VIII. Creation as an Event in Consciousness
Murielle Mobengo: There’s something else I’m beginning to wonder.
We’ve been speaking as though there were a creator here, an idea there, and then a process through which the creator brings the idea into existence.
But perhaps that’s already misleading.
If I return to Advaita, consciousness isn’t ultimately divided into separate consciousnesses. So perhaps what I call my creative experience is simply the place from which I experience something that is happening within consciousness.
In that case, the question How do I create? may already contain a false assumption.
Perhaps I am not creating in the way I think I am.
Loïc Yengo: I think I see what you’re saying.
Let me try another way of thinking about it.
Imagine that creation is an event.
Something happens — an event in consciousness, perhaps — and different people experience that event from different positions.
You could think of it almost as an impact that produces a wave.
The wave travels.
Different people may encounter it at different moments, from different places, and through different forms. One person may encounter it scientifically. Someone else may encounter it poetically. Someone else may encounter it through music.
They aren’t necessarily creating the event itself.
They may be perceiving the propagation of the event.
Murielle: That’s very interesting.
Because then creativity wouldn’t necessarily belong to the individual.
What belongs to the individual might be the particular way the event is perceived — and perhaps the form through which it becomes visible.
Loïc: Yes.
And this actually helps me with the contradiction I was struggling with earlier.
I said that I like the Platonic idea that things somehow already exist and that we discover them. But I also have this strong intuition that we genuinely create things.
Maybe both can be true.
Perhaps there is an event that doesn’t originate with the individual, but the way that event manifests through the individual is genuinely creative.
So the recognition and the creation aren’t necessarily opposites.
Murielle: Exactly.
The form isn’t predetermined.
A poet and a mathematician might encounter — I’m going to use the word carefully — the same movement in consciousness, but they won’t produce the same thing.
The poet may produce a poem. The mathematician may produce an equation. A painter may produce an image.
So perhaps what we call creation happens partly in the encounter between whatever is being perceived and the particular instrument through which it passes.
Loïc: Which would also explain why developing the instrument matters.
Murielle: Ah!
Yes.
Because suddenly we’re back to training.
Loïc: Exactly.
If you are the instrument through which something is perceived and materialized, then improving your capacity to perceive isn’t incidental to creativity.
It changes what you’re capable of receiving — or recognizing — and perhaps what you’re capable of doing with it.
Murielle: Which means we’ve come back to the distinction between sensitivity and perception.
Loïc: Yes.
Murielle: That’s fascinating.
Because we’ve spent all this time moving away from the curriculum, and we’ve just arrived back at it from the other side.
The curriculum isn’t necessarily teaching you what to create.
It may be training the instrument through which creation becomes possible.
Loïc: And actually, something has just happened here that resembles what we’re trying to describe.
I came into this conversation with two ideas that I couldn’t quite reconcile.
One was that things somehow exist before we create them — that we discover or recognize them.
The other was that I strongly believe we genuinely create.
And through what you’ve just said, I can now see a way in which those two ideas don’t have to contradict each other.
Murielle: Yes!
Loïc: I didn’t have that before.
Murielle: Neither did I.
And that’s creation.
[Laughter.]
Loïc: Maybe.
Murielle: No, but seriously — something exists now that didn’t exist for either of us at the beginning of the conversation.
Neither one of us arrived carrying the conclusion.
It emerged through the relation between the two of us.
Loïc: Yes.
And that’s important.
Because if that’s true, then the individual isn’t necessarily the complete unit of creation either.
Maybe relation itself can be generative.
Murielle: Which takes us straight back to peer culture.
Loïc: It does.
Murielle: My God. We’ve made a circle.
[Laughter.]
Murielle: But we have to be careful.
We’ve just constructed a very seductive model.
Creation as an event in consciousness, individuals perceiving it differently, relation generating forms — it’s beautiful.
But how would we know whether any of this is true?
Loïc: Exactly.
And now I’m going to become a scientist again.
[Laughter.]
Because this is where I would ask: what can we observe?
Maybe we can’t prove the metaphysical model. But perhaps we can investigate the creative experience itself.
Do people experience recognition?
Do they experience surprise?
Do ideas emerge through dialogue that neither person possessed beforehand?
Can particular practices change what people are able to perceive?
Those are questions we might actually be able to explore.
Murielle: So rather than beginning by trying to prove what creativity is, our hypothetical discipline could begin by observing what happens when people create.
Loïc: Yes.
And then perhaps you build vocabulary from there.
Murielle: Which is exactly how you described science at the beginning of the conversation.
Loïc: Observe and describe.
Murielle: Oh, that’s annoying.
[Laughter.]
We’ve come back to the beginning again.
Leave a Reply