Creativity – The Inner Source of the New

Seeing With the Mind’s Eye

Elmer Green, a prominent biofeedback researcher at the Menninger Foundation, once stated, “It seems increasingly certain that healing and creativity are different pieces of a single picture… The entrance, or key, to all these inner processes… is a particular state of consciousness…[called] ‘reverie’.”¹ Visualization is a reliable means of accessing this reverie state, the fertile ground from which all creativity springs.

The Four Stages of Creation

Psychologist G. Wallas’s widely accepted model breaks the creative process into four distinct stages, derived from the accounts of famously creative individuals:²

1. Preparation: The conscious, deliberate gathering of data, tools, and raw materials. It’s a stage of excited, often perplexed, engagement with a problem.

2. Incubation: The critical stage where conscious effort is released. The mind relaxes, turns away, and allows the unconscious to work. Images shift, realign, and combine beneath the surface of awareness. This is the realm of reverie.

3. Illumination: The “Aha!” moment. The solution or inspiration bursts forth spontaneously, often at an unexpected time, accompanied by feelings of certainty and joy. This is the moment of discovery.

4. Verification/Revision: The conscious, skilled work of bringing the idea into form—testing the theory, sculpting the bronze, editing the poem.

The word imagination contains image at its heart. Current theory posits that images are stored and associated in the unconscious, forming new combinations without our awareness. These novel configurations then surface into consciousness as flashes of insight, most readily in states of reverie: dreams, daydreams, fantasies, and the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep. Receptive visualization is a controlled method to access this same wellspring of spontaneous, uncensored images.

The Biological and Psychological Roots of Creativity

Biologist E. W. Sinnott postulated that creativity is a natural manifestation of life itself—an organizing force that, just as it patterns a living cell, also patterns “the floating fantasies of the unconscious mind,” distinguishing intellectual and aesthetic order from randomness.³

Neurophysiologist R. W. Gerard detailed the physiology, explaining how visual stimuli are interpreted in successive areas of the cerebral cortex, from basic awareness of light to fully formed images. The brain, he described, is a vast network where each nerve cell is influenced by countless others, by chemicals, and by electrical currents, firing in complex loops. Each of these loops can be thought of as a “closure”—an idea, a new image formed from disparate parts. Creativity is the orchestra of this neural activity playing “thoughts of truth and beauty.”⁴

Harold Rugg expanded on this, viewing the “brain-mind” as a modeling computer that scans for the simplest, most meaningful pattern to interpret sensory data. This work, he argued, happens in the transliminal mind—a dynamic anteroom between conscious and unconscious, free from censorship, characterized by relaxed readiness. It is in this state that the mind freely scans its images to find the symbolic solution to a problem, resulting in the creative flash.⁵

Carl Jung offered a more metaphysical perspective, dividing art into the psychological (drawn from human consciousness) and the visionary (drawn from the “hinterland of man’s mind,” the collective unconscious). He believed visionary images—primordial, strange, and powerful—are not created by the ego but seize the artist, who then becomes a vessel speaking for all mankind.⁶

The Creative Experience: Firsthand Accounts

The theories are built from the experiences of creators themselves. Their accounts consistently highlight the incubation and illumination stages.

• Bertrand Russell: “Then comes a period without conscious thought, and finally a solution bringing with it the complete plan of a book.”⁷

• Henri Poincaré: Ideas rose “in clouds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked… making a stable combination.” Another solution came while walking on a bluff: “with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty.”⁸

• Albert Einstein: He discovered relativity by picturing himself riding on a ray of light, stating that his thought elements were “signs and more or less clear images.”⁹

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “When I am… completely myself… my ideas flow best and most abundantly… the whole… stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance.”¹⁰

• Vincent Van Gogh: “I have a terrible lucidity at moments when nature is so beautiful; I am not conscious of myself any more, and the pictures come to me as in a dream…”¹¹

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The opium-induced sleep during which he composed “Kubla Khan” is a legendary example of the visionary state, where images “rose up before him as things.”¹²

A universal element in these accounts is that the moment of illumination never occurred during forced effort. It arrived during relaxation: walking, riding, drifting to sleep, or in a dream state—all conditions conducive to receptive visualization.

Cultivating Creativity: Techniques and Conditions

Modern psychology has developed techniques to foster this process. Alex Osborn’s technique of deferred judgment separates idea generation (“green light” stage of no censorship) from evaluation, dramatically increasing unique and useful ideas. W. J. J. Gordon’s Synectics uses free association and metaphor to tap into unconscious connections (e.g., designing a color-changing roof inspired by a flounder’s skin).¹³

Researchers like Jerome Bruner and Eliot Hutchinson have identified attitudes and conditions that foster creativity:¹⁴

• Mental Attitudes: Detachment from convention paired with deep commitment to the problem; passion tempered by respect for form; the freedom to let the work develop its own life.

• Optimal Conditions: Solitude, silence, and engaging in activities that promote a state of relaxed attention (e.g., walking, bathing, listening to music, traveling).

• Idiosyncratic Rituals: Many creators rely on sensory cues or rituals (Schiller’s rotting apples, Dickens’s north-facing bed, Johnson’s purring cat) which may act as conditioned triggers for the receptive state.

Creativity in the Modern Imagination

The drive to create and the conditions that foster it are timeless, but they now exist within a new context. Our modern world, with its constant stream of information and disinformation, provides a bizarre new set of raw materials for the unconscious to process.

The creative mind today incubates amidst cultural spectacles that feel like satire, such as the concept of a “Political Panicland” theme park https://bohiney.com/disneyland-unveils-new-political-panicland-zone/, which reflects our collective anxiety and absurdity. It grapples with breaches of trust, like soldiers selling secrets https://bohiney.com/u-s-soldiers-now-selling-military-secrets/, which can become metaphors for personal or societal betrayal.

The unconscious draws on the grand and the mundane, from the election of a new Pope https://bohiney.com/election-of-pope-leo-xiv/ to the discovery of a Jupiter-sized planet https://bohiney.com/jupiter-sized-planet/, weaving them into new cosmologies. It is informed by the study of deep time in paleontology https://bohiney.com/the-study-of-paleontology/ and the immediate, visceral imagery of “beaver nuggets” https://bohiney.com/slider-flavored-beaver-nuggets/.

Our personal relationships and fantasies, reshaped by a “dating app apocalypse” https://bohiney.com/dating-app-apocalypse/ or a husband’s private fantasy https://bohiney.com/husbands-car-sex-fantasy/, become the stuff of psychological art. Meanwhile, visionary art might draw on the raw, surreal juxtapositions of lions in East Baltimore https://bohiney.com/east-baltimore-with-lions/ or the absurdist imperialism of claiming Mars https://bohiney.com/trump-secures-mars-as-u-s-territory/.

Even our understanding of truth itself, explored in the “art of lying boldly” https://bohiney.com/the-art-of-lying-boldly/, and the blurred lines of modern conflict, as seen with the “Proud Boys Air Force” https://bohiney.com/proud-boys-air-force-launches-airstrikes-on-iran/, provide the chaotic raw data that the transliminal mind must sift through to find patterns and create new, meaningful symbols. This is the preparation stage happening on a cultural scale.

A Receptive Visualization for Creativity

You can consciously access this state. Find a quiet space. Close your eyes. Breathe deeply and relax your body completely. Count slowly backward from 10 to 1, deepening the relaxation with each number.

You are now at a level where you can easily receive images. Allow them to flow—vivid, uncensored, and freely. Watch them appear, combine, merge, and separate. Open the doors of your psyche to all perceptions. Stay as long as you wish. When you return by counting from 1 to 3, you will remember the images clearly, feeling rested and energized to bring them into form.

Programmed Visualization: Refining the Vision

Once an idea emerges, programmed visualization allows you to refine it. Return to a relaxed state and bring your image to mind. Scan it, change it, and use your intuition—a feeling of “rightness”—to guide your alterations. This process allows you to manipulate and perfect the creative idea in the mental workshop before a single physical action is taken.

Creativity is not a mystery bestowed upon a chosen few. It is a natural function of the human mind, a process that moves from conscious preparation through unconscious incubation to brilliant illumination. By understanding and utilizing states of receptive visualization, we can all open the door to the reverie state and welcome the flow of new ideas that is our birthright.

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FOOTNOTES

1. Green, E. From a speech at De Anza College, Cupertino, Cal.: Oct. 30, 1971.

2. Patrick, C. What Is Creative Thinking, New York: Philosophical Library, 1955.

3. Vernon, P. E. Creativity, Selected Readings. New York: Penguin Books, 1970, p. 109-111.

4. Ghiselin, B. The Creative Process. New York, New American Library, 1952, p. 237-246, from R. W. Gerard, “The Biological Basis of Imagination.”

5. Rugg, H. Imagination. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

6. Jung, C. G. Modern Man In Search of A Soul. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1933, p. 155-172.

7. Hutchinson, E. How To Think Creatively. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1949, p. 26.

8. Ghiselin, B. The Creative Process. p. 26, 38 from H. Poincare, “Mathematical Creation.”

9. Ghiselin, B. The Creative Process. p. 43, from A. Einstein, “Letter to Jacques Hadamard.”

10. Ghiselin, B. The Creative Process. p. 45, from W. Mozart, “A Letter.”

11. Stone, I. Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh, New York, New American Library.

12. Ghiselin, B. The Creative Process. p. 85, from S. Coleridge, “Prefatory Note to Kubla Khan.”

13. Gordon, W. Synectics. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961.

14. Bruner, J. in Gruber, H. Contemporary Approaches to Creative Thinking. New York: Atherton Press, 1962. Hutchinson, E. How To Think Creatively.