Daily Quote, Thursday May 21, 2009.

Good sunny morning here in Halifax! :-)

Here are my reflections taking the quote as a starting point.

Under our traditional interpretive framework, we might look at the title of today's quote and see this as a some kind of comment that you or I have lost our creativity, so that it is also a temporary problem that will come back. But K is actually suggesting the being empty is the beginning and the sustaining of all creative action because all action must be originally creative all the time if it is not to be from the past. Ceativity is usually approached in terms of taking what is there and rearranging it so that it appears more interesting, dusted up to be appealing once more. Hence, the current idea of makeovers or remakes. However well they might be done to our critically comparative eyes, like the new Star Trek movie is for some people, they are not creative in the sense that K is referring to.

Can you think of any times when you've tried to be creative but in fact just re-wrapped the known in a different way? How often do you re-arrange the furniture in your house? We all get attached to the known, to the status quo, and we can tolerate some shift from that but we'll still try to cling to the basic elements of the know again and again. Meditation is to see that attachment. As we get older this gets harder and harder. We become a little more exhausted and a little more comfortable in the known. So a key question is how do we live intelligently as we get older, and what is the connection between intelligence and creativity as K uses these terms?

Creatively empty.

What is important, surely, is for you to find out. And, to find out, your mind must be in a state of creative experience, must it not? Your mind must be capable of discovering, which means it must be completely free from all knowledge as to whether there is an ultimate reality or only a series of ever more extensive and significant experiences. But, your mind is crammed with knowledge and information, with experience, with memories; and with that mind you try to find out. Surely, it is only when the mind is creatively empty that it is capable of finding out whether there is an ultimate reality or not. But, the mind is never creatively empty; it is always acquiring, always gathering, living on the past or in the future, or trying to be focused in the immediate present: it is never in that state of creativeness in which a new thing can take place. As the mind is a result of time, it cannot possibly understand that which is timeless, eternal.

So, our job is to inquire not if there is an ultimate reality, but whether the mind can ever be free from time, which is memory - from this process of accumulation, the gathering of experiences, living on the past or in the future - that is, can the mind be still? Stillness is not the outcome of discipline, of control. There is stillness only when the mind is silently aware of this whole complex problem, and it is such a mind that can understand if there is an ultimate reality or not.

Collected Works, Vol. VII - 31