Drunkenness and Creativity

Drunk on half a drop...

People have said a great deal about the connection between meditation and creativity. I have only half a drop of meditation in my life. So perhaps I am not really qualified to speak about this, but I am going to say a few things anyway since that half drop has been enough to get me drunk. And when people get drunk, they start talking recklessly, don't they? Can't be helped. They can't be blamed for it. Blame the one who gets them drunk.

People think that meditation relaxes the mind by silencing it which makes it creative simply because the it starts seeing things that were hidden by the clouds of chaos. While this is essentially correct, it is a little too simplistic, too easy to misinterpret. And the reason for that is that typically, we do not have any idea about the incredible depths of relaxation that are possible. I certainly do not claim to have experienced those depths in their entirety. And what little I have experienced has certainly not been because of my own efforts. I have simply been fortunate enough to have caught that half a drop from the fountain of Silence.

To be able to step out of the well-beaten paths of everyday thought, one has to first stop walking on those paths. Creativity is the ability to create something genuinely new. For something to be genuinely new, it cannot be born out of just a superficial reorganization of what one already has - it must be born out of absolutely nothing. It must emerge from the void, from Silence. Then surely it stands to reason that for the phenomenon of true creation to happen through us, we must first step into Silence.

From my own meagre experience, I would like to say (not that I have any right to say such things, but I am drunk!) that what happens in Silence is far more than the simplistic explanation that I have mentioned above.

Silence has a life of its own, an intelligence of its own.

So then can one employ meditation to become more creative in the arts, sciences and all the other nonsense that we indulge in? I would say - no, that is not how it will work. One cannot enter Silence with a motive. Motives are loud things. One must leave them behind before one can enter Silence. And then one can only wait in the womb of Silence for new things to be born. Sometimes they may be the things that we are looking for, sometimes they may be something entirely different. All we can do is allow them to manifest through us. The Silence lives on its own terms. We can only allow it to live through us. As it is, what it has much more to offer that we can ever ask for. So it is no loss to leave our little demands behind. They will be satisfied in ways we can never think of (we are just not creative enough on our own).

All we can do is be drunk, even if it is on just half a drop! All we can do is offer ourselves to the magnificence of Silence, to its glorious creativity.