Most of us consciously react to associations; while reading a book, we get ideas and may write them down for later reference. But such conscious associations make only fragmentary contributions to a truly creative breakthrough. If we augment these associations with unbridled imagination and the analogies that association often ushers in, we do better. Imagination injects the process with new possibilities for unconscious processing; these possibilities interact with old possibilities producing more new possibilities, increasing the chances for the needed gestalt for creative insight.
Arthur Koestler noted that a different kind of association—an association of opposites that he called bisociation—may be more helpful to the creative process. “The basic bisociative pattern of the creative synthesis [is due to] the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills, or matrices of thought,” he declared. The more startling the bisociation, the more striking and novel is the creativity of the act.
A similar idea comes from psychologist Albert Rothenberg—he calls it Janusian thinking (after Janus, the Roman god with two faces). Rothenberg thinks that the idea for the Eugene O’Neill play
The Iceman Cometh may have been the result of Janusian thinking, in the form of a joke: A household
refrigerator needed attention. When the husband came home, he called up to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?” The wife called down, “No, but he’s breathing hard.” Sex, Rothenberg notes, is a signifier of life, the opposite being the iceman, or death.
In the same vein, the philosopher Hegel emphasized the importance of dialectic thinking, using thesis and antitheses in order to reach synthesis. Are Koestler, Rothenberg, and Hegel right in saying that we are creative when we invite conflicts in the form of bisociations, Janusian thinking, and thesis- antithesis dialectics? They have to be, because it’s impossible to really resolve those dichotomies using conscious analysis from known contexts. When confronted with such possibilities, we’re trying to digest information that only quantum consciousness can process, and the new is invited in.
Charles Darwin made extensive use of metaphor in developing his theory of evolution. What is a metaphor? Grammatically, a metaphor compares two objects or things without the use of “as” or “like.” (Classic examples include “All the world’s a stage,” and “A mighty fortress is our God.”) A metaphor involves borrowing the attributes of one object (say, the stage), and ascribing them to another object (the world) in order to facilitate our understanding of that second object. From the quantum perspective, a metaphor helps trigger the development of a thought in a superposition involving the unknown. This is also an example of how ambiguous stimuli are crucial for unconscious processing. Any doubt about the old—is this right or is this wrong?—can give rise to ambiguity, which is why paradox and anomaly also play such important roles in creative insight.
Work and Relaxation, Striving and Surrender
Emily Dickinson called the intensity of the burning question “white heat.” To maintain this intensity would not be humanly possible. Instead, the practical strategy is do-be-do-be-do: We alternate the intensity of the burning question with conscious relaxation. Why so much intensity? Intensity is needed because the mind’s superpositions of possibilities generated in our unconscious processing tend to be dominated by our learned contexts. That intensity makes up for low probability of the new. Intense persistence, even in the face of repeated failures, is important because the more you collapse the mind’s quantum state relative to the same question, the more you increase the chances of a new
response. So in between bouts of effort, sit quietly, allowing the waves of possibility to spread, forming bigger and bigger pools of possibility for quantum consciousness to choose from. A woman goes to a fabric store and orders 50 yards of material for her wedding dress. When the shopkeeper expresses surprise, saying, “Madam, you only need a few yards,” the woman replies, “My fiancé is a doer who would rather search than find.” The creative knows the importance of being, the importance of do-be-do-be-do. The creative does not get stuck in the joys of searching, but knows how to find.
Marie Curie did her doctoral thesis on the emission of electromagnetic radiation from uranium, but she got bogged down in finding the reason for the radiation. Her husband, Pierre, joined her research, and their joint perseverance eventually produced the insight that a new element, radium, was responsible. Clearly, the creative individual’s ego has to be both strong and highly motivated to be persistent and to handle the anxiety that the quantum jump into new insight creates. The contribution of the ego is justly recognized in the inventor Thomas Edison’s saying that genius is 2 percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration.
Bertrand Russell wrote about his use of alternate work and relaxation, of striving and unconscious processing in his creative work, as follows:
It appeared that first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking. Sometimes, I would find after a time, that I had made a mistake, and that I could not write the book I had had in mind. But often I was more fortunate. Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconscious, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation.5
Werner Heisenberg had a rule for his doctoral students. After initially discussing their Ph.D. problem with them, he told his students not to work on it for two weeks, but just to relax. He appreciated the value of alternating doing with being. Rabindranath Tagore, who also understood this alternate play of will and surrender, described it in one of his songs. Since no translation from the Bengali is available, I will paraphrase: When infinity calls I want to fly to its Siren’s song; I want to hold the infinity in my palm NOW. I forget I don’t have wings, That I am too damn local. This is the stage of striving that creative people know all too well. Tagore understood the stage of relaxation as well: On lazy afternoons, sunshine like butter, Swaying trees cast dancing shadows. I am bathed in the light of infinity. Unattended, still it fills my mind’s sky.
I process unaware, in silent bliss.
Tagore also knew that this bliss does not last long before inspiration fuels the desire for manifestation again: Oh infinity, oh great infinity— Go on, play your flute, sing your song. Let me forget That the doors of my room are closed. I am restless with creative energy. Doing and being, will and surrender.
The Aha Insight
After a long play of alternating will and surrender, persistence and relaxation, conscious and unconscious processing, our quantum consciousness recognizes and chooses the gestalt, the pattern of the little pieces that together make up the new meaning and context, the breakthrough pattern. From the superpositions of possibilities that have accumulated during the creative journey, we collapse the gestalt and see it as separate from ourselves. The breakthrough, as I have discussed before, usually comes during the relaxation phase.
Einstein once asked a psychologist at Princeton, “Why is it I get my best ideas in the morning while I’m shaving?” The psychologist answered that consciousness needs to let go of its inner controls in order for new ideas to emerge. This is the point. In ordinary waking consciousness, the ego’s inner controls override the preconscious primary experiences through which the quantum self communicates to the ego. When we’re relaxing—shaving is a good example; dreaming, bathing, and daydreaming are others—the normally preconscious experience of the insight breaks through.
I vividly remember the day when I came to the realization that all things are made of consciousness, not matter, and that from this vantage point we have to develop a science within consciousness. For many years I had been researching the idea that consciousness collapses the quantum possibility wave, but I was struggling to explain how a consciousness with such power could emerge in the material brain. One day, on vacation, I was explaining the difficulty to a mystic friend, Joel Morwood. He did not agree with my view and, at some point in the middle of a big argument, made a statement long familiar to me: “There is nothing but God.” Suddenly I knew that there is nothing but consciousness, that matter consists of possibilities of consciousness, and that it was possible to conduct scientific work on the basis of the primacy of consciousness.
I could already see glimpses of the new science; I already knew that it would resolve all the paradoxes of the old science and explain all the anomalous data, but I was in no hurry. I stayed in the glow of that aha moment for a long time. That insight was instrumental in the subsequent research and development of the paradigm of science within consciousness that culminated in The Self-Aware
Universe.
Remember the time lag between primary and secondary experiences? Our preoccupation with the secondary processes distracts us from our quantum self, making it difficult to experience the quantum level of our operation. A creative experience is one of the few occasions when we directly experience the quantum modality with its inherent cosmic awareness, and it is this spontaneous encounter that
produces ananda (Sanskrit for limitlessness)—the spiritual joy of the “aha” insight. This is what Rabindranath Tagore was writing about when he described his experience of the light that I see as the quantum self: Light, my light, the world-filling light; The eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light. Ah the light dances, my darling, At the center of my life. The light strikes, My darling, the chords of my love; The sky opens, the wind runs wild, Laughter passes over the earth.6
Similar peak experiences of ananda also happen in inner creativity. In spiritual traditions these experiences are given exalted names such as samadhi, or satori, or being in the Holy Spirit.
The Encounter in Manifestation
The fourth and final stage of creativity, the manifestation stage, is the encounter of idea and form. The self in its ego modality has to develop a form for the creative idea generated in stage three. After doing so it must sort out and organize its elements, and verify that it works. The importance of form is seen in studies done with children’s drawings, which show that until children learn certain forms, they are unable to express certain creative ideas.Even Einstein had trouble making the transition from idea to form. Many times he complained about his struggle to find the right form, the right mathematics, to express his idea of a unified theory of all the forces of the world, the problem that engaged him in the latter part of his life. The fact is that even after the brain has made a preliminary map of a novel mental idea, the unavailability of form in the ego’s known repertoire may send you hunting for ideas once again.
For many acts of creation, finding form in the outer world is just a difficult business, literally. An architect’s vision may never find expression in the outer world because of economics. Michelangelo’s struggle with creative manifestation included the struggle for more marble. Even after their insight about the existence of a new chemical element, radium, it took Marie Curie and her husband Pierre four years and processing of tons of uranium to isolate radium.
When Nikos Kazantzakis first attempted to write Zorba the Greek, he expressed his frustration with form in this way:
I wrote, I crossed out. I could not find suitable words. Sometimes they were dull and soulless, sometimes indecently gaudy, at other times abstract and full of air, lacking a warm body. I knew what I planned to say when I set out, but the shiftless, unbridled words dragged me elsewhere. … Realizing the time had not arrived, that the secret metamorphosis inside the seed still had not been completed, I stopped.7 The creative struggle between ego and quantum consciousness can bring agony, no doubt. But it’s well worth it, not only because of quantum leaps of insight but because the struggle eventually gives way to the play of form and idea (figure 20). The result is what we experience as flow. Then the pen
writes itself, the dancer becomes the dance, and the golfer finds himself in the zone. Many creative people talk about the experience of flow. “It is like diving into the pond—then you start to swim,” said the novelist D. H. Lawrence. “Once the instinct and intuition get into the brush tip, the picture happens, if it is to be a picture at all.” Figure 20: The tangled hierarchies of the various stages of the creative process (after Charles Hampden-Turner). Novelist Gertrude Stein, in conversation with the author John Preston, said the same thing. “Think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting.”
Can We Live in the Zone? The Story of Kalidasa
In ancient India there was a famous king named Vikrama. He had two poets in his court, but he favored one, Kalidasa, over the other. Many members of the court could see no difference in quality between the poetry of the two poets—a poem is a poem is a poem. So one day they put their question to the king. Why do you favor Kalidasa over the other court poet, when to us they both seem to write poetry equally well? The king decided that it was time for a demonstration.
The court assembled in the king’s garden in the dormancy of early springtime. Many trees were leafless, but one tree looked dead. The secondary poet was summoned first. Pointing to the dead tree, the king said to him, “Please compose a verse based on what you see.” The poet complied, and his verse can be translated as follows: “There is dead wood ahead.” When Kalidasa was given the same
task, he came up with, “A great tree, void of juice, shines ahead.”
The courtiers never again complained. Whereas the lesser poet saw the verse-making as a problem and solved it adequately, Kalidasa jumped contexts. He was able to see shining from the leafless tree because he himself was alive and spontaneous; he was in flow. Whereas the other poet was acting from his ego when he composed his poem, Kalidasa was acting from an encounter with the quantum self, so his poem created itself. Many poets live in the zone. Walt Whitman wrote: To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same.8 I believe every one of us has this ability, this creative potential. We just have to manifest it. Melody seeks to fetter herself in rhythm. While the rhythm flows back to melody. Idea seeks the body in form, Form its freedom in the idea. The infinite seeks the touch of the finite, The finite its release in the infinite. What drama is this between creation and destruction— This ceaseless to-and-fro between idea and form? Bondage is striving after freedom, And freedom seeking rest in bondage.9 —Tagore