Guiding Light: What Is The Creative Impulse?

It is very important for us to probe into the source of thought. What is a thought? Where does it originate? Is there any way that we can improve our thought process?

Why does someone get a violent thought, and why does someone get a creative thought? What is the source of creativity? These are questions we need to ask. Thought is nothing but an impulse of energy and intelligence.

Now, as you are reading, you are having a dialogue in your own mind saying, “Yes, I agree” or “No, that cannot be.” We all have a filter in our mind, and we accept only what we already know. Something which doesn’t already fall within our belief system, we reject it right away. This tendency in the mind is one of the main blocks to creativity and it stops you from growing mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

The second ingredient for creativity is imagination. You will see that every creative person has some imagination. Thomas Edison, once upon a time, dreamt of how to create light. It was purely an imagination. Similarly, the telephone or the aeroplane—all these inventions happened through certain imagination and linking that imagination to the present, to the ground reality. If you are thinking only of ground reality, then there can be no creativity, and if you are only imagining, then, too, there is no creativity. A balance is needed between the two. A balance between our intellect and our heart, feeling or intuition. Listening to our gut feeling and developing that intuitive ability within us is another aspect of creativity.

I call science a study of “what is this” and spirituality a study of “who am I?” They are not at loggerheads at all, they go hand in hand. So we need to study about ourselves, our seven layers of existence—the body; the breath, which keeps our body alive; the mind, which is perception, observation and expression; judgement and analyses, which are part of our intellect; then comes the memory, which stores the unpleasant impressions more than the pleasant; next is the ego, which gives us a sense of separation from others; and the seventh layer is the self, which is the reference point of all changes in life. We notice that everything is changing in our life, our body, mind, thoughts, environment, and our behaviour from here. The scriptures would call it atman.

A little bit of knowledge about these seven layers of existence makes a big difference in our lives. It brings freshness, and we become so alive and childlike. If you are cheerful and clear in your mind and heart, you will be creative.

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