Transcendence and the Nature of Creativity

Transcendence and the Nature of Creativity

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  The new knowledge is always tied to already existing knowledge.
  

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  Creative transformations are tied to past history or environment of the creative problem solver, which become the sole possible sources of knowledge and information.
  

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  Creativity becomes limited to the “relational” sort of creativity in which the individual may create the relationships connecting remote semantic domains or elements but does not create the elements themselves which already exist in the form of past experience, learning and knowledge (Mednick. 1962).
  

In the common parlance of contemporary cognitive psychology, creative solutions must be not only novel, but also be useful (Sternberg, 1999). Ordinary creative solutions are expected to involve a preservation of the information that the individual or the species has accumulated which has proved safe, dependable, and worthwhile. Questions of adequacy, safety, dependability, and workability constrain the expansions of capacity that are acceptable. Creativity is viewed as some rational-semantic factor of the intellect examined within a problem-solving context and thus becomes tied to practical concerns (Guilford, 1967). Transcendence as surpassing of normal capacity. Transcendence in the sense of exceeding, rising above, or going beyond normal capacity means that Transcendence implies truly “alternate” frames of reference and experience different than the framework of perception and personality action ordinarily operative during ego-directed awareness and waking work-a-day concerns. In this context, dreams and other altered focuses of consciousness are viewed as one of the species’ creative abilities that are an important source of truly inspired transcendent thinking. There is always some extra-rational dimension involved in a “transcendental insight” that carries an ordinary idea or stream of associative thinking outside reason’s limiting assumptions, and beyond the boundaries of established fact.

Transcendence is always connected to life’s meaning. Suddenly seeming coincidences become important and significant and tied to a framework where actions and events are not simply accidental but are meaningful in the greater scheme of the universe in which we have our being. Distinguishing the two forms of transcendence: A bird’s-eye view. To employ the metaphor of airplane flying, it is as if, rather than remaining earth-bound and extending normal capacity from the baseline of normal waking consciousness and usual ability functioning where perceptual objects, cognitive beliefs, and the ground-level perspective of the world remain as they are, instead you were to move up and above by airplane over the earth. Everything remains as it is, yet changes in some crucial way, when seen from the altered focus and direction of a bird’s-eye point of view. An entirely new frame of reference with its own “perspective” is involved, organizing the perceptual field in a different manner so that everything is different. The same world gives rise to a whole different body of data, with its own hypotheses and evidences depending on your worldview. Like trying to understand that the world is round while maintaining a deep-seated conviction that the world is flat, the challenge for transpersonal psychology is trying to figure out how to correlate point-for-point the transcended worldview and the immanent worldview. When creative behavior and experience is transcendent in practical terms. The species’ innate primary creative impulse toward originality that underlies transcendence (in the sense of surpassing) of normal capacities is given practical expression whenever we Perform in some new way not done before. Bring into physical existence something that did not exist before. Search for something never before found. Try some new venture never before attempted. Perceive reality in a completely new way. Go beyond previous learning and accomplishment. Look outside established frameworks. Give birth to the new and untried. Open up avenues of choice previously denied. Open up channels of awareness previously overlooked or ignored.