Buddhism and the creative process

Peter: Here’s the question. It’s not a personal one, but something I’ve been thinking about a while. Is there anything in Buddhist teachings where someone has thought about defining creative process? Either demystifying it or not?

Ken: Yeah, a lot. What do you want to know?

Peter: Well, can you tell me what book to read or whatever?

Ken: Oh, that’s more difficult. What do you want to know?

Peter: If there’s a way of defining a creative process, so it’s not mystified, that it could be a job.

Ken: Well, not so much in Buddhism, but creativity has been studied actually quite closely. And there are quite a few books written about it, some of them are very insightful. But it’s very interesting when you say “not mystify it.” Because creativity is a mystery. And I don’t say that to mystify it. I just say it because it is a mystery. I mean, let’s take an old invention, the printing press. Movable type was around for a long time before Gutenberg came up with the printing press. Do you know what he brought into the picture that made the printing press? The wine press. The wine press, what was used for pressing grapes, he realized, had the force to be able to get the movable type to actually print on paper. But both of these things had been around for quite a long time. So there is something quite mysterious about that. That two things come together.

Now, creativity is not something you can produce. However, it is possible to create the conditions which are likely to produce creative outcomes. And this I run into in my business consulting quite a bit. For instance one company I’m working with right now, they are a creative design company. They make television promotions and things like that. But there are two distinct phases to their work. One is coming up with ideas and the other is making them into products. Well, the first part is utterly mysterious and the second part is like manufacturing.

And so I recently had a session with them in which I said, “Okay, in this first part, you’re trying to make accidents happen because that is the creative process. You make lots of accidents happen and you realize, ‘Oh, this one can work.’ But you’re looking to make accidents happen. Once you move into the manufacturing process, you want to get rid of all the accidents and just crank it out.” And they went, “Oh yeah, that is what we do.” Because they were right in it and it moved back and forth in their facility, but they didn’t really see them as two very distinct processes. But what a lot of people try to do is they try to make the creative process like manufacturing, and that just doesn’t work. You have to work a very, very different way. It’s much more like gardening than an assembly line.

And when you garden, you can’t make a plant grow. All you can do is provide it with the conditions. And so it’s a whole different way of relating to things. And spiritual practice—and this is why I say there’s a lot in Buddhism about this—is primarily a growth process. It’s not a manufacturing process, even though it’s often presented to us as, you know, you do this kind of meditation you get this result, you do this meditation and you get this result, you do this meditation and get a result and bong! You’re enlightened! No, it doesn’t work that way. [Laughs] It’s a growth process.

And for everybody it’s different, in my experience. Even if you teach the same thing to five different people, they’ll have five different practices and after a month you’re going to have to have five different conversations with them. Because they’re all going to be at different stages and different things are going to be happening in them. And that’s the way it is. So you look to, “What are the conditions that need to be present? What are the redundancies that need to be present so that people are taken care of in the process?” So creativity is something you nurture, it’s not something you make happen. Now that’s my way of demystifying it, by respecting the fact that it is a mystery Does that help?

Peter: Yeah I’ve always thought so, I just didn’t wanna … it just seemed too simplistic to say that. So thank you.

Ken: Oh, okay.

Peter: I didn’t mean your answers seem simplistic—for me just to say, “Oh yeah, well, let’s make it mystical,” it feels like then it would be the end of a discussion.

Ken: No, no, you have to, you have to create the conditions and nurture it. So you can create conditions which nurture creativity, which allow accidents to happen, wonderful things to happen. And one of those is creating a positive ambience. And there’s a lot written about what are good conditions for creativity. Play is a very, very important condition for creativity. So people play all sorts of things and they just go off.

Research scientists who you’d think [would think] it would be more like manufacturing, they understand this very, very well. There was a mathematician in the 20th century that whenever he had a problem, he went for rides on the New York subway. That’s where he solved his problems. He just [went] cruising along in a rattly old thing. And so research scientists know that [a breakthrough in] their research doesn’t come from thinking about things. A good person for you to read about would be Richard Feynman. Who was a physicist out at Caltech until he died. A brilliant, brilliant guy and extraordinarily creative, both in how he did physics and in how he taught. That’d be a good person for you to read.

Peter: Feynman?

Ken: Feynman. F-E-Y-N-M-A-N, I believe, but you look him up. I mean, he’s up in the ranks of Einstein and things like that. There was an article in the New Yorker about him, and there are probably some lectures of his up on YouTube. But he was one of the top physicists of the 20th century and astonishingly creative.

The present meaning of past lives

Announcer: This was submitted by Seth in Colorado. “Just what does it mean that all sentient beings are, in fact, our own mothers and fathers from past lives? I’m not buying it. This fly in my window was my mother? Well, that makes the world a creepy place. What is the point of this? How can it be more than just believing this?”

Ken: Well, your question goes to a profound difference in worldviews. In Buddhism in general, and Tibetan culture in particular, the worldview is of a potentially endless cycle of life and rebirth, which has no beginning and, as I said, potentially has no end. If something has no beginning, then there’s been an infinite number of lives. And so every, every sentient being will have had an intimate relationship with every sentient being. So they’ll have been our mothers, fathers, lovers, you name it, brothers, sisters, etc.—as well as our worst enemies. There’s a famous verse, which I can’t remember in detail, but it’s about one of Buddha’s top students seeing a woman who is eating a fish, feeding a baby at her breast and kicking a dog. And he says, how tragic is samsara? When we suckle our worst enemy, eat our mother and kick our brother in our past life. [Laughs]

Now, that was the world view in Tibetan and in Indian culture. And that’s how people saw things. I’m not sure whether it was a case of belief. That’s just how they saw and experienced things. And we may think that’s terribly wrong, but you have to remember that 300 years ago, or actually a bit longer, a few hundred years ago, everybody knew the world was flat. It’s only relatively recently that everybody knows the world is round. So our own worldview is very different. Some people believe in past and future lives but most people tend to take the evidence of their senses. And we experience this—this life—but we don’t have the same vivid evidence-based substantiation of past or future lives. So your question is quite natural.

However, there’s another way of looking at this. That is, and this goes a bit deep, so I’ll try to explain this as clearly as possible. Everything we experience is the result of certain things coming together. So, every meal I eat involves the work, the labor, the interaction of many, many people often spread over continents now, as well as innumerable factors, sunlight, and water and plants and so forth. So another way of thinking about all sentient beings are our mothers and fathers is a way of expressing our very rich, the very rich interconnectedness, and interdependence of everything we experience. Now, there’s a profound consequence to that. If everything that we experience depends on everything else. Then it raises the question, “What am I?” And from that point of view, I am simply the result of all kinds of conditions coming together. There isn’t a “thing” which is me, even though I may wish to believe that. So when we say, “All sentient beings are our mothers and fathers,” it could also be understood as saying that whatever we are in our lives comes about through the actions and interactions with others. And in particular, I would say whatever you are that’s positive in our lives comes about through the love that we’ve received from others. And it’s a way of reminding us of that. So that we never think that we are just an entity in ourselves, and that we maintain an intimate and appreciative connection with everything that we experience.

Experiencing no-beginning mind

Student: One of the dedication prayers I learned from you—I really love this prayer—but it includes this line: “Give me energy to know that mind has no beginning.” And even though I say the prayer every day, I still don’t really understand what is being expressed in that line.

Ken: The prayer that you’re referring to actually isn’t the dedication prayer, it’s the prayer that’s used for guru yoga and the common Kaygu tradition. Now what part of the line do you do you … ?

Student: It’s very evocative to me, but the line is: “Give me energy to know that mind has no beginning.” I’m not sure what it means that mind could have no beginning.

Ken: Ah. [Pause] Well, we’re sitting in this room here. And it’s possible to open to the experience of the whole room. Not thinking about it, just open to the whole experience. [Pause]

When you do that, you drop out of a conceptual knowing, but there’s still the awareness of the whole room. All the people, sounds, shapes, colors, light, and so forth, right? [Pause]

Where does that non-conceptual knowing come from?

Student: Yes, it feels to me as if it’s already there somehow.

Ken: Just so. Mind has no beginning.

Student: Should we move on? [Laugh]

Ken: Up to you.

Ken and Student: [Laughter]

Two kinds of equanimity

Announcer: This question was submitted by Alex from North Carolina. “In Wake Up To Your Life you discuss the four immeasurables and say that the active form of corrupted equanimity is manipulation. The relationship between equanimity and manipulation is a bit opaque to me. Can you say a bit about how that works?”

Ken: When you have a sense of equanimity, you see clearly, you see more clearly how things are, in fact you see into the working of things. Because you see into the working of things, then you can see how to manipulate people to get what you want or how to manipulate situations. So if it isn’t true equanimity, but it’s corrupted equanimity, i.e., that self-interest is still operating, then it will, the self-interest will often manifest as an attempt to manipulate situations to serve that sense of self. You may notice that people who are good at manipulating others are very equanimous. They aren’t ruffled by things because they know how to work the situations, that they see everything as just objects, move people around like pawns on the chess board. And that they aren’t particularly reactive. This is the corrupt form.

True equanimity is quite different. It is the understanding that everything everybody does is because they think that at that moment, it’s going to improve their world. And that everybody is just trying to make their world a little bit better. And when we have that understanding, then we don’t judge people as bad or good. We can see that their actions are more skillful or less skillful, or they create more suffering, more struggle for themselves, and others are less. But because we understand this process and ourselves, we aren’t particularly judgmental. So there’s a big difference between between being nonjudgmental and understanding where other people are, and using that understanding to serve our own interests, which is the manipulation I’m talking about.