Science is an activity of outer activity to discover a body of knowledge that everyone can share and develop new applications to solve the pressing challenges of the environment. The application of science gives us technology.
The mainstream scientists try to sell the idea of the scientific method—produce many ideas by divergent rational thinking, then pare them down to one—convergence. Now subject that one idea to experimental verification and see if it works. If it doesn’t, back to the drawing board.
However, it is hard to explain all scientific discoveries and inventions this way. Creativity researchers became interested in studying the geniuses in science like Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, or the discoverers of quantum mechanics Heisenberg and Schrödinger.
The study revealed something unexpected. You know traditionally, creativity, people think, is some endeavor that creative artists, poets, writers, and musicians engage in. The researchers discovered the artists’ process when they do their creative thing via their studies. When they compared the process behind the act of great scientific discoveries of theories and inventions of technologies with that of the artists’ creative process, surprise! The two processes were identical. Scientists are a creative bunch just like artists.
I started looking at creativity in the nineteen eighties after I had my initial breakthrough that quantum physics is a physics of possibility for Consciousness to choose from. I also knew that choice can be discontinuous, quantum leaps. As a scientist, I already engaged in some minor cases of discovery before I took on the task of making sense of quantum physics. Not many quantum leaps there, although one event came close. But my discovery of Consciousness in quantum physics was certainly a quantum leap.
So, what became the burning question for me was, Is all creativity a quantum leap? Somehow a colleague in the education department heard about my musings in the university’s gossip grapevine and invited me to give a talk there. After the talk, she said, “Yeah, you may be right; creative insights come as discontinuous events; people compare them with bolts of lightning. But can you explain the rest of the creative process?”
That was the first time, I heard of the creative process.
And this woman Nora Cohen says, “It is well documented. The discontinuous insight is not an isolated event but is part of a protracted process with four stages.”
Wow, I thought excitedly. Can the quantum science of Consciousness explain the entire creative process? That would be a nice test of the theory.
Yes, it could, it did.
Another thing struck me while I was working on creativity. You know, it is not only scientists and artists who talk about their event of insight as a sudden event; spiritual teachers, at least the Zen masters also talk about sudden enlightenment. Bingo! Is transformation the culmination of the creative process? I started calling spiritual transformation an act of inner creativity.
I became friends with an Israeli physicist around that time who was also a military man. You know Israelis; everyone has to work in the military except that this guy took his military duty seriously. One day he told me about his new idea of how they should train their soldiers. “See our big problem is to prepare for surprises. Our army generals prepare for surprise attacks in a situational way. But you know. Arabs don’t always attack like that; sometimes they give us fundamental surprises for which you just cannot prepare in a situational contextual way.”
Aha! I thought. A classification of creativity is necessary: situational and fundamental. Situational creativity is creativity within a given known context. For example, you develop a creative holistic technique for healing flu using systems theory. Then when a new virus, let’s say COVID-19, comes along, and you invent a creative modification of your techniques, it applies to the new virus. This is an example of situational creativity. The physical context changed, but not the archetypal which is the systems theory version of the archetype of wholeness in this case by the way.
On the other hand, we explore an archetype itself directly to explore its nature and embody, the creativity required we call fundamental creativity. Fundamental creativity applied to COVID would require a quantum leap; we call this kind of healing quantum healing.
Creativity as a way to break from old ways of thinking as well as living is a relatively new concept on the horizon especially the way it is used now, very tilted toward outer experiences and products. In the olden days, people also talked about breaking from old ways which they called ignorance or unreal to the new which they called reality. Take me from the unreal to the real—asato ma sat gamaya—declares the Upanishads. But this was called spiritual awakening, not to be relevant for worldly people.
I began to suspect that the two processes may be two aspects of the same process, although my spiritual friends were resistant. When I had my own spiritual experience, I had no doubt; the process was the same, only the objective was different. Outer creativity is directed toward the manifestation of outer products—a poem, a scientific law, a piece of sculpture. In contrast, spirituality is inner creativity to manifests as a product of a “new me,” a new station of homeostasis for self-identity. And oh yes! It is important for worldly people as well.
Quantum Self
The creative process, as revealed by the researcher Graham Wallace as early as 1926, consists of four stages:
do, do, do, think, think, think in divergent ways, use active imagination, visualize your solutions, open your mind to new stuff, and think imaginatively and passionately.
In the second step, you relax. Here is how they got the clue that relaxing is important. A long time ago, there was a great scientist named Archimedes in Greece, who discovered the concept of buoyancy of fluids, the reason you feel lighter when immersed in water. The idea came to him not when he was thinking and sweating about the problem to solve, but when he was stepping into his bathtub full of water and the water overflew. He was ready as a result of unconscious processing during relaxation.
The same thing happened with another recent mathematician who discovered a new theorem of math while stepping on a bus for vacationing. There are many other similar cases. In arts, music, poetry, and literature, in every field of creativity.
this is the stage, just that split second when the quantum leap takes place.
You got your insight; now use the insight to generate a product in the appropriate medium.
Psychologists soon figured out that what Wallas meant by incubation—the image of a bird sitting on an egg–is a metaphor. When we do not process consciously, we must be processing nevertheless, but unconsciously. But this may be ok with psychoanalysts, how do explain incubation from a cognitive-behavioral materialist view? Sophistry began ideas like conscious brain action and unconscious brain action, never mind the anachronism of how that sounds.
When you use quantum physics for your thinking, it is easy to figure out what is happening here. When you consciously process, you are processing the manifest. As you stop, where do the thoughts go? Each of your thoughts acts like a pebble in the pond of the unmanifest—the unconscious and becomes waves of potentiality doing what waves do—expand. In this way, the expanding possibility waves created by your conscious thinking, soon make a huge pool of meaningful possibilities to choose your next thought.
Unconscious thinking or quantum thinking allows you (in your higher undivided Consciousness) to simultaneously process a whole bunch of possibilities. Whereas, in conscious thinking, you can only process one thought at a time.
When I became a physics instructor in the USA in 1963, I remember a conversation I had with a very erudite senior physicist. I had read an article the previous night claiming that scientific research may well involve creativity rather than just rational thinking. I kind of liked the sound of the word creativity, so I presented some of the ideas to this erudite guy as if they were my original ideas, impressing him no end.
Imagine my surprise, when a few months later, I was struggling with a problem and the conventional known thinking was all blind alleys. Just when I was feeling sorry for myself, and went into the basement café (called Snake Pit by the way), and started relaxing with a cup of coffee, Wham-O! A new idea, the solution.
Much later, after figuring out how unconscious processing works, I was still not happy. Something kept bothering me—there is something more.
One night I was dreaming. In the dream, some stick figures came on a stage. Oh, were they active? Dancing, gamboling, jumping. That went on for quite a while. Then they went away. A voice said in the background, those are the angels of doing. Soon I saw another bunch of stick figures, but they were just quietly sitting, doing nothing. The voice said those are the angels of being. Then those figures receded, and the doing angles came back. Then they went away, and the being angels returned, and it went on alternating like that. When I woke up, I found myself singing a Frank Sinatra jingle: do-be-do-be-do.
In the fifties. In a song in which Sinatra starred called From Here to Eternity. The creative process must include many episodes of doing and being to get the result—insight.
We talked about the three I’s before: inspiration, intuition, intuition; add to that a fourth I—imagination, and you’ve got pretty much of what doing—conscious processing—involves. Imagination, of course, involves divergent thinking. You engage in these four I’s for a while, then add the fifth I of incubation—doing nothing, just being which as explained before involves unconscious processing. Then a time comes when the processes converge; that is the quantum leap. It is a product of the unconscious, not of the conscious as creativity theorists first thought.
You know, you read the creativity research literature and people quote various creative people to make their point. Often, you find comments like, I don’t write, the pen writes itself, or I don’t paint, the brush does it, I just watch. The careful monitoring of my process revealed the explanation. The process these creatives are talking about is what psychologists call flow. manifestation stage. Ok, that’s not an explanation, not yet. The explanation came to me upon reading these evocative lines from the poet Rabindranath Tagore:
What drama is this between creation and destruction—
Our ideas come from the quantum self; our ego gives the idea its needed form. Creative manifestation is a flow between the quantum self and the ego.
We cannot create our own reality so long we hang on to just the ego mode for our operation. The creative choice does not happen from the contracted mode of the ego. Who am I then when that quantum leap happens? Who creates? Quantum self, who else?
For ages, that’s what spiritual teachers have been telling us, that it is the quantum self—our deeper self—that creates. The ego is a barrier to transformation. So, we hear evocative slogans, “Kill the ego,” and “Die before you die.” Is there validity in those slogans?
Slogans like that can scare people away. Are you prepared to leave the ego behind, and kill the ego? Like the great St. Augustine, most of us would say, “Not yet.”
Relax. If creativity just consisted of taking a quantum leap, then indeed it would be a leap to leave the ego behind. Realizing that creativity is a process of which the quantum leap is a part, solves our dilemma. Yes, we do jump to the quantum self when we get our creative idea or what we call insight. But in all the stages of the creative process, the ego plays a role, sometimes an important role as in preparation. Sometimes a complementary role in the flow experience
Let’s examine the nature of the two selves in some detail.
The subjective state of Consciousness we experience in intuitive thoughts and feelings is not the ordinary ego but an exalted expanded state of Ananda that we call the quantum self to distinguish it from the ego we experience in our ordinary normal thoughts and feelings using our memory.
You can also think of the quantum self as the self of the present moment. It is easy to notice that your ego usually is either thinking of the past or imagining the future. If instead, you remind yourself to stay in the present and attempt to do it, a process that is called meditation, you will be surprised to find that often you feel relaxed, your Consciousness is expanded. How did that happen? Because you fell into the quantum self, into the present at some point.
Unfortunately, your brain, unless you train it via long hours of meditation does not stay there. Remember though that neuroscientists have confirmed that long-term meditators do develop the state of frequent falling into the quantum self. Read the book Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. But even a fifteen-minute bout of meditation can take you to the quantum self momentarily and even that brief encounter relaxes you.
The normal state of Consciousness we experience is popularly called the ego. It seems to be quite predictable; it is certainly shaped by behavioral conditioning.
We also can be conscious of being conscious; we can look at the ego like any other object. Agreed, linguistically, when we look at the ego’s “I,” the I becomes “me,” but it is hard to find a distinction between the two.
This confusion about the nature of our subjectivity has given rise to a mechanistic cognitive/behavioral explanation of Consciousness: assume that the brain is a computer that can cognize, that is, give meaning to its input stimuli that it senses through its sensory apparatus. The brain also makes memory of the external stimuli that include the cognized meaning. It can process its memory like a computer.
In this way, when you are talking with a friend, although both of you speak in the first person singular using the word I, how can you say that it is not just two brains talking, that something we call Consciousness is involved?
There is a way to tell. The cognitive behavioral picture has to be objective. If you both are looking at a rose, then your brain states must be identical. And yet, every human being “knows” that there is a subjective quality of the experience that is individual.
So, to materialist scientists the question of Consciousness becomes a question of explaining the subjective quality, called qualia, of what we call experience.
As for the quantum self, cognitive behavioral materialist scientists just deny the existence of such exalted beings!
In quantum science, the problem is different. When Oneness splits in two, subject and object, when it looks through the brain and its tangled hierarchy of perception and memory apparatuses, the subject and object arise together, and there is no prior memory of it either if one is seeing an object for the first time. The experienced subject has no individuality of memory; in this way, it is cosmic, and everyone has the same quantum-self experience. The problem is to explain how during the course of living, the quantum self degenerates into the ego.
The explanation was given by the Buddhists long ago as dependent co-arising of the conditioned ego and the conditioned object of experience. Today, in quantum neuroscience we rephrase the explanation as “reflection in the mirror of memory.” It is a little vague; fortunately, a mathematical model backs up what we vaguely can see and makes the picture credible. When all the nuances of the processing of memory are considered, we find that our ego consists of ego/character/habit patterns/persona.
Conditioning gives us habit patterns. Character refers to character traits—the easy-without-effort abilities of the ego. A musician can hear the scale a particular piece of music is using; he does not have to think.
How does a habit that you can take or leave become a character trait? Practice, practice, practice. Practice gives you mastery. Once in a while, you become so relaxed as you are practicing, that you fall into your quantum self. Whenever that happens, you get a conviction. Habits of your conviction are your character traits.
We all develop multiple shades of ego behavior; each shade is called a personality. In each personality, we use a particular bunch of programs but not others; personalities are masks we wear in different situations. The ego uses different masks for its response to different situations.
It is important to emphasize the differentiation between habit patterns and character traits. Habit patterns are your propensities to use certain learned programs for responding to certain situations; character traits on the other hand are propensities that define you, that come into play easily without you making any effort; you have a conviction about them.
It is important to differentiate between your ego character and ego persona as well. The ego character is authentic. Persona can be a fake, inauthentic, self-image you project.
Excerpts from Hero’s Journey: Quantum Style
By Amit Goswami, PhD, a retired physicist from the University of Oregon, USA. For more insights and educational resources, visit Facebook, Cqaedu.
