Exercising your creativity

Ask yourself these questions BEFORE you do the exercise below. Take the questions seriously and really imagine that you need these answers about yourself regarding your creativity.

How creative am I? If I had had the “right breaks” and “right background” and “right upbringing”, could I be a genius in Hollywood with so much talent that I could single-handedly be a combination of director, fashion designer, writer, stunt director, camera operator and film editor all rolled into one personality that far exceeds the combined talents of Spielberg, Hitchcock and Lucas?

How quickly can I create? If I were asked to be that above envisioned genius and was given a ten million dollar budget and 250-person film crew, how long would it take me to create a five minute film from scratch?

How finely can I create? When making this film, how much would I rely on the helpers to fill in the details of my more abstract plans?

How much does my education and personal life history limit my creativity? Right now, do I have enough training and experience to create anything with much “depth” or “maturity”?

What is my personal sense of my own creative power? When faced with a challenging situation that contains much uncertainty and requires a lot of “filling in of the blanks”, what is my spontaneous, emotional summation of my ability to contend?

The creativity exercise: The following is a powerful tool in at least two ways. It can be used in daily life almost irrespective of the challenge or needs of the moment, and, it demonstrates to you your power of creativity with an undeniable clarity. The instructions that follow actually teach you a technique for harnessing your creativity, and this is as important as your creativity itself.

Be prepared to enter a state of consciousness that is typically called “day dreaming”. This means that you feel reasonably safe and comfortable about closing your eyes for five minutes. If you have not had enough sleep lately, then this technique may simply set you up for actually going to sleep, so this exercise needs you to be fairly alert-not drowsy. Also, though not strictly necessary, it would be good not to try this technique when having a strong emotion. If you’re angry or happy, let the emotion settle down first.

Step One: Close your eyes and have the desire to see a person riding a bicycle on a STREET THAT YOU KNOW WELL. This means that you wait a few seconds with this intent and just “see what happens”. You may get a mental image or other mental experience that convinces you that you have properly followed this first step. If you do not, then having thoughts about what the street looks like should be introduced into the mind to “kick it off in the right direction”. If at anytime, no matter how fleeting, you feel like you have “seen a person riding a bike”, then you are prepared to go to Step Two.

Step Two: Repeat Step One and have the additional intent to “follow” the bicyclist down the street. The experience that comes from this may be a vivid and continuous “dream movie” that shows the person riding the bike past familiar buildings, trees, etc., or it may be a series of quick snapshots of the bicyclist at various points along the way. Success with Step Two would be having more than one image in your mind. Hopefully, you’ll get a sense of motion of the bicyclist occurring in one or more moments during Step Two. The major use of your “will” is to simply and EASILY bring your mind, as often as necessary without feeling strained, back to the intent of having a picture or sense of a bicyclist traveling along a familiar street. Be patient with your mind when it thinks other thoughts or even produces other pictures in your mind. You do not have to fight your mind’s other productivity. All you have to do is reintroduce the “subject at hand” to the mind when it is found to have wandered off. Do not worry about chronological order. You may find yourself repeatedly starting back at the beginning of Step Two and then suddenly seeing the bicyclist “way down the street”. That’s okay. Do this until you feel you’ve seen the bicyclist travel at least a few blocks-even if it has been “all mixed up”.

Step Three: Intend for the bicyclist to move off the familiar street onto a wholly unknown side street or path through a park. Have a fainter intent to note, as the bicyclist travels, the other objects of the scene being traveled through such as trees, other people, clothing, animals, water, wind, grass, sounds, etc. Do this step until you have had an experience of the bicyclist traveling in an environment that is unfamiliar to you and that you have noted other objects in the scenes besides the bicyclist. This must again be a movie of sorts or several snapshots at least.

Step Four: Intend for the bicyclist to stop somewhere and talk to your best friend. See what happens. See what words they say, the looks on their faces and the EMOTION between them. As they are talking intend to see them from various angles-from behind your friend, behind the bicyclist, both from the side, a bird’s eye view, from below eye level. Note body posture. This step is successful if you achieve a few pictures and have a good “hunk” of conversation between the two.

In the future, whenever you have a decision to make or wish to understand a situation more deeply or are challenged with an emotional event that you feel you need to assimilate more fully or have to “come up with something by tomorrow”, then form a question or statement (a concept) in your mind that “embodies the situation you are in” and treat this concept as if it were the bicyclist above. Have the concept easily in mind, and be prepared to bring the mind back to it when wandering occurs. Do this repeatedly within the context of the moment (the familiar part), and then think about the past and the future of this concept. As long as your mind “stays on topic” that’s okay, but easily reintroduce the concept whenever you naturally note that wandering has occurred. Finally begin to “play with it” and introduce other elements to the concept BY PUTTING YOUR ATTENTION ON THE VARIOUS SIDE THOUGHTS that come up during the exercise. This “favoring other concepts” will lead you to many other thoughts about the initial concept. Do this until you feel you have explored the situation fully.

This amazing, powerful, and quickly effective technique can be relied upon to instantly transform how you see almost any situation. Solutions and understandings are merely a “thought away” from you. Practice this daily and you will quickly reap great rewards. The more you practice, the better you will get at this.

Ask yourself,

Why am I, I the Shadowking, so certain that I created the “dreams” when I had absolutely no “pre-dream” machinations within my awareness? Since I did not take any time whatsoever to manufacture a certain scene with its bicyclist, clothing, bike design, pathway materials, and other objects, why is it that I “own” this dream?

WHO DID create this dream’s huge number of details? How is this automatic process like breathing or my heart beating?

In terms of raw creativity, how powerful and fertile must my mind be to have done this virtually instantaneously and so completely? What can I do to really own my potential in this regard?

How would my life be different if I contemplated in this manner just one of my problems per day? How different could life be for me?

How does my normal use of my mind differ from this technique in terms of my moment-by-moment decision making processes? How much of my life is “considered?”

Was I ever the bicyclist in this dream? How was this identification possible when I was clearly manufacturing the entire dream-not just the bicyclist?

How does identification with a “part” eliminate or largely dampen my feelings of being intimate with the whole? How do I do this in daily life with my identifying with “me not you”, “us not them”, “then not now”, “there not here”, “right not wrong” etc.?

What would I think next if I decided to think about it?

What would happen if I told my mind to “surprise me”?

Can I use my heart like I have just learned to use my mind?