Sample Gallery 2

Sampler Photo Gallery 2

CREATIVITY: The Nature of the Creative Process

The cartography of the psyche is linked to the process of self-discovery in Trance, Art and Creativity. Understanding increases along with creative organization. Taxonomies of consciousness, from ancient Kabbalah to those of Ken Wilber shed light on the developmental process and our place and expression within the creative field. One gains in ability to combine the familiar in new and innovative ways. To be truly creative requires at least four traits according to Fromm: "capacity to be puzzled, ability to concentrate, capacity to accept conflict, and willingness to be reborn everyday."

Maslow extended creative traits to include "spontaneous, expressive, effortless, innocent, unfrightened by the unknown or ambiguous, able to accept tentativeness and uncertainty, able to tolerate bipolarity, able to integrate opposites." Whelan (1965) added, "energy, autonomy, confidence, openness, preference for complexity," etc. Creativity also brings a sense of destiny and personal worth. This brings a sense of joy, contentment and acceptance of self, which show its transformative ability. Creative people, who accept themselves, also have the further ability for compassion or brotherly love, (agape).

Gowan concludes that "creativity has a holistic quality, which restores the balance between right and left hemisphere function, between analog and digital computer aspects of thinking...Man's mind is a device for bringing infinite mind into manifestation in time; creativity is the commencement of this actualization."

Like fractal patterns emerging on the computer screen, no process-oriented therapist can fail to notice the aesthetic beauty of the unfolding process of the creative imagination. Experiential psychotherapy facilitates the participating, rather than observing self. Therapy is an art, and as such, it yields esthetic and physical pleasure as by-products. When the therapist joins with the participant, rather than remaining "objective observer", a co-creative shared reality emerges.

This shared reality is more than mutual hypnosis, or shared subjectivity. It is a virtual world that is essentially an artistic, expressive form--a "living form." Art embodies imagination. A work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and it expresses human feeling. A work of art expresses a conception of life, emotion, inward reality--the logic of consciousness itself.

The therapeutic art is designed to elicit a full response: sensuous, intellectual, and emotional, not separated but interfused. It has an air of intimacy, of immediacy. The fullness of presentation matches the fullness of response--yielding a sense of lived experience--personal experience. Like art, experiential therapy is inherently humanistic--concerned with human feelings and values. It helps us embody those values, and the nature of beauty.

Beauty is an emotional value which affects our volitional and appreciative nature. It is not inherent in any thing, but is our own pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing or event. It is neither intrinsic nor objectified. It is the first-hand experience of a state of consciousness. It may not be in the eye only, but beauty is in the beholder. Yet the beholder doesn't stand on the outside looking in, but becomes the object of contemplation. When the focus of contemplation is the self, a complex feedback loop manifests of self contemplating self manifesting self, contemplating self.
The therapeutic art is designed to elicit a full response: sensuous, intellectual, and emotional, not separated but interfused. It has an air of intimacy, of immediacy. The fullness of presentation matches the fullness of response--yielding a sense of lived experience--personal experience. Like art, experiential therapy is inherently humanistic--concerned with human feelings and values. It helps us embody those values, and the nature of beauty.Beauty corresponds with healing, creativity, genius, and bliss states or unitive experiences.
Art had its origin in magic. It is the path of transcendence from personality to Self, through the Middle Way. Art is the explication of the transformative process. Through art, common experience is transformed to archetypal, timeless experience. Art is nature transformed. Art shapes our perception of things outside ourselves, and embodies the workings of inner life.
Archetype, ritual, myth, and dream are other manifestations of this same parataxic mode, as is expressive therapy. It is characterized by the production of images who meaning is not clear or categorical (Gowan, 1975). In parataxic mode, symbols or images are used in a private or idiosyncratic manner. Through art, they can be shared with others, expressing feeling and transmitting understanding. In contrast, in the creative mode (Tiphareth) meaning is more or less fully cognized symbolically, with ego present.

The dynamic union of chaos and order is symbolic of our human process of transformation: old outworn forms break down (ego death), and that chaos is fertile ground for creative rebirth, rejuvenation. This Royal Wedding means nothing less than finding the lost soul--the alienated part of oneself which we normally call "Not-I." Soul retrieval is healing.