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CREATIVITY, IMAGINATION & VISION
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
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It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
C.G. Jung
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Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
The reaction which is now beginning in the West against the intellect in favour of feeling, or in favour of intuition, seems to me a mark of cultural advance, a widening of consciousness beyond the too narrow limits of a tyrannical intellect
C.G. Jung, Commentary, The Secret of the Golden Flower (Translated by Richard Wilhelm), p. 85
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... What do you come up against when you have a vision? - you come up against the problem of incarnating it in a denser way, in a material. The very fluid and open way of the world of imagination is infinite. The problem is how this infinity is to be condensed in the material object.
Cecil Collins, The Vision of the Fool & Other Writings [ed. Brian Keeble], p. 115
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A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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There is no rest for the soul. God is hungry for us to grow. When you look around and you see empty spaces, beware. In those spaces are cities, invisible civilisations, future histories, everything is HERE. We must look at the world with new eyes. We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven't begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. Our hunger can change the world, make it better, sweeter. The world that we see and the world that is there are two different things. Wars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle. We need a new language to talk to one another.
Ben Okri, The Famished Road, p. 498
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A culture grounded on extraversion alone will not survive because its values are too shallow to sustain it through the kind of crisis we now face. But there is a new consciousness coming into being I will call it quantum consciousness prepared and mediated by many thousands of individuals. With it, all things are possible. With its help, we can change our image of reality and the crystallized habits in which we are imprisoned because we don't know how to trust the heart and the imagination. The answers to our questions cannot come from the incomplete consciousness of the intellect but from a deeper revelation that may be born from our instincts, a new mythology of the whole of life as a divine unity. There is, in this new myth, no essential distinction between transcendent and immanent life; as the mystics have always told us, the distinction and the dualism are in our distorted perception of reality. The divine is what we are. We are eternally in the divine. This revelation above all others may heal our heart.
Anne Baring, in David Lorimer (ed),The Spirit of Science, p. 356
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As any creative person knows, when one gives the imagination free rein, it is likely to produce a lot of worthless material along with that which is highly prized by the individual and/or society. What is characteristically intuitive in this process is the factor of inspiration. Artists know that the muse must be wooed. Creative inspiration cannot be commanded, yet when it comes it carries with it the tremendous power and energy which may enable the artist to achieve a truly great work. It also carries the conviction and certainty characteristic of intuitive insight. The artist may not be able to explain why he or she feels compelled to carry out a particular piece of work, but he or she knows it must be done. The intuitive faculty leads the artist into new ways of expression and, whatever the medium, serves as the link between the individual and the universal experience given expression in a work of art. Thus, the source of true art is always an intuitive cognition of reality.
Frances E. Vaughan, Awakening Intuition, p. 48
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The state of awareness of visions is not one in which we are either remembering or perceiving. It is rather a level of consciousness at which we experience visions within ourselves.
This experience cannot be fixed; for the vision is moving, an impression growing and becoming visual, imparting a power to the mind. It can be evoked but never defined.
Yet the awareness of such imagery is a part of living. It is life selecting from the forms which flow towards it or refraining, at will.
A life which derives its power from within itself will focus the perception of such images. And yet this free visualising in itself whether it is complete or hardly yet perceptible or undefined in either space or time this has its own power running through. The effect is such that the visions seem actually to modify one's consciousness, at least in respect of everything which their own form proposes as their pattern and significance. This change in oneself, which follows on the visions' penetration of one's very soul, produces this state of awareness, of expectancy. At the same time there is an outpouring of feeling into the image which becomes, as it were, the soul's plastic embodiment. This state of alertness of the mind or consciousness, has, then, a waiting, a receptive quality. It is like an unborn child, as yet unfelt even by the mother, to whom nothing of the outside world slips through .
The life of the consciousness is boundless. It inter-penetrates the world and is woven through all its imagery. Thus it shares those characteristics of living which our human existence can show. One tree left living in an arid land would carry in its seed the potency from whose roots all the forests of the earth might spring. So with ourselves; when we no longer inhabit our perceptions they do not go out of existence; they continue as though with a power of their own, awaiting the focus of another consciousness. There is no more room for death, vision disintegrates and scatters, it does so only to reform in another mode.
Therefore we must hearken closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within. "The Word became Flesh and dwelt among us." And then the inner core breaks free now feebly and now violently from the words within which it dwells like a charm. "It happened to me according to the Word."
If we will surrender our closed personalities, so full of tension, we are in a position to accept this magical quality principle of living, whether in thought, intuition or relationships. For in fact we see every day human beings who are absorbed in one another, whether in living or in teaching, aimless or without direction. So it is with every created thing, everything we can communicate, every constant in the flux of living; each one has its own principle which shapes it, keeps life in it, and maintains it in our consciousness. Thus it is preserved, like a rare species, from extinction. We may identify it with 'me' or 'you' according to our estimate of its scale or its infinity. For we set aside the self and personal existence as being fused into a larger experience. All that is required of us is to release control. Some part of ourselves will bring us into the unison. The enquiring spirit rises from stage to stage until it encompasses the whole of Nature. All laws are left behind. One's soul is a reverberation of the universe. Then too, as I believe, one's perception reaches out towards the Word, towards awareness of the vision.
As I said at first, this awareness of visions can never fully be described, its history can never be delimited, for it is a part of life itself. Its essence is a flowing and a taking form. It is love, delighting to lodge itself in the mind. This adding of something to ourselves - we may accept it or let it pass; but as soon as we are ready it will come to us by impulse, from the very breathing of our life. An image will take for us suddenly, at the first look, as the first cry of a newborn child emerging from its mother's womb.
Whatever the orientation of a life, its significance will depend on this ability to conceive the vision. Whether the image has a material or an immaterial character depends simply on the angle from which the flow of psychic energy is viewed, whether at ebb or flood.
It is true that the consciousness is not exhaustively defined by these images moving, these impressions which grow and become visual, imparting a power to the mind which we can evoke at will. For the forms which come into the consciousness some are chosen while others are excluded arbitrarily.
But this awareness of visions which I endeavor to describe is the viewpoint of all life as though it were seen from some high place; it is like a ship which was plunged into the seas and flashes again as a winged thing in the air.Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions.
I search, inquire and guess. And with that sudden eagerness must the lamp wick seek its nourishment, for the flame leaps before my eyes as the oil feeds it. It is all my imagination, certainly, what I see there in the blaze. But if I have drawn something from the fire and you have missed it, well, I should like to hear from those whose eyes are still untouched. For is this not my vision? Without intent I draw from the outside world the semblance of things, but in this way I myself become part of the worlds' imaginings. Thus in everything imagination is simply that which is natural, it is nature, vision, life.
Oscar Kokoschka, On the Nature of Visions
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Have the courage to say, "I shall surely lift myself up". Do not kill the power of your mind, thinking, "I am a worthless worldly creature". Do not clip the wings of imagination; spread them out. Take the chandul as your model. When it sees the rising sun, it thinks it can reach the sun, and flies towards it. We too should be like that. However high the poor chandul flies, can it ever reach the sun? But through the imagination, it can certainly attain the sun. But our behaviour is just the opposite. We do not rise even as high as we can, but instead, we cramp our imagination, weaken our power of growth, and so flutter down to earth. Even the power that is ours, we lose by undervaluing it. When imagination is crippled one cannot but fall down. Let the imagination, therefore, be upward-looking. Since man progresses with the help of the imagination, do not throttle it. Don't whine "Brother, do not leave the beaten track; Stay where you are in the world, don't wander here and there in vain." Don't dishonour your soul. The seeker can be steady only when he has wide imagination and self-confidence. Only by these can he sustain himself and grow.
Vinoba Bhave, Talks on the Gita, pp. 57-8
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The vision is a symbolic way of experiencing revelation. The gradual unfoldment of each of the five senses brought a steady emerging revelation of God's world and a constantly extending vision. The development of sight brought a synthetic aptitude to focus the results of all lesser visions brought to the point of revelation by the other four senses. Then comes a vision, revealed by the "common sense" of the mind. This demonstrates in its most developed stage as world perception where human affairs are concerned, and frequently works out in the vast personality plans of the world leaders in the various fields of human living. But the vision with which you should be concerned is to become aware of what the soul knows and what the soul sees, through the use of the key to soul vision the intuition.
Alice Bailey, Discipleship in the New Age, Vol. I, pp. 687-8
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Vision is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist. The Kavi was in the idea of the ancients the seer and revealer of truth, and though we have wandered far enough from that ideal to demand from him only the pleasure of the ear and the amusement of the aesthetic faculty, still all great poetry preserves something of that higher truth of its own aim and significance. Poetry, in fact, being Art, must attempt to make us see, and since it is to the inner senses that it has to address itself, for the ear is its only physical gate of entry and even there its real appeal is to an inner hearing, and since its object is to make us live within ourselves what the poet has embodied in his verse, it is an inner sight which he opens in us, and this inner sight must have been intense in him before he can awaken it in us.
Therefore the greatest poets have been always those who have had a large and powerful interpretative and intuitive vision of Nature and life and man and whose poetry has arisen out of that in a supreme revelatory utterance of it. Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa, however much they may differ in everything else, are at one in having this as the fundamental character of their greatness. Their supremacy does not lie essentially in a greater thought-power or a more lavish imagery or a more penetrating force of passion and emotion; these things they may have had, one being more gifted in one direction, another in others, but these other powers were aids to their poetic expression rather than the essence or the source of it. Sight is the essential poetic gift The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and world-images which become the expressive body of the vision; and the great poets are those who repeat in some measure this ideal creation, kavayah satyasrutah, seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word.
Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, pp. 29-30
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Genius results from the miraculous fusion of the human race and the creative universe. What emerges from such a union nourishes our souls, expands our minds and senses and brings to life our own genius.
Sir Ernest Hall, 'In Defence of Genius', Annual Lecture, Arts Council of England. RSA Journal, 1996
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It is the poets whose proper task it is to bear witness to the qualities and values of the world; and I would remind you of one of the two or three supreme poets of this century Rainer Maria Rilke. Near the end of his life, in a brief period of continuous and prophetic inspiration, he completed his two greatest poetic works, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. In our secular world it is customary to look to scientists for the truth, to the arts for entertainment: I suggest that this attitude is deeply mistaken. Perhaps it should be reversed, for it is the part of the poet to present to us that total view and experience of reality which includes all aspects of our humanity in the context of every age. Or that situates every age, rather, in the context of the everlasting. Such poets have, even so, written in this century I think of Valery and St John Perse, of Rilke and of Yeats, indeed of T.S. Eliot and of Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins, of Robert Frost and there are others less complete or less illustrious. I know no poetry that goes beyond that of Rilke in stating suggesting rather who we are, what our place in the universe. Rejecting institutionalized religion he was the more free to experience those 'angels', intelligences of the universe, from 'behind the stars'. What are we, he asks, beside these great transhuman orders? And he replies:
Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable; you can't impress him with the splendour you've felt; in the cosmos where he more feelingly feels you're only a novice. So show him some simple thing, refashioned by age after age till it lives in our hands and eyes as part of ourselves. Tell him things To the things of this earth it is mankind who gives their reality. It is these only we can tell the Angel: Above all, the hardness of life, The long experience of love; in fact purely untellable things. But later, under the stars, what use? the more deeply untellable stars? For the wanderer does not bring from mountain to valley a handful of earth, for all untellable earth, but only a word he has won, pure, the yellow and blue gentian. Are we, perhaps here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit-tree, Window, possibly: Pillar, Tower It is we who give meaning to these things by our words, by performing Adam's appointed task of 'naming' the creation.
Thus we bestow on the creatures not a merely natural, but a human, an imaginative and invisible reality. And Rilke continues his thought that we are here 'just for saying' the names:
but for saying, remember, for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose of this sly earth, in urging a pair of lovers, just to make everything leap with ecstasy in them? The world finds in us an intenser, a totally new mode of being; as if we are here to perform an alchemical transmutation of crude base 'nature' into the gold of Imagination. And to the Angel we can show 'how happy a thing can be, how guileless and ours'; even in their transience: These things that live on departure understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all.
Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible hearts into oh, endlessly into ourselves. Whosoever we are.* Whosoever we are. That is a mystery which we cannot in our very nature hope to resolve. It has been the hubris of science to hope to know everything, to play Sherlock Holmes with the mystery of being itself. The poet, more humble, seeks to discern who and what we are within a totality greater than ourselves, a finally unknowable order. We are nevertheless the custodians and creators of that order of values and realities that are properly human, that human kingdom of the Imagination 'ever expanding in the bosom of God'. That 'divine body', the human Imagination, is the underlying order which bounds, embraces and contains the human universe.
Kathleen Raine, in David Lorimer (ed), The Spirit of Science, pp. 232-234
* Translated by Lieshman and Spender.
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Language deals in successive particulars; it expresses bit by bit what must be brought home to the soul at a single glance if it is to affect us profoundly. Words make the infinite finite. Symbols carry the spirit beyond the finite world of becoming into the realm of infinite being.
J.J. Bachofen
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Creativeness is the basis of evolution. With what then is it possible to strengthen the acts of creative power? Only with cheerfulness. Joy is a special wisdom. Cheerfulness is a special technique. This enhancement of vigor arises out of a conscious realization of the creativeness of elements. Truly, creative patience and cheerfulness are the two wings of the worker.
Agni Yoga
Community, sl. 163
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Creativity is precisely the ground where humanity and divinity share common space, the very core of human and divine union. The Creation tradition, therefore, puts art (with a small "a"] in the center of the development of the human person and of the satisfaction of human culture. As Eckhart would put it, there is no work that is satisfying to the human being that is not essentially a work of creativity, and each of us has this potential for self-expression living out images which is what art is all about.
Matthew Fox
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Recognizing the creative powers of imagery, many call us today to come up with visions of a benign future visions which can beckon and inspire. Images of hope are potent, necessary: they shape our goals and give us impetus for reaching them. Often they are invoked too soon, however. Like the demand for instant solutions, such expectations can stultify providing us with an escape from the despair we may feel, while burdening us with the task of aridly designing a new Eden. Genuine visioning happens from the roots up, and these roots for many are shrivelled by unacknowledged despair. Many of us are in an in-between time, groping in the dark with shattered beliefs and faltering hopes, and we need images for that in-between time if we are to work through it.
Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self, p. 25
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