The Colors of the Void

 "If someone witnessed my behavior at the time and labeled it a manic episode, I would not blame them. Certainly, for some time afterward, having been trained as a clinical psychologist within the Western medical model, I wondered if I was bipolar. Early into my spiritual emergency, I called a psychologist friend and described to him my symptoms. He said that I sounded like his manic-depressive patients in the in-patient unit and that if I went to a hospital, they would probably medicate me. Instead of checking myself into a psychiatric unit, I brought myself to a Jungian psychoanalyst." - Dr. Nisha Gupta Last week, we spoke at length about the creative mind and madness. What constitutes creativity has been a question that has led us along journeys. What constitutes madness feels as though it could take a similar route. Some of the greatest creative minds of our time have experienced periods of intense upheaval and emotion that resulted in amazing pieces of art, music, poetry...

 "Lira refers to a central aspect of the contemplative attitude and the capacity to grasp beauty. He states that ‘beauty is not seen when one is asleep, identified with pleasure or pain, when one is not paying attention and not concentrating, when the mind passes mechanically from one object to another without stopping, when it looks without seeing.'" -Alvaro Ignacio Langer While I missed class this week, this quote seems to me to capture the idea of the lesson. We do not see beauty, we are not held in awe, when we are sleeping or otherwise engaged. It does not exist for us when we are "looking without seeing," but when we look to see .- When we truly take the time to appreciate what we are seeing for all that it is, all that it took to be. Each item, each life around us holds worlds that we pass blindly by in our day-to-day rush. We take so much for granted and evaluate nearly everything (it seems) at surface level.  "...the Vidyadhara described perceptio...

 "A person cannot be creative in a domain to which he or she is not exposed... There can be agreement on whether a new computer game, rock song, or economic formula is actually novel, and therefore creative, less easy to agree on the novelty of an act of compassion or of an insight into human nature." -Mihaly Csikszentmihaly Last week, we focused on how creativity can help us to both find and solve problems. I'm choosing this quote from our readings because I so closely identify with the idea that our culture and environment shape our problems, our solutions, and what is or is not considered creative thinking.  When I stop and consider what problems I come head-to-head with each week, I can see clearly that these are problems within *my* society and the ways in which I solve them have to fall within the parameters of that society. It limits me but it also gives me a framework within which to operate. - Or a box to think outside of, as the case sometimes needs to be. Our h...

"The exact question of what is creativity is often ignored or answered in too many different ways. For example, Plucker, Beghetto, and Dow (2004) selected 90 different articles with the word "Creativity" in the titles (60 from the two top creativity journals, and 30 from peer-reviewed business, education, and psychology journals). Of these papers, only 38% explicitly defined what creativity was. Further, basic questions about creativity's nature remain under debate." (Kauffman, 2009) Why is it so difficult to pinpoint what creativity is? What it means? How have we been using it our whole lives without having any real clear parameters of what it means to be, to have, or to experience creativity? And can having a better grasp of those answers help us to identify more personally with our own relationship to being creative? I really appreciate the breakdown of this concept that we've seen in this week's readings, lending us the idea of the four C's of c...