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The Role of Creativity in Our Spiritual Life~Kabir Helminski August 1, 2005
[ the most essential ideas have been put in bold ]
What do we understand by the idea of creativity? Perhaps creativity is a particularly contemporary concept at that. It is difficult to find a word in the Qur'an that corresponds to it. God is al Khaliq, the Creator, and in fact the only Creator. Only God creates out of nothing, so in the Qur'an only God is described as “creator.” In one instance, however, Jesus is said to have “created” a bird “as a sign from God,” however the revelation frequently points out that nothing and no one, except for Allah, really creates anything out of nothing.
The central significance of creating and creation is mentioned in the very first revelation: Surah Alaq:
Read, in the name of your Sustainer who created,
Islamic civilization, at certain points in its history, was as creative as any civilization that ever existed, whether it acknowledged a word for creativity or not. What necessitates the emphasis on the concept of creativity at this time is that much of Islamic civilization is notable for the absence of creativity. Somehow, somewhere, a large majority Muslims, unfortunately, became convinced that there was nothing new to create. The usual Arabic word would be ibda'. Innovation, bida, was associated with heresy and malpractice. Everything worthwhile was thought to be already defined, modeled, decided, and concluded. The results have been devastating, both in practical and spiritual terms.
Here is a definition of Creativity: the ability to make something new, useful, or beautiful by combining given ideas or materials in unexpected ways.
Creativity appears in the natural world where life forms are continually manifesting new responses to environmental conditions. The latest findings in biology, for instance, reveal the extraordinary capacity of life to be creative. Mechanistic notions of biological processes are being replaced by something called “complexity theory” which suggests the spontaneous emergence of new patterns of order. The origin of life is now believed to have developed from bubbles with oily membranes within which self-generating processes began, and once begun these processes developed long-term symbiotic relationships. Furthermore, particularly at moments of system instability, new forms of order are seen to emerge. This is the power of divine creativity at work.
Scientists now recognize that life unfolded not from a random lightning bolt igniting a process in some kind of cosmic soup, but rather, through a process of oily bubbles taking shape and within them certain processes being initiated that gradually led to the awakening of life. In other words, through some process of containment, complexity unfolded intelligently. Life developed within form. In other words there was an encounter between the latent material of life and some invisible form giving energy.
It is said, that the human being is created in the “Image of God” according to the Judaeo-Christian perspective, and in the “noblest proportions” according to the Islamic perspective. And so the human being is the carrier of the creative Power of the Absolute which is grounded in a timeless, changeless, witnessing presence which engages with the ever-changing conditions of life. Through the encounter of these two realities, the eternal reality of presence and the diversity of life in all its manifestations, there exists the possibility of a truly creative action. The human being as God's khalifah, or representative, must share in God creative power in some way.
We are continually faced with two drives: one is toward the sensuous world which is presented to us in the name of life. The other is toward the ideal, the rational, the structure-creating tendency, an ordering power which comes from “above”. If we succumb to the sensuous completely, we descend into hedonism or savagery. If we are too dominated by the structuring drive we become puritanical, oppressive, and tyrannical.
We see this untempered domination of the life force in all fundamentalisms, and to a lesser extent in legalistic states of mind. Religion, if untempered by the life principle, by the humble details of our humanity, tends toward the domination and eventually the squelching of the life force. We see this very much in Islam today: an oppressive moralizing on matters of sexuality and gender, an antagonism to the free movement of energy in dance and music, and a dismissal of the role of the arts in educating human sensibilities.
Fortunately, these tendencies have not been very successful in oppressing the Sprit of Sufism, which is forever on the side of the particular, the sensual, the musical, the poetic. Yet this oppressive, self-proclaimed “orthodoxy” is always looming just at the boundary of our spiritual lives, always ready to encroach upon the sacred ground of human spontaneity and creativity. Fortunately, people like Rumi remind us from where our hearts receive their nourishment.
The Beauty For lovers, the only lecturer
Rumi is describing the way of lovers, those who are aware that they live in a universe of creative energy.
At the same time, the form giving tendency is essential to the creative process. Creativity can never be an undisciplined free for all, a catering to whim, and least of all a slavish response to the expedient, mediocre demands of the masses.
We can simplify these two forces by calling the first “feeling” and the second “reason.” Feeling needs to be guided and informed by reason; reason needs to tempered by the life force.
The work, which as we shall see must also be a form of play, is the process of transforming the blind necessity of labor in the physical realm into a free and joyful choice. It is in the joyful choice to undertake work in a creative way that leads to true freedom and beauty. It is in this way that the human being develops into a “beautiful soul.”
The work of a complete spirituality is to balance the sensuous and the spiritual, to protect the life force from the oppression of ego-constructed form; and, secondly, to develop the essential self (presence), protecting it from dispersion and absorption in the sensuous.
The sensuousness of the life force unfolds the power of spirit by calling it forth into the domain of manifestation and creativity. But if it is allowed to overwhelm presence, the spiritual development becomes impossible.
In what areas of our lives do we feel the need to be creative?
When faced with a compelling question, we search for an answer. Creativity sometimes arises in response to such a question. How often do we live in the intensity of a question as opposed to living in a state of habit and numbness?
When faced with extraordinary difficulty or grief, creativity can transform despair or even rage into beauty.
If we wish to intensify the creativity in our lives, we need some form to contain the latent energies of creativity, otherwise they will simply disperse, leak away, spend themselves in trivial pursuits. Each of us has a definite amount of life energy, which can be decreased or increased to some extent, but which needs, most of all, to be given form.
Those people who have experienced major creative breakthroughs have almost always occupied themselves with a burning question to the point of exhaustion, then let go, and finally experienced a breakthrough, an inspiration, a symbolic vision. Coleridge's Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner; Rilke's Duino Elegies, Lawrence Bragg's work with crystallograohy, and Kukele who dreamed an image of the hydrocarbon ring.
Human beings can receive knowledge in unexpected ways from Infinite Intelligence itself, but it doesn't happen purely by chance. The characteristics of a creative life begin with a state of mental opennesss, but also include some form of focus, sustained attention, letting go into the subconscious mind, and finally the breakthrough. Creativity comes when we are capable of living in the medium of our creativity.
We can identify some basic principles of living in the creative medium:
To develop ourselves along the lines for which we were created, to fulfill our destiny of being made in the image of God, of being God's Khalifah is to make the necessary and unavoidable work of being alive as a human being into the conscious, joyful creativity that comes from the union of opposites: the sensuous drive of the life force guided and given shape by the form-giving energy so as to produce creative life-forms. What will these living forms be: they could be forms of relationship, community, and education. They could be expressions of beauty created by people who live with a sense of beauty. They could be songs, poems, and other works of art.
God is the one who taught with the Cosmic Pen. The point of the pen and its ink are here on earth, while the Pen itself extends through all levels of existence and is ultimately in the invisible hand of God. This Pen connect all levels of reality and is the axis of Being.
By assuming our creative role as human beings in cooperation with the Divine Creativity we can avoid both the slavery to sensuality, on the one hand, and the tyrannical oppression of the life force, on the other. Eternity is in love with the ripened fruits of time. Heaven and earth are meant to balance each other. With this balance of the sensuous and the transcendent, with feeling and reason, with passion and detachment, with natural desire and intellect, the drudgery of life can become creative play, and we can experience the breakthrough of spiritual wisdom and guidance in facing the conditions of our life. We live in the midst of a continual dance of immanence and transcendence, of natural desire (wahm, shawah) and intellect (aql).
The over-emphasis of either instinctive vital desire or transcendent Intellect results in only a partial gnosis, an incomplete being. The spirituality of Sufism, which is also the essence of Islam is a state in which natural desire is guided and given form by transcendent Intellect, while that Intellect is also tempered and grounded in all the beauty of nature and humanness. The natural world is evidence of the Divine creativity, and it is left for human beings to allow themselves the wholeness and completeness that is the marriage of heaven and earth.
The Prophet said to the sick man: “Pray like this:
Rabbina atinah fi dunya hassanah (based on verse 201, Surah Baqara)
Schiller on the Aesthetic Education of Man
14 In his Philosophical Letters: Egoism erects its center in itself; love plants it outside of itself in the axis of the eternal whole. Love aims at unity; egoism is solitude. Love is the co-governing citizen of a blossoming free state , egoism a despot in a ravaged creation. Egoism sows for gratitude, love for ingratitude. Love gives, egoism lends. . . [PL Friedrich Schiller Poet of Freedom . Vol. III, p. 214]
Plato: Collected Dialogs, The Republic, Book VII, 536e, (New York, Pantheon Books, 1961): “Nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind. . . Do not, then, my friend, keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.”
15 But now reason speaks: the beautiful should not be merely life and not merely form, but rather living form, that is, beauty; in that it dictates to man the twofold law of the absolute formality and the absolute reality. Hence it also makes the decision: Man shall with beauty only play , and he shall only with beauty play .
17 Freedom lies only in the cooperation of both of his natures. The man rules one-sidedly by feelings, or sensuously tense, is thus dissolved and set free by form; the man who rules one-sidedly by laws, or spiritually tense, is thus dissolved and set free by matter.”
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