Cultural Creative Thinker

I am insane. I am at times difficult to handle. I don't make friends easily. I prefer to do things on my own. I observe things and people very closely. I have sharp senses. I don't always follow the rules. I love silence and the dark. I am not different or weird - although if I am either one of those, it really is an honour because I don't want to be like the other mass produced humans on the planet; we do have 7 billion and counting, now. - I am just ME. All those qualities I have noticed are the qualities of creative people. I am a CREATIVE person.

Creativity is generally referred to a person having an original thought, who is not shy of breaking the bounds of normal societal behaviour or process of thinking and comes out with something totally different. Creative people in essence, create. They do things which normal people can't do or do not do. That is what makes them stand out. Any person can be creative, but if they don't use their talent and mind, they are just normal and won't get far in life.

When I say I don't follow the rules sometimes, I do actually mean that sometimes I bend the rules and I test the boundaries. There is no fun in being normal and boring is it? There is no joy in leading a monotonous life and doing the same things over and over again. This is why people have hobbies. So they have an escape from their daily monotony. Creative people take it one step further and turn their hobbies or one of their hobbies, in to what they do professionally. This way they always enjoy what they do and in the process make money as well.

Urban dictionary has a very interesting meaning of the word creative listed and I bet, the person that actually made that entry was a creative individual.

"A quality that most people don't have. Being creative means you have the ability to think up many different types of art."

There are two schools of thought on creativity. One school of thought says that creativity is a quality, which is inherited and passed down generations. The other school of thought says that any one can be creative; we just have to use our talent and mind. In either case, it is apparent that not all people are creative. If that was the case, we would not have people running after paintings of Picasso or Leonardo da Vinci and they wouldn't be sold for exuberant amounts of money.

There are three kinds of people; the creative ones, the ones that are on the brink of being creative, but are unable to do what they want due to many factors and then there are the people who are the enemies of creativity; the people that solely rely on logic. These are the people that think and breathe logic and they think creativity is not up to their level and standard. These are the people that will try to think of everything in the logical perspective and if something doesn't fit in to their pre-thought up logical box in their minds, would not understand it. Not to say we don't need logical people in the world, they are needed in their own disciplines and do excel, but world runs on a balance; balance of the creatives and the logics. 

As time progresses and people get more educated, they start to think differently about the ideologies already explored. The idea of creativity is not new, but it has developed over the years, as so has a lot of other thoughts and ideas. Due to the fact that we now have the internet from quite some time and it has allowed platforms in social media to rise up and link people from different parts of the world together and enabled them to network and exchange ideas. It has not only allowed people from different parts of the world to talk to one another and exchange ideas, but it has also allowed cultures to intermix. People, who were contained to one particular culture before, are finding out about other cultures in different parts of the world and being influenced by it.

This is a very important aspect of creativity, because as the human mind begins to learn and educate it about new ideas and cultural practices and traditions, it begins to like and adopt some of those and then that starts showing in terms of how creative the mind becomes. It starts to think differently and starts to 'create' or form 'new' ideas about certain things, which it might not have thought about before. For example, the traditional Belly Dance of the Arab culture, made its way to the Far East, Asia and the West and people have adopted this type of dance in their culture too. Certain scholars agree with me and that is why they have thought creatively and formed a theory based on my idea about relating culture to creativity. The two scholars Roy and Anderson have given this theory the name, 'Cultural Creativity'.

Roy and Anderson divide 'Cultural Creativity' in to two parts.

  • Core Cultural Creatives
  • Green Cultural Creatives

The Core Cultural Creatives include the intellectuals and the thinkers; the ones who don't shy away from thinking boldly and differently. The people who essentially 'inspire'. These are the people who are the front runners when it comes to creativity. They are the ones who set the benchmark in their creative fields. For example, people like Beethoven, who was a Music Maestro and people like Leonardo da Vinci, who was not only a great painter, but he was a thinker and also an inventor. Not only are the people in the fields of Music and Art included when it comes to Core Cultural Thinkers/Creatives, but also people who actively participate in Social Activism. Who think up of new ideas and want to contribute to society and get rid of its evils. People who write for example and whose works are the ones referred to, by other people.

The Green Cultural Creatives are the people that ‘aspire’ to be like the people that belong to the core group of Creatives; people who get inspired by the leading edge thinkers and geniuses and follow in their footsteps. These kinds of people tend to have an orthodox and conservative outlook to life and the world and they don’t think much. Green Cultural Creatives is a group which has those people, that find a role model that belongs to the Core group and start getting influenced by their ideas and eventually, they start to think so much, that some of them develop new ideas of their own and get included in the Core group.

Carl Jung was a psychiatrist working in a hospital in Switzerland and just 30 years of age, when he sent a paper he wrote on a topic related to Psychology to Sigmund Freud, a very renowned Neurologist of his time, who was interested in psychoanalysis and other aspects of Psychology. People looked up to Sigmund Freud and his analysis; they studied his theories in medical universities in the greater part of Europe. Carl Jung was inspired by Sigmund Freud; hence he sent him his paper. The two formed a bond of six years long and collaborated on various theories of Psychology together, which also includes the Psychosexual Theory.

However the problem arose when Jung was bold enough to not be blindly convinced by Freud and started to think on his own about the subject matter. He formed his own thoughts and opinions; which lead to different theories being formed on the same issue by him. He no longer agreed with Freud on this one particular thing and thought that his theory was correct and disqualified Freud’s theory. This led to the savaging of the bond between the two men. Nevertheless Freud was a big influence on Jung’s mind and it was him that pushed Jung to think differently and creatively.

Jung was part of the group that we today would call the Green Cultural Creatives and got influenced by Freud who was part of the Core Creatives. He made his way from the Green Cultural group, to the Core group by thinking differently. So much so that today, Jung is a world renowned Psychiatrist and his works are referred to a lot. He is the founder of Analytical Psychology, is one of the best known researchers in the fields of Dream Analysis and Symbolization. Also, many Psychological concepts have been first introduced by Jung.

There is this great quote of Carl Jung on the subject of creativity:

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."

This quote suggests that we do not just think up of something creative on our own, but we are influenced by our surroundings and also the things we love. I would go one step forward and add to this by saying, not only things we love, but people we love. All throughout history, we have come to known some spectacular show of creativity from people; we have seen music pieces, works of art and even breathtaking spectacles of architecture. Not only that, we have read great literature from poets and authors, who were all influenced by something or the other that they loved.

Love is a strong emotion and so is the opposite of love; sorrow. Many people think that the opposite of love is hate, but for me, the opposite of love is sorrow. When people don’t have love in their lives, in any kind or way, they are sad. The absence of love does not cause hate, but sorrow and it is sorrow which forces people to think differently. Also, hate in a way is derived from sorrow and sadness. When people are sad and full of sorrow, they start to think negatively and that is when hate develops. So in my view, the opposite of hatred would be happiness and the opposite of love is sadness/sorrow. Both love and sorrow are such strong emotions that they cause people to think differently. People get inspired by both these emotions. These two emotions have lead to the rise of many famous poets, authors, artists, singers/musicians and influenced people in one way or the other.

Be a cultural creative thinker and be inspired to do something creative and different. I myself have written poems at many instances, whether they were happy poems or they were poems of sadness with serious undertones, the point is it lead to the creation of something original and new. That is the whole point of being creative and thinking creatively isn’t it? People like Leonardo da Vinci were so inspired by their muses that they painted them and their paintings became so famous after their deaths. Paintings like ‘The Mona Lisa’. The Mughal Emperor was so passionately in love, that when his wife died he was grief stricken and that forced him to think of the idea of the Taj Mahal, which is now today a symbol of everlasting love in a lot of peoples’ minds.

Monotony is an essential evil in today’s society. We lead such organized and planned lives, that we don’t have time for anything else. Life should be balanced and we should have time for ourselves too. Go out in the world and do something different. Be inspired by something or someone that you see and/or like and follow them. Budge from your routine and change it a bit. Think creatively and do something that you never dared before. Do not let your mind think logically and give you the excuse of ‘NO TIME’. Do not be part of the billions that follow other people. Be a creative thinker and give yourself a position in the category of the people that lead. Go ahead, break free.

Comments

  1. That's such an interesting piece - thank you for sharing it. I wrote my first book for Cultural Creatives everywhere - it was actually endorsed by Paul Ray himself!

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  2. One of the most beautiful things I have ever read. "Go ahead, break free." This simply sums up the whole thing perfectly! Loved it. Keep writing!! :)

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  3. Wow Eleanor, I am so honoured that you commented. Thank you for saying it is interesting! :) Zeeshan, thank you so much.

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