. .  .. .	“CREATIVITY in the SANCTUARY” Adapted from a presentation to the congregation of The Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church (13 November 2022) . “This morning we will sing and speak of CREATIVITY, its deep connections to spirituality, its roots in human memory, and its fruit in our imaginations and those of the generations to come.”

 

GOOD MORNING!     

 

HERE WE ARE AGAIN, in our congregation’s sanctuary, a sacred space, a place of SAFETY

(Recalling our opening HYMN —”May nothing evil cross this door”)  and I believe that THIS SANCTUARY—not by coincidence—is amongst our supreme CRADLES of CREATIVITY.[i]   

 

My ambition this morning is to point out some CONNECTIONS between our SANCTUARY and our CREATIVITY…  I believe that this is because this place is particularly conducive to our experience of MEMORY and of IMAGINATION—and it is the CONNECTIONS between these two cognitive functions from which CREATIVITY emerges – it is a place with ancient roots in both culture and biology in which MEANING can be created.  I am encouraged on this perilous path because as a research scientist I find deep RESONANCE between emerging understanding of the brain and ancient tradition.  

 

I mention CREATIVITY… BUT “I am not an artist,”  you might say.  So let me speak to that:  ARTISTS are simply those amongst us that might budget long hours or reservoirs of energy giving free rein to imagination in creating art—such as visual records like paintings or photographs, music, dance, performance –we do this to communicate with ourselves, learn our own boundaries and skills … and to communicate our experiences to others when ordinary language will not suffice.   WE DO more-or-less of THIS because creating connections, as I said, also creates MEANING! It is also a selective emphasis on specific cognitive functions, and like all selective emphases it can become dysfunctional when manifest in excess.

 

CREATIVITY involves constructive change at every level of the organism from the functions of our cells to our experience of free will. In the extreme, creativity is manifest as ART—the CONNECTING of one’s depths to the depths of another.  but YOU and I, often stricken with the lethargy of custom and habits that normalize what should be appreciated as extraordinary … often fail to notice this powerful way of creating MEANING in our lives.

From everyday problems (where should I park? How much should I put in the offering plate?) through solving our individual and shared existential crises (how can we help our descendants survive?), CREATIVITY is the psychological AIR WE BREATHE –that’s why they call notable examples, INSPIRED! 

 

Of course there are layers within layers like matryoshkas, those wonderful Russian nesting dolls—here we all are surrounded and feeling loved by these sheltering walls. And each other. Our minds enjoy a greater degree of FREEDOM to make deeper connections that ENRICH … ENLARGE our HUMANITY.

 

THIS IS BECAUSE each of us is also a cathedral built of uncountable layers of memory:  we have within us the cumulative memories of our ancestors: an unbroken genetic thread going back to the dawn of life itself—but also the cellular memories of personal experiences going back to our time in the womb.

 

AND how we YEARN to know and to be known … to make the connections that enable CREATIVE growth—

 

and Yearning is not to be taken lightly:

 

We yearn to connect because we yearn for meaning.  And it is in our vast reservoir of memories that connections are found that give rise to IMAGINATION.  IT IS  born there—struggling—yearning—to go beyond—like a word desperately trying to escape the dictionary.

 

IMAGINATION is like a constellation of some stars amongst the countless number we see– and experiences are the same, all more-or-usually-less accessible to consciousness. We exist and we function because these experiences are connected to each other in the matrix of about 86 billion neurons[iii] A number hard to imagine (unless you are an economist considering our national debt).  We are born with many connections, others develop in predictable ways as we mature, others are created by new experiences.

 

BUT it also seems that we cannot imagine what we have not first experienced in some way— an idea validated at every level within the organism:  and at the very deepest levels, consciousness is not even required. 

 

For example, ALL neurons that control our movements must make constant adjustments—and at every level, our nervous system does that by making PREDICTIONS. 

 

PREDICTIONS are based on past experience.  AND then we CORRECT ERRORS –even at the level of the spinal cord and in milliseconds.  At another level, predicting and error correction is responsible for all learning.  Do you listen to the news or think about economics? It is hugely dedicated to what we might expect based on what has happened.  What we KNOW lasts only a few seconds: You do not KNOW what happened 2 minutes ago—you REMEMBER IT—and you do not KNOW what will happen in two minutes, you IMAGINE IT.[iv] 

 

SO I found it thrilling when I learned that, like Russian nesting dolls again, our supreme future-oriented cognition—IMAGINATION—emerges from the neural substrate of memory.[v] In a very real way, we imagine the past, and remember the future.[vi] 

—these two functions share much of the matrix of connections in our brains… the neuroscience comforted me—as do all findings that converge on mitigating the mysteries I encounter routinely—like the denouement of an Agatha Christie mystery, an epiphany.  In fact (another scrap of neuroscience) we become wired to experience a surge of pleasure when unrelated threads of ideas converge in mutual support of a larger idea. (notes from A&O seminar)

 

Like all great insights in science, this idea raised more questions than it answered.  The endless horizons…  And in particular, IMAGINATION being the engine of CREATIVITY.  

 

 

CREATIVITY is a universal experience as we learn, develop, grow—never thinking about it.  It seeks answers to questions that are miniscule and mundane through those of survival itself. From solving a crossword puzzle through devising a possible solution to the mystery of our origin or fate or even that of the universe. 

 

My mother bootstrapped my reading by showing me comic books –and one day at table, my infant mind learned that GOD (whoever that was) CREATED THE UNIVERSE!  WOW! He (or she or it) created something from nothing! WOW! AND THEN created humans in her image!  so that is REAL creativity!   The comic book of the bible was one of my favorites until I discovered the Odyssey and how gods and humans interacted with each other on a regular basis. 

 

And I was (and am) in a continuing dialogue with understandings that are just out of reach—forever on the tip of my tongue : but I was encouraged: what could be more creative than to see the resonances between superficially dissimilar things:   “To see a World in a Grain of Sand?”  Or “Heaven in a Wild Flower,” Or to Hold Infinity in the palm of my hand / and Eternity in an Hour”[viii]

 

A Resonant Connection.

AND THIS is an appropriate place to ask and suggest answers to the questions about some of the ways that SPIRITUALITY is inextricably intertwined with CREATIVITY.

 

And we could start with the young SHIVA, known as NATARAJA –there is a good reason that many people revere the NATARAJA, the Sanskrit name for “Lord of the Dance”—the Hindu god Shiva in his form as the cosmic dancer.  The story resonates with our experience of CHANGE. 

 

SHIVA dances of doomsday, represented by the arch of flames that accompanies the dissolution of the universe … and THEN rebirth—symbolized by his drum.   THIS the dance of creation is said to have been performed in Chidambaram, in South India, a place identified with both the centre of the universe and the human heart.

A giant sculpture of Nataraja is the icon of CERN[ix] (“Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire”), the European Council for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, the $5 billion home to the Large Hadron Collider, and represents the seamless bridge between science, spirituality and the dynamic cosmos.  His lordly presence there urges us to take all these connections seriously. 

 

Fritjof Capra, author of the landmark book,  The Tao of Physics (1975), highlights the connection of Nataraja with modern theories of physics, observes:

“According to quantum field theory, the dance of creation and destruction is the basis of the very existence of matter. Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle [participates] in a dance—a pulsating process of creation and destruction. For … modern physicists then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter, the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomena.” 

But in the 45 years since Nataraja was installed at CERN, inquiries boot-strapped by billion dollar efforts indicates that when we look more deeply into particles, they give way to something dramatically less tangible: a cloud of probabilities—

 

have we found that down deep EVERYTHING is really NOTHING?!   Like before THE CREATION?   Or THE BIG BANG?  Or in the DAY BEFORE DAYS?  before TIME?

 

We can get lost in such questions … but we must get on with our daily lives — Surely we can create something more satisfying.  Perhaps the best place for such questions is in the background, like the faint sound of our own heartbeats and breath, only a source of interest or concern at rare moments… moments of awe, sublime experiences inspiring the exercise of these ideas. 

 

ARE THESE the RESONANCES that echo through our CREATIVE IMAGINATION?  Have we CREATED this idea or DISCOVERED it?  Is REVELATION the outcome of  DISCOVERING CONNECTIONS?  …  I believe the physicists that imagined, conceptualized and designed demonstrations of the fundamental constituents of the universe are no less artists that those of us who use words, or paints, or music, or our bodies.[x]

 

CHANGE.  Participants in a seminar I’ve taught every spring since 1979 hear me get passionate about my own experience as a brain scientist experiencing a deep resonance with the idea that Nataraja conveys: the MAELSTROM OF PERPETUAL DISINTEGRATION AND RENEWAL—a phrase I happily found in Marshall Berman’s book on CHANGE – he comments on why CHANGE is often approached with such great trepidation:

 “… To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world‑‑and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. 

…  it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.”[xi]

 

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BUT THERE IS A PLACE of PEACE even in a MAELSTROM– within this vortex of unimaginable power and potential for violent destruction there is, an ephemeral place of perfect balance, a place of  harmony, a place of peace—in what we call its eye[xii].  Poets call it a “stillpoint.” It is also a moving target.

“Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm—an  arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”

• Robert Frost considered that such stillness is a precious “momentary stay against confusion.”
• As Ellen Handler Spitz put it, “the aesthetic ideal dissolves categories of time and space and absorbs into itself past memories and anticipation of the future” (1985:142).

      WE all pursue balance, by orienting toward such a STILL POINT[xiii] That state in which apparent contradictions feel reconciled: We NEED to know that the peace it implies is possible. 

      Vincent van Gogh, said that “Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. [I see art] in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”  —

 

The biological roots and resonances of perpetual disintegration and renewal go deep:  Creative and destructive forces are no less present at the level of our development, beginning at conception … and every day, now, in the organization of our organs—most notably The human brain itself is a continuing, more-or-less controlled organ of the creation and destruction and recreation of CONNECTIONS.   And our humanity is the (usually) hopeful outcome.  

 

 

You can see why I entered this dazzling world

 

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And our SANCTUARY is an ideal environment for their creation and  discovery of CONNECTIONS—in large measure because it is safe! Free, if only briefly, from the distractions of urgent needs  –Such is the nature of organisms: whenever possible, exploring, discovering, taking apart, putting together, always creating and discovering connections in activities that are more-or-less like PLAY.

It is in in such a unique state of consciousness that the forging of new connections manifests and surges within and between us

 

  I always envision a playground full of our children, and my backyard where squirrels and finches in their season are learning all they can about who they are, what they are capable of, and what it means to play with others.

 

The ancients understood THE POWER OF A SAFE PLACE—in the times of the ancient Greeks, groups of participants, often in an altered state created by chanting, dancing, or drugs, created a ring of fire to designate a place of safety that enabled them to be free in their expression and to protect the audiences (who gathered at their own risk) from their possible excesses. 

 

In more recent times (say, the last 1500 years) churches in Europe might be explicitly recognized in law as SANCTUARY

 

 

 

 

 

AND Just as the great Romantic era painter Eugene Delacroix said, any art—not least the art of the inspired orator—is  “no more than the pretext … that joins the mind of the artist with that of the spectator.”(1850)^[i] 

 

Not the MEETING OF MINDS we find in academe or board rooms, but the SPEAKING OF HEART TO HEART. 

 

 

 

Of course ANY space can be sacred if it encourages … if it enables … CREATING CONNECTIONS—the source of all meaning. … AND always, in lockstep with our personal experiences of the wonders of the world—HERE! Especially in sanctuary, we are especially safe to find connections with EACH OTHER: You may agree with John Donne[xvi] who (while recovering from near death from typhus) understood and wrote 400 years ago … that we never need to send to know for whom the bell tolls.  Because we are all part of humanity, anyone’s death diminishes every individual”[xvii]

 

 

 CONCLUDE

 _______________________________________________________________

OUT TAKES

 

Modern people understand that perceptions come from outside one’s self and a transmuted into thoughts that seem to come from within themselves

 

BUT the exact path that information takes when we are being CREATIVE involves machinations that we do not understand!

We can describe the devil out of it, but people that experience unexpected or abundant creative experience are often at a loss: ideas come from a SOURCE that is USUALLY HIDDEN—the perception is that it is from OUTSIDE YOU.

 

 

SOME EXPERIENCES OF CREATIVITY

Edward Albee:  spoke of writing as self-discovery, connecting his act of writing to what he’s thinking about. –like when something is on the tip of your tongue and you can’t quite connect it to consciousness—Truman Capote would agree!     BUT it can go further, as when W. H. Auden discovered by writing things he would never have otherwise thought or felt before. Robert Frost had a similar experience writing poetry. and Keats had often “not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after I had composed and written it down”  Similarly, E.M. Forster famously said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”   IF pressed, modern creatives would consider that an altered state of mind enabled access to otherwise unavailable or even unknown resources—new dots that could be connected;  BUT we are still in transition from the views of ancients in the Western tradition who were likely to believe  that  creativity originates from a divine force, either  one God  or multiple  gods ( (Niu & Sternberg 2006). And other scholars[xx]   It was all a matter of connecting dots, some of which are inaccessible—theology often argues we are creative because we were made in the image of the supreme creator:  “The King James Version translates “breath of the Almighty” as “inspiration of the Almighty.”   So, when the source of one’s inspired expression is mysterious, we are sore tempted to invoke the god of the gaps.

 

It is part of the human condition to seek explanations—the steps by which one’s state of mind has come about.  And in our tradition, when one is not forthcoming we satisfy this need with GOD. Nicknamed in scholarship, “THE GOD OF THE GAPS” Filling in where other explanations are not forthcoming. 

 

Most problem solving is Like driving across country at night in a dense fog: out headlights only let us see a few feet ahead, but you can travel from sea to sea if you are patient.[xxi]  

 

Experiences and feelings we do not understand are often considered MYSTICAL—that is MYSTERIES: and working toward solving them is part of the great game!   OF COURSE we will never know it ALL…this recreation (and I mean RE-CREATION) is endless and REFLECTS in our minds the truth of being in a universe the ends of which are undetectable.  We pursue more points of light—dots to connect—and comforting metaphors.

 

… thinking about people who are conspicuously creative[xxii],

 

To approach the meaning of “Spiritual” it is important to recall that as we experience the world, its representation within us grows and enlarges.  We inhale the world, we take it into us, like our breath.  Spiritual refers to that in a way — “spirit” is breath, the breath of life that we take into ourselves.  The urgency of breathing partly informs the meaning of “inspiration.”   The external world, taken in through our senses has become part of us, in some senses we are indistinguishable and have become—even briefly—“one.”   But as we mature this is so gradual it is imperceptible.  Spiritual refers to the fact the we have been inspired by taking something from outside ourselves into us.  Inspiration has from earliest times been regarded as the gift of the gods.

 

We have experienced views of cosmos, from the Palomar Observatory’s telescopes, then the Hubble Space Telescope, and now the James Webb Space Telescope. 

And not so unlike ancient navigators that connected the dots to create intelligible patterns we are still trying.  

Just as we find these progressively more complex pictures views of the cosmos extraordinarily affecting, we are confronting vastly expanded views of the components of the brain that support our cognitive abilities in extraordinary ways … and I find some of these potent sources of stimulating ways to think about CREATIVITY.

 

 

 

 

“A mind,” William James has written, “is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or reinforce one another.  The collection of ideas alters by subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies alter as the organism gets more aged.” — How does the interplay of your ideas changed and how do they change YOU?  And what of the dramatic transformative change sometimes called a “mystical experience?”

 

 

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SPECTRUM of INTENSITY

FOR ME the word “mystical” resonates with “mystery”—a common experience we are all motivated to solve and which may represent the meeting of needs from recreational to biologically urgent—a matter of survival.

 

AND I feel that the specific experiences themselves operate across a gradient or spectrum of intensity, from the common classroom experience of “transformational learning” (Piagetian accommodation writ large) through a whole-life-changing intense “spiritual experience” –a major paradigm (world view, lebenswelt) shift.  

 

	To approach the meaning of “Spiritual” it is important to recall that as we experience the world, its representation within us grows and enlarges.  We inhale the world, we take it into us, like our breath.  Spiritual refers to that in a way — “spirit” is breath, the breath of life that we take into ourselves.  The urgency of breathing partly informs the meaning of “inspiration.”   The external world, taken in through our senses has become part of us, in some senses we are indistinguishable and have become—even briefly—“one.”   But as we mature this is so gradual it is imperceptible.  Spiritual refers to the fact the we have been inspired by taking something from outside ourselves into us.  Inspiration has from earliest times been regarded as the gift of the gods.
“Spiritual experience” and “religious experience.”  For our purposes, spiritual experiences are personal, private and  ineffable. We may approximate them in words or pictures, and others with whom we try to communicate may even understand in part, recognizing some common ground, some shared dimension. “Religion” on the other hand refers to a social phenomenon which is founded on, validated by,  spiritual experience as related by like-minded individuals and/or role models.  We are bound to each other by common beliefs and goals, and our validation for this activity is our corroboration from personal experience of our inspirations or of our pursuit of them.  Below we will visit definitions and experiences and try to find common ground. “Sublime,” often regarded as one of the supreme aesthetic experiences (see Burke) involves simultaneous deep attraction combined with awe and fear.

 

DESCRIPTION

WHAT is a “CREATIVE experience?”  The dictionary/shared definition is only a doorway!   We MUST enter in this way if we are to share questions and answers with others.

EVERYDAY CREATIVIY.

 

 

James (1918) described four salient characteristic of the mystical experience which have sustained the test of time and are still quoted by today’s scholars of mysticism (e.g. Stace, 1960; Happold, 1990):

• Ineffability: The experience defies expression; it cannot be described in words.
• Noetic quality: It gives insight and knowledge into deep truths, which are sustained over time.
• Transiency: Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Usually they last from a few seconds to minutes and their quality cannot be accurately remembered, though the experience is recognised if it recurs.
• Passivity: Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, like meditation, once they set in, the mystic feels out of control as if he or she were grasped and held by a superior power.

 

 

[in the definition of spirituality we probably do not need reference to religion –although they are often linked, in part because most if not all religious traditions have found various ways of evoking a mystical experience and then putting these experiences into service as validation for the religious precepts: they make predictions, ask for trust in the process, and are validated by success.  

 

IS Dostoyevsky’s “eternal harmony” the same as  Maslow’s “peak experience” or the  Zen Buddhist’s “satori” or  the yogi’s “samadhi”?  Is Buddha’s “awakening” the same as Jung’s “individuation?”     Is the  “luminosity” of the Tibetan Book of the Dead the same as the Quaker’s  “inner light” or Jacob Boehme’s “light which is the heart of God” or the  “living flame” of Saint John of the Cross?   Is Saint Paul’s  “peace that passeth understanding” the same as Thomas  Merton’s “transcendental unconscious”?   Could Blake’s “divine intuition” be linked to Gurdjieff’s “objective  consciousness” or Brother Lawrence’s “unclouded vision” or Arthur  Deikman’s “deautomatization”?   How are Arthur Clarke’s “overmind” and Emerson’s “Oversoul” related?     Could Colin Wilson’s “intensity experience,” Eliade’s “shamanic  ecstasy,” and  Saint Teresa’s “ecstasy” be the same as the LSD  explorer’s “moment of truth” or Meyerhoff’s peyote-induced “mystic  vision,”  Or how about what Julian Silverman (writing of acute schizophrenia) called “the  oceanic fusion of higher and lower referential processes”?  Might all these be a manifestation of one part or another of the  neurophysiological “drive-arrest-release sequence in biogenic amine inhibitory systems, releasing temporal lobe limbic, hippocampal-septal  hypersynchrony that lasts for long periods of afterdischarge?”

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CONNECTIONS

• CREATIVITY

  • Look in on our Cultural tradition that ONLY THE GODS CAB CREATE; READ perception-and-free-will-reality-and-perfection

  • READ The Beast in the Brain: The Neuroethology of Creativity (Greenberg 2002)

  • AHA! Eureka!  Epiphany, Jouissance,

  •  
• CREATIVITY notes 
  • Spontaneity is a an aspect of authenticity  (authority and spirituality): 
  • AUTHENTICITY  

OLDER OUT-TAKES,  ENDNOTES:

 

MY OWN DISPOSITION is to search for facts with which I am comfortable because they seem to correspond to reality—these derive from experience (but can I trust my senses?) or the experiences and testimony of trusted witnesses.

 

 

 

 

 

Modern people understand that thoughts come from within themselves, often under the influence of some outside influence—a trigger or catalyst

 

BUT the exact path that information takes when we are being CREATIVE involves machinations that we do not understand!

We can describe the devil out of it, but people that experience unexpected or abundant creative experience are often at a loss: ideas come from a SOURCE that is USUALLY HIDDEN—the perception is that it is from OUTSIDE YOU.

 

 

 

MEANING derives from these CONNECTIONS –every word I use is defined in the dictionary using all the other words.

 

Looking at  stars in the night sky, suddenly one will seem to stand out and an entire

constellation of connections will appear