Are You Accessing Your Creative Genius? (Part 2)

Welcome back.

We’re still talking about the Creative Genius.

Our creative genius is all about accessing the realm of imagination.

And imagination is a lot more mystical than rational materialists like to admit.

Even science came from our imagination.

In 1619, At 23 years old, René Descartes received the idea to pursue rational inquiry from an angel in a dream. Yes, you heard that right. A dream gave us the idea of rationality. The angel told him to “achieve the conquest of nature” by “measure and by number.”

Science generally gets cleaned up after the breakthrough which comes from dreams and Eureka! bathtub moments, or right brain epiphanies.

Take for example the periodic table of elements:

in 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed of “a table where all the elements fell into place as required.” Awakening, he immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. “Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.”

Or the structure of DNA:

In 1953, James Watson famously dreamed of two intertwined serpents with heads at opposite ends which provided him the idea of the double helix structure for the DNA chain.

Or countless business breakthroughs, like the modern sewing machine:

In 1905, Elias Howe invented the first Singer treadle sewing machine after a dream where he was required to build a sewing machine in a strange country for a savage king. The king had given him 24 hours to complete the machine but he could not make the needle work (as was the case in reality). At sunrise, as he was taken out to be executed, when he realized that the spears carried by the warriors were pierced near the head. He awoke and within a few hours completed his final design with the eye at the head of the needle.

You can think of imagination as another dimension of reality that we draw upon to shift our current material reality.

It gives us magical powers.

It pulls in information from the wider system that is not available to regular egoic consciousness.

You can never predict what we will imagine next. Imagination always jumps out of the box. It defies expectations.

Therefore, you can never count out someone with imagination. It makes life less like Monopoly and more like a game of Jumanji.

So how can we reliably unlock the vast potential of the imagination?

The key to imagination is relaxation.

This is because anxiety shuts down big areas of the brain and puts us into “shortcut mode”. It makes us reach for safety, comfort and familiarity. We short cut to habitual responses instead of trying novel responses.

You’ve probably noticed that your creative genius pipes up during showers and baths and on walks, when you are most relaxed.

Thoreau, Beethoven, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Snoop Dogg are all known for taking long walks to develop their ideas.

“Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.”

and

“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” - Friedrich Nietzsche

In short, anxiety blocks creativity.

If we are feeling anxious, there is nothing more important and time-sensitive than tending to our anxiety.

If we can ground and allow our fear to pass through, our nervous system will return to a regulated state.

This brings vast amounts of neural real estate back online and the potential we see in a situation easily expands.

What’s more, our authenticity and uniqueness increase when we are less anxious.

Our anxious identities, or guardians, are common and dull.

Our true self is rare and exquisite.

“A Genius is the one most like himself.” - Thelonius Monk