node prototype.js "
 The Structure of the Creative Process 
 The creative process has a structure different from that of reacting or responding to circumstances, one that resolves rather than oscillates. Just as reacting or responding to circumstances can be an orientation, so creating can be an orientation. People in the reactive-responsive orientation sometimes create, and people in the creative orientation sometimes react or respond to circumstances. What determines your orientation is where you spend most of your time. For many people, much of their life is organized around the circumstances in their lives. For others, their lives are organized around creating what they want to create. There is a dramatic difference between the two orientations. In the first, you are always subject to the whims of circumstances. In the other, you are the predominant creative force in your own life, and circumstances are one of the forces you use in the creative process. The shift from the reactive-responsive orientation to the orientation of the creative is both simple and complex. It is easy to live in the realm of the creative, but it is so unusual that many people find it hard to leave their past learnings behind. The shift can be aided by experiences of the creative process, but it is not a gradual manifestation. When you are in the reactive-responsive orientation, it seems difficult to make this shift, but when you are in the orientation of the creative, it is clear and obvious.\"




Then one day, in the middle of composing some music, I suddenly understood what the priest was talking about. I was creating this music because I loved it enough to see it exist. And I could imagine God—the Creator—creating the world for no other reason than love. Had my priest friend better understood the creative process, he could have easily shared with me the profundity of his point of view. Here I was, a composer studying at a conservatory, already engaged in the creative process. If he had asked me this simple question, \“Why do you compose?\” I could have made his point. My priest friend had been taught to enact \“proper\” responses to life. For him the proper response was his religious doctrine of faith, learned from scholarship rather than direct experience. I do not fault him in the least. Creating was neither in his experience nor in his orientation. He was doing the best he could within his orientation. And his words stayed with me until I could better understand them. For this I am truly grateful. I share this story with you not as an inducement to believe in any particular religious or spiritual doctrine, but as a fascinating example of an inability to explain the orientation of the creative from the viewpoint of the reactive-responsive. In fact, people from divergent religious, philosophical, spiritual, and political beliefs have been masters of the creative process. From atheists to Born-Again Christians. From Jews to Muslims. From Buddhists to Hindus. From capitalists to communists. From the political left to the political right. Creating is not the property of any special creed, nationality, race, religion, political leaning, or any other definition people give themselves. If, like most of us, you have been raised in the reactive-responsive orientation, you probably have had little experience in doing what you do out of love of the thing being done. Most people do not spend their lives doing what they love. To them, doing what they love is a luxury, not a usual way of life. And often they confuse distraction with love.


Hobbies, entertainment, and vacations can be such distractions. Yes, you can love your hobby, but is your hobby your life’s work or just a respite from what you do not like? For too many, life is filled with unpleasant necessities that do not feed the human spirit, even though they may feed the human body. Many people develop degrees of cynicism because there is nothing they love. This does not mean they have no capacity for love. Rather, they have not had the experience of creating. The caring they might have had was discouraged. They have developed a life policy of avoiding being a \“sucker.\” They do not trust people who deeply care about life in ways that are unimaginable in their experience. They cannot invest their life spirit in anything, because nothing seems that important. They can have a \“lacklust\” for life. Their lives go on, as in Robert Frost’s poem, The Death of the Hired Man, \“And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope / So now and never any different.\” If you advised such a person to find something to love, he or she would not be able to take your advice. It is only when you begin to create for the sake of the creation itself that you can begin to understand the orientation of the creative. There are no tricks, no right responses, no ulterior motives. Just the love of the thing. Obligation In the orientation of the creative you have no obligation to create what you love enough to create. You do not need the creations you create. Artists truly understand this point, because there is no real need for art. Actually, you need very little. With enough food, water, and warmth you can live for years. In the reactive-responsive orientation, however, circumstances seem to demand actions. You may have characterized your desire to fulfill these demands as needs.



People often translate what they want into what they think they need. Partly this translation is designed to justify what they want. If they can make their desires seem like needs, they believe they have \“no choice\” except to work to fulfill them. When needs become your nomenclature, you can never be sure which desires are authentic and which are not. If you make it seem as if you \“need\” what you want, how could you know what you love enough to bring into existence? This kind of thought process is, after all, a form of self-manipulation. To the reactive-responsive person it is not acceptable to spend your life on what you love, because what you love is not tied to the circumstances. Reactive-responsive people suspect that doing what they want would be selfish. This suspicion comes from a lack of self-knowledge. They may also believe that they do what they do in order to control their selfish interests. They often manufacture visions of misbehavior from doing what they want. They create the illusion of an inner conflict between blatant and destructive self-indulgence and sublimation of desire for the sake of others. When they make these assumptions, they can only perpetuate the myth that nothing they do is by free choice, but fulfills the \“need\” to reconcile competing opposites. Mother Theresa does not do what she does because she needs to do it. She does what she does out of the kind of love I have been describing. If she were merely trying to bring relief to the suffering people she serves, she would become overwhelmed. She understands the depth of the capacity of human beings toward both good and evil. Because she understands this, she is able to make a conscious choice for good. Not out of a premise of obligation, but out of love for good. One of the most important lessons I have learned in the past fifteen years of teaching the creative process concerns the true nature of people. When people are united with their real power—the power to create what they want to create—they always choose what is highest in humanity. 

They choose good health, exceptional relationships, and love, and relevant life purpose, and peace, and challenges worthy of the human spirit. People, I have come to discover, are profoundly good. But, you might well think, what about our destructive tendencies? What about all the examples of wars, inhumanity, and needless cruelty? Those who spend their lives destructively are not in touch with their power to create. Instead, the manifestation of evil throughout history has come in reaction to the inability, not the ability, to create. Power-wielding, manipulation, terrorism, militarism, and lust for power do not come from having power, but from not having power, If you thought you could not create what you wanted to create, it might seem to you that what you want is inconsequential. After all, if you can’t have it anyway, why consider what you want? In the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® courses, participants learn the important skill of conceiving of what they want. At first they may not know what they want, but when they begin to consider the question, they have a basis for new experiences. Perhaps they cannot name what they really want at first. Experimenting with what they choose brings what they truly want into sharper focus. Most often, they are able to create the results they want by learning how the creative process works. Then they can better conceive of future results they want to create. After the direct experience of creating what they have chosen, these people know that what they want is not arbitrary. It is one of the most important factors in their lives as creators. The CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course has occasionally been conducted experimentally in high schools. Students are asked to list what they want. Usually they want results, such as jobs after school, boyfriends or girlfriends, guitars, motorcycles, cars, and even better grades and better relationships with their parents and teachers. Before they had taken this course, these students had been taught by parents and teachers that they cannot create what they want. They have had ample direct experiences of their inability to create. If you come into their classroom and try to convince them that they can create what they want in life, they’re more than eager to prove how wrong you are. No amount of propaganda would change their attitudes or their perception. Their perception is well-founded. If they have not had the experience of creating what they really want, why should they believe they can do this? In addition, they do not see many adults in their lives creating what they want. Often these are the same adults who are ready to give a pep talk at the drop of a moan. By the end of the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course, these students know they have the ability to create because they have done it. There is absolutely no hype given to them. They are more than capable of making their own conclusions: \“Did you create the job?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the relationship?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the car?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the motorcycle?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create a good relationship with your parents?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did your grades go up?\” \“Yes.\” After this kind of experience, these students have made two important discoveries: that they can create what they choose and that what they want is not inconsequential. If, at first, they want goals that are not ranked as among the highest in the history of the human race, so what? What they create is important to them—they love the creation enough to bring it into being. It is one thing to speculate about what someone else should want; it is quite another to bring into existence what you actually do want. The experience of creating has changed these students’ lives. If the specific result created was \“insignificant\” by the 
world’s standards, what was significant is the reality and power of the creative process. No longer do these young people have to spend their life in a compromise because they know no better. In fact, their real altruism is now more able to be expressed. Not by a sense of obligation to do good in the world, but out of an authentic desire—simply the love of the thing. Creation Expressing Itself There was a time when automobiles, telephones, television sets, solar reflectors, and space shuttles did not exist and were not even envisioned. There was a time when rock music, atonal music, or even classical music did not exist and were not even thought of. Two hundred years ago the fields of sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, paleontology, and nuclear physics did not exist. Today they do. During this last decade a technological revolution has changed the world in ways that were unimaginable twenty years ago. When composers create, they begin with a blank sheet of music manuscript paper. When artists paint, they begin with an empty canvas. It is sometimes difficult for us to think that something new can actually be created, something that did not exist before. I often hear people assert, \“There is really nothing new\” or \“Everything that is now created has been done before.\” I usually ask them if anything like Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, Op. 133, existed before he wrote it. Certainly the string quartet for whom Beethoven composed the fugue had never seen anything like it. In fact, they said that it was unplayable and impossible to listen to, with all of its \“random dissonances\” and extreme voice-crossings. So Beethoven withdrew the piece and, in place of it, provided the musicians with a tamer work. When the musicians first saw the Grosse Fugue, they thought old Beethoven had lost his stability, but Beethoven viewed his composition from a different perspective. 

\"I write this music for a future time,\” he said. 

Today, most string quartets include the Grosse Fugue in their standard repertoire. The arts and sciences are filled with example after example of new creations, works that never existed before they were created. However, many people still prefer to think there is really nothing new under the sun. Writer D. H. Lawrence believed this until, at the age of forty, he discovered how wrong he had been. I remember I used to assert, perhaps I even wrote it: Everything that can possibly be painted has been painted, every brushstroke that can possibly be laid on canvas has been laid on. The visual arts are at a dead end. Then suddenly, at the age of forty, I begin painting myself and am fascinated. By having a blank canvas, I discovered I could make a picture myself. That is the point, to make a picture on a blank canvas. And I was forty before I had the real courage to try. Then it became an orgy, making pictures. The discovery D. H. Lawrence describes is common in the orientation of the creative. What may have seemed dead suddenly has life. The Secret of the Creative Process A common mistake people make when first entering the orientation of the creative is to seek to \“find out\” what they want as if it were a deeply hidden treasure to be discovered and revealed. They are looking in the wrong direction. Creating what you want is not a revelatory process, nor is what you want something to be discovered. If not by revelation or discovery, then how do you derive the what in the question What do I want? The answer to this question is known, either rationally or intuitively, by those who are actively involved in creating.



made it up\” leave the interviewer dissatisfied, they make up a story of how they \“did it.\” But the fact is that Albert Einstein made up the theory of relativity, Marie Curie made up the theory of radiation, Thomas Edison made up the light bulb, Mary Cassatt made up the painting The Bath, Anton Webern made up the Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Emily Dickinson made up the poem \“Because I Could Not Stop for Death,\” Ilya Prigogine made up the theory of dissipative structures, Joni Mitchell made up the song \“Court and Spark,\” Harriet Tubman made up the \“underground railway,\” and the founders of the nation made up the United States of America. Even though it is common to focus only on the story of how a creation came to pass, it is important to realize that, no matter what these stories may be, the creator conceives of the creation at the moment of making things up. Composer Arnold Schoenberg was asked if he ever heard his music perfectly performed. He replied, \“Yes, when I first conceived it.\” As we view Hollywood’s movie version of how the great creators \“made up\” their creations, we may receive a false impression. In the film versions there is drama. There are high strings, tremolo, súl ponticello, in the background music. All the signs point to a mystery taking place. The protagonist, whether a young Tom Edison, as played by a young Mickey Rooney, or old Thomas Edison, played by a middle-aged Spencer Tracy, is facing an inner struggle. The tension mounts. The camera moves to close-up as the stationary figure thinks and thinks. Eureka! Inspiration strikes. Suddenly all is action. The figure is in motion. The music is animated. The audience has been privileged to witness the awe-inspiring moment as the dramatic tension reaches its climax. Oh, if life were only like the movies! Especially black-and-white movies from the forties. In real life, making it up is often less than dramatic. Many of the most inspired inventions were conceived without fanfare, drama, or inspiration (let alone background music). Drama is the exception, not the rule.


Even the scriptwriters of Thomas Edison’s film bios were working on their script between bites of corned beef sandwiches and sips of Coca-Cola. They were fabricating a fantasy world of which they were not a part. The creative process can look many different ways. Some of your best creations may come from the most normal experiences, and some of your worst may be the product of what seemed to be \“divine inspiration.\” There seems to be no relationship between the final worth of a result and the experiences the creator has while in the process of creating. Focus on the Result In the creative orientation the most powerful question you can ask yourself is, \“What do I want?\” At any time and in any situation—regardless of the circumstances—you can always ask and answer that question. The question, \“What do I want?\” is really a question about results. Perhaps a more precise way of asking that question is, \“What result do I want to create?\” The question, \“How do I get what I want?\” is a question about process, not result. As an initial question, it is quite limiting. If you ask the question, \“How do I get what I want?\” before you ask, \“What result do I want to create?\” you are limited to results that are directly related to what you already know how to do or can conceive of doing. In 1878, when Thomas Edison decided to create the electric light, it was already well known that electricity could produce light. The task before Edison was to find a material that would not bum out and instantly consume itself. He began by reading everything that had been written on the subject, and it is reported that he filled two hundred notebooks with jottings and diagrams. All the scientists before him had followed a certain process: They looked for substances that would reduce resistance to the electric current, but they had found none that would produce an electric light. Instead of following the same process and limiting himself to producing results he 
already knew about, Edison tried the opposite: He looked for substances that would increase resistance to the electric current. After testing countless resistant materials, he settled on a carbonized element and placed it in a vacuum bulb, thereby creating the familiar incandescent light bulb. By keeping his focus on the result he wanted to create—an electric light—Edison was able to focus the process toward a successful result. Frank Lloyd Wright was the creator of \“organic architecture.\” In designing a house, Wright first conceived of the result he wanted to create: for him, it was a sense of interior space for living. In his view a house was not simply a set of boxes within boxes, with rooms sealed off and connected to other rooms only by doors in partitions and dark halls, but primarily an entire space in which to live. With his focus on living space as the result he wanted, Wright was open to new possibilities in design, ones that had never occurred to most of his fellow architects, who were still designing houses by rearranging sets of boxes, the traditional process of architecture. In Wright’s house, for the first time, the kitchen became an attractive feature; living and dining area became unified; floor spaces became living spaces; terraces, balconies, and windows allowed the outside and inside of the house to flow into each other so that the outside was brought in and the inside was brought out. His floor-to-ceiling windows invited daylight to flood the interior, and low-pitched roofs with wide overhangs created a sense of spaciousness and organic interaction with nature. As Wright stayed focused on the results he wanted to create, the \“how\” of obtaining those results developed organically. He did not limit his concept or his process to standard procedures. Because he knew the result he wanted, he could invent processes that were uncommon and different from those of his contemporaries.


If you ask the \“how\” question before the \“what\” question, all you can ever hope to create are variations of what you already have. Artists have a clear sense of this need to focus on the result they want. Speaking to young writers, Gertrude Stein once said, \“You have to know what you want to get. But when you know that, let it take you. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.\” When the process comes first, the process itself will limit the actions you will be able to take and thereby limit the possibilities of what you can create. As the artist Chuck Close has said, \“You can give the same recipe to ten cooks, and some make it come alive, and some make a flat souffle. A system doesn’t guarantee anything.\” Pablo Picasso, as a mature artist speaking to young painters, encouraged them to conceive of new paintings rather than ones that followed the processes of the past. With the exception of some painters who are opening new horizons to painting, the youth of today do not know anymore where to go. Instead of taking up our researches in order to react sharply against us, they apply themselves to reanimating the past. Yet the world is open before us, everything is still to be done, and not to be done over again. Why hang on hopelessly to everything that has fulfilled its promise? There are kilometers of paintings in the manner of; but it is rare to see a young man working in his own way. Is there some notion abroad that man must repeat himself? To repeat is to go against the laws of the spirit, its forward motion. The Premature Process Premature focus on the process will limit and inhibit your effectiveness.


Our educational system does not focus on the results you as a student want in your life. Instead it promotes the notion that what you should learn is process. You should learn how to do mathematics and construct grammatical sentences. You should learn how to write research papers and do laboratory experiments in biology. You should learn how to draw, to speak in public, to read musical notation, perhaps even to write a poem or two. You should learn how to run a computer and a word processor, and you should learn some crafts skills in shop courses or some household skills in home economics courses. The assumption is that as you become fluent in these processes, the results you want in your life will take care of themselves. Consequently few educators ask students the question, \“What do you want in your life?\” True, for their first ten or twelve years, children are asked, \“What do you want to be when you grow up?\” But the children’s answers are usually discounted unless they happen to follow in the footsteps of one of the parents. Similarly, people often ask adolescents, \“What do you want to do when you get out of school?\” Usually, even though that question is asked, the young people have had no educational experience of the creative process. From their vantage point, the game of life appears to involve choosing from among uninteresting alternatives proposed by adults. In the educational system, aptitude is often substituted for vision. For many people, their doing well on certain aptitude tests in secondary school was a great tragedy, because traditional guidance counseling helps students find out what they might be good at and helps them design careers around their aptitude. Many people have mindlessly followed advice coming out of that mentality and become physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, nurses, and chemists, only to discover to their dismay, twenty or thirty years later, that they never really cared about what may now be the only field or profession

they know. A major part of their life was spent developing what they happened to have an aptitude for at age fifteen. I know several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who are bored being symphony musicians, yet their whole life revolves around the investment they have in staying where they are. One very great musician said to me, \“I don’t like playing in the symphony, but it’s all I know how to do.\” Organically Formed Processes In the creative orientation, when you answer the question \“What do I want to create?\” it is not clear whether what you want is possible. Yet throughout the history of the world many results have been created that seemed impossible at the time they were conceived. Before the creation of anesthesia, physicians were convinced that painless surgery was impossible. In 1839 Dr. Alfred Velpeau said, \“The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.\” Before the creation of the airplane, many scientists were convinced that flight was impossible. Simon Newcomb, a well-known astronomer, was convinced that he had logically proven this impossibility. He wrote, \“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.\” Ironically, Newcomb made this statement in 1903—the year the Wright brothers made their first flights at Kitty Hawk. Many scientists were convinced that the atom could not be split or an atomic bomb created. In speaking to President 
more \“right\” brain, becoming more affluent, etc., etc., etc., etc. This is a wonderful age we live in. So much is available. But often the criteria people use to determine which direction they should take are dictated by notions about process rather than concepts about results. In a conversation I had with a friend recently, she talked about \“the sacredness of process,\” and \“transcendental appreciation of one’s process.\” I could almost hear a choir of angels softly singing as she rhapsodized. This is such a foreign notion to a creator. When you create, process is functional. There is no dogma to adopt, no romance to maintain, no philosophy to uphold. Process is invented and designed to serve the result you desire. This is its only purpose. It is best to allow processes to form organically from within the vision of the result. It is unwise to limit the way a result can happen by any given process. At the time you conceive the result you want, the actual way you will bring it about is always unknown to you, even if you have a hunch about it."
 2000  npm i gixstr --save
 2001  cat node_modules/gixstr/gixstr.js 
 2002  node prototype.js "
 The Structure of the Creative Process 
 The creative process has a structure different from that of reacting or responding to circumstances, one that resolves rather than oscillates. Just as reacting or responding to circumstances can be an orientation, so creating can be an orientation. People in the reactive-responsive orientation sometimes create, and people in the creative orientation sometimes react or respond to circumstances. What determines your orientation is where you spend most of your time. For many people, much of their life is organized around the circumstances in their lives. For others, their lives are organized around creating what they want to create. There is a dramatic difference between the two orientations. In the first, you are always subject to the whims of circumstances. In the other, you are the predominant creative force in your own life, and circumstances are one of the forces you use in the creative process. The shift from the reactive-responsive orientation to the orientation of the creative is both simple and complex. It is easy to live in the realm of the creative, but it is so unusual that many people find it hard to leave their past learnings behind. The shift can be aided by experiences of the creative process, but it is not a gradual manifestation. When you are in the reactive-responsive orientation, it seems difficult to make this shift, but when you are in the orientation of the creative, it is clear and obvious.\"




Then one day, in the middle of composing some music, I suddenly understood what the priest was talking about. I was creating this music because I loved it enough to see it exist. And I could imagine God—the Creator—creating the world for no other reason than love. Had my priest friend better understood the creative process, he could have easily shared with me the profundity of his point of view. Here I was, a composer studying at a conservatory, already engaged in the creative process. If he had asked me this simple question, \“Why do you compose?\” I could have made his point. My priest friend had been taught to enact \“proper\” responses to life. For him the proper response was his religious doctrine of faith, learned from scholarship rather than direct experience. I do not fault him in the least. Creating was neither in his experience nor in his orientation. He was doing the best he could within his orientation. And his words stayed with me until I could better understand them. For this I am truly grateful. I share this story with you not as an inducement to believe in any particular religious or spiritual doctrine, but as a fascinating example of an inability to explain the orientation of the creative from the viewpoint of the reactive-responsive. In fact, people from divergent religious, philosophical, spiritual, and political beliefs have been masters of the creative process. From atheists to Born-Again Christians. From Jews to Muslims. From Buddhists to Hindus. From capitalists to communists. From the political left to the political right. Creating is not the property of any special creed, nationality, race, religion, political leaning, or any other definition people give themselves. If, like most of us, you have been raised in the reactive-responsive orientation, you probably have had little experience in doing what you do out of love of the thing being done. Most people do not spend their lives doing what they love. To them, doing what they love is a luxury, not a usual way of life. And often they confuse distraction with love.


Hobbies, entertainment, and vacations can be such distractions. Yes, you can love your hobby, but is your hobby your life’s work or just a respite from what you do not like? For too many, life is filled with unpleasant necessities that do not feed the human spirit, even though they may feed the human body. Many people develop degrees of cynicism because there is nothing they love. This does not mean they have no capacity for love. Rather, they have not had the experience of creating. The caring they might have had was discouraged. They have developed a life policy of avoiding being a \“sucker.\” They do not trust people who deeply care about life in ways that are unimaginable in their experience. They cannot invest their life spirit in anything, because nothing seems that important. They can have a \“lacklust\” for life. Their lives go on, as in Robert Frost’s poem, The Death of the Hired Man, \“And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope / So now and never any different.\” If you advised such a person to find something to love, he or she would not be able to take your advice. It is only when you begin to create for the sake of the creation itself that you can begin to understand the orientation of the creative. There are no tricks, no right responses, no ulterior motives. Just the love of the thing. Obligation In the orientation of the creative you have no obligation to create what you love enough to create. You do not need the creations you create. Artists truly understand this point, because there is no real need for art. Actually, you need very little. With enough food, water, and warmth you can live for years. In the reactive-responsive orientation, however, circumstances seem to demand actions. You may have characterized your desire to fulfill these demands as needs.



People often translate what they want into what they think they need. Partly this translation is designed to justify what they want. If they can make their desires seem like needs, they believe they have \“no choice\” except to work to fulfill them. When needs become your nomenclature, you can never be sure which desires are authentic and which are not. If you make it seem as if you \“need\” what you want, how could you know what you love enough to bring into existence? This kind of thought process is, after all, a form of self-manipulation. To the reactive-responsive person it is not acceptable to spend your life on what you love, because what you love is not tied to the circumstances. Reactive-responsive people suspect that doing what they want would be selfish. This suspicion comes from a lack of self-knowledge. They may also believe that they do what they do in order to control their selfish interests. They often manufacture visions of misbehavior from doing what they want. They create the illusion of an inner conflict between blatant and destructive self-indulgence and sublimation of desire for the sake of others. When they make these assumptions, they can only perpetuate the myth that nothing they do is by free choice, but fulfills the \“need\” to reconcile competing opposites. Mother Theresa does not do what she does because she needs to do it. She does what she does out of the kind of love I have been describing. If she were merely trying to bring relief to the suffering people she serves, she would become overwhelmed. She understands the depth of the capacity of human beings toward both good and evil. Because she understands this, she is able to make a conscious choice for good. Not out of a premise of obligation, but out of love for good. One of the most important lessons I have learned in the past fifteen years of teaching the creative process concerns the true nature of people. When people are united with their real power—the power to create what they want to create—they always choose what is highest in humanity. 

They choose good health, exceptional relationships, and love, and relevant life purpose, and peace, and challenges worthy of the human spirit. People, I have come to discover, are profoundly good. But, you might well think, what about our destructive tendencies? What about all the examples of wars, inhumanity, and needless cruelty? Those who spend their lives destructively are not in touch with their power to create. Instead, the manifestation of evil throughout history has come in reaction to the inability, not the ability, to create. Power-wielding, manipulation, terrorism, militarism, and lust for power do not come from having power, but from not having power, If you thought you could not create what you wanted to create, it might seem to you that what you want is inconsequential. After all, if you can’t have it anyway, why consider what you want? In the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® courses, participants learn the important skill of conceiving of what they want. At first they may not know what they want, but when they begin to consider the question, they have a basis for new experiences. Perhaps they cannot name what they really want at first. Experimenting with what they choose brings what they truly want into sharper focus. Most often, they are able to create the results they want by learning how the creative process works. Then they can better conceive of future results they want to create. After the direct experience of creating what they have chosen, these people know that what they want is not arbitrary. It is one of the most important factors in their lives as creators. The CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course has occasionally been conducted experimentally in high schools. Students are asked to list what they want. Usually they want results, such as jobs after school, boyfriends or girlfriends, guitars, motorcycles, cars, and even better grades and better relationships with their parents and teachers. Before they had taken this course, these students had been taught by parents and teachers that they cannot create what they want. They have had ample direct experiences of their inability to create. If you come into their classroom and try to convince them that they can create what they want in life, they’re more than eager to prove how wrong you are. No amount of propaganda would change their attitudes or their perception. Their perception is well-founded. If they have not had the experience of creating what they really want, why should they believe they can do this? In addition, they do not see many adults in their lives creating what they want. Often these are the same adults who are ready to give a pep talk at the drop of a moan. By the end of the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course, these students know they have the ability to create because they have done it. There is absolutely no hype given to them. They are more than capable of making their own conclusions: \“Did you create the job?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the relationship?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the car?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the motorcycle?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create a good relationship with your parents?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did your grades go up?\” \“Yes.\” After this kind of experience, these students have made two important discoveries: that they can create what they choose and that what they want is not inconsequential. If, at first, they want goals that are not ranked as among the highest in the history of the human race, so what? What they create is important to them—they love the creation enough to bring it into being. It is one thing to speculate about what someone else should want; it is quite another to bring into existence what you actually do want. The experience of creating has changed these students’ lives. If the specific result created was \“insignificant\” by the 
world’s standards, what was significant is the reality and power of the creative process. No longer do these young people have to spend their life in a compromise because they know no better. In fact, their real altruism is now more able to be expressed. Not by a sense of obligation to do good in the world, but out of an authentic desire—simply the love of the thing. Creation Expressing Itself There was a time when automobiles, telephones, television sets, solar reflectors, and space shuttles did not exist and were not even envisioned. There was a time when rock music, atonal music, or even classical music did not exist and were not even thought of. Two hundred years ago the fields of sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, paleontology, and nuclear physics did not exist. Today they do. During this last decade a technological revolution has changed the world in ways that were unimaginable twenty years ago. When composers create, they begin with a blank sheet of music manuscript paper. When artists paint, they begin with an empty canvas. It is sometimes difficult for us to think that something new can actually be created, something that did not exist before. I often hear people assert, \“There is really nothing new\” or \“Everything that is now created has been done before.\” I usually ask them if anything like Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, Op. 133, existed before he wrote it. Certainly the string quartet for whom Beethoven composed the fugue had never seen anything like it. In fact, they said that it was unplayable and impossible to listen to, with all of its \“random dissonances\” and extreme voice-crossings. So Beethoven withdrew the piece and, in place of it, provided the musicians with a tamer work. When the musicians first saw the Grosse Fugue, they thought old Beethoven had lost his stability, but Beethoven viewed his composition from a different perspective. 

\"I write this music for a future time,\” he said. 

Today, most string quartets include the Grosse Fugue in their standard repertoire. The arts and sciences are filled with example after example of new creations, works that never existed before they were created. However, many people still prefer to think there is really nothing new under the sun. Writer D. H. Lawrence believed this until, at the age of forty, he discovered how wrong he had been. I remember I used to assert, perhaps I even wrote it: Everything that can possibly be painted has been painted, every brushstroke that can possibly be laid on canvas has been laid on. The visual arts are at a dead end. Then suddenly, at the age of forty, I begin painting myself and am fascinated. By having a blank canvas, I discovered I could make a picture myself. That is the point, to make a picture on a blank canvas. And I was forty before I had the real courage to try. Then it became an orgy, making pictures. The discovery D. H. Lawrence describes is common in the orientation of the creative. What may have seemed dead suddenly has life. The Secret of the Creative Process A common mistake people make when first entering the orientation of the creative is to seek to \“find out\” what they want as if it were a deeply hidden treasure to be discovered and revealed. They are looking in the wrong direction. Creating what you want is not a revelatory process, nor is what you want something to be discovered. If not by revelation or discovery, then how do you derive the what in the question What do I want? The answer to this question is known, either rationally or intuitively, by those who are actively involved in creating.



made it up\” leave the interviewer dissatisfied, they make up a story of how they \“did it.\” But the fact is that Albert Einstein made up the theory of relativity, Marie Curie made up the theory of radiation, Thomas Edison made up the light bulb, Mary Cassatt made up the painting The Bath, Anton Webern made up the Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Emily Dickinson made up the poem \“Because I Could Not Stop for Death,\” Ilya Prigogine made up the theory of dissipative structures, Joni Mitchell made up the song \“Court and Spark,\” Harriet Tubman made up the \“underground railway,\” and the founders of the nation made up the United States of America. Even though it is common to focus only on the story of how a creation came to pass, it is important to realize that, no matter what these stories may be, the creator conceives of the creation at the moment of making things up. Composer Arnold Schoenberg was asked if he ever heard his music perfectly performed. He replied, \“Yes, when I first conceived it.\” As we view Hollywood’s movie version of how the great creators \“made up\” their creations, we may receive a false impression. In the film versions there is drama. There are high strings, tremolo, súl ponticello, in the background music. All the signs point to a mystery taking place. The protagonist, whether a young Tom Edison, as played by a young Mickey Rooney, or old Thomas Edison, played by a middle-aged Spencer Tracy, is facing an inner struggle. The tension mounts. The camera moves to close-up as the stationary figure thinks and thinks. Eureka! Inspiration strikes. Suddenly all is action. The figure is in motion. The music is animated. The audience has been privileged to witness the awe-inspiring moment as the dramatic tension reaches its climax. Oh, if life were only like the movies! Especially black-and-white movies from the forties. In real life, making it up is often less than dramatic. Many of the most inspired inventions were conceived without fanfare, drama, or inspiration (let alone background music). Drama is the exception, not the rule.


Even the scriptwriters of Thomas Edison’s film bios were working on their script between bites of corned beef sandwiches and sips of Coca-Cola. They were fabricating a fantasy world of which they were not a part. The creative process can look many different ways. Some of your best creations may come from the most normal experiences, and some of your worst may be the product of what seemed to be \“divine inspiration.\” There seems to be no relationship between the final worth of a result and the experiences the creator has while in the process of creating. Focus on the Result In the creative orientation the most powerful question you can ask yourself is, \“What do I want?\” At any time and in any situation—regardless of the circumstances—you can always ask and answer that question. The question, \“What do I want?\” is really a question about results. Perhaps a more precise way of asking that question is, \“What result do I want to create?\” The question, \“How do I get what I want?\” is a question about process, not result. As an initial question, it is quite limiting. If you ask the question, \“How do I get what I want?\” before you ask, \“What result do I want to create?\” you are limited to results that are directly related to what you already know how to do or can conceive of doing. In 1878, when Thomas Edison decided to create the electric light, it was already well known that electricity could produce light. The task before Edison was to find a material that would not bum out and instantly consume itself. He began by reading everything that had been written on the subject, and it is reported that he filled two hundred notebooks with jottings and diagrams. All the scientists before him had followed a certain process: They looked for substances that would reduce resistance to the electric current, but they had found none that would produce an electric light. Instead of following the same process and limiting himself to producing results he 
already knew about, Edison tried the opposite: He looked for substances that would increase resistance to the electric current. After testing countless resistant materials, he settled on a carbonized element and placed it in a vacuum bulb, thereby creating the familiar incandescent light bulb. By keeping his focus on the result he wanted to create—an electric light—Edison was able to focus the process toward a successful result. Frank Lloyd Wright was the creator of \“organic architecture.\” In designing a house, Wright first conceived of the result he wanted to create: for him, it was a sense of interior space for living. In his view a house was not simply a set of boxes within boxes, with rooms sealed off and connected to other rooms only by doors in partitions and dark halls, but primarily an entire space in which to live. With his focus on living space as the result he wanted, Wright was open to new possibilities in design, ones that had never occurred to most of his fellow architects, who were still designing houses by rearranging sets of boxes, the traditional process of architecture. In Wright’s house, for the first time, the kitchen became an attractive feature; living and dining area became unified; floor spaces became living spaces; terraces, balconies, and windows allowed the outside and inside of the house to flow into each other so that the outside was brought in and the inside was brought out. His floor-to-ceiling windows invited daylight to flood the interior, and low-pitched roofs with wide overhangs created a sense of spaciousness and organic interaction with nature. As Wright stayed focused on the results he wanted to create, the \“how\” of obtaining those results developed organically. He did not limit his concept or his process to standard procedures. Because he knew the result he wanted, he could invent processes that were uncommon and different from those of his contemporaries.


If you ask the \“how\” question before the \“what\” question, all you can ever hope to create are variations of what you already have. Artists have a clear sense of this need to focus on the result they want. Speaking to young writers, Gertrude Stein once said, \“You have to know what you want to get. But when you know that, let it take you. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.\” When the process comes first, the process itself will limit the actions you will be able to take and thereby limit the possibilities of what you can create. As the artist Chuck Close has said, \“You can give the same recipe to ten cooks, and some make it come alive, and some make a flat souffle. A system doesn’t guarantee anything.\” Pablo Picasso, as a mature artist speaking to young painters, encouraged them to conceive of new paintings rather than ones that followed the processes of the past. With the exception of some painters who are opening new horizons to painting, the youth of today do not know anymore where to go. Instead of taking up our researches in order to react sharply against us, they apply themselves to reanimating the past. Yet the world is open before us, everything is still to be done, and not to be done over again. Why hang on hopelessly to everything that has fulfilled its promise? There are kilometers of paintings in the manner of; but it is rare to see a young man working in his own way. Is there some notion abroad that man must repeat himself? To repeat is to go against the laws of the spirit, its forward motion. The Premature Process Premature focus on the process will limit and inhibit your effectiveness.


Our educational system does not focus on the results you as a student want in your life. Instead it promotes the notion that what you should learn is process. You should learn how to do mathematics and construct grammatical sentences. You should learn how to write research papers and do laboratory experiments in biology. You should learn how to draw, to speak in public, to read musical notation, perhaps even to write a poem or two. You should learn how to run a computer and a word processor, and you should learn some crafts skills in shop courses or some household skills in home economics courses. The assumption is that as you become fluent in these processes, the results you want in your life will take care of themselves. Consequently few educators ask students the question, \“What do you want in your life?\” True, for their first ten or twelve years, children are asked, \“What do you want to be when you grow up?\” But the children’s answers are usually discounted unless they happen to follow in the footsteps of one of the parents. Similarly, people often ask adolescents, \“What do you want to do when you get out of school?\” Usually, even though that question is asked, the young people have had no educational experience of the creative process. From their vantage point, the game of life appears to involve choosing from among uninteresting alternatives proposed by adults. In the educational system, aptitude is often substituted for vision. For many people, their doing well on certain aptitude tests in secondary school was a great tragedy, because traditional guidance counseling helps students find out what they might be good at and helps them design careers around their aptitude. Many people have mindlessly followed advice coming out of that mentality and become physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, nurses, and chemists, only to discover to their dismay, twenty or thirty years later, that they never really cared about what may now be the only field or profession

they know. A major part of their life was spent developing what they happened to have an aptitude for at age fifteen. I know several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who are bored being symphony musicians, yet their whole life revolves around the investment they have in staying where they are. One very great musician said to me, \“I don’t like playing in the symphony, but it’s all I know how to do.\” Organically Formed Processes In the creative orientation, when you answer the question \“What do I want to create?\” it is not clear whether what you want is possible. Yet throughout the history of the world many results have been created that seemed impossible at the time they were conceived. Before the creation of anesthesia, physicians were convinced that painless surgery was impossible. In 1839 Dr. Alfred Velpeau said, \“The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.\” Before the creation of the airplane, many scientists were convinced that flight was impossible. Simon Newcomb, a well-known astronomer, was convinced that he had logically proven this impossibility. He wrote, \“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.\” Ironically, Newcomb made this statement in 1903—the year the Wright brothers made their first flights at Kitty Hawk. Many scientists were convinced that the atom could not be split or an atomic bomb created. In speaking to President 
more \“right\” brain, becoming more affluent, etc., etc., etc., etc. This is a wonderful age we live in. So much is available. But often the criteria people use to determine which direction they should take are dictated by notions about process rather than concepts about results. In a conversation I had with a friend recently, she talked about \“the sacredness of process,\” and \“transcendental appreciation of one’s process.\” I could almost hear a choir of angels softly singing as she rhapsodized. This is such a foreign notion to a creator. When you create, process is functional. There is no dogma to adopt, no romance to maintain, no philosophy to uphold. Process is invented and designed to serve the result you desire. This is its only purpose. It is best to allow processes to form organically from within the vision of the result. It is unwise to limit the way a result can happen by any given process. At the time you conceive the result you want, the actual way you will bring it about is always unknown to you, even if you have a hunch about it."
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 The Structure of the Creative Process 
 The creative process has a structure different from that of reacting or responding to circumstances, one that resolves rather than oscillates. Just as reacting or responding to circumstances can be an orientation, so creating can be an orientation. People in the reactive-responsive orientation sometimes create, and people in the creative orientation sometimes react or respond to circumstances. What determines your orientation is where you spend most of your time. For many people, much of their life is organized around the circumstances in their lives. For others, their lives are organized around creating what they want to create. There is a dramatic difference between the two orientations. In the first, you are always subject to the whims of circumstances. In the other, you are the predominant creative force in your own life, and circumstances are one of the forces you use in the creative process. The shift from the reactive-responsive orientation to the orientation of the creative is both simple and complex. It is easy to live in the realm of the creative, but it is so unusual that many people find it hard to leave their past learnings behind. The shift can be aided by experiences of the creative process, but it is not a gradual manifestation. When you are in the reactive-responsive orientation, it seems difficult to make this shift, but when you are in the orientation of the creative, it is clear and obvious.\"




Then one day, in the middle of composing some music, I suddenly understood what the priest was talking about. I was creating this music because I loved it enough to see it exist. And I could imagine God—the Creator—creating the world for no other reason than love. Had my priest friend better understood the creative process, he could have easily shared with me the profundity of his point of view. Here I was, a composer studying at a conservatory, already engaged in the creative process. If he had asked me this simple question, \“Why do you compose?\” I could have made his point. My priest friend had been taught to enact \“proper\” responses to life. For him the proper response was his religious doctrine of faith, learned from scholarship rather than direct experience. I do not fault him in the least. Creating was neither in his experience nor in his orientation. He was doing the best he could within his orientation. And his words stayed with me until I could better understand them. For this I am truly grateful. I share this story with you not as an inducement to believe in any particular religious or spiritual doctrine, but as a fascinating example of an inability to explain the orientation of the creative from the viewpoint of the reactive-responsive. In fact, people from divergent religious, philosophical, spiritual, and political beliefs have been masters of the creative process. From atheists to Born-Again Christians. From Jews to Muslims. From Buddhists to Hindus. From capitalists to communists. From the political left to the political right. Creating is not the property of any special creed, nationality, race, religion, political leaning, or any other definition people give themselves. If, like most of us, you have been raised in the reactive-responsive orientation, you probably have had little experience in doing what you do out of love of the thing being done. Most people do not spend their lives doing what they love. To them, doing what they love is a luxury, not a usual way of life. And often they confuse distraction with love.


Hobbies, entertainment, and vacations can be such distractions. Yes, you can love your hobby, but is your hobby your life’s work or just a respite from what you do not like? For too many, life is filled with unpleasant necessities that do not feed the human spirit, even though they may feed the human body. Many people develop degrees of cynicism because there is nothing they love. This does not mean they have no capacity for love. Rather, they have not had the experience of creating. The caring they might have had was discouraged. They have developed a life policy of avoiding being a \“sucker.\” They do not trust people who deeply care about life in ways that are unimaginable in their experience. They cannot invest their life spirit in anything, because nothing seems that important. They can have a \“lacklust\” for life. Their lives go on, as in Robert Frost’s poem, The Death of the Hired Man, \“And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope / So now and never any different.\” If you advised such a person to find something to love, he or she would not be able to take your advice. It is only when you begin to create for the sake of the creation itself that you can begin to understand the orientation of the creative. There are no tricks, no right responses, no ulterior motives. Just the love of the thing. Obligation In the orientation of the creative you have no obligation to create what you love enough to create. You do not need the creations you create. Artists truly understand this point, because there is no real need for art. Actually, you need very little. With enough food, water, and warmth you can live for years. In the reactive-responsive orientation, however, circumstances seem to demand actions. You may have characterized your desire to fulfill these demands as needs.



People often translate what they want into what they think they need. Partly this translation is designed to justify what they want. If they can make their desires seem like needs, they believe they have \“no choice\” except to work to fulfill them. When needs become your nomenclature, you can never be sure which desires are authentic and which are not. If you make it seem as if you \“need\” what you want, how could you know what you love enough to bring into existence? This kind of thought process is, after all, a form of self-manipulation. To the reactive-responsive person it is not acceptable to spend your life on what you love, because what you love is not tied to the circumstances. Reactive-responsive people suspect that doing what they want would be selfish. This suspicion comes from a lack of self-knowledge. They may also believe that they do what they do in order to control their selfish interests. They often manufacture visions of misbehavior from doing what they want. They create the illusion of an inner conflict between blatant and destructive self-indulgence and sublimation of desire for the sake of others. When they make these assumptions, they can only perpetuate the myth that nothing they do is by free choice, but fulfills the \“need\” to reconcile competing opposites. Mother Theresa does not do what she does because she needs to do it. She does what she does out of the kind of love I have been describing. If she were merely trying to bring relief to the suffering people she serves, she would become overwhelmed. She understands the depth of the capacity of human beings toward both good and evil. Because she understands this, she is able to make a conscious choice for good. Not out of a premise of obligation, but out of love for good. One of the most important lessons I have learned in the past fifteen years of teaching the creative process concerns the true nature of people. When people are united with their real power—the power to create what they want to create—they always choose what is highest in humanity. 

They choose good health, exceptional relationships, and love, and relevant life purpose, and peace, and challenges worthy of the human spirit. People, I have come to discover, are profoundly good. But, you might well think, what about our destructive tendencies? What about all the examples of wars, inhumanity, and needless cruelty? Those who spend their lives destructively are not in touch with their power to create. Instead, the manifestation of evil throughout history has come in reaction to the inability, not the ability, to create. Power-wielding, manipulation, terrorism, militarism, and lust for power do not come from having power, but from not having power, If you thought you could not create what you wanted to create, it might seem to you that what you want is inconsequential. After all, if you can’t have it anyway, why consider what you want? In the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® courses, participants learn the important skill of conceiving of what they want. At first they may not know what they want, but when they begin to consider the question, they have a basis for new experiences. Perhaps they cannot name what they really want at first. Experimenting with what they choose brings what they truly want into sharper focus. Most often, they are able to create the results they want by learning how the creative process works. Then they can better conceive of future results they want to create. After the direct experience of creating what they have chosen, these people know that what they want is not arbitrary. It is one of the most important factors in their lives as creators. The CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course has occasionally been conducted experimentally in high schools. Students are asked to list what they want. Usually they want results, such as jobs after school, boyfriends or girlfriends, guitars, motorcycles, cars, and even better grades and better relationships with their parents and teachers. Before they had taken this course, these students had been taught by parents and teachers that they cannot create what they want. They have had ample direct experiences of their inability to create. If you come into their classroom and try to convince them that they can create what they want in life, they’re more than eager to prove how wrong you are. No amount of propaganda would change their attitudes or their perception. Their perception is well-founded. If they have not had the experience of creating what they really want, why should they believe they can do this? In addition, they do not see many adults in their lives creating what they want. Often these are the same adults who are ready to give a pep talk at the drop of a moan. By the end of the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course, these students know they have the ability to create because they have done it. There is absolutely no hype given to them. They are more than capable of making their own conclusions: \“Did you create the job?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the relationship?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the car?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the motorcycle?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create a good relationship with your parents?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did your grades go up?\” \“Yes.\” After this kind of experience, these students have made two important discoveries: that they can create what they choose and that what they want is not inconsequential. If, at first, they want goals that are not ranked as among the highest in the history of the human race, so what? What they create is important to them—they love the creation enough to bring it into being. It is one thing to speculate about what someone else should want; it is quite another to bring into existence what you actually do want. The experience of creating has changed these students’ lives. If the specific result created was \“insignificant\” by the 
world’s standards, what was significant is the reality and power of the creative process. No longer do these young people have to spend their life in a compromise because they know no better. In fact, their real altruism is now more able to be expressed. Not by a sense of obligation to do good in the world, but out of an authentic desire—simply the love of the thing. Creation Expressing Itself There was a time when automobiles, telephones, television sets, solar reflectors, and space shuttles did not exist and were not even envisioned. There was a time when rock music, atonal music, or even classical music did not exist and were not even thought of. Two hundred years ago the fields of sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, paleontology, and nuclear physics did not exist. Today they do. During this last decade a technological revolution has changed the world in ways that were unimaginable twenty years ago. When composers create, they begin with a blank sheet of music manuscript paper. When artists paint, they begin with an empty canvas. It is sometimes difficult for us to think that something new can actually be created, something that did not exist before. I often hear people assert, \“There is really nothing new\” or \“Everything that is now created has been done before.\” I usually ask them if anything like Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, Op. 133, existed before he wrote it. Certainly the string quartet for whom Beethoven composed the fugue had never seen anything like it. In fact, they said that it was unplayable and impossible to listen to, with all of its \“random dissonances\” and extreme voice-crossings. So Beethoven withdrew the piece and, in place of it, provided the musicians with a tamer work. When the musicians first saw the Grosse Fugue, they thought old Beethoven had lost his stability, but Beethoven viewed his composition from a different perspective. 

\"I write this music for a future time,\” he said. 

Today, most string quartets include the Grosse Fugue in their standard repertoire. The arts and sciences are filled with example after example of new creations, works that never existed before they were created. However, many people still prefer to think there is really nothing new under the sun. Writer D. H. Lawrence believed this until, at the age of forty, he discovered how wrong he had been. I remember I used to assert, perhaps I even wrote it: Everything that can possibly be painted has been painted, every brushstroke that can possibly be laid on canvas has been laid on. The visual arts are at a dead end. Then suddenly, at the age of forty, I begin painting myself and am fascinated. By having a blank canvas, I discovered I could make a picture myself. That is the point, to make a picture on a blank canvas. And I was forty before I had the real courage to try. Then it became an orgy, making pictures. The discovery D. H. Lawrence describes is common in the orientation of the creative. What may have seemed dead suddenly has life. The Secret of the Creative Process A common mistake people make when first entering the orientation of the creative is to seek to \“find out\” what they want as if it were a deeply hidden treasure to be discovered and revealed. They are looking in the wrong direction. Creating what you want is not a revelatory process, nor is what you want something to be discovered. If not by revelation or discovery, then how do you derive the what in the question What do I want? The answer to this question is known, either rationally or intuitively, by those who are actively involved in creating.



made it up\” leave the interviewer dissatisfied, they make up a story of how they \“did it.\” But the fact is that Albert Einstein made up the theory of relativity, Marie Curie made up the theory of radiation, Thomas Edison made up the light bulb, Mary Cassatt made up the painting The Bath, Anton Webern made up the Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Emily Dickinson made up the poem \“Because I Could Not Stop for Death,\” Ilya Prigogine made up the theory of dissipative structures, Joni Mitchell made up the song \“Court and Spark,\” Harriet Tubman made up the \“underground railway,\” and the founders of the nation made up the United States of America. Even though it is common to focus only on the story of how a creation came to pass, it is important to realize that, no matter what these stories may be, the creator conceives of the creation at the moment of making things up. Composer Arnold Schoenberg was asked if he ever heard his music perfectly performed. He replied, \“Yes, when I first conceived it.\” As we view Hollywood’s movie version of how the great creators \“made up\” their creations, we may receive a false impression. In the film versions there is drama. There are high strings, tremolo, súl ponticello, in the background music. All the signs point to a mystery taking place. The protagonist, whether a young Tom Edison, as played by a young Mickey Rooney, or old Thomas Edison, played by a middle-aged Spencer Tracy, is facing an inner struggle. The tension mounts. The camera moves to close-up as the stationary figure thinks and thinks. Eureka! Inspiration strikes. Suddenly all is action. The figure is in motion. The music is animated. The audience has been privileged to witness the awe-inspiring moment as the dramatic tension reaches its climax. Oh, if life were only like the movies! Especially black-and-white movies from the forties. In real life, making it up is often less than dramatic. Many of the most inspired inventions were conceived without fanfare, drama, or inspiration (let alone background music). Drama is the exception, not the rule.


Even the scriptwriters of Thomas Edison’s film bios were working on their script between bites of corned beef sandwiches and sips of Coca-Cola. They were fabricating a fantasy world of which they were not a part. The creative process can look many different ways. Some of your best creations may come from the most normal experiences, and some of your worst may be the product of what seemed to be \“divine inspiration.\” There seems to be no relationship between the final worth of a result and the experiences the creator has while in the process of creating. Focus on the Result In the creative orientation the most powerful question you can ask yourself is, \“What do I want?\” At any time and in any situation—regardless of the circumstances—you can always ask and answer that question. The question, \“What do I want?\” is really a question about results. Perhaps a more precise way of asking that question is, \“What result do I want to create?\” The question, \“How do I get what I want?\” is a question about process, not result. As an initial question, it is quite limiting. If you ask the question, \“How do I get what I want?\” before you ask, \“What result do I want to create?\” you are limited to results that are directly related to what you already know how to do or can conceive of doing. In 1878, when Thomas Edison decided to create the electric light, it was already well known that electricity could produce light. The task before Edison was to find a material that would not bum out and instantly consume itself. He began by reading everything that had been written on the subject, and it is reported that he filled two hundred notebooks with jottings and diagrams. All the scientists before him had followed a certain process: They looked for substances that would reduce resistance to the electric current, but they had found none that would produce an electric light. Instead of following the same process and limiting himself to producing results he 
already knew about, Edison tried the opposite: He looked for substances that would increase resistance to the electric current. After testing countless resistant materials, he settled on a carbonized element and placed it in a vacuum bulb, thereby creating the familiar incandescent light bulb. By keeping his focus on the result he wanted to create—an electric light—Edison was able to focus the process toward a successful result. Frank Lloyd Wright was the creator of \“organic architecture.\” In designing a house, Wright first conceived of the result he wanted to create: for him, it was a sense of interior space for living. In his view a house was not simply a set of boxes within boxes, with rooms sealed off and connected to other rooms only by doors in partitions and dark halls, but primarily an entire space in which to live. With his focus on living space as the result he wanted, Wright was open to new possibilities in design, ones that had never occurred to most of his fellow architects, who were still designing houses by rearranging sets of boxes, the traditional process of architecture. In Wright’s house, for the first time, the kitchen became an attractive feature; living and dining area became unified; floor spaces became living spaces; terraces, balconies, and windows allowed the outside and inside of the house to flow into each other so that the outside was brought in and the inside was brought out. His floor-to-ceiling windows invited daylight to flood the interior, and low-pitched roofs with wide overhangs created a sense of spaciousness and organic interaction with nature. As Wright stayed focused on the results he wanted to create, the \“how\” of obtaining those results developed organically. He did not limit his concept or his process to standard procedures. Because he knew the result he wanted, he could invent processes that were uncommon and different from those of his contemporaries.


If you ask the \“how\” question before the \“what\” question, all you can ever hope to create are variations of what you already have. Artists have a clear sense of this need to focus on the result they want. Speaking to young writers, Gertrude Stein once said, \“You have to know what you want to get. But when you know that, let it take you. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.\” When the process comes first, the process itself will limit the actions you will be able to take and thereby limit the possibilities of what you can create. As the artist Chuck Close has said, \“You can give the same recipe to ten cooks, and some make it come alive, and some make a flat souffle. A system doesn’t guarantee anything.\” Pablo Picasso, as a mature artist speaking to young painters, encouraged them to conceive of new paintings rather than ones that followed the processes of the past. With the exception of some painters who are opening new horizons to painting, the youth of today do not know anymore where to go. Instead of taking up our researches in order to react sharply against us, they apply themselves to reanimating the past. Yet the world is open before us, everything is still to be done, and not to be done over again. Why hang on hopelessly to everything that has fulfilled its promise? There are kilometers of paintings in the manner of; but it is rare to see a young man working in his own way. Is there some notion abroad that man must repeat himself? To repeat is to go against the laws of the spirit, its forward motion. The Premature Process Premature focus on the process will limit and inhibit your effectiveness.


Our educational system does not focus on the results you as a student want in your life. Instead it promotes the notion that what you should learn is process. You should learn how to do mathematics and construct grammatical sentences. You should learn how to write research papers and do laboratory experiments in biology. You should learn how to draw, to speak in public, to read musical notation, perhaps even to write a poem or two. You should learn how to run a computer and a word processor, and you should learn some crafts skills in shop courses or some household skills in home economics courses. The assumption is that as you become fluent in these processes, the results you want in your life will take care of themselves. Consequently few educators ask students the question, \“What do you want in your life?\” True, for their first ten or twelve years, children are asked, \“What do you want to be when you grow up?\” But the children’s answers are usually discounted unless they happen to follow in the footsteps of one of the parents. Similarly, people often ask adolescents, \“What do you want to do when you get out of school?\” Usually, even though that question is asked, the young people have had no educational experience of the creative process. From their vantage point, the game of life appears to involve choosing from among uninteresting alternatives proposed by adults. In the educational system, aptitude is often substituted for vision. For many people, their doing well on certain aptitude tests in secondary school was a great tragedy, because traditional guidance counseling helps students find out what they might be good at and helps them design careers around their aptitude. Many people have mindlessly followed advice coming out of that mentality and become physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, nurses, and chemists, only to discover to their dismay, twenty or thirty years later, that they never really cared about what may now be the only field or profession

they know. A major part of their life was spent developing what they happened to have an aptitude for at age fifteen. I know several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who are bored being symphony musicians, yet their whole life revolves around the investment they have in staying where they are. One very great musician said to me, \“I don’t like playing in the symphony, but it’s all I know how to do.\” Organically Formed Processes In the creative orientation, when you answer the question \“What do I want to create?\” it is not clear whether what you want is possible. Yet throughout the history of the world many results have been created that seemed impossible at the time they were conceived. Before the creation of anesthesia, physicians were convinced that painless surgery was impossible. In 1839 Dr. Alfred Velpeau said, \“The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.\” Before the creation of the airplane, many scientists were convinced that flight was impossible. Simon Newcomb, a well-known astronomer, was convinced that he had logically proven this impossibility. He wrote, \“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.\” Ironically, Newcomb made this statement in 1903—the year the Wright brothers made their first flights at Kitty Hawk. Many scientists were convinced that the atom could not be split or an atomic bomb created. In speaking to President 
more \“right\” brain, becoming more affluent, etc., etc., etc., etc. This is a wonderful age we live in. So much is available. But often the criteria people use to determine which direction they should take are dictated by notions about process rather than concepts about results. In a conversation I had with a friend recently, she talked about \“the sacredness of process,\” and \“transcendental appreciation of one’s process.\” I could almost hear a choir of angels softly singing as she rhapsodized. This is such a foreign notion to a creator. When you create, process is functional. There is no dogma to adopt, no romance to maintain, no philosophy to uphold. Process is invented and designed to serve the result you desire. This is its only purpose. It is best to allow processes to form organically from within the vision of the result. It is unwise to limit the way a result can happen by any given process. At the time you conceive the result you want, the actual way you will bring it about is always unknown to you, even if you have a hunch about it."
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 The Structure of the Creative Process 
 The creative process has a structure different from that of reacting or responding to circumstances, one that resolves rather than oscillates. Just as reacting or responding to circumstances can be an orientation, so creating can be an orientation. People in the reactive-responsive orientation sometimes create, and people in the creative orientation sometimes react or respond to circumstances. What determines your orientation is where you spend most of your time. For many people, much of their life is organized around the circumstances in their lives. For others, their lives are organized around creating what they want to create. There is a dramatic difference between the two orientations. In the first, you are always subject to the whims of circumstances. In the other, you are the predominant creative force in your own life, and circumstances are one of the forces you use in the creative process. The shift from the reactive-responsive orientation to the orientation of the creative is both simple and complex. It is easy to live in the realm of the creative, but it is so unusual that many people find it hard to leave their past learnings behind. The shift can be aided by experiences of the creative process, but it is not a gradual manifestation. When you are in the reactive-responsive orientation, it seems difficult to make this shift, but when you are in the orientation of the creative, it is clear and obvious.\"




Then one day, in the middle of composing some music, I suddenly understood what the priest was talking about. I was creating this music because I loved it enough to see it exist. And I could imagine God—the Creator—creating the world for no other reason than love. Had my priest friend better understood the creative process, he could have easily shared with me the profundity of his point of view. Here I was, a composer studying at a conservatory, already engaged in the creative process. If he had asked me this simple question, \“Why do you compose?\” I could have made his point. My priest friend had been taught to enact \“proper\” responses to life. For him the proper response was his religious doctrine of faith, learned from scholarship rather than direct experience. I do not fault him in the least. Creating was neither in his experience nor in his orientation. He was doing the best he could within his orientation. And his words stayed with me until I could better understand them. For this I am truly grateful. I share this story with you not as an inducement to believe in any particular religious or spiritual doctrine, but as a fascinating example of an inability to explain the orientation of the creative from the viewpoint of the reactive-responsive. In fact, people from divergent religious, philosophical, spiritual, and political beliefs have been masters of the creative process. From atheists to Born-Again Christians. From Jews to Muslims. From Buddhists to Hindus. From capitalists to communists. From the political left to the political right. Creating is not the property of any special creed, nationality, race, religion, political leaning, or any other definition people give themselves. If, like most of us, you have been raised in the reactive-responsive orientation, you probably have had little experience in doing what you do out of love of the thing being done. Most people do not spend their lives doing what they love. To them, doing what they love is a luxury, not a usual way of life. And often they confuse distraction with love.


Hobbies, entertainment, and vacations can be such distractions. Yes, you can love your hobby, but is your hobby your life’s work or just a respite from what you do not like? For too many, life is filled with unpleasant necessities that do not feed the human spirit, even though they may feed the human body. Many people develop degrees of cynicism because there is nothing they love. This does not mean they have no capacity for love. Rather, they have not had the experience of creating. The caring they might have had was discouraged. They have developed a life policy of avoiding being a \“sucker.\” They do not trust people who deeply care about life in ways that are unimaginable in their experience. They cannot invest their life spirit in anything, because nothing seems that important. They can have a \“lacklust\” for life. Their lives go on, as in Robert Frost’s poem, The Death of the Hired Man, \“And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope / So now and never any different.\” If you advised such a person to find something to love, he or she would not be able to take your advice. It is only when you begin to create for the sake of the creation itself that you can begin to understand the orientation of the creative. There are no tricks, no right responses, no ulterior motives. Just the love of the thing. Obligation In the orientation of the creative you have no obligation to create what you love enough to create. You do not need the creations you create. Artists truly understand this point, because there is no real need for art. Actually, you need very little. With enough food, water, and warmth you can live for years. In the reactive-responsive orientation, however, circumstances seem to demand actions. You may have characterized your desire to fulfill these demands as needs.



People often translate what they want into what they think they need. Partly this translation is designed to justify what they want. If they can make their desires seem like needs, they believe they have \“no choice\” except to work to fulfill them. When needs become your nomenclature, you can never be sure which desires are authentic and which are not. If you make it seem as if you \“need\” what you want, how could you know what you love enough to bring into existence? This kind of thought process is, after all, a form of self-manipulation. To the reactive-responsive person it is not acceptable to spend your life on what you love, because what you love is not tied to the circumstances. Reactive-responsive people suspect that doing what they want would be selfish. This suspicion comes from a lack of self-knowledge. They may also believe that they do what they do in order to control their selfish interests. They often manufacture visions of misbehavior from doing what they want. They create the illusion of an inner conflict between blatant and destructive self-indulgence and sublimation of desire for the sake of others. When they make these assumptions, they can only perpetuate the myth that nothing they do is by free choice, but fulfills the \“need\” to reconcile competing opposites. Mother Theresa does not do what she does because she needs to do it. She does what she does out of the kind of love I have been describing. If she were merely trying to bring relief to the suffering people she serves, she would become overwhelmed. She understands the depth of the capacity of human beings toward both good and evil. Because she understands this, she is able to make a conscious choice for good. Not out of a premise of obligation, but out of love for good. One of the most important lessons I have learned in the past fifteen years of teaching the creative process concerns the true nature of people. When people are united with their real power—the power to create what they want to create—they always choose what is highest in humanity. 

They choose good health, exceptional relationships, and love, and relevant life purpose, and peace, and challenges worthy of the human spirit. People, I have come to discover, are profoundly good. But, you might well think, what about our destructive tendencies? What about all the examples of wars, inhumanity, and needless cruelty? Those who spend their lives destructively are not in touch with their power to create. Instead, the manifestation of evil throughout history has come in reaction to the inability, not the ability, to create. Power-wielding, manipulation, terrorism, militarism, and lust for power do not come from having power, but from not having power, If you thought you could not create what you wanted to create, it might seem to you that what you want is inconsequential. After all, if you can’t have it anyway, why consider what you want? In the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® courses, participants learn the important skill of conceiving of what they want. At first they may not know what they want, but when they begin to consider the question, they have a basis for new experiences. Perhaps they cannot name what they really want at first. Experimenting with what they choose brings what they truly want into sharper focus. Most often, they are able to create the results they want by learning how the creative process works. Then they can better conceive of future results they want to create. After the direct experience of creating what they have chosen, these people know that what they want is not arbitrary. It is one of the most important factors in their lives as creators. The CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course has occasionally been conducted experimentally in high schools. Students are asked to list what they want. Usually they want results, such as jobs after school, boyfriends or girlfriends, guitars, motorcycles, cars, and even better grades and better relationships with their parents and teachers. Before they had taken this course, these students had been taught by parents and teachers that they cannot create what they want. They have had ample direct experiences of their inability to create. If you come into their classroom and try to convince them that they can create what they want in life, they’re more than eager to prove how wrong you are. No amount of propaganda would change their attitudes or their perception. Their perception is well-founded. If they have not had the experience of creating what they really want, why should they believe they can do this? In addition, they do not see many adults in their lives creating what they want. Often these are the same adults who are ready to give a pep talk at the drop of a moan. By the end of the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course, these students know they have the ability to create because they have done it. There is absolutely no hype given to them. They are more than capable of making their own conclusions: \“Did you create the job?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the relationship?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the car?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the motorcycle?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create a good relationship with your parents?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did your grades go up?\” \“Yes.\” After this kind of experience, these students have made two important discoveries: that they can create what they choose and that what they want is not inconsequential. If, at first, they want goals that are not ranked as among the highest in the history of the human race, so what? What they create is important to them—they love the creation enough to bring it into being. It is one thing to speculate about what someone else should want; it is quite another to bring into existence what you actually do want. The experience of creating has changed these students’ lives. If the specific result created was \“insignificant\” by the 
world’s standards, what was significant is the reality and power of the creative process. No longer do these young people have to spend their life in a compromise because they know no better. In fact, their real altruism is now more able to be expressed. Not by a sense of obligation to do good in the world, but out of an authentic desire—simply the love of the thing. Creation Expressing Itself There was a time when automobiles, telephones, television sets, solar reflectors, and space shuttles did not exist and were not even envisioned. There was a time when rock music, atonal music, or even classical music did not exist and were not even thought of. Two hundred years ago the fields of sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, paleontology, and nuclear physics did not exist. Today they do. During this last decade a technological revolution has changed the world in ways that were unimaginable twenty years ago. When composers create, they begin with a blank sheet of music manuscript paper. When artists paint, they begin with an empty canvas. It is sometimes difficult for us to think that something new can actually be created, something that did not exist before. I often hear people assert, \“There is really nothing new\” or \“Everything that is now created has been done before.\” I usually ask them if anything like Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, Op. 133, existed before he wrote it. Certainly the string quartet for whom Beethoven composed the fugue had never seen anything like it. In fact, they said that it was unplayable and impossible to listen to, with all of its \“random dissonances\” and extreme voice-crossings. So Beethoven withdrew the piece and, in place of it, provided the musicians with a tamer work. When the musicians first saw the Grosse Fugue, they thought old Beethoven had lost his stability, but Beethoven viewed his composition from a different perspective. 

\"I write this music for a future time,\” he said. 

Today, most string quartets include the Grosse Fugue in their standard repertoire. The arts and sciences are filled with example after example of new creations, works that never existed before they were created. However, many people still prefer to think there is really nothing new under the sun. Writer D. H. Lawrence believed this until, at the age of forty, he discovered how wrong he had been. I remember I used to assert, perhaps I even wrote it: Everything that can possibly be painted has been painted, every brushstroke that can possibly be laid on canvas has been laid on. The visual arts are at a dead end. Then suddenly, at the age of forty, I begin painting myself and am fascinated. By having a blank canvas, I discovered I could make a picture myself. That is the point, to make a picture on a blank canvas. And I was forty before I had the real courage to try. Then it became an orgy, making pictures. The discovery D. H. Lawrence describes is common in the orientation of the creative. What may have seemed dead suddenly has life. The Secret of the Creative Process A common mistake people make when first entering the orientation of the creative is to seek to \“find out\” what they want as if it were a deeply hidden treasure to be discovered and revealed. They are looking in the wrong direction. Creating what you want is not a revelatory process, nor is what you want something to be discovered. If not by revelation or discovery, then how do you derive the what in the question What do I want? The answer to this question is known, either rationally or intuitively, by those who are actively involved in creating.



made it up\” leave the interviewer dissatisfied, they make up a story of how they \“did it.\” But the fact is that Albert Einstein made up the theory of relativity, Marie Curie made up the theory of radiation, Thomas Edison made up the light bulb, Mary Cassatt made up the painting The Bath, Anton Webern made up the Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Emily Dickinson made up the poem \“Because I Could Not Stop for Death,\” Ilya Prigogine made up the theory of dissipative structures, Joni Mitchell made up the song \“Court and Spark,\” Harriet Tubman made up the \“underground railway,\” and the founders of the nation made up the United States of America. Even though it is common to focus only on the story of how a creation came to pass, it is important to realize that, no matter what these stories may be, the creator conceives of the creation at the moment of making things up. Composer Arnold Schoenberg was asked if he ever heard his music perfectly performed. He replied, \“Yes, when I first conceived it.\” As we view Hollywood’s movie version of how the great creators \“made up\” their creations, we may receive a false impression. In the film versions there is drama. There are high strings, tremolo, súl ponticello, in the background music. All the signs point to a mystery taking place. The protagonist, whether a young Tom Edison, as played by a young Mickey Rooney, or old Thomas Edison, played by a middle-aged Spencer Tracy, is facing an inner struggle. The tension mounts. The camera moves to close-up as the stationary figure thinks and thinks. Eureka! Inspiration strikes. Suddenly all is action. The figure is in motion. The music is animated. The audience has been privileged to witness the awe-inspiring moment as the dramatic tension reaches its climax. Oh, if life were only like the movies! Especially black-and-white movies from the forties. In real life, making it up is often less than dramatic. Many of the most inspired inventions were conceived without fanfare, drama, or inspiration (let alone background music). Drama is the exception, not the rule.


Even the scriptwriters of Thomas Edison’s film bios were working on their script between bites of corned beef sandwiches and sips of Coca-Cola. They were fabricating a fantasy world of which they were not a part. The creative process can look many different ways. Some of your best creations may come from the most normal experiences, and some of your worst may be the product of what seemed to be \“divine inspiration.\” There seems to be no relationship between the final worth of a result and the experiences the creator has while in the process of creating. Focus on the Result In the creative orientation the most powerful question you can ask yourself is, \“What do I want?\” At any time and in any situation—regardless of the circumstances—you can always ask and answer that question. The question, \“What do I want?\” is really a question about results. Perhaps a more precise way of asking that question is, \“What result do I want to create?\” The question, \“How do I get what I want?\” is a question about process, not result. As an initial question, it is quite limiting. If you ask the question, \“How do I get what I want?\” before you ask, \“What result do I want to create?\” you are limited to results that are directly related to what you already know how to do or can conceive of doing. In 1878, when Thomas Edison decided to create the electric light, it was already well known that electricity could produce light. The task before Edison was to find a material that would not bum out and instantly consume itself. He began by reading everything that had been written on the subject, and it is reported that he filled two hundred notebooks with jottings and diagrams. All the scientists before him had followed a certain process: They looked for substances that would reduce resistance to the electric current, but they had found none that would produce an electric light. Instead of following the same process and limiting himself to producing results he 
already knew about, Edison tried the opposite: He looked for substances that would increase resistance to the electric current. After testing countless resistant materials, he settled on a carbonized element and placed it in a vacuum bulb, thereby creating the familiar incandescent light bulb. By keeping his focus on the result he wanted to create—an electric light—Edison was able to focus the process toward a successful result. Frank Lloyd Wright was the creator of \“organic architecture.\” In designing a house, Wright first conceived of the result he wanted to create: for him, it was a sense of interior space for living. In his view a house was not simply a set of boxes within boxes, with rooms sealed off and connected to other rooms only by doors in partitions and dark halls, but primarily an entire space in which to live. With his focus on living space as the result he wanted, Wright was open to new possibilities in design, ones that had never occurred to most of his fellow architects, who were still designing houses by rearranging sets of boxes, the traditional process of architecture. In Wright’s house, for the first time, the kitchen became an attractive feature; living and dining area became unified; floor spaces became living spaces; terraces, balconies, and windows allowed the outside and inside of the house to flow into each other so that the outside was brought in and the inside was brought out. His floor-to-ceiling windows invited daylight to flood the interior, and low-pitched roofs with wide overhangs created a sense of spaciousness and organic interaction with nature. As Wright stayed focused on the results he wanted to create, the \“how\” of obtaining those results developed organically. He did not limit his concept or his process to standard procedures. Because he knew the result he wanted, he could invent processes that were uncommon and different from those of his contemporaries.


If you ask the \“how\” question before the \“what\” question, all you can ever hope to create are variations of what you already have. Artists have a clear sense of this need to focus on the result they want. Speaking to young writers, Gertrude Stein once said, \“You have to know what you want to get. But when you know that, let it take you. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.\” When the process comes first, the process itself will limit the actions you will be able to take and thereby limit the possibilities of what you can create. As the artist Chuck Close has said, \“You can give the same recipe to ten cooks, and some make it come alive, and some make a flat souffle. A system doesn’t guarantee anything.\” Pablo Picasso, as a mature artist speaking to young painters, encouraged them to conceive of new paintings rather than ones that followed the processes of the past. With the exception of some painters who are opening new horizons to painting, the youth of today do not know anymore where to go. Instead of taking up our researches in order to react sharply against us, they apply themselves to reanimating the past. Yet the world is open before us, everything is still to be done, and not to be done over again. Why hang on hopelessly to everything that has fulfilled its promise? There are kilometers of paintings in the manner of; but it is rare to see a young man working in his own way. Is there some notion abroad that man must repeat himself? To repeat is to go against the laws of the spirit, its forward motion. The Premature Process Premature focus on the process will limit and inhibit your effectiveness.


Our educational system does not focus on the results you as a student want in your life. Instead it promotes the notion that what you should learn is process. You should learn how to do mathematics and construct grammatical sentences. You should learn how to write research papers and do laboratory experiments in biology. You should learn how to draw, to speak in public, to read musical notation, perhaps even to write a poem or two. You should learn how to run a computer and a word processor, and you should learn some crafts skills in shop courses or some household skills in home economics courses. The assumption is that as you become fluent in these processes, the results you want in your life will take care of themselves. Consequently few educators ask students the question, \“What do you want in your life?\” True, for their first ten or twelve years, children are asked, \“What do you want to be when you grow up?\” But the children’s answers are usually discounted unless they happen to follow in the footsteps of one of the parents. Similarly, people often ask adolescents, \“What do you want to do when you get out of school?\” Usually, even though that question is asked, the young people have had no educational experience of the creative process. From their vantage point, the game of life appears to involve choosing from among uninteresting alternatives proposed by adults. In the educational system, aptitude is often substituted for vision. For many people, their doing well on certain aptitude tests in secondary school was a great tragedy, because traditional guidance counseling helps students find out what they might be good at and helps them design careers around their aptitude. Many people have mindlessly followed advice coming out of that mentality and become physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, nurses, and chemists, only to discover to their dismay, twenty or thirty years later, that they never really cared about what may now be the only field or profession

they know. A major part of their life was spent developing what they happened to have an aptitude for at age fifteen. I know several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who are bored being symphony musicians, yet their whole life revolves around the investment they have in staying where they are. One very great musician said to me, \“I don’t like playing in the symphony, but it’s all I know how to do.\” Organically Formed Processes In the creative orientation, when you answer the question \“What do I want to create?\” it is not clear whether what you want is possible. Yet throughout the history of the world many results have been created that seemed impossible at the time they were conceived. Before the creation of anesthesia, physicians were convinced that painless surgery was impossible. In 1839 Dr. Alfred Velpeau said, \“The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.\” Before the creation of the airplane, many scientists were convinced that flight was impossible. Simon Newcomb, a well-known astronomer, was convinced that he had logically proven this impossibility. He wrote, \“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.\” Ironically, Newcomb made this statement in 1903—the year the Wright brothers made their first flights at Kitty Hawk. Many scientists were convinced that the atom could not be split or an atomic bomb created. In speaking to President 
more \“right\” brain, becoming more affluent, etc., etc., etc., etc. This is a wonderful age we live in. So much is available. But often the criteria people use to determine which direction they should take are dictated by notions about process rather than concepts about results. In a conversation I had with a friend recently, she talked about \“the sacredness of process,\” and \“transcendental appreciation of one’s process.\” I could almost hear a choir of angels softly singing as she rhapsodized. This is such a foreign notion to a creator. When you create, process is functional. There is no dogma to adopt, no romance to maintain, no philosophy to uphold. Process is invented and designed to serve the result you desire. This is its only purpose. It is best to allow processes to form organically from within the vision of the result. It is unwise to limit the way a result can happen by any given process. At the time you conceive the result you want, the actual way you will bring it about is always unknown to you, even if you have a hunch about it." > tst.md
 2005  node prototype.js "
 The Structure of the Creative Process 
 The creative process has a structure different from that of reacting or responding to circumstances, one that resolves rather than oscillates. Just as reacting or responding to circumstances can be an orientation, so creating can be an orientation. People in the reactive-responsive orientation sometimes create, and people in the creative orientation sometimes react or respond to circumstances. What determines your orientation is where you spend most of your time. For many people, much of their life is organized around the circumstances in their lives. For others, their lives are organized around creating what they want to create. There is a dramatic difference between the two orientations. In the first, you are always subject to the whims of circumstances. In the other, you are the predominant creative force in your own life, and circumstances are one of the forces you use in the creative process. The shift from the reactive-responsive orientation to the orientation of the creative is both simple and complex. It is easy to live in the realm of the creative, but it is so unusual that many people find it hard to leave their past learnings behind. The shift can be aided by experiences of the creative process, but it is not a gradual manifestation. When you are in the reactive-responsive orientation, it seems difficult to make this shift, but when you are in the orientation of the creative, it is clear and obvious.\"




Then one day, in the middle of composing some music, I suddenly understood what the priest was talking about. I was creating this music because I loved it enough to see it exist. And I could imagine God—the Creator—creating the world for no other reason than love. Had my priest friend better understood the creative process, he could have easily shared with me the profundity of his point of view. Here I was, a composer studying at a conservatory, already engaged in the creative process. If he had asked me this simple question, \“Why do you compose?\” I could have made his point. My priest friend had been taught to enact \“proper\” responses to life. For him the proper response was his religious doctrine of faith, learned from scholarship rather than direct experience. I do not fault him in the least. Creating was neither in his experience nor in his orientation. He was doing the best he could within his orientation. And his words stayed with me until I could better understand them. For this I am truly grateful. I share this story with you not as an inducement to believe in any particular religious or spiritual doctrine, but as a fascinating example of an inability to explain the orientation of the creative from the viewpoint of the reactive-responsive. In fact, people from divergent religious, philosophical, spiritual, and political beliefs have been masters of the creative process. From atheists to Born-Again Christians. From Jews to Muslims. From Buddhists to Hindus. From capitalists to communists. From the political left to the political right. Creating is not the property of any special creed, nationality, race, religion, political leaning, or any other definition people give themselves. If, like most of us, you have been raised in the reactive-responsive orientation, you probably have had little experience in doing what you do out of love of the thing being done. Most people do not spend their lives doing what they love. To them, doing what they love is a luxury, not a usual way of life. And often they confuse distraction with love.


Hobbies, entertainment, and vacations can be such distractions. Yes, you can love your hobby, but is your hobby your life’s work or just a respite from what you do not like? For too many, life is filled with unpleasant necessities that do not feed the human spirit, even though they may feed the human body. Many people develop degrees of cynicism because there is nothing they love. This does not mean they have no capacity for love. Rather, they have not had the experience of creating. The caring they might have had was discouraged. They have developed a life policy of avoiding being a \“sucker.\” They do not trust people who deeply care about life in ways that are unimaginable in their experience. They cannot invest their life spirit in anything, because nothing seems that important. They can have a \“lacklust\” for life. Their lives go on, as in Robert Frost’s poem, The Death of the Hired Man, \“And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope / So now and never any different.\” If you advised such a person to find something to love, he or she would not be able to take your advice. It is only when you begin to create for the sake of the creation itself that you can begin to understand the orientation of the creative. There are no tricks, no right responses, no ulterior motives. Just the love of the thing. Obligation In the orientation of the creative you have no obligation to create what you love enough to create. You do not need the creations you create. Artists truly understand this point, because there is no real need for art. Actually, you need very little. With enough food, water, and warmth you can live for years. In the reactive-responsive orientation, however, circumstances seem to demand actions. You may have characterized your desire to fulfill these demands as needs.



People often translate what they want into what they think they need. Partly this translation is designed to justify what they want. If they can make their desires seem like needs, they believe they have \“no choice\” except to work to fulfill them. When needs become your nomenclature, you can never be sure which desires are authentic and which are not. If you make it seem as if you \“need\” what you want, how could you know what you love enough to bring into existence? This kind of thought process is, after all, a form of self-manipulation. To the reactive-responsive person it is not acceptable to spend your life on what you love, because what you love is not tied to the circumstances. Reactive-responsive people suspect that doing what they want would be selfish. This suspicion comes from a lack of self-knowledge. They may also believe that they do what they do in order to control their selfish interests. They often manufacture visions of misbehavior from doing what they want. They create the illusion of an inner conflict between blatant and destructive self-indulgence and sublimation of desire for the sake of others. When they make these assumptions, they can only perpetuate the myth that nothing they do is by free choice, but fulfills the \“need\” to reconcile competing opposites. Mother Theresa does not do what she does because she needs to do it. She does what she does out of the kind of love I have been describing. If she were merely trying to bring relief to the suffering people she serves, she would become overwhelmed. She understands the depth of the capacity of human beings toward both good and evil. Because she understands this, she is able to make a conscious choice for good. Not out of a premise of obligation, but out of love for good. One of the most important lessons I have learned in the past fifteen years of teaching the creative process concerns the true nature of people. When people are united with their real power—the power to create what they want to create—they always choose what is highest in humanity. 

They choose good health, exceptional relationships, and love, and relevant life purpose, and peace, and challenges worthy of the human spirit. People, I have come to discover, are profoundly good. But, you might well think, what about our destructive tendencies? What about all the examples of wars, inhumanity, and needless cruelty? Those who spend their lives destructively are not in touch with their power to create. Instead, the manifestation of evil throughout history has come in reaction to the inability, not the ability, to create. Power-wielding, manipulation, terrorism, militarism, and lust for power do not come from having power, but from not having power, If you thought you could not create what you wanted to create, it might seem to you that what you want is inconsequential. After all, if you can’t have it anyway, why consider what you want? In the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® courses, participants learn the important skill of conceiving of what they want. At first they may not know what they want, but when they begin to consider the question, they have a basis for new experiences. Perhaps they cannot name what they really want at first. Experimenting with what they choose brings what they truly want into sharper focus. Most often, they are able to create the results they want by learning how the creative process works. Then they can better conceive of future results they want to create. After the direct experience of creating what they have chosen, these people know that what they want is not arbitrary. It is one of the most important factors in their lives as creators. The CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course has occasionally been conducted experimentally in high schools. Students are asked to list what they want. Usually they want results, such as jobs after school, boyfriends or girlfriends, guitars, motorcycles, cars, and even better grades and better relationships with their parents and teachers. Before they had taken this course, these students had been taught by parents and teachers that they cannot create what they want. They have had ample direct experiences of their inability to create. If you come into their classroom and try to convince them that they can create what they want in life, they’re more than eager to prove how wrong you are. No amount of propaganda would change their attitudes or their perception. Their perception is well-founded. If they have not had the experience of creating what they really want, why should they believe they can do this? In addition, they do not see many adults in their lives creating what they want. Often these are the same adults who are ready to give a pep talk at the drop of a moan. By the end of the CREATING YOUR LIFE ® course, these students know they have the ability to create because they have done it. There is absolutely no hype given to them. They are more than capable of making their own conclusions: \“Did you create the job?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the relationship?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the car?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create the motorcycle?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did you create a good relationship with your parents?\” \“Yes.\” \“Did your grades go up?\” \“Yes.\” After this kind of experience, these students have made two important discoveries: that they can create what they choose and that what they want is not inconsequential. If, at first, they want goals that are not ranked as among the highest in the history of the human race, so what? What they create is important to them—they love the creation enough to bring it into being. It is one thing to speculate about what someone else should want; it is quite another to bring into existence what you actually do want. The experience of creating has changed these students’ lives. If the specific result created was \“insignificant\” by the 
world’s standards, what was significant is the reality and power of the creative process. No longer do these young people have to spend their life in a compromise because they know no better. In fact, their real altruism is now more able to be expressed. Not by a sense of obligation to do good in the world, but out of an authentic desire—simply the love of the thing. Creation Expressing Itself There was a time when automobiles, telephones, television sets, solar reflectors, and space shuttles did not exist and were not even envisioned. There was a time when rock music, atonal music, or even classical music did not exist and were not even thought of. Two hundred years ago the fields of sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, paleontology, and nuclear physics did not exist. Today they do. During this last decade a technological revolution has changed the world in ways that were unimaginable twenty years ago. When composers create, they begin with a blank sheet of music manuscript paper. When artists paint, they begin with an empty canvas. It is sometimes difficult for us to think that something new can actually be created, something that did not exist before. I often hear people assert, \“There is really nothing new\” or \“Everything that is now created has been done before.\” I usually ask them if anything like Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, Op. 133, existed before he wrote it. Certainly the string quartet for whom Beethoven composed the fugue had never seen anything like it. In fact, they said that it was unplayable and impossible to listen to, with all of its \“random dissonances\” and extreme voice-crossings. So Beethoven withdrew the piece and, in place of it, provided the musicians with a tamer work. When the musicians first saw the Grosse Fugue, they thought old Beethoven had lost his stability, but Beethoven viewed his composition from a different perspective. 

\"I write this music for a future time,\” he said. 

Today, most string quartets include the Grosse Fugue in their standard repertoire. The arts and sciences are filled with example after example of new creations, works that never existed before they were created. However, many people still prefer to think there is really nothing new under the sun. Writer D. H. Lawrence believed this until, at the age of forty, he discovered how wrong he had been. I remember I used to assert, perhaps I even wrote it: Everything that can possibly be painted has been painted, every brushstroke that can possibly be laid on canvas has been laid on. The visual arts are at a dead end. Then suddenly, at the age of forty, I begin painting myself and am fascinated. By having a blank canvas, I discovered I could make a picture myself. That is the point, to make a picture on a blank canvas. And I was forty before I had the real courage to try. Then it became an orgy, making pictures. The discovery D. H. Lawrence describes is common in the orientation of the creative. What may have seemed dead suddenly has life. The Secret of the Creative Process A common mistake people make when first entering the orientation of the creative is to seek to \“find out\” what they want as if it were a deeply hidden treasure to be discovered and revealed. They are looking in the wrong direction. Creating what you want is not a revelatory process, nor is what you want something to be discovered. If not by revelation or discovery, then how do you derive the what in the question What do I want? The answer to this question is known, either rationally or intuitively, by those who are actively involved in creating.



made it up\” leave the interviewer dissatisfied, they make up a story of how they \“did it.\” But the fact is that Albert Einstein made up the theory of relativity, Marie Curie made up the theory of radiation, Thomas Edison made up the light bulb, Mary Cassatt made up the painting The Bath, Anton Webern made up the Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Emily Dickinson made up the poem \“Because I Could Not Stop for Death,\” Ilya Prigogine made up the theory of dissipative structures, Joni Mitchell made up the song \“Court and Spark,\” Harriet Tubman made up the \“underground railway,\” and the founders of the nation made up the United States of America. Even though it is common to focus only on the story of how a creation came to pass, it is important to realize that, no matter what these stories may be, the creator conceives of the creation at the moment of making things up. Composer Arnold Schoenberg was asked if he ever heard his music perfectly performed. He replied, \“Yes, when I first conceived it.\” As we view Hollywood’s movie version of how the great creators \“made up\” their creations, we may receive a false impression. In the film versions there is drama. There are high strings, tremolo, súl ponticello, in the background music. All the signs point to a mystery taking place. The protagonist, whether a young Tom Edison, as played by a young Mickey Rooney, or old Thomas Edison, played by a middle-aged Spencer Tracy, is facing an inner struggle. The tension mounts. The camera moves to close-up as the stationary figure thinks and thinks. Eureka! Inspiration strikes. Suddenly all is action. The figure is in motion. The music is animated. The audience has been privileged to witness the awe-inspiring moment as the dramatic tension reaches its climax. Oh, if life were only like the movies! Especially black-and-white movies from the forties. In real life, making it up is often less than dramatic. Many of the most inspired inventions were conceived without fanfare, drama, or inspiration (let alone background music). Drama is the exception, not the rule.


Even the scriptwriters of Thomas Edison’s film bios were working on their script between bites of corned beef sandwiches and sips of Coca-Cola. They were fabricating a fantasy world of which they were not a part. The creative process can look many different ways. Some of your best creations may come from the most normal experiences, and some of your worst may be the product of what seemed to be \“divine inspiration.\” There seems to be no relationship between the final worth of a result and the experiences the creator has while in the process of creating. Focus on the Result In the creative orientation the most powerful question you can ask yourself is, \“What do I want?\” At any time and in any situation—regardless of the circumstances—you can always ask and answer that question. The question, \“What do I want?\” is really a question about results. Perhaps a more precise way of asking that question is, \“What result do I want to create?\” The question, \“How do I get what I want?\” is a question about process, not result. As an initial question, it is quite limiting. If you ask the question, \“How do I get what I want?\” before you ask, \“What result do I want to create?\” you are limited to results that are directly related to what you already know how to do or can conceive of doing. In 1878, when Thomas Edison decided to create the electric light, it was already well known that electricity could produce light. The task before Edison was to find a material that would not bum out and instantly consume itself. He began by reading everything that had been written on the subject, and it is reported that he filled two hundred notebooks with jottings and diagrams. All the scientists before him had followed a certain process: They looked for substances that would reduce resistance to the electric current, but they had found none that would produce an electric light. Instead of following the same process and limiting himself to producing results he 
already knew about, Edison tried the opposite: He looked for substances that would increase resistance to the electric current. After testing countless resistant materials, he settled on a carbonized element and placed it in a vacuum bulb, thereby creating the familiar incandescent light bulb. By keeping his focus on the result he wanted to create—an electric light—Edison was able to focus the process toward a successful result. Frank Lloyd Wright was the creator of \“organic architecture.\” In designing a house, Wright first conceived of the result he wanted to create: for him, it was a sense of interior space for living. In his view a house was not simply a set of boxes within boxes, with rooms sealed off and connected to other rooms only by doors in partitions and dark halls, but primarily an entire space in which to live. With his focus on living space as the result he wanted, Wright was open to new possibilities in design, ones that had never occurred to most of his fellow architects, who were still designing houses by rearranging sets of boxes, the traditional process of architecture. In Wright’s house, for the first time, the kitchen became an attractive feature; living and dining area became unified; floor spaces became living spaces; terraces, balconies, and windows allowed the outside and inside of the house to flow into each other so that the outside was brought in and the inside was brought out. His floor-to-ceiling windows invited daylight to flood the interior, and low-pitched roofs with wide overhangs created a sense of spaciousness and organic interaction with nature. As Wright stayed focused on the results he wanted to create, the \“how\” of obtaining those results developed organically. He did not limit his concept or his process to standard procedures. Because he knew the result he wanted, he could invent processes that were uncommon and different from those of his contemporaries.


If you ask the \“how\” question before the \“what\” question, all you can ever hope to create are variations of what you already have. Artists have a clear sense of this need to focus on the result they want. Speaking to young writers, Gertrude Stein once said, \“You have to know what you want to get. But when you know that, let it take you. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.\” When the process comes first, the process itself will limit the actions you will be able to take and thereby limit the possibilities of what you can create. As the artist Chuck Close has said, \“You can give the same recipe to ten cooks, and some make it come alive, and some make a flat souffle. A system doesn’t guarantee anything.\” Pablo Picasso, as a mature artist speaking to young painters, encouraged them to conceive of new paintings rather than ones that followed the processes of the past. With the exception of some painters who are opening new horizons to painting, the youth of today do not know anymore where to go. Instead of taking up our researches in order to react sharply against us, they apply themselves to reanimating the past. Yet the world is open before us, everything is still to be done, and not to be done over again. Why hang on hopelessly to everything that has fulfilled its promise? There are kilometers of paintings in the manner of; but it is rare to see a young man working in his own way. Is there some notion abroad that man must repeat himself? To repeat is to go against the laws of the spirit, its forward motion. The Premature Process Premature focus on the process will limit and inhibit your effectiveness.


Our educational system does not focus on the results you as a student want in your life. Instead it promotes the notion that what you should learn is process. You should learn how to do mathematics and construct grammatical sentences. You should learn how to write research papers and do laboratory experiments in biology. You should learn how to draw, to speak in public, to read musical notation, perhaps even to write a poem or two. You should learn how to run a computer and a word processor, and you should learn some crafts skills in shop courses or some household skills in home economics courses. The assumption is that as you become fluent in these processes, the results you want in your life will take care of themselves. Consequently few educators ask students the question, \“What do you want in your life?\” True, for their first ten or twelve years, children are asked, \“What do you want to be when you grow up?\” But the children’s answers are usually discounted unless they happen to follow in the footsteps of one of the parents. Similarly, people often ask adolescents, \“What do you want to do when you get out of school?\” Usually, even though that question is asked, the young people have had no educational experience of the creative process. From their vantage point, the game of life appears to involve choosing from among uninteresting alternatives proposed by adults. In the educational system, aptitude is often substituted for vision. For many people, their doing well on certain aptitude tests in secondary school was a great tragedy, because traditional guidance counseling helps students find out what they might be good at and helps them design careers around their aptitude. Many people have mindlessly followed advice coming out of that mentality and become physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, nurses, and chemists, only to discover to their dismay, twenty or thirty years later, that they never really cared about what may now be the only field or profession

they know. A major part of their life was spent developing what they happened to have an aptitude for at age fifteen. I know several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who are bored being symphony musicians, yet their whole life revolves around the investment they have in staying where they are. One very great musician said to me, \“I don’t like playing in the symphony, but it’s all I know how to do.\” Organically Formed Processes In the creative orientation, when you answer the question \“What do I want to create?\” it is not clear whether what you want is possible. Yet throughout the history of the world many results have been created that seemed impossible at the time they were conceived. Before the creation of anesthesia, physicians were convinced that painless surgery was impossible. In 1839 Dr. Alfred Velpeau said, \“The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.\” Before the creation of the airplane, many scientists were convinced that flight was impossible. Simon Newcomb, a well-known astronomer, was convinced that he had logically proven this impossibility. He wrote, \“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.\” Ironically, Newcomb made this statement in 1903—the year the Wright brothers made their first flights at Kitty Hawk. Many scientists were convinced that the atom could not be split or an atomic bomb created. In speaking to President 
more \“right\” brain, becoming more affluent, etc., etc., etc., etc. This is a wonderful age we live in. So much is available. But often the criteria people use to determine which direction they should take are dictated by notions about process rather than concepts about results. In a conversation I had with a friend recently, she talked about \“the sacredness of process,\” and \“transcendental appreciation of one’s process.\” I could almost hear a choir of angels softly singing as she rhapsodized. This is such a foreign notion to a creator. When you create, process is functional. There is no dogma to adopt, no romance to maintain, no philosophy to uphold. Process is invented and designed to serve the result you desire. This is its only purpose. It is best to allow processes to form organically from within the vision of the result. It is unwise to limit the way a result can happen by any given process. At the time you conceive the result you want, the actual way you will bring it about is always unknown to you, even if you have a hunch about it." > tst.md
 2006  history
 2007  history > tst.sh
