Creativity: Exploring The Vastness Of Our Own Potential

: By Imelda Almqvist

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The Heart of our Creative Process is also the Heart of Creation itself. Ultimately, there is no separation between the vastness of the cosmos and the vastness of our own potential and inner world (cosmos).

One online seminar I taught last year, called ‘The Heart of the Creative Process’ explored the following questions:

What is Creativity?
Are there different forms of Creativity?
What lies at the Heart of the Creative Process?
External and internal creativity.

Years of offering one-to-one shamanic healing sessions showed me that most people have (what I will call) a limited edition definition of creativity. By this I mean that they often think it relates to creating art, music or perhaps architecture, or something else in the external world, that it is not a quality they themselves possess.

External creativity is more obvious: we can all see that buildings, songs, paintings, novels etc. demonstrate creativity. However, I once worked with a young lawyer who was very good at ‘thinking outside the box’ but did not think of herself as a creative person until I pointed out to her that this too is creativity.

Do you perhaps have a friend who can mirror your thoughts back to you in such a way that you feel both cleverer and more clear-headed for the gift of mirroring? That is internal creativity! Psychotherapists specialize in that kind of creativity.

Do you know someone who is genius at finding clever storage solutions or can explain complex things using effective simple words? All of those things are forms of creativity in action.

True Creativity Sees Connections

It is my observation that true creativity often involves a marriage (or surprising connection) of two things that are not related to most people’s minds. The larger point I am trying to make here is that creative people often see connections and build bridges where others see no such things (until someone shows them! Then many of us can cross the same bridge).

We see such creativity in, for example, the naming of products. Flying from Stockholm to London my son was asked recently (in Swedish) if he had a surfboard in his hand luggage! For one moment, I thought the security officer had lost the plot but then it dawned on me: surfboard (surf platta) is the Swedish word for an iPad or tablet used to surf the internet. Aha! Someone had fun dreaming up that translation!

Quantum Creativity and Possibilities

The best explanation of how I have come to view the operating principles of our universe is provided by Amit Goswani, author of the book Quantum Creativity: Think Quantum, Be Creative. He says that manifest matter is always preceded by quantum possibilities or potentialities. Therefore, you could say that there are two realms of reality: Potentiality and Actuality. Making a conscious choice ‘collapses’ those possibilities into a manifest actuality.

In everyday language this means making a choice between two things, meaning that one thing becomes matter and another potentiality fades away for now because it ‘was not to be’. (Most likely there were many additional potentialities we were not even aware of!)

In other words, we use our intention to bring an idea into form! We then focus our attention on ‘what we invite to dance with us’ (and those forces will indeed arrive!).

The Great Unmanifest and Creation

During my classes, I often speak about the Heart of the Creative Process as ‘the place where gods and goddesses dance and dream’. It is the place where reality as we know it is created. It is a realm of undivided Divine Consciousness or Source in the most literal sense: a place where every possibility or potentiality exists and originates.

This is the place, fecund with potentiality that we need to access if we are to create healthy vibrant reality that is not a repeat of the old (wounded, distorted, failing) blueprints that have shaped human history.

Within this realm of undivided Divine Consciousness, the worlds that we sense and inhabit open up. Quantum Physics teaches that communication in this realm is non local (in shamanism we communicate effortlessly across – or outside – time and space, with the past, the future, the living, the dead and some people would extend that to star beings and galactic forces).

In ancient texts (and alchemy) creativity is often perceived as a sacred marriage (hieros gamos) between Heaven and Earth, sometimes between the Sun and the Moon. Teaching a rock art workshop in caves in Spain my students and I have seen glimpses of the great mystical union behind this principle. I believe that in the timeless realm this reflects the union of sacred feminine and sacred masculine primordial energies as we live in a polarised reality where we perceived those as divided, even conflicting.

This Heart of Creation, or realm of Undivided Divine Consciousness is also called the Void, the Cosmic Womb or the Great Unmanifest (depending on which author you read or what spiritual school of thought you follow).

In my own words, Creativity in the human realm is the phenomenon of using our consciousness to pull things out of The Great Unmanifest or Cosmic Pool of Limitless Divine Potential and birth them as manifest reality on Earth. We do not do this alone. It is an endless act of co-creation and co-dreaming with the gods (cosmic or archetypal forces if you prefer).

The Human Craving For Meaning

For human beings, that interaction (between consciousness and matter) needs to be meaningful (literally meaning-full: full of meaning). The meaning of Life may be up for debate but in the final reckoning we can choose to assign meaning to our own life (or not).

I perceive meaning as a Divine gift. I have come to trust it, even when I cannot always see it. As my life unfolds, things that seemed insignificant at the time acquire meaning. For example, some voluntary work I did in my twenties working in a field hospital in Bangladesh, or a language I studied and never used again (Mandarin Chinese) have, decades later, provided the key that unlocked something profound in a healing session with a client.

Nothing is wasted. Every snippet of human experience has its place in the larger tapestry. Even the things my own children discuss over breakfast often provide clues for client work or ideas for teaching that same day. I remember one morning walking my boys to school and on the way home all rubbish bins were out and spilling over (and the waste collection truck running late). Ten minutes later, I was in a session with a client who said: ‘I never let anything go ... I am like a human bin spilling over with other people’s rubbish ...’ Pure coincidence? Mmmmm!

Serving A Cause Or Process Greater Than Ourselves

In my observation, profound meaning arrives through devotion and a lifetime of service to a cause or process greater than ourselves. A most wonderful book, Man’s Search For Meaning, was written by Viktor E. Frankl. He was a prominent Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist taken to Auschwitz where he observed very closely how people coped (or not) with the Death Camps of the Holocaust.

His conclusion was that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. He survived the war and went on to found Logotherapy, the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, and became a key figure in existential therapy.

Existential therapy is a philosophical method of therapy that operates on the belief that inner conflict within a person is due to that person’s confrontation with the four givens of existence. Those givens are the inevitability of death, freedom (and its attendant responsibility), existential isolation and finally meaninglessness.

The view that Frankl brought to existential therapy is that life has meaning under all circumstances, even under extreme suffering. ‘Meaningless’ in that school of thought is defined as meaning not yet discovered. Frankl had already conceived of this theory in the 1920s but put it to the test while incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps.

On a completely personal level (and not claiming to have lived through anything like the circumstances Frankl faced), I always feel an instant and huge shift in well-being when I am able to give even negative things a place and decode their meaning – their meaning to me, not necessarily any universal meaning.

Some might say that I am not decoding the meaning but assigning this meaning. My reply is that in the final reckoning this distinction is of no importance to me because I can choose to live a meaning-full life and I can choose to have a meaning-full relationship with the prospect of my own death as well. For me this is all about embracing all the gifts that the gods bestow, even the difficult and incomprehensible ones.

Seminars

Here are links to the FREE online sacred art seminars mentioned in Chapter 11 (from which this article is excerpted):

©2018 by Imelda Almqvist. All Rights Reserved.
Publisher: Moon Books, imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
All Rights Reserved. www.johnhuntpublishing.com

Article Source

Sacred Art - A Hollow Bone for Spirit: Where Art Meets Shamanism
by Imelda Almqvist

The greatest piece of art we will ever make is our own life! Making sacred art means stepping outside the realm of ego-led consciousness to become a hollow bone for spirit so art becomes a mystery school process. When we connect to Divine forces greater than ourselves, creative blocks do not exist and healing occurs naturally. Sacred Art - A Hollow Bone for Spirit: Where Art Meets Shamanism tells the story of sacred art across cultures, continents and historical periods and makes a plea for sacred art to once again take its rightful place in our perception. (Also available in Kindle format)

About the Author

Imelda Almqvist is a shamanic teacher and painter. She teaches courses in shamanism and sacred art internationally and her paintings appear in art collections all over the world. Imelda is the author of Natural Born Shamans - A Spiritual Toolkit for Life. For more about Imelda visit https://imeldaalmqvist.wordpress.com/about/