The capacity to channel ideas from the realm of potential into form through an act of Awareness and receptivity. Creativity is not the generation of something from nothing but rather the recognition and manifestation of what seeks to emerge - a bridge between the archetypes and the world of action, transforming the non-specific into the specific.
Therefore, my dear Sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. — Rainer Maria Rilke
This understanding inverts the modern assumption that creativity originates in the individual mind. The Perennial Philosophy suggests instead that creative insight involves contact with realities not reducible to neural activity - that the Creator serves as vessel rather than source, channeling rather than generating. The experience of inspiration (etymologically “breathing in”) points toward reception; the artist, mystic, and philosopher share the posture of active receptivity, clearing inner space so that Ideas may descend and incarnate. What the Neoplatonists understood as participation in Nous, what the Sufis describe as the polished heart receiving divine self-disclosure, creativity enacts in the domain of making.
Characteristics of creative flow:
- Non-linear: Resists sequential thinking and predetermined outcomes
- Receptive: Requires openness to what arrives from beyond the ego
- Present-focused: Emerges through awareness of the immediate moment
- Fearless: Thrives in the absence of judgement and grasping
The Creative Process thus parallels contemplation - both require the quieting of habitual mind, the suspension of the ego’s need to control, and trust in what emerges from depths the conscious self does not command. The unconscious, in Jungian terms, possesses its own intelligence; creativity represents one mode of its communication.
Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives, a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before - just as it is, it passes into the invisible world. Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater. — Rainer Maria Rilke
See also Imagination, inspiration, muse, active imagination, flow, gnosis, revelation, making.