The crucial ingredient that's going missing in our modern world is creativity: not the art and ingenuity that's all around us - and that we can all admire and enjoy - but our own
creativity: the creativity that's there inside any human being.
Whether we're thinking, for example, of joy, love, inspiration or courage, we're not going to survive without our own, innate creativity, a "power supply" as important to our flourishing as food and water.
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In this age of "affluence", marked as it is by a whole new set of illnesses such as obesity
and teenage depression, we've never been more in need of our natural defence against emotional distress.
Distress and illness can leave our mind "one track" and "locked down", whilst our truly healthy state is to be alive with creativity.
Depression, for example, can impose a uniform negativity onto our thinking, while anxiety can make every day seem full 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 antidote is to keep up our inner dynamism. That means we need back our creativity.
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Whether joy, insight or courage, all of these "prime human assets" follow a simple property of nature: they show "self-organisation". In other words, they all operate as "laws unto themselves" and are possessed of
"minds of their own". Taken together, they are what keep our mind from growing stagnant or frozen, and allow our mind to come properly into
its own.
Our self-creativity (as well as "collective-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.
Abandon our self-creativity, and we become compelled
more than creative - and present an easy target for fear,
anger
and their fellow
"stress forces".
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A way of thinking of this is as two competing sets of "forces" that enable our true aliveness and health - or rob 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 forcesgive us real power and freedom just so long as we invest in them.
(2)"Compulsive forces"- that tyrannise us from the inside, like fear, anger
and compulsive desire
(the kind that makes us obsessed or addicted). It's these that squander 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.
This is why our self-creativity is so vulnerable to attack - because our self-creativity is the very seat of our innate
power.
This is behind the effort a mother naturally makes for her child, and propels a musician to keep practising an instrument and writing new music even long after finding commercial success - just for the sheer enjoyment of doing so.
Being creative, this power needs no telling or bossing about. Simply by itself, and under its own steam, it is by far and away our most powerful source of motivation, whatever might be our pursuit or interest.
Something relevant to so many of us in the modern age, for instance, is the need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. This, in turn, relies on our having the initiative and empowerment to adopt measures like healthy eating, exercise and social engagement.
Without this, 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.