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Dream

In an essay titled “The Power and Peril of Language”, philosopher Susanne K. Langer describes the fundamental nature of human thought:

“The tendency to manipulate ideas, to combine the abstract, mix and extend them by playing with symbols, is man’s outstanding characteristic. It seems to be what his brain most naturally and spontaneously does. Therefore, his primitive mental function is not just judging reality, but dreaming his desires” (1944, p. 52).

Where do our thoughts, emotions, and dreams come from? What role do the stimuli and symbols of our environments and contexts play in their arising? Psychiatrist Carl Jung observes:

“I have also realized that one must accept the thoughts that go on within oneself of their own accord as part of one’s reality. The categories of true and false are, of course, always present; but because they are not binding they take second place. The presence of thoughts is more important than our subjective judgment of them. But neither must these judgments be suppressed, for they also are existent thoughts which are part of our wholeness” (1961, p. 298).

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born” (Henry David Thoreau, 1854, Walden).

A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions | Islam:
“No one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself” (1946, p. 310).

Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), A Sheaf of Golden Rules from Twelve Religions, in Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp.309-310). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Jung, C. G. (1961) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. New York, United States: Vintage Books – Random House Inc. (1965 ed.)

Langer, S. K. (January, 1944), The Power and Peril of Language, from “The Lord of Creation” in Fortune. New York, United States: Time Inc., reprinted in Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 50-53). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

Thoreau, H. D. (1854) Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” [HTML document]. Retrieved June 2021 from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm#chap03

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Creativity

An artist might view creativity as the satisfying of an urge to make something of beauty, something others may also find appealing or that will somehow resonate. What is its source and what enables its manifestation? Filmmaker David Lynch uses the analogy of fishing when approaching a creative endeavour through a Jungian plumbing of the collective unconscious. According to Lynch, an appropriate setting is helpful and can take a form such as meditation. This quieting one’s mind and a lowering of the line or net is followed by a corresponding patient waiting until the fish, or idea, bites. Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna states such riparian metaphors describe the creative forces flowing within nature and the imagination “which run like an endless river through all of us and are driven by the hydraulic momentum of the cataracts of chaos… These things are icons for the world that wants to be” (2001, p.49).

“Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed” (Wikipedia, retrieved September 2020). Beyond this, many definitions of creativity exist that span popular understanding. In one example from an analytical perspective, it is

“a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies: testing and retesting these hypotheses and possibly modifying and retesting them; and finally communicating the results”, while “it is usually distinguished from innovation in particular, where the stress is on implementation” (Wikipedia, retrieved September 2020).

Creative Destruction is the idea posited by Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter of a business cycle of mutation. A process of continual renewal which can see completely new yet highly relevant opportunities emerge from what had been up until that point often viewed as entrenched, immovable means of conducting business, or society. Do present circumstances offer the chance for creative destruction and rebirth more generally in our vastly complex civilization?

Abraham, R., McKenna, T., Sheldrake, R. (2001) Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness. Rochester, United States: Park Street Press