The psychology

of

Creativity

an introduction to metapsychology

with

Denise Marts

Creativity is not a mysterious, elusive process unique to artists or "creative" individuals.  It is the most basic psychological function there is.  Everyone is doing it every hour, every minute and every second of every day.  The creative mind never rests.  It creates constantly.  Dreams are an aspect of creativity at work while we sleep.  Thus creativity is not optional.  The only choice we have is to do it consciously or unconsciously.  Creativity is not an isolated, ephemeral process but a unified, concrete process of  mind and matter wherein imagination, the image-making process of the mind, impresses itself upon energy causing it to coalesce into patterns that literally become physical reality.  This process is called metacognition.  Imagination is one aspect of metacognition, intuition is the other.

Whereas imagination literally shapes reality, intuition is a supra-rational process that directly apprehends the gestalt, or big picture, of reality quite apart from sensory perception and the interpretive processes of the "logical" mind. 







 

That is why ESP, a common name for intuition, is called "extra-sensory" perception and not merely "sensory" perception.  Intuition has nothing at all to do with the senses.  The belief that it does is a misunderstanding of intuition and the cause of a fundamental confusion in New Age thought that erroneously  associates intuition with sensory processes and mistakenly ascribes its origins to the body.  This viewpoint is deeply flawed by an unquestioned grounding in scientific reductionism that wrongly reduces the operations of consciousness to a by-product of biochemistry.  Intuition is an ultimate high speed mental process, a "direct knowing" that originates in  subtle energy fields far beyond the central nervous system of the body.  Intuition may or may not register as feelings or sensations in the body but intuition itself is not a feeling nor does it originate in the body.  Mind always creates and effects matter, including the body, and not the other way around.  The depth of this confusion is so profound and the degree of error so vast that the belief that consciousness arises from matter is literally the modern day equivalent of the medieval belief in an earth centered cosmos.

In the creative process imagination and intuition work hand-in-hand.  Imagination is the "what" and intution is the "how".  Imagination decides "what" to create and intuition, through an innate grasp of the big picture, determines how best to carry it out given the prevailing currents of the larger collective reality.

 

Denise Marts is an artist and a pioneer in the emerging discipline of metapsychology and related art form of metasymbolism.