I could write a single word. Even then, I doubted whether what I’d written was what I really wanted to say.174
On a more mundane level, creativity teachers often tell you that you need to “get out of your own way.”175 Writing teachers have methods and exercises that will help their pupils let go. For some of these, see the Exercises. As with meditation, establishing a warming-up ritual or formula always helps. Stephen Covey might say you develop a habit; he recommends the athletic model of visualizing success.176
When you feel that your ego is disengaged, you are ready for Step 3.
3.Center your awareness.
For this method I am deeply indebted to Swami Kriyananda, a.k.a. Donald Walters. He explains, “The most important thing at all times, when expressing oneself artistically, is to hold mentally before oneself the thought, or feeling, that one is trying to express.” Then one “should refer back again and again to this concept” during the act of creation.177
The concentration must be complete, and the conception must be clear. Kriyananda says that thirteen Celtic songs came to him in two days and that if the process had taken longer, they wouldn’t have been as good.178 He took three days to write eighteen melodies for Shakespeare’s poems and one day to write thirty-three melodies for his oratorio, Christ Lives.179 In Crystal Clarity: The Artist as Channel, he says,
The relationship between a thing seen and the consciousness one experiences on seeing it cannot be a mental perception only. It must come from inner clarity, which involves one on deeper levels. The more clearly one’s whole being enters into the experience, the more crystal clear will be his expression of it.180
In Writers Dreaming Isabel Allende says, “Books don’t happen in my mind, they happen somewhere in my belly.”181 We must become totally involved with what we want to express until we merge with it and at last become it, as Barbara McClintock did with her grain. She says that she identified so fully with her plants that she felt she had become one of their genes or chromosomes.182
4.Relate to the center of what is trying to happen through you.
In his lectures on creativity, Swami Kriyananda gives the following instructions: go to your center; then relate to the center of what you want to know or express. If the concentration is complete, the right answers will come.
He explains how he used this process to write a song about St. Francis. He held the thought of the saint in his mind and received the notes of a melody. He later discovered that the first several notes were like the theme song from Franco Zeffirelli’s film about St. Francis, Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Kriyananda has also written Renaissance and Celtic tunes without knowing those types of music.183 He testifies,
I don’t know where the melodies come from. But I do know when they are right. For example, I wanted to write a melody for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which would, of course, need a Persian melody. I was thinking about it, and I woke up with a beautiful melody in my mind. A few years ago I sang it to somebody from Iran, and he said, “Oh, but that’s Persian.” I hadn’t heard Persian music before, but I knew he was right. It’s as though melodies are given to me—I don’t create them, but I listen and hear them.184
Harpist Derek Bell says that Kriyananda’s music is intuitive:
He more or less hints at that when he makes that wonderful statement about “Deirdre of the Sorrows.” He says, “I didn’t know what I should write for her, so I sat down and let her sing it to me.”185
Kriyananda also makes a remark applicable to engineers, scientists, and business executives:
Clarity begins with asking the right questions. It comes with knowing exactly what the problem is, and then, offering that problem up into the creative flow, in the full expectation of receiving a solution.186
Watson and Crick kept “asking the right questions” until they codified the exact structure of the double helix, a problem they solved by building a model and applying Watson’s insight that the two strands should be contrasting rather than identical.187 Crick says the “key questions” were, “What are genes made of? How are they copied exactly? And how do they control, or at least influence, the synthesis of proteins?”188 Charles Link invented a new type of paper clip by asking what design would solve two problems: the sharp end digging into papers and the large end required to face up for use.189 The inventor of McDonald’s asked, “Where can I get a consistent hamburger on the road?” Businessman Marc Stuer explains, “That’s how he invented McDonald’s. Not by having the answer, but by keeping the question open.”190 Ray and Myers comment, “Implicitly or explicitly, creativity always begins with a question.191
5.Get out of the way and let the inspiration flow.
If you have practiced the first four steps, the next one should be simple. Keep your ego out of the way, and be receptive to the flow. Swami Kriyananda says, “Once this clarity comes, inspiration flows.”192 He also warns, however,
The ego is an energy-stopper for creative activity of all kinds. The simple thought, “I am painting a tree,” is enough to hinder the clear flow of inspiration. The greater the flow of creative energy, moreover, the greater the stoppage of energy in the thought of “I.”193
We will investigate this problem in Chapters 5 and 6 on the role of the self in creation. When artists become preoccupied with their own self-expression, they can lose the thread that binds them to the source of inspiration. When they are inspired like Kriyananda, works can come quickly.
Buddhist author Mark Epstein uses the metaphor of Thoughts without a Thinker: “‘Thoughts exist without a thinker,’ taught the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion. Insight arises best, he said, when the ‘thinker’s’ existence is no longer necessary.”194
6.If you lose the felt sense of what is trying to happen, repeat stage 3 and/or 4.
It is common, after you’ve been working awhile, to feel a loss of contact with the Unified Field. You will notice when it happens: the flow will sputter into spurts, and you yourself, the small ego or I, will intervene to help, making up the words, advising the forms or colors, suggesting an additional chord or note. When this happens, as it will, stop what you are doing. Close your eyes and reconnect with the form.
Swami Kriyananda relates an experience of revising a paragraph, again and again, without being able to get the words right. He stopped to meditate, and the correct words came in a flash to him: words entirely different from the ones he had been trying to manipulate when he was less connected.
In Crystal Clarity: The Artist as Channel, he explains how he has written music that expresses the spirit of a certain place, such as the Holy Land:
If my mental definition was sufficiently clear, the melody has come, usually instantly, and has seemed completely appropriate not only to me, but to others who had visited those places with me.
If, on the other hand, the melody wouldn’t come to me, then instead of worrying at it from the musical end, I would work at clarifying my mental image. Once the image has been crystal clear, the melody has come of itself.
I have never known this method to fail. It is why I insist with so much faith that one tune in, artistically, to the reality to which one wants to relate, whatever that reality, and then give it meaningful expression.195
You “hold” your idea “mentally before” yourself and keep returning to it as your act of creation