As fast as our environment is being trashed in the modern world, so also is our creativity: not the art and ingenuity that's all around us - that we can all admire and capitalise on - but our own
creativity.
If our planet is essential to our survival, then so also is our own, innate creativity, our joy and love not least.
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Given the new illnesses of "affluent" societies, such as obesity
and teenage depression, we've never been more in need of protecting our emotional health.
True health goes with being innately creative, while distress and illness accompany minds (as well as compulsions and habits) that are "one track" and "locked down".
Depression, for example, can colour everything in shades of grey and leave our thinking uniformly negative, while anxiety can make us overloaded with the sense of danger. In both cases, the mind becomes a (highly "efficient"!) factory of obedient sameness in the thoughts, beliefs and moods that it produces. The obvious antidote is our own, innate dynamism and creativity.
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Whether joy, insight or courage, all of these "prime human assets" operate as "laws unto themselves" with "minds of their own". Taken together, they are what keep our mind from growing stagnant or frozen, and allow us - in our selves as well as in our communities - to come properly into our own.
Human creativity - like our joy and love etc. - is no mere luxury: it is essential to our health, motivation, free will and humanity. Ultimately, our self-creativity
is
"us" - if by "us" we mean our
true
self.
When we abandon our self-creativity, we lose all resistance to being bullied and compelled by a set of "tyrants" resident in our heads: fear,
anger
and their fellow
"stress forces".
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A way of thinking of this is that there are two competing sets of "forces" within in; one that enables our true aliveness and health; and another that robs us of them. These are:
(1) Creative forces like love and joy - that move and inspire us, not just emotionally but also in terms of how committed and engaged we are in our lives. These forces give us real power and freedom just so long as we invest in them.
(2) "Compulsive forces"
- that attack us from the inside, like fear, anger
and compulsive desire
(the kind that makes us obsessed or addicted). It's these that destroy our self-creativeness - precisely because they deny us our own, real
power and freedom.
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For fear etc., power is an end in itself - whether power over our minds and selves, or power over whole societies and cultures. And since our self-creativity is our true source of power, our self-creativity is the first thing that fear etc.
attack.
It's that simple: possessed of love, a mother needs no other motivation when caring for her child; equipped with joy, a musician keeps practising an instrument and writing new music even long after finding commercial success.
Being creative, self-creativity needs no telling or bossing about. Under its own steam, it is by far and away our most powerful - and intelligent - source of motivation.
Take the effort to to maintain a healthy lifestyle. This succeeds best when we nurture our own, innate initiativeto adopt measures like healthy eating, exercise and social engagement - and to do so on terms that naturally inspire us.
Without self-creativity, no "miracle" of modern science will spare us from the evolving epidemics of our age.
Never before has there been a more urgent need to sharpen our awareness and appreciation of self-creativity, and protect this priceless resource.
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What protects our realest, most creative form of power and freedom in us - our self-creativity, in other words - is the prefrontal cortex.
This is a region of the brain that helps keep stress at bay through enabling and protecting our
emotional resilience,
positive outlook, and
attention.
As it turns out, these are the same functions as more traditionally have been attributed to the heart. Meanwhile, the heart is intimately connected to the prefrontal cortex - through a neural "highway" known as the vagus nerve, where the nerve "traffic" flows as much from the heart to the prefrontal cortex as it does in the other direction.
The intriguing possibility, here, is that the prefrontal cortex and heart operate as a kind of team.
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Either way, centuries of wisdom remind us to take notice of the qualities "of the heart":
- contentment
to weather compulsive desire, possessiveness and pride;
- calm
with which to survive the furnace of anger
and the bite of shame;
- courage
enough to stand up to that bully, fear;
- compassion
for our nearest and dearest, for our own self, and even for those from across the border;
- connectedness
and integrity;
- consciousness
and caring, and commitment
to one another and to truth.