Creative Block and the Ego’s Death

Have you ever noticed that creativity may not come naturally --- or as a friend of mine says, “through the front door”?  For example, why is it when I have an open hour or two (or occasionally, longer) to compose new music (a lifelong hobby) that I oftentimes will find myself resorting to mundane or repetitive tasks instead; which cut into my available time for creative projects?  I’ve even mentioned to friends, with befuddlement: “It’s amazing how interesting vacuuming all the floors can be when faced with wide-open time for creative purposes?”

While I do not believe that creativity can somehow be “staged,” it has nonetheless perplexed me (as someone who by nature loves to create music, poetry, and new ideas) how I will shoot myself in my own foot around the actual act of creating.  What gives?

Here today I wish to draw attention to just one element of so-called creative block.  Namely, I want to explore the spiritual dimensions underlying all creativity…

I believe that to open oneself to creative inspiration requires surrender.  By surrender I mean letting go of cognitive control (something for which mindfulness meditation practice has contributed much in my own history).  The problem is that my personal sense of self, my ego, does indeed rely on the mind to sustain itself.  Remove thinking?  Much less call that fun?  You’ve got to be kidding!

To the false mind-made self (Eckhart Tolle’s working definition of the ego), letting go into creative flow represents nothing less than: DEATH.  No big surprise then that all manner of distraction (what psychotherapy would call resistance) arises and takes over and more than occasionally subverts the whole creativity-directed enterprise!

I’m reminded here of psychiatrist, Carl Jung, who spoke of the work toward increasing consciousness --- including  in no small measure, creativity --- as involving the opus contra naturam; literally, the work against nature, or going upstream.  Understood in the this way, creativity, which may be interpreted by the ego as dissolving of the mind-made self, is the last thing the ego really wants to do.  And now we’re going to call creative behavior our “recreational outlet”?   The ego responds: “I don’t think so!”

I am hoping that this perspective might shed some grace on what is otherwise easy to be judgmental of; and also that this view might lend some patience to our courageous selves as they desire to go against the stream.  Here’s to what psychologist Rollo May called the “courage to create”!