Season 2, Episode 8: Discover what it means to be a creativist and how to harness the power of creative intention and attention to unfold what you want to create. Orna explains the core ideas behind this transformative approach and the defining aspects of being in creative mode. This episode will inspire you to create with intention and purpose as the simplicity of the process is defined.
Read the Transcript to Go Creative! Podcast Season 2, Episode 1: What is conscious creation?
Orna Ross: Hello, creatives and creativists. Welcome back. Thank you for your patience while we have been sorting out the back end, for want of a better word, of the podcast.
When you set up a new podcast, there's a lot of things to do that aren't necessarily visible to listeners and we've been organizing the distribution of the podcast, the different channels where it's going to turn up, and hopefully making it easier for you to find it and to locate it on your devices, your phones or your computers, or wherever it is that you listen to your podcast.
This then is season two. We're kicking off a new season. I'll be doing these in seasons of seven, I think, and taking breaks in between, and grouping them around a theme. So, as ever, the podcast is unfolding through the creative principles that we talk about on the podcast. Very organically, I'm responding to what's arising, to where it's fitting into my other work, and also to the needs, the things that I'm beginning to hear back from those of you who are beginning to listen in.
So, it's a thing now. It's up, it's established, it's running, and welcome to season two.
So, in this season for the next seven episodes, what I'm going to be looking at is the foundations, the basis. So, this is a podcast, for those who may be listening in for the first time, about conscious creation, and it is for both creatives, those who consider creativity to form the foundation of their work. So, writers and artists, and others who consciously draw on their creative process, are aware of their process and so on. But it's also for what I call creativists, and a creativist is somebody who applies conscious creation to everything that they are making in their lives.
We know now that there is a very identifiable creative process, and that is part of what we are talking about all the time here on this podcast, and we know that there are. things that foster a good creative flow, a good creative process for you, and that's what we're encouraging here on the podcast.
So, creatives can be creativists as well. Sometimes creativists do not work in the creative field, they work somewhere else. But of course, in no matter what field you work in, whether it's raising a child, looking after the elderly serving coffee in your local cafe, whatever it is, it can be approached in a creative way or in a conventional way, and obviously we're all about approaching it all in the creative way.
Today I'm going to talk about fundamentals, and this is the most fundamental aspect of everything that I'm talking about, what is conscious creation? So, this is a short podcast episode, but it is a very key one in terms of understanding what it is we're trying to do around here.
It doesn't matter, as I said, what you're trying to create in your life, it might be more time. It might be different experiences. It could be home comfort, it could be something to do with a relationship, could be around travel, intimacy, or alone time, fun, meaning, anything, art, money, honestly, you name it. It doesn't matter.
The thing is that conscious creation begins with recognizing that you want something. Also, the whole philosophy of creativism goes on the basis that wanting is how we grow, wanting is a sign that you're alive. When you stop wanting, something's gone wrong. The life force is not moving through you in the way that it is supposed to.
So, the process is simply you want something, and as I said already, it can be something small, something big.
When you're starting conscious creation, it can be really good to pick a small thing, something that you would like, but that you're not, if, for example, what you really want is to create an intimate relationship in your life and you don't have that, starting off with that is possibly not the best idea because you're bringing a lot of weight and a lot of emotion, a lot of history perhaps to that want. Whereas, if you take something small and you apply the process, and then you get better at the process, then you can begin to take in the bigger things.
How it operates is very simple, and apologies to those of you who know this inside out, but it's always good to have a refresher actually, it never goes away. It's always evergreen, this stuff. You want something, and you consciously turn that want, that desire, into a creative intention.
Creative intention can be conscious or unconscious, and the unconscious is a topic for another episode. But here we're talking about consciously, you make an intention. That intention then channels your creative attention. So, intention gives rise to attention, and that creative attention then gives rise to actions.
When we talk about the actions that bring a creative intention into being, we're looking not just at the work that we do to make it happen, but we're also looking at the creative rest and play that support you staying in the create state. That's what's different about conscious creation and goal setting. Goal setting tends to be very linear. I want this, I'm going to do that, and I'm going to get what I want. But, of course, we know the process is much more complex than that, because if it was that simple, we'd all have everything we want and we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in.
Desire unfolds intention. Intention unfolds attention. Attention unfolds action, and then action unfolds achievement. This is a natural process that's going on all the time.
A hundred thousand times in every moment, this is happening, as I said, consciously and unconsciously. When the way is clear, it moves forward and we feel a sense of fulfilment all the way through the process, not just at the achievement end of the process, but actually all the way through. But of course, sometimes we hit obstacles and blocks. In fact, inevitably we hit creative resistance, because there is a gap between where we are and where we want to be, and resistance resides within that gap.
Again, we have talked a little bit about resistance already on the podcast. I've already offered you one way of finding flow through resistance, and we'll look at many more as time goes on.
That's it really in terms of conscious creation, in terms of defining it. What I want to say is that creative resistance can be extremely painful and can take a lot of our creative attention.
If we're blocked, if we're in resistance, we're wavering, we're faltering, we're doubting, we're denying that we even want the thing that we actually do want, and it can lead us into despair. It definitely can make us feel low and lacking in energy, disillusioned, disappointed. All of these things are signs that creative resistance is in place.
I think it's also important to say that we live in a conventional, not a creative world. We're not taught how to connect with our own creative capacity, our own creative process, our own creative flow, because it's very difficult to teach this. We need to draw on multidisciplinary. We need to draw on psychology and philosophy, and all sorts of things that our learning and apparatus has divided up into separate things.
But creativity is the sum of all its parts. Everything is flowing in this moment, and it's that reconnection with where you are right now in this moment and that ability to give it attention, to turn your attention away from the outer world and all the things it tells you to give your attention to, all the things that are screaming now for your attention, the amount of bombardment that we are receiving in terms of people looking for our attention. It becomes more and more difficult to turn our attention inwards, but it also becomes more and more necessary.
As we are seeing the rise in noise and attention grabbers, we're also seeing a rise and understanding of its opposite and how, if we want to create the things that we truly want to create, we need to turn our attention inwards.
So, in the next in this series of podcasts, I'm going to be looking at creative purpose and where that connects with creative process. Also, always the presence in the moment, that turning up for where you actually are and giving your inner world, your inner life, attention, because that's what marks out a creative or creativist approach to life. It's that ability to take the attention away from the outer world and turn it inwards, and to do that, we need practices.
It's not as simple as just deciding to do that with our conscious mind, because what we're actually doing is tapping into subconscious and the unconscious, and you cannot do that with conscious mind.
Einstein has a very good quote about that, ” you can't solve a problem from the level of the mind that creates the problem.” You have to go to a deeper, larger, more expansive level of mind.
So, we'll look at all of that, how the practices, creative rest and play practices, that we bring in enable us to bring the presence of mind that encompasses all our layers, and in so doing, how that creative attention gives rise to proper action, right action, as the Buddhists call it, rather than bouncing off mindlessly and into the next thing.
I will say the bouncing off mindlessly into the next thing is better than sitting around ruminating. Creativity is always about action, and the smallest step in the direction that we want to go. Sometimes we don't know what we're doing. Sometimes we're being moved to do things. So, action is rarely a mistake because at worst it'll be action in the wrong direction, and we will realize that and learn from it and reset our course. But often, if something is chosen for us and brought to us and we move through it, it takes us where we're going in ways that our conscious mind would never have been able to think about.
So, one of the defining aspects of being in creative mode, and our next episode will talk about mind modes and mindsets. One of the defining aspects of being in creative mode is that we allow ourselves to be carried. We give ourselves over to that process. We understand that life is much bigger than our conscious human mind.
The conscious human mind is a wondrous thing. It truly is. It's the most sophisticated, complex, influential and impactful creation on this planet. But it's only one of them, and it isn't even the sum of the human being, never mind the sum of the whole world.
The unconscious is where we can reside once we have a process that allows us to reside there safely, and that's what this podcast is all about.
So, that's it. That is the summary of what is conscious creation. It's that simple. It's not easy always, but it is that simple and we can keep coming back to it. We can keep returning to it. Once we understand what we're doing, we absolutely will not be in creative mode at all times. 100%. That never happens. The act of conscious creation is the gap between being in it and out of it.
The movement towards it. That's where we live. So, absolutely 100 percent, expect to fall away because you will, because that's part of the process, and that's not an occasion for blame, or shame, or guilt, or in any way turning on yourself and giving yourself a hard time.
The opposite. When we understand what's going on, we understand how the process deepens our compassion for ourselves, our understanding of ourselves. Understanding and compassion are completely connected, and creative compassion is a really important part of the process. Understanding that we are flawed, that if we were 100 percent wonderful conscious creators, we would be a supernatural being, not a human being. That's not how human life operates. We are born, we suffer, we die, and in between we replicate that process all the time. That is what it is to be a human being.
When we move into creative mode, all of that is just fine. We stop seeing that as a problem. We stop pretending that we are places where we are not. We are perfectly happy to be flawed and not to get things right when we're in creative mode, because we're just in this moment doing what this moment requires of us, and there's such super safety in that way of living.
So, while conscious creation is, as I said, a simple process, it is never an easy process.
It brings us right into the heart of life and all its complexity, and all its richness, and all its layers, and all its glories, and that's why I commend it to you, that's why I try to live that way myself.
I hope this has been a useful in terms of explaining what my interpretation, my way of approaching conscious creation is, so that you are clear.
I'd love to hear from you, as always, about your own thoughts on conscious creativity.
Next, I'm going to look at the mind modes, different mind modes that our brain gets us into. Then also, I want to look in this series at the law of attraction, which is something that turns up around conscious creation all the time, and how conscious creation actually differs from the law of attraction.
I also want to look more closely at creative a purpose and how it feeds into what it is that we are creating and what we want. Where does desire cut in, where do they intersect, desire and purpose. And as I said, we'll be looking more closely at practices that help us to cultivate creative presence.
So, until next time, have a great week and don't forget to go creative. Bye, bye.