Practical Applications Session 3 – Opening the Door to Creativity

By Bob Bongiovanni, MA

In the last two sessions, we have discussed how a Jungian paradigm can bring new perspective to the basic experiences of life. We are not meant to struggle for survival in a dangerous, meaningless jungle. Everything we experience – dark and light, joyful and sorrowful – bring wholeness to each of us as individuals and to all of us as a collective. But to know life this way means to confront and integrate whatever holds us back, whatever we fear and reject. Many people settle for a painful, deprived existence rather than face that confrontation.

Last week, we re-imagined relationships and love as being in service of individuation, or perhaps even as an expression of individuation. Today, we consider creativity in a similar way.

What is it about some people that allows them to step outside familiar patterns and truly innovate, to breath life into something amazingly new? We tend to categorize people into two camps: the inherently creative, and everyone else. From a Jungian perspective, everyone has the potential to be creative, but this potential is stifled early and often never surfaces again.

In his book The Self Aware Universe, quantum physicist Amit Goswami points out that, in the West, we tend to think of human life as being shaped by two forces, nature and nuture. Goswami compares this view to Hindu philosophy which holds that human life is shaped by three forces or drives: past conditioning, called tamas; instinct, called rajas; and creativity, called sattwa. Our environment furnishes our conditioning; our instincts arise from our physical bodies. From where, then, comes creativity? Goswami says that creativity is the drive that comes from the collective unconscious.

Adding the creative drive seems simple on the surface, but it has powerful implications. If, in fact, conditioning and instinct were the only sources of human motivation, we would be little more than slaves.

Being enslaved by our past conditioning is another way to describe possession by complexes. As you’ll recall, a complex is usually planted through a traumatic experience, and it claims more and more of our energy unless it is confronted. A full possession by a complex means that our lives are reduced to a constant escape from pain and fear. People dominated by complexes can only imagine choices that the complex allows them to imagine. Creativity is unimaginable.

This is fairly easy to see in people who have a malignant sort of complex – for instance, a negative mother complex that leaves them feeling fundamentally unloved and unlovable, despite the affection of those who surround them. But, this sort of conditioning is also behind our very sense of identity. We are conditioned by our past experiences to define who we believe we are and who we are not. This, of course, shut off all sorts of different possibilities and potentials. Some call this ego rigidity. I am who I am, I can’t or won’t change, so don’t ask me to. This is a more subtle form of enslavement.

Being enslaved by instinct means feeding a hunger that is insatiable. If we believe that physical existence is the only reality – if we dismiss realities beyond the physical– then life is reduced to an endless pursuit of pleasure and a vain attempt to escape inevitable death.

What allows us to escape these enslavements? Creativity. Suddenly, we see entirely new possibilities, outside of conditioning or instinct. Quantum physics tells us that every moment has infinite possibilities, but only one of those possibilities is allowed to collapse into reality. Goswami argues that conditioning and instinct conspire to allow only a narrow range of possibilities, which stifles individuation. We must balance the forces of conditioning and instinct with creativity, and there are practices we can institute in our lives to nurture this creativity.

The first practice, which is the basis of Jungian analysis, is to know our own complexes and shadow. If we cultivate awareness, we will not be dominated by complexes. This is no minor effort of course. But even if we only lessen the complexes, see them for what they are, separate from our core identity, we create a small crack through which creativity may flow.

The second practice, according to Goswami, is persistence. We must find something that intrigues or draws us – a problem we must solve, a question we must answer, an alien place we must explore – and we must persist in our devotion to solutions, answers, and explorations. This can be very frustrating. We will be tempted to give up. But then we also give up on creativity. This means that the ego has a critical role in creativity. It takes a strong ego to be persistent. It must bear the anxiety that comes with uncertainty.

The third practice is to purposefully expose ourselves to unfamiliar people, places, ideas and things. The idea is to provoke a shift of contexts, to break out of familiar ruts. It’s particularly powerful to do things that provoke a bit of anxiety or fear.

The fourth practice is to develop the ability to suspend, even momentarily, the chatter of everyday consciousness, thus opening up to the unconscious. Some people do this through meditation; some people do this through an absorbing activity, like listening to music, knitting, or reciting a mantra.

The fifth practice is opening ourselves to intensive collaborative efforts with other people. That’s why brainstorming often results in creative solutions that isolated contemplation would never have surfaced. No two people have the same conditioning or the same relation to instinct; bringing people together allows creativity to constellate amongst them, when it would not have been accessible to them as individuals.

These are five practices that can cultivate creativity. It’s equally advisable to familiarize ourselves with the forces that deny or stifle creativity. Goswami calls the thwarting of creativity “being bitten by the three-headed demon” and the three heads of this demon are boredom, doubt, and pain.

Here is a quote from Goswami on this point:

What do we do when such suffering inundates us in the course of daily life? If we are still fascinated by ourselves, we cultivate escapes. In a sometimes obsessive flight from boredom, we pursue novelty—a new mate or a new video game—as a shield against that particular demon. To avoid the pain of discomfort, we seek pleasure: food, sex, drugs, and all that. And we secure ourselves in tight systems of belief as insurance to forestall doubt. Alas, all of these efforts are only more conditioning.

Trying to solve problems of inner emptiness and doubt with external fullness or internal rigidity is a materialist, classical approach. If we can change the world (and other people as part of that world), then we do not have to change ourselves. And yet, because reality is not static, we do change: We become cynical, or we slip into a mind-numbing hopelessness. We fluctuate between highs and lows, valleys and mountains, and life becomes a roller-coaster ride, a cheap melodrama, a soap opera.

Even our wonderful civilization, of which we are justifiably proud, threatens us in a big way. The creativity of our fellows that has provided our affliction-dodging toys of amusement has also delivered destructive toys that promise and deliver unquestionable suffering. This makes some of us wonder whether it is possible to be wisely creative. Can we use creativity to gain wisdom? Can we express creativity in ways that are constructive? (page 233)

Here Goswami issues a cautionary note – creativity is not always constructive. Creativity has been called into the service of destructiveness. Again, there is an important role for the healthy ego. The collective unconscious is unfamiliar with the consequences of creativity as it enters the domain of the ego, the domain of limitation in time and space. Therefore, the ego has a moral obligation to moderate the expression of creativity, to prevent unnecessary suffering. This is what we mean by wisdom – the ability to step outside immediate gratification, consider long term and wide spread consequences, and proceed with compassion.

I would like to end with a quote from Jung’s essay “The Structure of the Psyche,” which appears in Volume 8 of his Collected Works:

The unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse. It is like Nature herself—prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation. No wonder, then, that it has always been a burning question for humanity how best to adapt to these invisible determinants. If consciousness had never split off from the unconscious—an eternally repeated event symbolized as the fall of the angels and the disobedience of the first parents—this problem would never have arisen, any more than would the question of environmental adaptation. (page 157)