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The attempt to characterize the behavior and expressive activity [art] of the insane as the meaningless product of neurochemical disturbance is nothing more than the most recent expression of the terrifyingly intense need felt by some psychiatrists to put a stop to all “abnormal manifestations.”
— John McGregor
Ghosts, demons and other creatures with neither name nor domicile have been around me since childhood.
— Ingmar Bergman
Great wits are sure to madness near allied;
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
— John Dryden
The wellsprings of artistic creativity appear to be fed from many sources, including so-called mental illness.Not surprisingly, creativity, especially heightened creativity, therefore is sometimes associated with insanity, since it is inclined to frequent much the same terrain which madness roams, somewhere below, outside, beyond, or otherwise apart from the comparatively sterile flatlands of status quo reality. The Minotaur is not about to stroll up to the surface and sit still while we paint or sculpt its likeness; if we truly want to bring it to canvas or poetic life, we’re going to have to descend — and not just intellectually — to its lair, with no solid guarantee that we will return (or at least return intact).
In the labyrinths that house madness — but not only madness — dwell more than a few of the intimations, images, and imperatives that fuel the artist, or the artistic impulse. It is into this dreamlike, perhaps seemingly chaotic, sometimes terrifying, and often overwhelminglocale that the serious artist must sooner or later descend, not in a tour bus or bathyscaphe, but alone and naked, open-eyed, significantly unattached to the familiar or known. Some
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artists choose to descend, some have to, and some — like Van Gogh or Dostoyevski — are already there.1
And though it all went wrong I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
— Leonard Cohen
Art — the poetry of creativity, the aesthetic precipitating of intuition — inevitably draws not only from many sources, but also from many selves, even if only one of these does, or is given credit for, the final “translation.”
It is easy to be seduced by contemporary culture’s semi-deification of autonomy and “I did it my way” individualism, and to forget that not only are we all in the same boat, but that we’re all waves of the same shoreless Sea.
Life’s art are we, framed by what is beyond all framing. As sages have long taught, nothing truly exists apart from and independent of everything else, including us.
So should the captain — or artist — be made any more special than the deckhand or supposedly less creative person? Everyone and everything with whom, and with which, we are involved is part of the creative process. We’re needed, yes, but so are they. Is the flower more important than its stem or roots? Can its bloom be truly separated from the sunlight, water, weather, and soil that brought it into being? And can these flower-precursors, these non-flower elements of flower-ness, themselves be truly separated from what brought them into being? What is being pointed to here is not independence, nor dependence, but rather interdependence on every scale, an interdependence that’s but the presenting surface of primordial inseparability.
So much for the mythos of the solitary artist — which, not surprisingly, is most common in cultures that overvalue personal independence. Creativity at essence is inescapably collaborative — as perhaps most obviously exemplified by the communally-oriented art of places like Bali — and needs to be recognized as such, both at the level of cultural brainstorming, and in a more purely or privately personal sense.
In the spirit of such collaboration — which doesn’t necessarily require physical proximity to “participating” others — individuality does not have to wither or get crowded out, but rather can flower, and flower with idiosyncratic flair
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and beauty and bouquet, since it has sufficient support to breathe and stretch and live without having to try to be or remain “on top.” Independence and dependence can then beneficially coexist, bringing out the best in all involved.
For much of the day I have been feeling off center, oddly fragile. My focus is less keen than usual; I’m definitely off balance. And yet as I now begin to write, I immediately settle, without trying at all. It seems that the very intention to create—
whether with a plan or not — recenters me. Perhaps my off-balanced state gives me an energetic edge, providing both impetus and fuel for creativity. This fuel, once ignited, rearranges me into a conducive environment for what needs to be written. A magic of which I never tire.
Not that it always begins like this; often I feel stable and settled well before I sit down to write. But always there is surplus energy as soon as I start, even if I am exhausted. Diverse and sometimes discordant elements in me find a common rhythm, a central pulse and purpose in which all can share and be given a voice simultaneously individual and collective.
So as soon as creativity shifts from intention to actual expression, it seems that internal elements — desires, thoughts, feelings, habits that take turns masquerading as me — line up. But no, it’s before that, in the very genesis of intention. At the first whiff of creative possibility, the scattered elements within me quickly find a working harmony, like a bunch of previously autonomous cells forming a colony — a primordial cooperative capable of an originality not before possible.
This organic collaboration, a vital community of previously diverse and/or discordant elements within, provides much of the juice — and perhaps also the animating spark — for creativity. It may even be that the intimacy we cultivate with these elements, and with their interrelationship, largely determines the depth and reach of our creativity.
But to whom or to what do we — or can we — give the credit for “our”
creativity? So much is involved in the whole process, not just internally, but also externally. Weather, food, traffic, others’ art, time available, relationship dynamics — an outer collaboration paralleling the inner.
Others in our life may not seem to be as creative as us, but without them we likely would not create as we do. Their presence, doings, intentions, and quality of relationship with us affect our creativity. In fact, at times we may simply
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serve as a channel for ideas and artistry that arose more in them than us, but that they were unable to express. So we express it for them.
And, ultimately, for all of us.
It is easy to overassociate creativity with artists. Our everyday creativity, which can manifest in many, many ways—how we do the dishes, arrange our desk, handle a trying conversation, and so on — is not necessarily any less original or significant than the productions of recognized artists. Just because there is no frame around something does not mean it is not creative.
Still, we can learn much about our own creativity from examining the lives of those far more driven to create than us. Modern research, as well as historical evidence, closely links creativity, especially high creativity, with mental and emotional states that are typically viewed as being far from “normal.”2 The aberrant condition — bipolar disorders, drug addictions, and so on — of many artists and writers appears to be intimately connected with their creativity.3 But what about the rest of us? Are we sentenced to being less creative because we’re less prone to extreme mood swings, madness, or drug addiction? No.
We might be less creative simply because we’re more cut off from our own psychoemotional rawness. We may have overbudgeted for defense against our own ups and downs.
Nevertheless, the very imbalances and abnormalities we see dramatized in many artists exist in us also, if only in our dreams, needing not much more than a timely unchaining, in conjunction with a constructive intent, to spill over into creativity.
When creativity is at its most potent, we may feel as though we have been taken over, possessed, literally occupied by the creative process. It is this ability to be possessed — nondestructively possessed — perhaps in conjunction with some degree of mood elevation,4 that largely determines our creative reach.
If we are busy being in control, flattening out our highs and lows — or, worse, pathologizing the non-normal — we simply obstruct creativity, by robbing it of the energy differentials on which it feeds. The very states (or passions) that have the power to take us over — lust, rage, ecstasy, grief — need to be approached not with leveling agendas, but rather with enough openness so that their essential energies might be channeled into creativity.
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The more in contact we are with our depths, the more creative we will tend to be; but much depends on how such contact is made. Some do so dysfunctionally, through self-destructive or pathological freefalls.5 Others do so through a more conscious descent — they are not forced into proximity with the wonders and horrors of the deep, but instead choose and develop intimacy with them. As we cease avoiding our out-of-balance and on-the-edge states, learning to cultivate comfort with our discomfort, we will not only suffer less, but our creativity will flow more easily.
We don’t access our inner treasures by avoiding the dragon, nor by blindly leaping into its lair. Some may get too close too soon to the dragon, and so cannot properly integrate what surfaces for them as they encounter such darkly overwhelming intensity. What works best is developing intimacy with the dragon — gradually and consciously — so that its fire provides not just heat, but also light.
Creativity often begins with being touched by and touching the edges of our deep interiority. The resulting energies — in conjunction with a dynamic receptivity — fuel an expression that’s both original and meaningful.
The ground of creativity is energy not committed to a particular position, energy that is enough on the loose to be available for originality-generating conversion. The sky of creativity is sentient openness. The richer the energy, the richer the creativity.
Creativity creates the illusion of a self-contained creator, a somebody doing it, but in fact it births and delivers itself, if we will but give our permission. At essence, creativity bypasses egoity, though egoity may claim credit for creativity’s products. In the throes of pure creativity, we primarily exist as an intimate witnessing of — and space for — what is unfolding. We are then not the creator, but are simply present for — and also as — the creative process.
Creativity best flourishes when we are out of our own way. We then do not so much make the music, as make room for it, recognizing that creativity ultimately is not something we do, but something we are.
I see you’ve gone and changed your name again And just when I climbed this whole mountainside To wash my eyelids in the rain
— Leonard Cohen
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My son Dama, 10 at the time, knew only indirectly of the hellride I was buckled into following my 5-MeO NDE. All he apparently knew was that I was having a hard time, and that that was because of what I had smoked. He slept through all of the nights when I was up in terror. Although it seemed that he had only a superficial or casual sense of my crisis, something changed in him that did indicate a deep knowingness about my struggle — his art.
Up until I took my fateful smoke, his drawings had not been particularly remarkable, leaning more to unshaded designs than to the depth-suffused rendition of actual forms. Within a few weeks of my NDE, however, his art took a radical turn, metamorphosing almost overnight. Bizarre, intensely energetic reptilian forms began to dominate his sketchpads — darkly writhing, malevolent-looking, richly shaded things that accurately conveyed to me the actual feeling of what I faced each tortuous night.
Dama was an unusually innocent boy, with seemingly no pull toward the more malignant aspects of things. Nevertheless, his drawings, rapidly churned out on an almost daily basis, were now overflowing with tangible horror, much of which strongly resonated with what I had experienced while physically unconscious and dying — dragon-headed men, repulsively aberrated humans, sky-wide demonic heads, reptilian masses swarming out of galactic birth-clouds, insinuating their way into softer realms. And all drawn with remarkable skill, professionally shaded and precisely lined. No training, no prelude — just full-blown, startlingly alive artistry, pouring forth seemingly unbidden, page after page.
At the same time, Dama’s lucid dreams (dreams in which he knew he was dreaming) began to feature an apparently alien intelligence, a large-craniumed lizard-headed humanoid with whom he felt a strong, fear-free kinship. Again and again, he would draw this being, and I would watch with fascination, feeling as though my journey through the shadowlands of the prepersonal and the transpersonal was somehow being tracked by Dama’s trans-anthropocentric drawings.
The movement (or magnetizing) of my attention down — and I mean “down”
in the sense that the neocortex is “up” — into the phylogenetically older, apparently darker or more primitive territories of my brain (including its
“reptilian” zones) had become not only a journey into terror, but sometimes also a journey through terror, supported to a significant degree both by Dama’s drawings and his easy, loving presence.
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I was stranded from the familiar, often terrifyingly, and Dama’s art helped me not to return to the familiar, but to make more room for the non-familiar, the alien, the impossible-to-anticipate creations of the chaos within and all around me. My own creativity was nonexistent during this time, for all my energies were committed to enduring and working through my “madness”—
or so it seemed. Perhaps that very creativity, curled up in a hibernational extreme, found an articulate outlet through Dama.
In this sense, it was not “his” or “my” creativity, but our creativity. I should add that when I was Dama’s age, I was a talented artist, with a special aptitude for drawing. The psychic osmosis between us brings to mind those research findings indicating that a higher everyday creativity is found in the psychiatrically normal relatives of those with bipolar mood disorders.6 Not that I was bipolar, but I was definitely not functioning “normally.” I’ve often observed that when one member of a couple is relatively non-expressive of a certain feeling, the other member often ends up expressing this feeling for both parties (that is, if I won’t get openly angry, my partner may “have to” express both her anger and mine). Could this not also happen with regard to creativity?
At this moment, a chaos of papers surrounds me, on my desk, printer, floor, and elsewhere, many emblazoned with almost indecipherable scribbles. But, but — I know where they all are, and what they each contain, my attention hovering amidst it all like some mother eagle surveying her egg-laden nest.
Both intense focus and deliberate spaciousness coexist here, at once still and overflowing with new life. As intentionality enters this, conduits spontaneously arise, through which order—perhaps a new, more complex ordering—emerges from chaos, crystallized through lenses that themselves are constantly being created. The labor may be painful and lengthy, but it’s free of artificial induction, episiotomies, epidurals, anaesthetics, and other “expert” intrusions.
And whose art is it, anyway? Labeling it “mine” is, ultimately, a form of theft, or at least plagiarism.
Quality art does not just celebrate the virtuosity of its creator, but also helps awaken us to a truer sense of ourselves and the Mystery of Being, to the point where there is only Beauty, only shapely Openness. The ecstatic poetry of Rumi is very different than the euphoric efforts of, say, Shelley; the former, rooted as it is in the perspective of Being, directly plugs us into the Sacred, whereas the latter, cemented as it is to a significant degree in egoity, at best only alerts us to the Sacred. Art that is not egoically based can either be preegoic
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(as in the art of the insane7 or of a young child) or transegoic (as in the 100,000 songs of Milarepa or Rumi’s intoxicated clarity) — but in both cases, it cares not for fame.
Dama didn’t keep his pictures. As soon as they were done, he’d let them go their own way.
It is as if such art, “knowing” that it emerges from all of us — in an unthinkably vast, unmappable, and organic collaboration — exists as a gift for everyone, owned by none and belonging to all.
NOTES
1. Artists, particularly writers and poets, show a far higher incidence of manic-depressive illness than non-artists. Why? For starters, consider so-called hypomania (meaning mildly manic): Its symptoms include elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, more energy than usual, decreased need for sleep, hypersexuality, increased productivity, and sharpened and unusually creative thinking. This list, supposedly describing the signs of a disorder, also describes many of the qualities that are most highly valued by (and often characteristic of) modernity’s high-achievers— including me, prior to taking 5-MeO.
Such symptoms — symptoms! — are for most artists (and also for most of the rest of us) what steroids are for bodybuilders. The side effects may be quite unpleasant, but generally are taken as a necessary payment for what is reaped.
Paralleling this is a tendency to underdiagnose the manic aspects of manic-depressive illness (Jamison, 1990, p. 336)— the melancholic side is easily recognized as depression, but the manic or hypomanic side is often viewed as no more than
“normal” functioning or “creative inspiration.”
Hypomanic energy is generally admired in modern culture — nonstop action (which Sogyal Rinpoche [1992, p. 19] calls “active laziness”) fills business, social life, movies. Almost as common a greeting as “How are you?” is “Keeping busy?”
In such an atmosphere, productivity is an all but unquestioned virtue. Staying up, keeping up, getting addicted to being up, juiced, buzzed, plugged in, turned on, hyperstimulated — take America completely off coffee for a week, and you’d likely have a national crisis! Taking more and more time to save time, we feel squeezed for time, forgetting that hurrying wastes time, even as we try to find time to offset the resulting erosion of self. Running the red light to make it to meditation class on time. Or in my case, burning the candle at both ends.
The hyperacusis — the heightening of senses — so commonly present during manic (and hypomanic) states is obviously supportive of most creative activity.