More and more, I have come to understand that creativity has little to do with what I think, and more to do with who I am and where I am at any given moment. I call this The Now.
I am a worshipper of the moment, of now, for me, this was the road back to sanity and towards peace.
I came to see mostly that the mind exists to take us forward and back, it is a practical thing, not a creative thing. Creativity, in fact, is the absence of what we like to describe as thought.
I am learning to write and think out of the quiet, not the noise.
According to the spiritual philosopher Eckhart Tolle, writing in The Power Of Now, the mind is essentially a survival machine, a monster in some ways, storing and analyzing information, obsessed with the past, fearful of the future.
It is not the mind that is creative; it’s the absence of thinking. It’s a fascinating argument, and I have been living it, working hard these past few years on the state of consciousness Tolle calls “the inner quiet.”
I think of the inner quiet like the feeling I got when lying on my back on a warm day, floating in a pond as smooth as glass and as quiet as space.
Enlightenment, Tolle says, means rising above thought: “When you do use your mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and stillness, between mind and no mind.”
Most of us are taught just the opposite. We fill our heads with worries, grievance, fear, and anger. We are so busy thinking we can’t think at all. That is the very embodiment of the chaotic information we like to call the news.
There is so much news, there is no news.
No mind, Tolle writes, is consciousness without thought, the state of inner quiet. Only in that state is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does the idea have any real power.
Tolle writes that all true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The greatest scientists and artists, he argues, report that their significant breakthroughs come at a time of “mental quietude,” not the frenzied “thinking” that preoccupies and distracts so many of us.
When I sit down to write – or when Maria begins work on a quilt – we both work out of the quiet space Tolle describes. Sitting at my computer, there is no past, no future, only right now. Before I touch my keyboard, I ask, “where am I now,” and I write from there. It is the most peaceful place in my life, and there, I am free to be, as opposed to think.
I find this inner quiet by listening to my heart, my feelings, my body, not my mind. It isn’t through the mind, through thinking, that the world and human and animal life was created.
The more we learn about the body, says Tolle, the more we realize how powerful the intelligence is that works within it, and how little we know about it. When the mind reconnects with the body, it becomes a wonderful tool because it serves something greater than itself.
And it rises far above my fractured mind and has begun to serve something other than itself.