Tag Archives: creativity

Imagination

Posted on by David Lawrence Preston
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Imagination is the faculty by which we formulate ideas about things that are not present or have not been directly experienced. It is how we innovate: everything ever created first had to be imagined.

A good imagination is not just the preserve of children, storytellers and artists, it is available to everyone.

Imagination involves all five senses. We imagine by means of pictures, sounds, touch, taste and smell, or a combination. The more vivid and lasting these thought-images and sense-impressions, the more powerful they are.

Imagination can be used for good or ill. When we use our imagination wisely, it is a vehicle for positive change. It can begin the process by which better things become reality, or it can lead us in the opposite direction.

Contemplate yourself in the conditions you wish to create in your life. Do it often. There are always better things ahead for those who focus their minds on a bright future.

Two types of imagination

There are two forms of imagination. The first rearranges existing ideas, concepts and memories into new combinations. We can bring the past to mind in any combination of the five senses, but are not creating anything new. We can also imagine how things might have turned out if things had been different.

The second is creative. It envisages things that never existed (past, present or future). Try this: close your eyes. Imagine an elephant. ‘See’ it as clearly as you can. If you are able to do this, the first type of imagination is engaged.

Now imagine a pink elephant wearing a tuxedo. How clearly can you ‘see’ it? If you are able to do this, your creative imagination is at work since there is not and never can be a real pink elephant, let alone one dressed this way.

Awaken your imagination

  • Tell stories, the more far-fetched the better. Picture these events in your mind’s eye.
  • Take an everyday object and ask yourself how it could be improved. Imagine it made shorter, longer, thicker, lighter, heavier, or was packaged differently or grouped with something else.
  • Use cartoons or mind maps rather than lists. Make them colourful and inventive.
  • Imagine how you might make your home or workplace more pleasant, your work more fun, useful and productive.

Envision your future – a powerful exercise

Take a few moments to relax and envisage the perfect life for yourself:

  • Create a mental screen inside your forehead, just above eye level.
  • Project onto it images of your perfect life. Imagine being what you aspire to be, your dreams becoming reality and bringing you happiness.
  • Experience it with all your senses. ‘Hear’ the sounds and ‘sense’ the feelings and atmospheres. What are you doing? Who’s with you? How do you feel? What do you smell and taste?

If any limiting thoughts or images creep in, let them go. If they refuse to go away, acknowledge them, terminate the session and return to it five or ten minutes later.

 *****

Improving your creative imagination cannot help but have a transformational effect on your life!

 

©David Lawrence Preston, 11.12.2016

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The Superconscious

Posted on by David Lawrence Preston
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The human mind has powers far greater than those most of us imagine. That’s because it extends beyond our physical boundaries into the energy field that surrounds us, connecting us with other minds and linking with the information fields that control the universe.

Among the amazing capabilities of the mind are its ability to:

  • Seemingly pluck ideas out of the air
  • ‘Know’ something without any concrete evidence
  • Solve complicated problems without any specialist training, including in our sleep
  • Send and receive messages from others, and
  • Recall events and circumstances apparently from past lives.

All these are functions of what is often called the Superconscious Mind. We are part of a limitless source of knowledge and inspiration that extends beyond the physical brain and limitations of the five senses. It includes everything that existed in the past, exists in the present and will exist in the future, if indeed the terms ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ have any meaning in the quantum world.

Superconscious inspiration and insight have been available to us since the day we were born. Listen carefully. Every moment, the universe offers you spiritual guidance that you would be unwise to ignore.

The Superconscious challenges scientific analysis

Superconscious insight is often dismissed as bogus by neuroscientists because it cannot be explained by current scientific understanding of the workings of the brain alone. However, the evidence is overwhelming. For instance, Uri Geller is only one of many psychics to be investigated under rigorous conditions and has repeatedly proved his ability to communicate telepathically over huge distances. Nevertheless because the investigators have found no physical explanation, he is frequently portrayed as a trickster.

Superconscious abilities

We are a long way from understanding all the powers of the Superconscious, but we do know that they include the following:

  • An ability to ‘know’ and to ‘connect’ that does not rely on past learning.
  • Intuitive insight and decision making.
  • Heightened creativity and inspiration.
  • The ability to stand back and observe, reflect and detach from our thoughts and emotions.
  • Telepathy – the ability to communicate unaided at a distance.
  • Synchronicity – the ability to perceive, interpret and be guided by linked events and coincidences.

How do you make use of your Superconscious?

Think about it:

  • Do you instinctively know when something is going to work or not?
  • Have you ever felt an overwhelming urge to do something without being able to justify it logically? Did you follow it? What happened?
  • Have you ever backed away from a course of action that seemed logical at the time, only to discover later that it would have spelled disaster? What happened? How did you feel?
  • Do you ever wake up with a good idea, or the answer to a problem that has been bothering you?
  • Have you ever had a ‘psychic’ experience? What happened?
  • Do you ever feel that life is trying to steer you? In what way?

Trust your Superconscious

Surveys reveal that more than half of us believe in tarot cards and palmistry, and nearly half in mind reading. Sales of pendulums, dowsing rods, crystals and other New Age paraphernalia have rocketed in recent years. There is nothing wrong with any of this, as long as we remember that the props themselves are unimportant. They are merely tools which help some of us access our Superconscious.

Seek help from professional psychics if you must, but don’t hand responsibility for your life over to them. Instead, develop your own Superconscious abilities. When you place your trust in them, they never let you down. Our Superconscious abilities are a natural part of us. The more we use them, the more reliable they become.

 

©David Lawrence Preston, 11.12.2016

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Creativity and intuitive ideas

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 ‘Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to look after them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.’

John Steinbeck

There are many ways of generate creative ideas. The first uses the mind as an information and data processing device, reacting to the environment to create new associations, connections and solutions. The others use the deeper parts of the mind as a source of inspiration and ideas.

Here are some ways of coming up with creative ideas by accessing your inherent intuitive capabilities:

1. The stimulus-response method

Place yourself in a sensory-rich environment – one which stimulates and arouses the senses. For isntance, mix with lively people; they spark off new ideas. When stimuli act on the senses, they set off a chain reaction in which each thought sparks off new ideas.

For example, what do you do if you’re stuck for something to buy your mother for her birthday? You could tackle it in a logical way: make a list of the things she likes, cross off the items you know she already has, whittle it down to two or three, and then go to the shops. The chances are, though, your range of items would be rather limited.

Alternatively:

  • Wander through your local shopping centre, looking in shop windows and visit her favourite shops.
  • Ask Dad for his ideas.
  • Think about what other people of her age with her interests enjoy.
  • Browse the internet and look through home-shopping catalogues, newspapers and magazines.
  • Recall what gave her the most pleasure when you were a child.

One idea may lead to another and you’ll eventually find something suitable, maybe something you would never have thought of otherwise.

The stimulus-response method works best if you put yourself in a child-like frame of mind and free yourself from rational, adult thinking. Fun and laughter stimulate the brain to come up with new ideas.

2. Ask your Superconscious

Ask your Superconscious for help. Relax mind and body into the Alpha State and focus on a specific question. Be patient; your mind will carry on working on it even when you’ve turned your attention to other things.

3. Sitting for Ideas

Allow an hour for this method. Go to a quiet place. Dim the lighting. Have a notebook and pen ready. Then relax your body and sit patiently, ask a question and wait for the answer to pop into your head. Jot down any ideas that come before you leave the room.

Some of the greatest minds have this and used it to the full. Thomas Edison, for instance, used to sit in a chair clutching as small object. When he was so relaxed that the object fell from his hands, he asked his inner self a question and waited. He claimed the method was virtually foolproof. He remarked, ‘When you become quiet, it just dawns on you.’

In similar vein, when they were stuck for ideas Albert Einstein often sat staring at the clouds and eccentric artist Salvador Dali relaxed on his chaise-longue clutching a spoon. The biochemist, August Kekule, claimed to have discovered the structure of the benzene ring whilst nodding off in front of his fire.

4. Sleeping on it

There’s plenty of evidence that the sleeping mind solves problems more efficiently than the waking mind. To use your problem solving ability this way, write down your problem, read through it just before you go to sleep, and ask your Superconscious to work on it. Keep a pen and pad at your bedside: you may find the answer comes to you during the night.

However, you don’t have to wait until nightfall or put aside special relaxation time to tap into your intuitive mind. Many good ideas may come when you’re walking in the country, relaxing in the garden or lying on a beach. While your conscious mind is idling, your unconscious is busy. Carry a small notebook with you so you can record any precious gems.

5. Tune In!

These and many other examples suggest that there is a deeper level of wisdom which we can access when we quieten the conscious mind by stilling the thoughts. Imagine it as a TV station transmitting 24 hours a day. If you switched on your TV and all you got was a blank picture, would you immediately blame the TV station? No, first you would you check your set and check it’s properly tuned in. Intuition is much the same. Plug in, switch on and listen. Then act upon it.

In truth, what marks out the most creative people is not so much the ideas they come up with but what they do with them. Have you ever had an idea for a product, story, service, play or film etc. and failed to act on it, only for someone else to launch it and make a fortune? Do you ever look at something someone else has produced and think, ‘I could have done/made/written that!’?

What’s the difference? Simple: they trusted their intuition and acted on it – you didn’t!

 

©David Lawrence Preston, 28.7.2016

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How using the right brain makes you more creative

Posted on by David Lawrence Preston
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In the past, intelligence was seen as something inherited in fixed amounts which couldn’t be altered. Some people were thought to be more creative than others because they were born with special talents.

Nowadays, we know that the brain has two parts, a left and right hemisphere, each with its own special functions. This discovery thirty years ago changed the entire foundation of psychology, neurology and education.

In broad terms, left brain activity is related to thinking (the ‘cognitive’ domain) and right brain activity to intuition, emotion and creativity (the ‘affective’ domain). To develop creativity, therefore, we must make more use and better use of the right brain. Then we tap into the same resource that great men and women down the ages used to fashion great works of art, music and sculpture and major scientific discoveries.

Most people have a tendency to favour one hemisphere or the other, but for many activities we rapidly alternate between the two.

Some activities are predominantly left brain based: reading, speaking, calculating, computer programming etc. Others mainly utilise the right brain, for example, drawing, playing music, dancing, and long-term memory. The creation of new ideas is a right brain function; evaluating and developing these ideas is a left brain task. Sometimes (e.g. creative writing) the use of left and right brain switches so quickly that it is impossible to tell which is being used.

When both sides are working together and contributing equally, the brain performs at its optimum level.

Are you more left brained or right brained?

Do you tend to prefer to think logically, take things one at a time, step by step, analyse, calculate and use words?

Or do you process things more emotionally, think in pictures, use colour, ‘feel’ and daydream?

Or both equally?

You can develop both sides of your brain

Long ago, Professor Robert Ornstein of the University of California discovered that people who had been educated to predominantly use one side of the brain had great difficulty in using the other. He also discovered that when the unused side of the brain was stimulated, the result was a vast increase in the overall ability of a person – in the region of five to ten times.

To improve your creative mind-power, therefore, first find out which side of your brain is under-used, then concentrate on developing that side.

For many of us the right is the weaker. This is because our schooling encourages us to make more use of the left brain. Politicians stress the importance of the ‘3 R’s’ – reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. We are encouraged to think about the world in words and numbers. Art, music, dance and more imaginative pursuits are pushed to the periphery.

The balanced use of left and right brain can help you to:

  • Become more creative
  • Learn more quickly
  • Improve your memory
  • Solve problems faster
  • Improve communication
  • Be more intuitive
  • Understand body language

Many of the great artists and inventors had the ability to utilise both sides equally. They appeared to tap into a source of inspiration beyond their contemporaries. What were they tuning in to? Some psychologists believe it is their own unconscious minds; others that it is the Collective Unconscious of all humankind; still others that it was some form of Universal Consciousness.

Whatever it was, it is something to which we all have access through the right brain. However, we usually receive only the germ of an idea from there and must use our more structured left to develop it. The right hemisphere is a rich source of inner wisdom but you have to trust it. It’s a quiet voice, a subtle feeling. Tune in. It’s like having a wise being inside you, always on hand to offer guidance and support.

Get started! If you are predominantly left-brained spend more time on activities which utilise the right brain. Try to avoid analytical or calculating thoughts. Allow yourself to daydream. After one month, review your progress. What difference has this made to your life?

©David Lawrence Preston, 7.4.2016

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