Choosing Creativity Over Condition­ing Is The Primary Choice Of Your Life

Quantum physics says that objects are possibilities for you to choose from. Really, the primary ongoing question of your life is: are you going to choose same-old, same-old, or are you going to explore new possibilities? In other words, are you going to live in the conditioned but comfortable cocoon of your ego, or are you going to take some risk, aspire for the new, and explore your quantum consciousness?

The question of choosing creativity over condition­ing is real. In the real quantum world, your consciousness is the only reality and your brain is the by-product of the evolution of consciousness to make better and better representations of all the mental meaning available for you to explore in all the different contexts you can discover for your exploration. True, your past explorations produced conditioned way stations for your personality and character, but you don’t have to be stuck in any one of them. You can always move on, changing your old order, replacing it with the new.

You can easily intuit that this is an exciting journey. I submit that the mean­ing of our lives rest in this journey, and that we have been engaged in this jour­ney for many lives, something like the hero of the movie Groundhog Day.

Quantum Thinking? or Conditioned Thinking?

No one has to tell you how to think according to the dictates of your condi­tioned way station that you call your ego. It comes to you quite naturally. You often do it quite helplessly.

Creativity is far from this; creativity is not this ego stuff. Quantum thinking consists of realizing that creativity ultimately con­sists of choosing the new among the quantum possibilities of meaning, giving us a new thought, discontinuous with all previous thoughts.


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Ordinary thoughts follow a stream of consciousness. They are continu­ous, one more or less causally following the other. A creative thought does no such thing; it follows no cause, no other thought before. The passage from all the previous thought to the new creative one is fraught with discon­tinuity. You become separate from your stream-of-consciousness thinking, suddenly caught in a wonderful feeling of surprise. Aha!, a new thought, a creative insight. But you have no idea where the thought came from or how it arose in your awareness. A creative insight is a discontinuous event of thought, a quantum leap.

In the process of quantum leaping, your conscious identity has leaped from your ordinary state of consciousness, the ego, to a nonordinary cosmic unity of superconsciousness, which you may call your quantum self. Your quantum self is nonlocal; its identity is the whole cosmos.

Creativity: Rising Beyond Your Conditioning

Do-be-do-be-do: Think Quantum, Be CreativeIn every creative event of insight, creative people (let’s call them “creatives”) rise beyond their conditioning. The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote about one of his creative experiences, “Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.”

Anyone can be cre­ative. When we are children, we have creative experiences many times; these experiences give us the conditioned contexts of our ego identity. Learning how to be creative when we are adults is learning how to penetrate the ego condi­tioning when the situation arises. Learning how is not, however, a regression to childhood, negating the ego entirely. It is reclaiming again and again some of our childhood innocence, in spite of the ego, in fact, using the ego.

In brief, here is an important recurring theme of the creative journey. Our creative ideas are the results of the creative play of consciousness, which is the only real play there is in a quantum universe. However, the shadows (memories) of these creative ideas in our mind-brain complex give rise to conditioning, a tendency for homeostatic repetition. Conditioning sets us in a seductive shadow play, making the world appear to be a play of dichotomies: creativity and conditioning, good and evil, consciousness and matter, activ­ism and non-doing, and so forth. To be creative is also to penetrate this oppositional camouflage and develop the ability to integrate the dichotomies.

The Questions of Creativity Enable Us To Make Progress

The world responds to our questions. Sometimes the response is creative, other times not. But to make progress is to ask questions.

These are some of the tradi­tional arenas for creative acts — art, poetry, mathematics and the sciences, music and dance. But they do not exhaust the scope of creativity. More recently, the arena of creativity has been recognized to include business enterprises, a very welcome addition to the tradition.

The previous are examples of outer creativity, creativity in the outer arena of human expression in which there is a product that everyone can share. But we also have our inner arena, the state of consciousness in which we live, feel, think, and intuit. Not everyone lives the same inner states, the same degree of inner wholeness. In this way, there is inner creativity, creativity in the inner landscape of experiences.

Engaging Inner Creativity: Do-Be-Do-Be-Do

In the olden days and even now, a large number of people engage in what is called a spiritual journey, in search of God. When looked at closely, it becomes apparent that this is a journey toward self-realization, using the creative process of inner creativity.

But spiritual search (research?) is not the only arena in which you have to engage inner creativity. Much closer to home and everyday life is the idea of applying inner creativity in relationship. If you learn to love somebody with creativity in practice, the experience is radically different from what you ordinarily call love.

We become most alive, most joyful when we are creative; our creative moments are the greatest moments of our lives.

Creativity is a four-stage process – preparation, incubation (waiting quietly as a bird sits on her egg), insight, and manifestation (of the insight). Preparation (doing) and waiting (being) are not necessarily chronological. What happens before a creative insight takes place is many alternative episodes of doing and being – do-be-do-be-do, like that Frank Sinatra jingle.

*subtitles by InnerSelf

Copyright 2011 by Amit Goswami, Ph.D.
Reprinted with permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Co.
Dist by Red Wheel Weiser, www.redwheelweiser.com

Article Source

How Quantum Activism Can Save Civilization: A Few People Can Change Human Evolution
by Amit Goswami.

How Quantum Activism Can Save Civilization: A Few People Can Change Human Evolution by Amit GoswamiAmit Goswami asserts that quantum thinking allows us to break from past bad habits and bring us into of free will and possibilities. He calls for a plan of action that involves applying "quantum thinking" to a variety of societal issues:  spiritual economics concerned with our well-being rather than only our material needs; democracy that uses power to serve, instead of dominating others; education that liberates rather than shackles; and new healthy practices that restore wholeness.

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About the Author

Amit Goswami, author of: How Quantum Activism Can Save CivilizationAmit Goswami, Ph. D. is a professor of physics (retired) at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR where he has served since 1968. He is a pioneer of the new paradigm of science called science within consciousness an idea he explicated in his seminal book, The Self-Aware Universe. Goswami has written six other popular books based on his research on quantum physics and consciousness. In his private life, Amit Goswami is a practitioner of spirituality and transformation. He calls himself a quantum activist. He was featured in the film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" and its sequel "Down the rabbit hole" and in the documentary "Dalai Lama Renaissance" and the award winning "The Quantum Activist." You can find more information about the author at the website www.AmitGoswami.org.