CREATIVITY

“There are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between there are doors…”

-          William Blake

            Have you ever wondered if you could know everything you knew or if you could remember everything you knew? Truthfully, no matter how sharp a man’s mind is, I think he can never know all that he knows neither can he remember all that he knows nor effectively and exhaustively utilize all that he knows.

One question, perhaps an unasked question, has been left unanswered: if a man can never know all that he knows, then what does he know?

            What is the measure of our knowledge? Is it measured in the amount of things we know (in the realm of the sub-conscious); or in the amount of things we remember we know (in the realm of a weak mind); or is it measured in the amount of things that we know we know (in the realm of the conscious)?

            The human mind is the deepest vortex ‘known’ to man – sucking anything, everything and sometimes things outside everything that comes its way. It combines this nature with being ruminant – rehashing things that come its way. Notably, of these two aspects of its nature, man has no control over the former, but to a large extent has control over the latter.

I think that an effective understanding of this control is the unit of measurement for knowledge.

Now, only a trained mind can remember all that he (epignosis) knows, but when he does not know all that he knows, he can only remember all that he knows he knows. Hence, no matter how hard a man tries to work at remembering all that he ‘knows’, he would always fail.

Following this laid down premise, how then do we know all that we know?

Our sub-conscious is like a strong tide banging against the walls we’ve built within, walls of emotion, values, religion, superfluous activities, the quest for survival and relevance and the strongest of them all; education. These walls were, albeit most times unintentional, built by the society and world we live in, imposed on us from birth, caging our minds from truly living. Thus, realizing that all that we know is hidden in the titanic bank of our sub-conscious, how then do we empty, or perhaps a better word; enjoy, this vast vortex of knowledge?

What is the link between the sub-conscious and the conscious?

Liberty.

The mind needs to be free from its caging walls, perhaps just to hear the silence in the world and the intellectual orchestra in the mind.

The world has fed us a great lie, or so I thought. You do not need to train the mind; you need to free the mind. For training only enhances remembrance which we’ve discovered is just a futile attempt to get that which you do not know you know. Let the mind be at peace with itself – allowing it to roam to every nook and cranny of its entire being – bringing to fore all that it knows and does not know it knows. At that precise moment, the mind holds the power which has been indiscriminately assigned or ascribed to knowledge, fake knowledge.

The process of giving power to the mind is contemplation; one of the easiest tasks in life, yet it has become the hardest. For those walls built within have supressed our mind, hence, creating an atmosphere where we constantly struggle against all the noise in the world, clawing against the walls it forms in our minds.

Occasionally, we get successful at supressing those walls, and then the flow of our sub-conscious spills over. And sometimes we aren’t strong enough but the tide of our sub-conscious becomes so strong it spills over. At these times, we come up with something special, innovative if you like. We, at these times, are described as being creative, but I say it is just unknown knowledge splashed upon reality.

What then is creativity?

Creativity is when we go beyond what we know we know. Beyond where our conscious is totally and completely enmeshed with our sub-conscious, lies creativity, a modicum of divinity - a shore to which no man, acclaimed or proclaimed intelligent, has ever reached unaided.

A question then arises; how?

Alas, I cannot escape, I refer back to my previous insinuation; ‘or so I thought’. Freedom or liberty is not free, especially when you are not born with it, but then are we ever born with it? If we have to struggle or fight to be free, especially a struggle of a kind I am about to put forward, can we say we are truly free, freedom being total escape from fetters, encumbrances, laws and bondages that deter you from doing whatever in whatever way? If freedom was feasible in its entirety, then the human mind might attain perfection. But since perfection isn’t a human possibility and all we can do is try, we cannot totally free the mind, we can only try. And by trying, we train ourselves to suppress all encumbrances that hold the mind captive.

Therefore, we should train the mind to be free, not train the mind to remember, for we know not what we know. The more we desire to know, the more we need to release our mind from whatever hold may keep it from getting to that which we do not know.

But when do we stop craving, wanting, desiring? Do we stop when satisfaction is infinite? Or do we still crave for more – something beyond the ephemeral state of our wanton pleasure – a taste of divinity?

‘There are things that are known and things that are unknown’ and between there are doors (the known known and the unknown known). But to really reach the unknown is what I call creativity.