Developing your Creative Self
A look at the spiritual necessity of creativity to a healthy, wholesome life.
My Mother was an incredibly creative person, though she’d rarely admit it. She used to make cards for all occasions: birthdays, Christmas. You name it. The cards were really cute, too, and more or less customized to each person, for each occasion that they were made. It was always such a unique gesture to get a personalized, handmade card on whatever the special day was. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how many other people get opportunities to express themselves creatively, the way my Mother used to with her stamping hobby. I worry that too many people are worried about self-perception to explore their own creativity fully, when I think that creative expression is necessary for healthy, human development.
While I reminisce on my own journey, and what’s brought me to the point of wanting a career in a creative field, in spite of its challenges; I consistently circle back on the relevance of fear to the journey itself. Like many emotional responses, fear, as a condition, serves people in several ways. Fear can keep you safe, for example. From our earliest years, and that first feeling of there being a boogeyman in the closet, or a devil in the furnace, fear acts like a type of coating, enshrouding us with dread so that we learn to stay away. While this is typically a useful response to the perception of something threatening, there’s something about art itself that begs the human condition to ask for more. In this scenario, of what use is an emotion designed for self control?
I ask this as a rhetorical question. Certainly, there are many situations, particularly in the creative fields, where a strong sense of fear is necessary for a long and prosperous career. But, fundamentally, there is an inherent inconsistency with the competing notions of needing to explore something further, while doing so from inside a restrictive bubble, isn’t there? So what gives? How do people become more creative when parts of our own psyche are actively competing against just that? The simple answer is to learn to see past the fear, and to focus on the goal itself, and then to learn what the fear is telling us about reaching that goal. What follows is my best attempt to explain how to leverage fear in the pursuit of mastery, and all the steps it takes to get there. Enjoy!
Masks of Memory
What does it mean to ‘pierce the veil’? In a practical sense, the term refers to seeing more than what is normally meant to be seen. But this is actually an ironic definition. People who have never ‘pierced the veil’ in their lives would only understand this literally, but I suspect that there are a good deal of artists and entrepreneurs who, upon actually piercing the veil for themselves, began to understand what it was that they accomplished. See: Jackson Pollock, for example. An artist who more or less stumbled into his fame, and then realized what the world actually looked like for the sake of his accomplishments. I’m not saying this to diminish the artist in any particular way. I’m just pointing out that you don’t know what ‘it’ is until you actually do, and then you generally can’t forget it, for the most part. It seems like a very simple thing to say, piercing the veil, and it is; yet it is a profoundly inspiring and transformative act. One that is very hard to forget.
I suppose that the best place to start here is to start by exploring the concept of masking, and what it means to be masked. All humans wear masks, and frankly, it’s quite probable that most animals do, too. In fact, I would reckon that any memory//consciousness driven animal, which is to say any animal that bases at least some of its decision-making processes on the memories of previous experiences, wears masks. I say this because it’s the force of constant, experiential living that defines the future of all things’ lived experiences. In fact, I would even go so far as to postulate that evolution, and therefore, the divine process of spiritual maturation, is directly tied to the collective unconsciousness of a species’ amalgam of shared experiences. In essence, we all grow based on what we need now, and in the future, and that this process is so intrinsic to life in this Universe that it is profoundly spiritually connected to real, lived experiences.
Fear, as an emotion, sits behind these masks of memory, and acts like a server to a webpage. In essence, experience is perceived on the front-end, processed in the back-end, and then a response is returned. If enough ‘data’ has created a response that the current experience being felt is also one to be feared, then that’s the response that gets returned to the user experiencing the situation. When this response becomes the norm, one of the most practical ways to move past this type of barrier is to push through the masks of memory, find the source of fear, and then to start to knead it out from within. This process is called ‘guided mastery’, and it’s not an easy process, by any reasonable consideration. But it does work. If you wanted to try it on yourself, you could look up a psychologist named Albert Bandura, and then go have some fun. For best results, I would recommend that this particular type of practice be performed in pairs, using someone as a guide to help the other person through their fears. However, for a truly hair-raising experience, it can be done by one’s own hand, as well. Now you know. But what do you know? At this point, not much. Just a practical way to let spiders crawl around on your arm, if you’re into that and were previously afraid of it.
A Stairway to Heaven
If Albert Bandura and the topic of guided mastery is where you should start your reading to enhance your creativity, then the next two people to look into would be Lev Vygotsky and Abraham Maslow. We’ll start with Maslow, and his work on the ‘hierarchy of needs’. In general, Maslow makes for a good read for anyone who wants to learn how to help themselves directly through their own environment, because he teaches you how to master specific domains of your life, and then expand from there. In this regard, the point of reading Maslow as a form is to learn how to help yourself from a long term planning point of view, because he teaches you which kind of stimuli are going to affect you along your own growth curve, as well as where and how. Maslow’s big claim to fame was modeling a person’s (or an animal’s) ‘hierarchy of needs’. The point of understanding Maslow in relation to developing creativity is tied directly to the notion that creativity is generally hampered by fear, and learning where fear sits on Maslow’s hierarchy is important for overcoming it.
If you follow this link, it will take you to Maslow's Wikipedia entry, where you can find a diagram of 'Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs'. From there, you should notice that ‘safety needs’, which is very much what your own fear is concerned with, is listed as a deficiency need. What this means is that, if you lived in perpetual fear, you would not grow into your highest self because of it. To avoid this, the mind generally goes through programmed responses to avoid the fear stimulus altogether, facilitating growth, but in a different direction. As years and years of this programming occurs, it actually changes your identity to the tune that you are ‘afraid’ of something. This is a mask. It’s a mask that’s built by believing your programming over a given period of time, rather than exploring the stimulus. If you were to explore this mask in relation to a fear of heights, or bees, for example, you may eventually discover a root cause for the fear. Then, slowly and perhaps using Bandura’s guided mastery approach, you could work your way through the fear. You may actually develop an equilibrium with that fear, for example, or else learn to overcome it altogether.
The reason for bringing up Maslow first is because his research sits directly at the intersection of creativity and fear. Understanding that you likely fear your own creative deficiency more so than actually being creatively deficient is a powerful weapon in the fight for your higher self. Next, I want to talk about Vygotsky, and his work on the zone of proximal development. The zone of proximal development is a way of looking at learning as a mindset for people to take on new challenges. The idea is that learning new things takes on a form, like a stairway, and that where you want to be in your learning curve is purposefully moving towards the next step. If you stay inert, you don’t learn. If you push to the extreme, you learn lots, but you take on more risk. You want to find the right ‘throttle speed’, for lack of a better term, and then ride it to the next step. Step by step, evenly paced. This helps ensure a more thorough, complete transmission of knowledge by providing the right amount of what you’re learning, at the right speed for it to settle in without causing a breakdown.
Finding the right pace of learning is very important for Vygostky’s zone of proximal development to work most effectively. Learning, in a metaphysical sense, is like waves crashing on a beach. No one wave contains all the requisite information of the big picture and, simultaneously, each new wave contains knowledge from the previous waves, as well as new knowledge. I use the wave metaphor here because I find it very peaceful, but also quite open to adaptation. For the most part, the gist of the metaphor is that it takes time to learn something effectively, but that it’s worth it because of the time it takes. No one hires amateurs, except for free. You should cherish the time it takes you to learn something because you value the strength of your own word. If you’re willing to tell a client that you’ve been working in a professional capacity for X years, well, what does that look like? The most rational way for someone to make a jump into the purely unknown, and then be able to relate that to other people, is by the strength of their own word against their commitment to finishing the task. This is why you should use Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in conjunction with Bandura’s guided mastery. The one (Bandura) helps you see the steps that are necessary for what you seek, while the other (Vygotsky) teaches you to relate your learning of those steps to others. The stairway to Heaven metaphor lies in that relationship, as others will start to see you for who you are, and then help you develop the mask you want to wear because of it.
Of Myth and Madness, and the Source of Charisma
I have a theory that your highest self is also your most artistic self, and that it is achieved through an outward projection of your soul. Pride, for example, is fundamentally the projection of one’s soul, and in so doing, the outward representation of an individual's own, unique charisma. Charisma isn’t one thing or another, so much as a weaving of personal and spiritual threads that a person adorns. Charisma isn’t fixed, either. It morphs and changes as the spiritual core of a person’s identity grows and develops. You cannot be more or less charismatic than others in a binary sense, as it is not something which is calculated metricly, and it has no final tally. A person can weave in and out of situations where their charisma expands or diminishes, the same way as a day can be sunny or rainy. What may be different is that weaving charismatically takes place, at least partially, within spiritual domains, and those can break down in less obvious ways then what can be seen in the mirror, causing your charisma to fade. Over time, you may come to believe this fading is permanent, creating a mask that will effectively make it permanent. Don’t make that mask!
Rather than making a mask, what I like to do instead is to make a character. Making a character will serve you better than a mask, because the character is a force that you are then able to project into the world, rather than something that the world is projecting into you. You’d be surprised what this force of projection can help with. Things like introversion, or being ‘nerdy’. These can all be overcome by an avatar in the spirit world, to help you see how it’s affecting you in your lived reality. For me, for example, I like dragons. They’re fierce, powerful, strong and cunning. But the good ones are very noble, too. And majestic. Growing up, I had confidence issues, particularly around my looks and my speech. For example, I have a tendency to use big words in complex phrases at awkward times, especially when no one else knows what I’m talking about. And it hinders me. But, as a dragon, that’s to be expected. Dragons read a lot, and they’re smart creatures. They’re also handsome when they go out as humans, or whatever floats your boat. The point is to find something that not only represents you, but that also pushes you to represent it. Find your myth, and when you do, let your myth come find you, too.
Now, which is the greater charade? The one where all of the rules are set, and everyone pretends to follow them? Or, the one where none of the rules are set, and so everyone tries to hide them? It’s a tricky question. It’s also a trick question, since both deal with illusion and honesty in a fundamental way. I think I’d prefer the latter overall, though I don’t like either, to be honest. At least with the latter, where none of the rules are set, and so everyone hides what they know, you can reasonably assume that you’re already in an anarchic system, so you can always follow the natural order to the best of your ability. The problem with the former is that it breeds liars, and liars can’t be trusted. And so, in a world of limited knowledge, madness becomes your ally because limited knowledge is still knowledge. Lies are garbage. I bring this up because madness is a very harrowing experience, but because of this, it exposes the truth. ‘Don’t fear the Reaper’, as the song goes. They might have called it a harrow for the metaphorical connections, but the tune wouldn’t have been as awesome.
This is an important distinction between the two states. That I would prefer madness for the sake of the truth over all of the lies is important for setting up your avatar, who will come to facilitate your creative focus, in turn. There is an interesting scene in King Lear, the play by William Shakespeare. In the scene (Act III, Scene II), Lear is standing out in a storm and cursing the skys for their ability to rain on him with impunity, all the while cursing the decisions he’d made thus far in the play. At the end of the scene, the Fool wraps up the scene by more or less stating that if everything and everyone went and got along just perfectly, there would be something so wrong in the world that no one would even want to see it. The real world is set in madness, and our purpose, as humans, is to create order out of it, according to the strongest attributes by which we would create that order. These lines by the Fool are quite foundational for the play, King Lear, but also to the point I’m trying to make here. By the end of the play, with Lear old and shattered, every decision that he had made in the play where he orchestrated the answers he wanted to hear had all turned to dust. Meanwhile, those characters who stuck with him, and who told him the truth, despite what it would cost them, they ended up being the only forthright characters in the play, by the end of it. Them and Lear, post redemption. This is important because, however crazy it sounds, you should be forthright and reciprocal with your avatar, too; even though it only exists in the spirit world. Your avatar, in a reciprocal relationship, will appreciate your honesty, and offer their own in return. The more honest you are with yourself, the more honest you will continue to be with yourself, and as this trend develops, it pushes out the mask by overriding the memory. From within, and without. This is the source of your creative self.
