Expand Your Mind
As a creative thinker, you need to seek out opportunities to expand your mind.
Why do you need to expand your mind?
Because each time you do expand your mind, you can reflect back on how your mind was before and see its limitations. When you have done this a few times over the years, it allows you to speculate and understand that your current perspective is also limited.
This will give you the insight and drive to seek the new. You will be better prepared to 'look to the sides' of what you know and understand. And perhaps this will give you an advantage is recognising new things in the realm of the unknown.
The Unknown and the Unconscious Mind
The realm of the unknown in the physical universe is almost identical, as far as we are concerned, to the realm of the personal unknown which is the unconscious mind. If you have ever experienced a burst of sudden insight into a certain pattern of your own behaviour you will appreciate that you are unable to think about and understand something until you can 'see it' consciously. There has to be a process of recognition. And generally speaking we only recognise what we already know. So you have to expand your mind to know a little more.
Projecting the Familiar
The mind seems to work in patterns of recognition. Gaze at clouds in the sky long enough and you will start to see faces or figures of humans or animals. The mind projects the familiar onto the unfamiliar. It tries to make sense of the unknown so it can feel safer. The ability to draw patterns of connections between diverse elements is a prime creative skill. In fact, that greatest of creative geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci, used to prime his mind for creative endeavour by gazing at the ashes in the fireplace and trying to pick out recognisable things like faces, beasts or countryside scenes. In the movie, Little Man Tate, Jodie Foster stimulates her son's genius at bedtime by having him gaze at the shadows on the walls and point out what he recognise in them.
Making connections
So the mind comes to understand the world by comparing new unknown things to old known things -- and sees where the similarities lie. It looks at a thing and scans it's memory bank of templates for all the things it knows and has names for, and looks for those things that are like the new thing. This gives it some kind of reference points to work with. Comparison helps us to define a thing.
The question that creative thinkers need to at least consider is: what if there is nothing in your experience that is like the things in the unknown (the realm of all possibility)? How will you recognise something if you have nothing with which to relate to it?
I think this is a very interesting point when you consider the challenges we face as a human race. There are answers to our critical problems. They are waiting 'out there' to be discovered and thought up by someone. Maybe you....
It's prime, virgin, untouched territory. A rich mine of incredible new ideas. And somehow, we have to get beyond what we know already. We have to consider that 'what we look for' might be limiting us from finding what is possible. Those patterns of the known that we project on the unknown, they are very useful and re-assuring, but they might also stop us from seeing what we need to see.
Mind Expanding Ideas
This line of thought was triggered by a book that I just read called 'The Vision: Out-of-Body Revelations of Divine Wisdom'
by Jaap Hiddinga. This book documents the author's out of body experiences and the journeys he has taken throughout this and other dimensions guided and tutored by various angels and spiritual guides. Wherever your beliefs lie, I think there is much to be gained from reading this book. Even if you come from a perspective that the idea of God, and spiritual realms, and angels etc is all poppycock, I think you can still expand your mind by at least considering the possibilities expressed. And by understanding how difficult the author finds it to describe some of the things (other types of life forms or sentient beings) he is shown in other universes. It really brings home this idea that we are comfortable with what we know, but that this is the tip of the iceberg, and there are infinitely more things outside what we know.
Open the window
By expanding your mind thus, you allow for the possibility. You have opened a window in your brain to the possibility of ideas coming in that are completely outside your comfort zone.
Expanding your mind allows you to think the impossible. And that is truly creative.
Onwards and upwards,
Wily
