Creativity – a mind-thing?

Introduction

Creativity is a strange thing. It is generally regarded as a matter of the mind, whether we understand this to mean the brain or something immaterial. It is an obvious assumption that creativity is a matter of the mind, because ultimately creativity is always about ideas in a certain sense, and where else should these come from if not from our mental, subjective mind?

But when we take a closer look at the creative process, it becomes a little less clear. It seems as if creativity is somehow a matter of the mind, but somehow also not.

Let me explain what I mean by that:

Out of the Box

As described in the last article, Introduction to Creativity, creativity is fundamentally about finding something new, a kind of innovation. I have defined creativity in my own words as follows:

--> Creativity is the ability to constantly discover things that were previously unknown to you.

And it doesn't matter at what level or in what aspect of an activity this novelty occurs. And I don't think it matters whether your new discovery is already known to others. If you have come to the discovery of something previously unknown to you through your “own efforts,” then you can definitely call that creative.

So the fundamental challenge of creativity is this:

How can I find something that I don't know what it is? (because I don't know it)

Or to put it in more familiar terms:

How can I leave my own box?

That's a good question. And to answer it better, it makes sense to first ask:

What is this box anyway?

The box of all boxes

The box is generally understood to mean: the familiar, the norm, the usual. In other words, the classic “that's just how it's done.” But ultimately, these norms exist nowhere except in our minds. This means that the box of all boxes, the box in which all boxes are contained, the original box, the boss box, is your mind itself! It is your usual ways of thinking and viewing everything.

The big problem

So we already see a big problem with the thesis that creativity is a question of your mind. If creativity is about leaving the box, but the mind is the box itself, then the question arises:

How can the box leave itself?

How can a mind step outside of itself?

How can a mind invent something that is not contained within it?

In system theory, this problem would be formulated as follows:

A system can only assimilate something “unequal” if it can be transferred into categories within the system. Anything that cannot be connected to its own structures cannot be processed—it is not understood, but remains ‘noise’ or “incomprehensible.”

Definition of a system: various interconnected and interacting elements that function as a unit.

In other words:

This would mean that your mind (which is a kind of system) can only absorb things that are structured similarly to it. Something that completely contradicts its own structure cannot simply be assimilated, integrated, or understood by the mind. This means that the greater the difference between an idea and the established thought structure, the greater the creative “effort” required. In order to assimilate an idea that is completely contrary to the habitual patterns of the mind, the mind must first adapt its structure to the structure of the idea, which means it must first transform itself.

But not all creativity requires such a transformation of the receptive structure. Even within existing structures, there are usually still new things to discover. One only has to interpolate between the known points, filling in the gaps, so to speak. And that is the form of creativity (I would call it building block creativity) that we see most often in parkour and elsewhere. More on that in another article.

But now back to the core problem of creativity:

Seeing and “seeing”

The mind therefore only ever “sees” patterns that are at least similar to it. In a sense, it only sees itself. That's why we usually always have the same kind of ideas, no matter which spots we go to. Because we always see everything in the same light, so to speak.

Here's a parkour example that illustrates this phenomenon well:

Everyone knows the situation: you are training and are kicked out of the spot for no apparent reason. Where we see a constructive and creative activity, the residents see “young people” who “have nothing to do” and are engaging in “vandalism” or something similar. Any attempts at explanation fail; it is as if one is talking to a wall. This can sometimes be frustrating for those training, and one might almost think that one is dealing with stupidity. But in reality, we are only dealing with a logical problem: we can only see what our concepts allow us to see.

It is simply the case that the concepts with which these people view the world do not cover this phenomenon (parkour). It cannot therefore be classified into their internal categories. As a result, they sort it into concepts they already know, which gives them a completely distorted picture. The concept of freestyle sport is apparently so novel and is based on a series of concepts that we take for granted but which did not exist in the past. Therefore, the transfer is too great to be able to explain it to someone who has not grown up with these concepts. It is as if we were talking to people from the past.

This everyday example (and there are countless others; you will surely find some if you pay attention) shows that although we may see with our eyes, we primarily see with our minds.

The edge of the world

The parkour vs. residents example is, of course, flattering to our parkour souls. But the problem naturally affects not only these “angry citizens,” but everyone, including us—just in other areas, such as parkour itself. For example, every time we are stuck for ideas during training.

But don't worry. If you can only think of the same thing over and over again, or if you can't think of anything at all, it doesn't mean you're uncreative. If you “can't see anything anymore,” it just means you've hit the wall of your box—and when you feel that point, it's a very good sign, because that's where the creative process begins! Because this wall is – not even metaphorically, but literally – the edge of your world. And behind this invisible wall lies the unknown, the new, the fresh.

So here again is the basic problem of creativity, formulated differently, because it is the crux of creativity:

How can one understand a new concept that cannot be constructed from old concepts?

Or, to put it another way:

How can a fish understand the concept of air?

Creativity – not a mind-thing after all?

The idea that the box could leave itself sounds absurd. And so it seems logical to conclude that creativity simply cannot be a matter for your mind! After all, it is precisely this mind that stands in the way of creativity, right?

In a way, that is correct. But there is, of course, a part that the mind can contribute to make it ready to grasp something new.

And one of these preparatory measures (besides that which I have described in artticle 1 – Introduction into creativity) is to engage with the subject matter. You may might have an abundant flow of ideas in parkour, and yet but you don´t get any ideas about carpentry. That's because you're busy with parkour and not carpentry. And the reason for this is most likely that you are interested in one and not the other.

Here we see two basic prerequisites for becoming creative in a field:

A) You must be interested in the subject matter.

B) You must engage with the subject matter.

Both points are likely to be fulfilled by most parkour practitioners. But that's apparently not enough to be creative yourself; these are only the prerequisites.

Creative activity

One thing we notice when we observe exceptionally creative movers is that they don't sit in a corner somewhere and generate brilliant ideas in their minds with great mental effort. Rather, the ideas seem to pop up spontaneously in the middle of training.

This brings us to the next point: creative activity

Creativity happens much more during the act of doing than by “thinking something up” before doing it. The creative process for creative people usually looks more like this: they simply practice—and somewhere in the process, they come across something new. Creativity therefore seems to have more to do with discovery through activity than with deliberate mental construction.

A style of action

So is creativity nothing more than chance? Something that accidently happens while just trying stuff?

At first glance, it seems like chance—but if it were pure chance, there would be no consistency in creativity. But there obviously is. And that's because creative activity has very specific characteristics, which means that discovery is a regular occurrence. And these characteristics distinguish creative activity from ordinary activity. It is these definitive characteristics of the action that allows discoveries to be made in the first place! Creative action is a specific style of action.

This naturally raises the question:

What is the nature of this activity?

Ordinary action vs. creative action

To understand creative action, I would first like to consider ordinary action. This will make the differences clearer. This is what a classic, normal, everyday action looks like:

You are at point A (actual state) and want to get to point B (target state), and your action is the means (arrow) to get from A to B.

A → B

The action is the instrument for getting from A to B. It is usually interchangeable as long as it fulfills its purpose.

For example:

You have a piece of bread (A, actual state), but you want a buttered bread (B, desired state). So you have to spread the butter on the bread (arrow, action). Whether you spread the butter on the bread with a knife, a spoon, or your hand is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is achieving B.

When we look at a creative action, we immediately see a difference: in creativity, the goal is unknown by definition. So you don't even know what B could be. This means that the action looks like this:

A → unknown

This means that creativity requires “result-open” action, which is a fundamental difference from everyday actions, which are linked to a specific goal. In this sense, creativity is not a matter of the mind. It is a type of activity, a style of action.

Freestyle structure

I believe this is why freestyle sports are not so easily accessible to many people, as freestyle sports do not have a fixed goal by nature. Freestyle sports correspond in their structure to the structure of creative action – no wonder that the proliferation of ideas in freestyle disciplines escalates exponentially – while classic sports are rigid.

Creativity – a matter of the mind after all?

An action is not simply random – there is always a certain mental component underlying an action, which gives it its character. And this is where the mind comes into play again, I think, but in a very unusual way.

An unusual use of the mind – active passive

The challenge for the mind when it comes to creativity is not that it has to actively do something, but that it actively has to refrain from doing something. It must not pursue B, because that breaks the rules of creativity. Does that mean that you are more creative when you are unconscious? Of course not. Without the mind, you do nothing at all. It is more that the mind should not be passive, it must be actively passive!

This image may illustrate it well:

You have a tense muscle and are now consciously trying to relax it. It is an active effort, but in an unusual direction—it is an effort to uneffort—reverse effort (aka relaxation). But this “un-” is active. You could call it inverted action.

Less precisely, you could say: You have to let it flow. And that is a skill that you have to train just as hard as a new move, for example (or anything else). Or even more so, because we are not used to using our mind in this way. We are very well trained in defining B's!

Subconscious B's

The problem is that we often prescribe a B without being aware of it! You could say that we are passively active. In other words, we are active without knowing it or controlling it. This means that we often unconsciously impose a series of goals on our training. Our training is under pressure. It is always just a means to an end. And the more our lives are entangled with the field of activity in which we want to be creative, the more difficult it becomes not to attach goals and expectations to it. We need to maintain a status, a personality, the feeling that we are making progress, etc. But one thing I can definitely say after all these years: all of this is poison for creativity. The ideal condition for creativity is pressure-free, self-forgetful training that happens primarily for the joy of it. By self-forgetful, I mean that you are completely absorbed in the activity and don't think about what other benefits you could personally gain from the training. The activity has a certain purpose in itself.

Introspective

So when we deal with creativity, we must begin to observe and feel our inner state during training. And even if we don't always see the B's directly, a sign of hidden B's is when there is some kind of tugging and pushing in a certain direction. This usually means that we have defined a B somewhere. And that means that we have degraded training to a means to an end. And that means that we are violating a rule of creativity, because we are no longer acting with an open mind.

An example of a subconscious B: A classic creativity trap

Going into a training session with the intention of being creative can already be problematic. It subordinates the training to a goal, and at that moment you have fallen into the A-B pattern because B has been defined. You expect the training to have produced something “creative.” And most of the time, when you “want to be creative,” you also have an image of what “creative” looks like, and this image is based on old concepts of creativity or what creativity looks like in others. And while you still think you are in the creative process, you are actually working in the opposite direction. We are completely in the box.

So if you want to learn creativity, you have to follow its rules. And that means first and foremost getting to know the creative mode instead of wanting to see creative results.

Pressing questions

So we see that training must be consciously kept free of all kinds of goals. But the question is:

Is creativity aimless action?

Can you imagine that the creative minds in the history of art and science, etc., created their works from a mental state of aimlessness? Not really, if you ask me. Creativity has far too concrete results for that. That means there is definitely something missing.

It is true that creative activity is open-ended, but it seems that this openness is not synonymous with aimlessness and that this openness itself is only an objective description of the activity, a quality that is itself merely the result of something else.

And this brings us to a topic that, in my opinion, is of monumental importance:

Inspiration. The driving force behind all creative activity.

So we are not at the end of the topic.

Creativity series

These articles should therefore not be viewed individually. The topic of creativity seems too broad to cover in a single article, so there will be a series of articles on the subject.

Here is a summary of what has been covered so far:

Article 1 dealt with the starting point of creativity, the absolute minimum requirement for creativity to arise in the first place. And with the general assumption that there are creative and uncreative types of people.

Article 2 dealt with the question of to what extent creativity has anything to do with the mind at all. It rejects the assumption that creativity requires a particularly outstanding mind, since the mind itself is the box. It then goes on to argue that creativity is rather a style of action characterized by openness to results. This openness to results is, in turn, only a characteristic that is imparted to the action by a state of mind, a creative mode.

The next article will deal with the topic of inspiration.

Thank you, see you soon :)