We all possess the capacity to imagine and to conjure images, whether asleep or awake. Humans speak in words, but our creative impulses originate from imagery that comes alive each night in our dreams. In such incubative spaces, we often receive inspiration to try something different or new. As we reflect, our intuition opens up. We are carried into a place of immense possibility. This state of expanded awareness is where we may rediscover our own innate creativity.
Albert Einstein, who purportedly slept very little but credited the unseen worlds with his ability to imagine and thus invent, offered that Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Many of us remember daydreaming as kids, but at some point we learn to become practical in order to interface with the everyday world. Consequently, many of us do not grant ourselves nearly enough down-time in which to balance our right and left brain activities. Time spent in nature is restorative and imperative if we are to calm the monkey mind enough to relax into the magic of the moment. The rhythms of the natural world place our bodies back in touch with an inherent wisdom.
Many spend their entire lives in fear, and though it may be difficult to understand, fear is a state of mind. Our mental outlook can be changed through such practices as mindfulness. From Wikipedia:
Enlightenment is a state of being in which greed, hatred and delusion have been overcome, abandoned and are absent from the mind. Mindfulness, which, among other things, is an attentive awareness of the reality of things (especially of the present moment) is an antidote to delusion and is considered as such a ‘power.’ This faculty becomes a power in particular when it is coupled with clear comprehension of whatever is taking place.
The Buddha advocated that one should establish mindfulness in one’s day-to-day life maintaining as much as possible a calm awareness of one’s bodily functions, sensations (feelings), objects of consciousness (thoughts and perceptions), and consciousness itself. The practice of mindfulness supports analysis resulting in the arising of wisdom. A key innovative teaching of the Buddha was that meditative stabilisation must be combined with liberating discernment.
Mindfulness gives us insight into the nature of our doubts and fears. Moving beyond fear, even during the briefest moments of clarity, allows us to access our intuitive, creative potential.
If we feel we have lost our ability to To reactivate this potential, we have only to begin anew. The power to create afresh exists within every one of us, in every moment.
