When we last discussed creativity, the focus was on the difference between the creative mind and the ordering mind and how the creative mindset eschews structure and barriers in favour of openness to making mental connections, and how the ordering mindset does just the opposite.

This time, I’d like to focus in on one particular aspect of this openness : being open to surprises coming from your own mind. Being open, in other words, to inspiration.

A creative person must be open to inspiration. That sounds obvious, but being open to inspiration involves a great deal more that just keeping an open mind or not consciously rejecting inspiration. It is my belief that maintaining openness to inspiration requires a fundamental structuring of the psyche around creativity that has an effect on every aspect of the mind and personality.

To begin with, we need to take a look at what, exactly, creativity is as a subjective experience of the mind. Roughly defined, it is the sudden bursting into consciousness of the results of a deep subconscious process of searching for connections or solutions to problems. This requires a characteristic inner stillness, a zone of withdrawal from the immediate, sensory world into the inner world, and most importantly, a key opening of the gates between the conscious and the subconscious minds to allow the creative spark of imagination to jump that gap and turn a subconscious notion into a conscious idea.

This stillness, this inner reserve, requires the creative individual to reserve a portion of their consciousness for creativity. This accounts for the oft observed connection between creativity and introversion. If all your mental horsepower is tied up in the immediate, the sensory, the broadly interpersonal, there is little room left for the contemplation and inner correlation that is the basis for creativity. You are therefore more likely the find high levels of creativity in people who are somewhat withdrawn and reserved. They are not necessarily anti-social. They simply don’t have the same sort of mental resources to devote to the here and now, and must make different choices based on that lack.

To a highly ordered and ordering mind, however, this stillness is anathema. On the surface, it seems like mere idleness, or worse, daydreaming. Why sit around “doing nothing”, thinks the ordering mind, when there are so many things that need doing in the immediate sensory word? It seems insane to sit and wait for some mysterious force known as “inspiration” when you could be dealing with real, concrete, known things and reaping tangible rewards.

But even worse, to the ordering mindset, than the idea of the sort of apparent idleness that the creative mind requires is the sudden intrusion of unwilled thought into the conscious mind. This is the sort of randomness and chaos that the ordering mind intensely fears and, indeed, is deeply structured to prevent. The sort of sudden illumination or inspiration that gives a creative person great joy and motivation would leave a highly ordered person confused, shaken, and frantically attempting to reconstruct the deep inner fortress of order and predictability upon which they rely.

So in many ways, the ordered mind precludes creativity. The kind of uncertainties required for the proper creative mindset are actively sought out and eliminated by the ordering mind.

That’s not to say that ordering people are somehow crippled, inferior, or defective. They simply have different cognitive priorities, and therefore, different strengths. What they lack in creativity they make up for in effectiveness. Creative people’s dislike of order and detachment from the here and now often leaves them poorer than average at the day to day business of life, and the sort of inner stillness required by the creative and/or contemplative mindset too often leads to a physical stillness as well. That cool still place in the mind can becoming an inner refuge from external realities, an escape, and such a refuge can becoming a crippling addiction which cripples the creative person’s ability to handle the real world.

Again, it’s all about where your internal cognitive priorities are set. And, of course, moderation and balance.

And of course, I am talking about theoretical pure cases. Nobody is purely creative or one hundred percent ordering. But most of us come down more on one side or another.

The creative and ordered types just need to understand one another better. The ordered people have to understand that there’s some good reasons why the creative types seem incapable of dealing with daily life, and the creatives need to understand the ordered types drive for order as coming not from mere power tripping but a deep emotional desire for safety and peace.