TWENTY QUESTIONS FOR DILIP MUKERJEA: QUESTION 14

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Question #14: 

Edward de Bono advocates ‘creativity’ as essentially a problem of perception.

Alex Osborn calls it a matter of applied imagination.

Nobel laureate and physicist Linus Pauling looks at ‘creativity’ from the standpoint of having a lot of ideas.

Dee Hock of VISA fame thinks ‘creativity’ is more about getting old ideas out of our heads.

Many experts have proclaimed ‘creativity’ as a deliberate process of combining seemingly disparate ideas, which also happens to be an old school of thought.

Amidst all this diversity of perspectives, what are your personal views?

DM:   A creative question of the highest pedigree! All your examples are personalities of superlative creative brilliance, and I salute them unreservedly. I tend not to define, lest it confine…by its very nature, I believe that creativity should not be defined. But I take your point.

What is it? To me it is a sensation, a phenomenon, a truth, about our embedded destiny, a quality that makes us distinctive when matched against all other known species that have come and gone.

It is a quality of consciousness that can enslave, and liberate, cause rupture yet lead to rapture, but always have the capacity to successfully address the tears and fears that beset us.

The word create is derived from the Greek kranein, meaning ‘to accomplish’ and the Sanskrit kar, ‘to make’.

From the Latin, we have creare, ‘to make out of nothing.’ To create means to originate, to bring into being from nothing, to cause to exist.

Creativity is defined as creative ability; artistic or intellectual inventiveness. But most of all, creativity is a reflection of the creative source from which we have all emerged.

This theme could be expanded ad infinitum, so for now, I would just add that all children, born as fresh editions of consciousness, are resplendently creative; they store the secret of what it means to be creative by looking at their positive qualities: curiosity, enthusiasm (meaning: ‘to be filled with God’), spontaneity, imagination, innocence, an absence of fear, and an unlimited capacity to change behaviour.

[to be continued in the Next Post]