Can society develop such a healthy respect for creativity as to make it pivotal to the education of all its citizens? It certainly can, but here, too, we must loosen our emphasis on doing, on rote learning, and on the three Rs. We need to encourage children to recognize interim failure as an inherent component of creativity, and of eventual success. “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own correction,” said Vilfredo Pareto, the famous 19th-century economist. “You can keep your sterile truths to yourself.”
One high school English teacher who understood this point was trying to stimulate her disadvantaged students to read Shakespeare. One day she asked the class about the meaning of a particular passage in The Taming of the Shrew. After a long silence, a usually quiet student attempted an answer, but it was wrong. The teacher, however, was so pleased with his unexpected attempt that she reached in her pocket, came up with a dollar bill, and gave it to the student. When another student complained about rewarding a wrong answer, the teacher explained, “Sometimes it takes a lot of wrong answers before you get the right one.” Her class later unanimously voted for more Shakespeare.
Education in schools usually proceeds in an unambiguous, linear, and unimaginative fashion. In other words, our scientific culture, with its materialist emphasis, insists too much on prediction and control. As a result imagination and intuition suffer. These aspects of our experience require surrender of control, which permits the radical receptivity of the nonlocal domain. In other words,
being must accompany doing in our schools.
We must never underestimate the role of inspiration, which is born of relaxation, meditation, and communion with nature. Unfortunately, efficiency-minded curricula have little room, if any, for such non-structured activities. When I was a child I was home-schooled until age 11, so I had a lot of time by myself in our backyard, which to my eyes was paradise, full of mango, lychee, jackfruit trees, cranberries, and other lush vegetation. There was also a pond where I skipped stones; I liked watching their ripples extend after they danced over the water. But mostly I reenacted the great epic stories of the Mahabharata, which were my secret source of inspiration.
Can we create such opportunities for every schoolchild? We rightly worry about providing breakfast for their physical bodies, but their mental bodies starve from lack of inspiration from the quantum self. Let’s face it: Those computer games that many children play so early in their lives may help with concentration, but they are not inspiring. They leave the subtle body untouched except for the lower chakras. You’ve taught your child the three Rs. Where would they be if you hadn’t? But have you remembered the three I’s— Imagination, intuition, and inspiration? Their mastery of the three Rs has cultivated will. Without the three I’s, how will they learn being?
The Societal Barrier Against Creativity
When we erect a defense against somebody else’s creative approach, or contribute to any other inhibition of creativity, we reveal our ignorance. We’re acting like the proverbial fool who saws off the branch of the tree that supports him. When an entire society sets up barrier after barrier to
creativity, the very foundation of that society becomes shaky; the society becomes moribund.
To put it differently, change happens, like it or not. If we cannot align change to the universal purpose, it will express itself as decay. This is social entropy, and it stinks like gangrene. We need to balance the progress of entropy. Periodically we need to go back to basics and to redefine the very fundamentals on which society is based so that they continue to reflect the particular context in which we live. This redefinition requires creativity.
The United States of America was defined by the U.S. Constitution, by the Bill of Rights, by democracy and capitalism, by liberal education, by individualistic know-how and creative can-do, and by a deep sense of spiritual values. These elements have carried this society through thick and thin. Why? Because during a crisis, whether it’s the Civil War or the Great Depression, we have always managed to redefine ourselves. Creativity has always been available, a wellspring of resilience to draw from. But we cannot take it for granted. In a democracy we elect politicians to represent us and we expect them to take action on our behalf. But early 21st-century politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, are ostriches, up to their necks in the sand of denial. If they remain shackled by dogmatic worldviews that stand in opposition to creativity, it will be difficult to dig ourselves out.
Quantum Activism
Fortunately, the winds of change that are producing both the current crisis and the quantum paradigm shift are strong enough so that only a relatively few dedicated people are needed to take us over the threshold to the next stage of evolution—the primacy of the intuitive mind. If you are reading this book, you may be one of these people, perhaps one of millions all over the world. And you may be ready for what I call quantum activism.
Succinctly put, the goal of quantum activism is to change ourselves and our societies using the transformative principles of quantum physics.1 Creativity is a major tool of transformation for the quantum activist, so the message of this chapter is this: Join the ranks of those who are harnessing quantum creativity to positive change. In the myth of the Holy Grail, when Percival comes to the Grail castle where the king is maimed, his first intuition is to ask the king, “What’s wrong with you?” But his training as a knight holds him back, and no movement occurs. “Seek, and ye shall find,” said Jesus. Ask your question, and the door to creative transformation will open as it did for Percival when he eventually asked his question, and the kingdom was revitalized. The crippled Grail king is a metaphor for the psyche when the self is dominated by wrong thinking (faulty worldview), wrong living (frantic lifestyle), and wrong livelihood (jobs that leave no room for creativity). Only by continuing to ask the questions that spring from intuition do we make room for creativity, for transformation. As a quantum creative you already engage in right thinking and right living, and hopefully the idea of the economics of consciousness will enable you to achieve a right livelihood. As a quantum activist you will endeavor to bring this sensibility to your fellow humans. The evolutionary movement of consciousness demands it.
Where fear does not create barriers impenetrable Where the mind is free to take risk,
But honest curiosity motivates, Where we can listen to the cosmos Whispering its purposiveness to us, Into that land of creative freedom Let my world awake.2 —Tagore