, and to find new ways of doing things. Without creativity, the human race would go on doing things in the same way, generation after generation, and would have failed to evolve beyond instinctive, animalistic behaviour.

Psychologists recognize that creativity, whether in the arts or in the sciences, expresses itself in terms of three things – fluency (the ability to generate a range of ideas), flexibility (the ability to draw these ideas from many different sources) and originality (the ability to come up with new ideas). For example, a simple creativity test asks children to think of as many uses as they can for a house brick. A response that is merely fluent would involve numerous ideas, but all drawn from the same category (e.g. the use of a brick as a loadbearing object). On the other hand, a response that is both fluent and flexible would recognize that in addition to being load-bearing, a brick can weigh things down, can be used as a missile, as a means of storing heat, as an obstacle, as a metaphor and so on. A response that is fluent, flexible and original would also contain some unusual uses, such as grinding the brick into powder, and using the powder for cleaning and polishing.

Many leading artists and scientists have testified to the fact that their most creative ideas have come to them in moments when their minds were relaxed, or when they were daydreaming, or even sleeping. Of course, they would have prepared the ground by study and experiment beforehand, but it seems that the unconscious, which is the source of creative ideas, can often best bring material up into the conscious mind when the latter is in a quiescent mood.

Meditation is one of the most effective ways of achieving this mood, and when children meditate, creative ideas often arise unbidden. It seems likely that meditation also helps creativity at other times, keeping open the channels between the unconscious and the conscious mind, thus allowing creative ideas to emerge into awareness. Insight and intuition, as valuable in the sciences as they are in the arts, make their presence felt, and the mind becomes increasingly free to enjoy more of its own richness.

There are many meditations that actively encourage creativity, partly through helping with visualization (see also Meditation 11, pages 103–5), and partly through heightening the meditator’s inner awareness. The following three exercises are a good starting point for developing creativity. The first introduces and encourages creativity, while the two that follow deal more specifically with fluency, flexibility and originality.

MEDITATION 8: Encouraging Creativity

After establishing meditative awareness as usual, ask the children to visualize the following scene:

• Imagine there is a white screen just between and above your closed eyes. See the outline of a house appear on the white screen, just a plain outline, without any details. Now see the front door appear. Now see each of the windows. Now the chimneys. And now the house is being coloured. Next, you can see the details of the garden, perhaps with trees and flowers and a pond. Then the birds arrive, and the squirrels come to look for food on the lawn. Now the sun begins to shine, and fills the garden with light and shadows, and the front door opens and children come out into the garden to play.

The advantage of using this as a meditation instead of asking the children to draw each of these things is that their visual imagination is likely to be much better developed than their skills with a pencil or a paintbrush. Making the link between what is seen in the imagination and what is reproduced on paper can come later during an art lesson (and especially in connection with the work arising from Exercise 5 on pages 43–4). The more vividly a child can visualize a scene, the more he or she can capture its essence on paper. But in any event, skill in drawing is not the object of the exercise. Creativity in a drawing is apparent in the details it includes, and in the arrangement of the details, rather than in the quality of draughtmanship.

This meditation can take almost any subject as its starting point. Once the children have worked with the picture of a house, they can meditate upon a scene at the seaside or in the mountains or on a farm, or be asked to visualize a sporting scene, or a children’s party, or an episode from an exciting film, or a zoo full of animals, or even a busy street. As the work progresses, include scenes that on the face of it have little to offer visually. The more inventive children become, the more able they are to see the possibilities in the most unpromising material. For example, they can be asked to work with a foggy afternoon, or with a pond in winter, or with a quiet country lane. Don’t ask the children to ‘draw’ or to ‘put in’ details. Instead, tell them to ‘see’ these details appear. They should not be making a conscious effort to ‘create’ something. As in a dream, the unconscious will create things by itself if left to get on with it. Children, with their spontaneous approach, are far better at this than are adults. When faced with the same exercise, some adults find themselves staring at nothing but the blank screen. The only advice to give to them is patience. Details will emerge eventually. The problem seems to be that the conscious mind, taken aback by the invitation to allow things to emerge by themselves, regards the task as impossible, and therefore actually inhibits the creative images from appearing.

Fiona

Fiona, an eleven-year-old with a rather unsettled home background, found the above exercise not only helped her to work more creatively in school, it also enabled her to calm some of her worries and to go to sleep more easily at night. Her favourite starting point was a woodland just behind her home. ‘I see it with all the leaves just coming on the trees in spring, so that I can see the sky through the branches. I look around to see if there are any flowers, and sometimes I find bluebells and celandines and wild primroses. Then sometimes a rabbit or a bird comes to say hello. Once I heard the voices of my friends, and sometimes when I fall asleep I dream I’m still in the wood, and it makes me happy.’

MEDITATION 9: Fluency and Flexibility

A rather different approach to creativity is encouraged by the following meditation that invites the children to generate as many different versions of the same object as possible. Ask the children to visualize a blank screen as before, then continue as follows:

• Allow a cat to appear on your screen. Look closely at the cat. Notice its colour, the length of its tail, and the way it is sitting or standing. Now look at its face, and see that it has a very contented expression, as if it has just been given some cream. Now see the expression change to a watchful one, as if it suspects there is a mouse under the chair. Now see it change to a disappointed expression, as it realizes there is no mouse there after all. Now the expression changes to a happy one, as the cat thinks she hears the children coming home from school. Now it changes to a cross expression, as she realizes the children are going off to play without first coming into the house. Now the expression becomes sleepy, and now hungry . . .

You can carry on with as many variations as you like. The children are experiencing their ability to change what they are seeing in a variety of quite subtle ways. You can use other subjects in addition to the cat, for example:

• a country scene in which the seasons change through spring, summer, autumn and winter

• a day that goes from sunny to cloudy, and then to stormy and back again

• an artist’s sketch pad on which the artist quickly draws the same scene from different viewpoints

• the children themselves looking in a mirror and seeing their reflections in a variety of clothes – school clothes, best clothes, summer clothes, winter clothes, pyjamas, sports clothes.

Don’t linger too long over any one scene. The purpose of the meditation is to experience fluency and flexibility, and the ingenuity with which the mind can generate creative scenes.

The last two meditation exercises encourage originality, but there are even more specific ways of doing so, as in the following exercise:

MEDITATION 10: Originality Exercise

Again, start by asking the children to visualize a blank screen.

• On the screen, you can see an inventor standing in his or her workroom. The inventor is going to invent a new way of travelling. He has had enough of cars and ships and bicycles and aeroplanes, and is going to invent something that no one else has ever thought of. Look at how he gathers together all the bits and pieces that are going to be needed. Now see how these are put together. Notice how the finished object looks. Where is it intended to travel? Look to see whether it really is something new or not. Look to see if you think it is going to work, and if you would like to ride in it.

Instead of something in which to travel, the inventor could be working on a new writing machine perhaps, or a new way of digging the garden or washing the dishes or making the beds or cleaning the car. Choose something linked to the children’s own experience, and therefore likely to hold their interest.

When discussing the results of this exercise, take care not to praise some children’s originality over that of others. Each time a child thinks of something that is new for him or her, originality has been demonstrated, even if many thousands of people have thought up the very same thing in the past. Originality can be all too easily stifled if children are led to believe that anything they come up with has already been thought of before, and that their originality is of no value compared to that of the great men and women of the past or even to that of other children. Reflect on how many adults are held back in their creative thinking by just such misguided notions!