Creativity

Serious about Creativity

July 26, 2011

Recently I came across a very interesting woman, Paula Scher. I saw a Tedtalk from a few years ago where she talked about design, play and being serious. In that talk she differentiates between being solemn and being serious. Differentiating between those words is not natural for me, because I have a general feeling of [...]

Understanding the Meaning of Concepts

July 11, 2011

We bring up our children with too much conceptual abstractions, that they have to memorize. They have to learn concepts without realizing the underlying reality. Learn concepts without understanding the meaning. They have to learn what others think is important. And slowly along the way, they lose the ability to think creative. It is like [...]

Creativity to Prevent External Pressure and Internal Decay

June 27, 2011

David Bohm on Creativity: Creativity is essential, not only for science but for the whole of life. If you get stuck in a mechanical, repetitious order, then it will degenerate. One of the problems is, that every civilization got stuck in a certain repetition. The creative energy gradually died away and that is why the [...]

Creating Something New Together

June 24, 2011

David Bohm on Dialogue: If the meaning of communication is to convey information or knowledge from one person to another, then the essence of communication is ‘to make something common’. Dialogue as a special kind of communication, is ‘to make something IN common’. Or creating something new together. But in most cases there is a [...]

Creativity Grows on Insight and Understanding

June 22, 2011

Creativity has an inherent order that grows on insight and understanding. It has to develop according to that. It might need rules and boundaries to keep growing in a certain direction. It might need ideas from others to grow even further … but … only after a certain amount of independent growth. Without interference from [...]

Our Incoherent View of the Whole

February 12, 2011

Coherence is a word that David Bohm used a lot. I noticed it in the video that I wrote about in my previous post. It is a word with a meaning that is rather general. A word that you read without really noticing. But the more I became aware of the word, the more I [...]

Polarisation and That what is Inbetween

November 22, 2010

I was planning to write a post about ‘the medium between law and necessity’, another phrase in the aesthetic letters. But looking at the subject, I realised it was something I have been writing about again and again on this blog. Not using the same words, but the essence of those posts was mainly the [...]

Sensuous and Formal Instinct

November 15, 2010

At the end of part two of the Letters on Aesthetics, Schiller talks about two opposite roads that depart us from our destination. He calls it false roads and says that only the beautiful can bring us back from this twofold departure. In the beginning of part three (letter 12) he talks about those two [...]

Creativity beyond Praise and Criticism

November 5, 2010

Still reading the letters on aesthetic education, I tried to understand the beginning of part two. In that part, Schiller paints a picture of how the individual is blinded by the age in which he lives, the society in which he is born. But also about the struggle of that society itself. That has this [...]

Form becomes Independent of Meaning

November 3, 2010

Being distracted by the art of language and the definition of art in my previous posts, I now continued reading Schiller’s Letters. At the end of part one, Schiller goes a long way to describe the influence of the culture on the individual. The individual who looses the contact with the whole. The inner union [...]

Free Will Between Inclination and Duty

October 26, 2010

So I started reading Schillers letters on aesthetic education. But it is not what I would call an easy read. If I was not determined to understand what he has to say, I would have already quit. But before I started reading from the beginning, I had a quick overview. And in that overview I got [...]

From Aesthetics to An-Aesthetics

October 18, 2010

Last week I saw another video of Ken Robinson. He had a TED-talk some years ago about how schools kill creativity, which I watched several times because I thought it was great. Well, he had another talk (Changing Paradigms) of which RSA made an animation. Which I also love, I really like to see a [...]

The Concept of Water

October 15, 2010

Seeing the theme for this years Blogactionday made me think of a story in the book I was reading. The book, On Creativity, is about the importance of creativity. How we all have this inner desire to discover and create something new that is whole, harmonious and beautiful. It is not something rare, it does [...]

How to Confront Inner Conflict Instead of Ignoring it

October 9, 2010

Sometimes David Bohm says so much with one sentence, that I feel the need to take it a bit apart. It is a line in the first chapter of the book On Creativity. He describes how the mind tries to avoid contradictions. It is often too confusing or painful to stay with a certain problem, [...]

Will Confusion Really be our Epitaph

October 7, 2010

Today I started reading the first chapter of the book On Creativity by David Bohm. I already wrote some posts about what struck me most in the preface of the book. And this first chapter made it even more fascinating. Many times, while reading, I wanted to go and write a post about it. But [...]

When the Mind is Trying to Escape the Awareness of Conflict

October 6, 2010

This post is about another block to creativity, a block that prevents us from expressing the creativity that is present in each of us. Self-sustaining confusion of the mind. This not the usual confusion, the confusion we experience if we just don’t understand something from outside. Bohm, in On Creativity, says that this self-sustaining confusion [...]

The Worldview of Aesthetics

October 5, 2010

With my previous post I compared different views on aesthetics. It were the views, as I understood them, from Kant, Adorno and Bohm. But I did not compare their totality. Now that is too difficult for me to do, as I only have a very general understanding of each of their views. But even if [...]

Beauty is Not Just in the Eye of the Beholder

October 4, 2010

Creativity has to do with recognizing differences and similarities. Recognize patterns that have a certain appeal to us, patterns in which we see beauty. Now it is often said that beauty is subjective. That beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But according to David Bohm in On Creativity, beauty is not purely subjective. [...]

Recognizing Patterns from an Underlying Reality

September 29, 2010

Maybe I can better change the subtitle of this blog. Since reading the book Science, Order and Creativity, creativity seems to be the main focus of my blog. But while thinking about that, I realized it always was the main focus of my blog. Of all the blogging I did so far. My focus was [...]

How Creative Energy becomes Destructive

September 28, 2010

From the moment I started reading this chapter in the book Science, Order and Creativity, I knew it would be on my mind for a long time. Looking at the posts now, I see that I read the book in June. And still, everything I do, read and hear is in the light of that [...]

Basic Ground for the Meaning of Life

September 20, 2010

So creativity is something that can only arise from within. And every outside interference can block it. At least that is what research seems to suggest. But what does that mean? And what exactly do we mean by creativity? I think that, as I already wrote in the post Inner Drive or Navigation from Outside, [...]

Creativity and the Need for Free Space

September 14, 2010

Money prevents creativity. This was one of the conclusions in the previous post. Another post was about something else that prevents creativity: the need for approval. Both conclusions were based on sound research. Of course it is all a bit more complex than that, but still the conclusions were very interesting. I think this is [...]

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

August 31, 2010

This weekend I saw some very interesting videos on Youtube. One of those videos Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, was so interesting that I wanted to take a closer look. So I uploaded the video below and took notes of the conclusions. Which were surprising, but at the same time, made very [...]

What is the Self?

July 27, 2010

This week I found another interview with David Bohm. Somewhere in that interview he talks about why we need the space to develop creativity. He wrote about that in the book Science, Order and Creativity and I already have several posts about one chapter of that book. The chapter states that creativity is very important, [...]

The Development of Creativity

July 18, 2010

I recently had a guestpost on the blog Thoughtwrestling about the place of creativity in human development as a whole. In the post I also mentioned how I see the development of creativity itself. I wrote another post on that before, where I used my model of development to describe creativity in different forms (like [...]

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