:: CREATIVITY ::

MEDITATION: THE GREATEST SOURCE OF CREATIVITY

There is nothing more creative than meditation and meditation enhances every art and creativity. It gives a deeper dimension to creativity. 

Osho says “Meditation is the greatest source of creativity. It releases tremendous energy, because tensions are less, anxieties are less, so the energy that was involved in tension and anxiety is no more involved there. It is available. You can create better.”

Read on as Osho shares His insight on the synthesis of meditation and creativity.

“Each art and each creativity can be tremendously enhanced by meditation. If somebody is a painter and he starts meditating, his painting will have a sudden jump, it will become tremendously profound -- because whatsoever you paint reflects your mind. If the mind goes deeper, your painting will go deeper. You paint your mind. What else can you paint? You paint yourself.

So if something deep happens in you, your painting will immediately start moving in a deeper dimension. Or if you sing, with meditation your song will have a totally different quality to it. It will not be superficial; it will start moving vertically -- in depth and in height. If you dance, your dance will be different, because if you meditate you will come to know a dance in which the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. Then even the audience will suddenly feel a new breeze, a new ray of light. The dancer will become a vehicle of the divine.

So whatsoever you are teaching, make it a point to add meditation to each effort. Meditation is the greatest source of creativity. It releases tremendous energy, because tensions are less, anxieties are less, so the energy that was involved in tension and anxiety is no more involved there. It is available. You can create better.
And your art will become more objective -- what Gurdjieff means by objective. It will become more real. It will not be just a dreamy thing that you are doing not knowing why, that you are doing not knowing what, that you are doing because you feel restless, so you need to do something.

Once you become settled, centered, then art is not like an obsession; it is not an occupation. You do it for a clear-cut purpose... it becomes purposive. It has a direction, it has a message to deliver. And when somebody looks at the painting, or listens to the song, or looks at the dance or the sculpture, he will have a glimpse of what you wanted to convey to him.

Much of the modern art is very very non-objective, nightmarish in that way. It seems that only troubled people are painting. It seems as if only insane people -- who have lost all sense of direction -- are painting.

So help people to meditate, and that will be the greatest contribution to their creativity.

Somewhere creativity and meditation have to meet, otherwise both can be dangerous. It has happened in the east. Meditation took a very different route to creativity -- it moved away from creativity. It lost all track of creativity. It became escapist.

If meditation loses track of creativity, it becomes escapist. One starts renouncing the world -- it becomes suicidal. And if creativity is without meditation -- as it is happening in the West -- then the creativity goes insane. Both are not good alternatives -- suicide and insanity. Many great painters, at sometime or other in their life, were put into the mad asylum. Or even if they were not put, they were insane, people tolerated them.

Their painting and their work are enough proof that they were not in their senses. They were possessed, as if by some evil force, or by many forces together, and they were torn apart.

In the West, creativity has taken a route totally different to meditation; in the east, meditation took a route absolutely negating creativity -- both have failed. Both had to fail -- and it is good that both have failed. Now a totally new world, where creativity and meditation meet together and go hand in hand, is possible in the future. That will be the greatest synthesis between the east and the west, between the active mind and the passive mind, between male and female, Yin and Yang.

Meditation is Yin, creativity is Yang. Meditation is passive, creativity is active.

Meditation is female, creativity is male. They both have to meet. And when they both meet, something beautiful happens.”

Blessed are the ignorant
# 19