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Exploring Spirit and ExperienceMemory, Meditation and Creative Imagination
It may be that inspiration and innovation happen only with a coming together of the mind or spirit and the environment, or lived-in world.
Can there be only one source for a brilliant work of art? Searching for Inspiration and Seeking Innovation from Tradition, related articles on Suite 101, explore theories that creativity comes either from within, or from environment, knowledge and tradition. Possibly, however, history-making innovation can occur only through a blend of internal and external “sparks”. This article considers how that “blending” of influences might actually happen. The Practical Use of MnemosyneIn Greek mythology, the mother of the nine Muses, sister goddesses who inspired artistic achievement, was Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. This makes sense if one accepts the importance of tradition in creativity, as memory would be a critical tool for passing on knowledge and artistic achievement in oral cultures. In his article Mnemosyne and Apollo: The Role of Memory in Musical Creativity , Joseph Dillon Ford underscores the significance of the mythical story that Apollo, god of light, needed the help of Mnemosyne to become “fully conscious of his own godhood”. Ford interprets the story as reflecting the Greeks’ “remarkably intuitive understanding of the psychology of creativity”, in particular the importance of memory. Mindfulness and ReflectionF. Varela, E. Thompson and E. Rosch in their book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991) seek to bring together cognitive science, the study of the mind, with a Buddhist method of examining experience, mindfulness meditation. According to the authors, this type of meditation is not a psychic going away, but rather, experiencing “what one’s mind is doing as it does it”. Meditators come to realise how cut off they are from the events of their daily lives. People practising mindfulness meditation can experience a state that artists might link with creative inspiration. Varela et al describe a “panoramic” perspective. “A traditional metaphor for this experience is that mind is the sky…in which different mental contents, like clouds, rise and subside”. The authors argue that the existence of the panoramic view may have profound implications for how we reflect on ourselves and the world. Wordsworth described the origin of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. But perhaps, with a meditative perspective, recollection or reflection can be “a form of experience itself, open to possibilities other than those contained in one’s current representations of time and space”. Whether one can achieve the “panoramic view” only through meditation training, or it is part of a person’s natural state of mind (and this is debated), it sounds like a good possible objective for people interested in tapping the sources of their creativity.
The copyright of the article Exploring Spirit and Experience in Art & Society is owned by Brenda Ann Burke. Permission to republish Exploring Spirit and Experience in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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