with a Buddhist group, you may be asked to watch your thoughts, paying attention as they arise, noticing them while being aware that they are separate from you. The Chinmaya Mission, a Hindu group studying Vedanta, uses a similar method: watching your thoughts and thinking that you are not your thoughts, sensing your body and thinking that you are not your body. If you are not your thoughts, if you are not your body, what are you? You are that which watches the thoughts.165 You are the Witness, the spark of the Unified Field internalized in a human body. When you identify with this part instead of the chattering ego, you are on the path to spiritual growth. You can also create.
Various spiritual traditions may cultivate receptivity in different ways. In Islam you are stopped from your routine five times a day to feel this connection. In the Christian tradition you may pray, do the rosary, or practice the presence of God as Brother Lawrence did.166 You may wish to follow The Way of a Pilgrim, a Russian Christian who took St. Paul’s advice to “pray without ceasing” and lived in a state of divine communion by repeating the Jesus prayer.167 In one Tibetan meditation you watch your thoughts flowing down a stream like logs. In many traditions you watch the breath. Who is breathing? You are not what is breathing; you are watching the breath. A method taught by Paramhansa Yogananda associates a mantra with the ingoing and outgoing breath.168 A secular method taught in a popular 1960s book was called The Relaxation Response.
Edgar Cayce’s recommendations are explained by Mark Thurston. Within us is the divine spark (“individuality”). In meditation we seek to join it to the divine (“universal Christ consciousness”) through techniques that raise the energy “through the spiritual centers, or chakras.”169 We prepare the body through bathing; we prepare the mind through “intoning” (chanting), music, breathing exercises (pranayama), and focus on the third eye.170 Cayce defines meditation as “emptying self of all that hinders the creative forces from rising along the natural channels of the physical man.” He defines prayer as “the concerted effort of the physical consciousness to become attuned to the Consciousness of the Creator.”171
Ken Wilber writes often about identification with the Witness. He defines it as “The self that depends upon the causal line of cognition . . . the Self supreme that prevents the three realms—gross, subtle, and causal—from flying apart.”172 He explains it as the point where “Your very self intersects the Self of the Kosmos at large:”173 i.e., your gem upon the net.
Swami Kriyananda relates,
Often I have found, by meditation-induced concentration, that I can accomplish in an afternoon what others have required days or even weeks to complete . . . Before taking up meditation, I would sometimes stare at a page for days before I could write a single word. Even then, I doubted whether what I’d written was what I really wanted to say.174
On a more mundane level, creativity teachers often tell you that you need to “get out of your own way.”175 Writing teachers have methods and exercises that will help their pupils let go. For some of these, see the Exercises. As with meditation, establishing a warming-up ritual or formula always helps. Stephen Covey might say you develop a habit; he recommends the athletic model of visualizing success.176
When you feel that your ego is disengaged, you are ready for Step 3.
3.Center your awareness.
For this method I am deeply indebted to Swami Kriyananda, a.k.a. Donald Walters. He explains, “The most important thing at all times, when expressing oneself artistically, is to hold mentally before oneself the thought, or feeling, that one is trying to express.” Then one “should refer back again and again to this concept” during the act of creation.177
The concentration must be complete, and the conception must be clear. Kriyananda says that thirteen Celtic songs came to him in two days and that if the process had taken longer, they wouldn’t have been as good.178 He took three days to write eighteen melodies for Shakespeare’s poems and one day to write thirty-three melodies for his oratorio, Christ Lives.179 In Crystal Clarity: The Artist as Channel, he says,
The relationship between a thing seen and the consciousness one experiences on seeing it cannot be a mental perception only. It must come from inner clarity, which involves one on deeper levels. The more clearly one’s whole being enters into the experience, the more crystal clear will be his expression of it.180
In Writers Dreaming Isabel Allende says, “Books don’t happen in my mind, they happen somewhere in my belly.”181 We must become totally involved with what we want to express until we merge with it and at last become it, as Barbara McClintock did with her grain. She says that she identified so fully with her plants that she felt she had become one of their genes or chromosomes.182
4.Relate to the center of what is trying to happen through you.
In his lectures on creativity, Swami Kriyananda gives the following instructions: go to your center; then relate to the center of what you want to know or express. If the concentration is complete, the right answers will come.
He explains how he used this process to write a song about St. Francis. He held the thought of the saint in his mind and received the notes of a melody. He later discovered that the first several notes were like the theme song from Franco Zeffirelli’s film about St. Francis, Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Kriyananda has also written Renaissance and Celtic tunes without knowing those types of music.183 He testifies,
I don’t know where the melodies come from. But I do know when they are right. For example, I wanted to write a melody for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which would, of course, need a Persian melody. I was thinking about it, and I woke up with a beautiful melody in my mind. A few years ago I sang it to somebody from Iran, and he said, “Oh, but that’s Persian.” I hadn’t heard Persian music before, but I knew he was right. It’s as though melodies are given to me—I don’t create them, but I listen and hear them.184
Harpist Derek Bell says that Kriyananda’s music is intuitive:
He more or less hints at that when he makes that wonderful statement about “Deirdre of the Sorrows.” He says, “I didn’t know what I should write for her, so I sat down and let her sing it to me.”185
Kriyananda also makes a remark applicable to engineers, scientists, and business executives:
Clarity begins with asking the right questions. It comes with knowing exactly what the problem is, and then, offering that problem up into the creative flow, in the full expectation of receiving a solution.186
Watson and Crick kept “asking the right questions” until they codified the exact structure of the double helix, a problem they solved by building a model and applying Watson’s insight that the two strands should be contrasting rather than identical.187 Crick says the “key questions” were, “What are genes made of? How are they copied exactly? And how do they control, or at least influence, the synthesis of proteins?”188 Charles Link invented a new type of paper clip by asking what design would solve two problems: the sharp end digging into papers and the large end required to face up for use.189 The inventor of McDonald’s asked, “Where can I get a consistent hamburger on the road?” Businessman Marc Stuer explains, “That’s how he invented McDonald’s. Not by having the answer, but by keeping the question open.”190 Ray and Myers comment, “Implicitly or explicitly, creativity always begins with a question.191
