CREATIVITY Its Many Meanings In The World

There are several meanings of the term "creativity". This means we should be clear about what we mean when we talk about it. Basically, these several meanings indicate that there are several perspectives in play. Any of these can work for a particular context, but you just have to be clear what context you refer to when you refer to creativity. And being able to understand all the different perspectives that exist on creativity is, itself, I believe, an act that supports creative emergence, through the satistfaction then release from intellectual constraint upon the creative act.

That may be overly hopeful, but in any event, what follows is a whirlwind tour.

This is persuasively expressed by Howard Gardner in his research into multiple intelligences ( logical/mathematical reasoning, kinesthetic manuever, and more). Creativity is the ability to take existing objects, feelings, and concepts and combine them in different ways for novel and innovative purposes. Creativity is available to any one no matter what level of development they have in any number of intelligences. Creativity here is a skill, or set of skills, the results of which are examined by a group of peers and deemed worthy, or unworthy. Creativity can produce artifacts of any kind or nature, which means accountants, librarians, lawyers, housewives, middle managers, janitors, CEOs, presidents, artists, and anyone can be creative.


Creativity is dynamic associated with the arts and artists.
The exhibition and usage of creativity is strictly what artists do. They are able to see new combinations, new grammars, new ideas, new horizons. That ability is creativity. Artists use creativity to make and embed signs in artwork that can relate to worldviews at the fundamental level. Their artwork 'creates' a world of perception. Creativity is what artists seeks to cultivate and sustain in their artist practice or study. Creativity is like yeast; it lives and dies in the process of artistry; it is taken from to produce art, and the art then replicates it for others. Not all artists are truly creative, but it is what all artists seek to be.


Creativity is a quality of the most developed levels of an intelligence.
Creativity is equivalent to mastery, achieved through training, commitment, and study. Through a mastery that pushes the leading edge of logic/mathematical reasoning, kinesthetic action, or other kinds of intelligence development, thus emerges the demonstration of creativity. Creativity is for the elite. There is a conscious awareness of a person as a 'creator', at these highest levels of being and knowing, where a thought indeed becomes an action, or has an immediate effect, as directly and efficiently as possible. Thus, creativity is a level, or a group of very high levels, of personal development.


Creativity is a state of consciousness.
As a temporary altered mode of feeling, creativity is the exhibition of impulses that arise in a person, and then die down, to be experienced spontaneously at some later point. Thus infants and the elderly, and all in between, can potentially exhibit creativity. Creativity comes about from nowhere, stays awhile as a heightened awareness or impulsive drive, and then leaves, to return without reason or rhyme. Creativity is akin to inspiration, and the momentum that comes from it. Tools and routines, both healthy and unhealthy in nature, are used to stimulate and trigger creativity.


Creativity is the fabric of the Kosmos.
The kosmos refers to all of consciousness, or poetically the total weave of interior and exterior wool. Creativity is what that wool is made of. It is the mother of consciousness, and so it is programmed into deepest codes of human existance. Thus there isn't a single thing, action, thought, exchange, or mode of being/knowing that does not exhibit creativity, or is not creativity at its core. As the primary drive of existence, in the manifest and unmanifest realms, creativity is inevitable, inescapeable, and the primary condition of life. One cannot avoid creativity, just as one cannot avoid birth, life, and death. One can simply accept creativity, in is vast, unqualified ISness, and as the always already symphony of everything.

MD
Chicago, Illinois
November 2005


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