The Creative Moment
Artists and scientists describe their creative moment as being spontaneous. Some speak of a feverish daze until that sudden instant when things became clear. Others talk of seeing the central idea in a dream, or dozing off, or quite in a flash while doing something else. Examples of the latter are the dream of Elias Howe in which he got the idea of the sewing machine, the reverie of Friedrich August Kekulé in which he saw the structure of the benzene ring, and, most astonishing of all, Srinivas Ramanujan’s equations that came to him, not once but many, many times, in his lucid dreams.
But can we know if these stories are literally true? We don’t think in words although we may use them to index thoughts and to speak of our mind states. Some believe that creative impulse requires language, but others like Albert Einstein, Francis Galton, and Roger Penrose disagree. The mathematician Jacques Hadamard said:
I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think and I shall completely align my case with Galton’s in the sense that even after reading or hearing a question, every word disappears the very moment that I am beginning to think it over; and I fully agree with Schopenhauer when he writes, ‘thoughts die the moment they are embodied in words’.
This situation is quite similar to our remembrance of scenes which in each recounting is somewhat different for it gets colored by the state of the mind at the moment of recounting. The mind is a lens and stories about these creative moments are a way of speaking about it so that the listener understood. Those for whom consciousness is machine-like will think that the stories are made up.
The womb of light
My own understanding is that the creative moment is like the instant when a baby is born. It requires a golden womb of light (hiraṇyagarbha, हिरण्यगर्भः) that is impregnated by the magic that occurs at moments of deep experience (saṃskāra, संस्कार). The embryo grows in time and one is no longer consciously aware of it. And then at the moment when the circumstances are right, it flashes as a thought or as a vision. That is the creative moment. The knowledge of the subject is illuminated by the thought. It produces astonishment (camatkāra, चमत्कार), although in retrospect one might see the seeds of it in the many experiences that preceded it.
The sustenance of the embryo requires discipline and suitable ground. Absent that, one would have the sense of an amazing experience but not have the capacity to translate it into words that make sense to others.
The ground is prepared by tattva-śuddhi, that is purification of the elements that form the mind. This is a process of yogic practice or some other training to sharpen the senses. Mathematics, music, dance or theatre may augur a calm that is essential for one-pointed focus. In the observation that ensues, one is in harmony with the world, and out of that balance emerges new insight.
Two personal stories
Let me speak of two creative moments from 1992. In the first one, I was teaching an undergraduate course on neural networks. The subject was new and thousands of researchers around the world were working on it. A student asked me a question that I had never thought about. I stood nonplussed for a long moment and then out of nowhere I said something in response which turned out to be the beautifully simple idea of instantaneously trained neural networks. I don’t know where I got it from and why it had eluded so many people prior to me.
A few months later, I was browsing through the New Yorker magazine at home in the living room. The last page had an essay by the American novelist John Updike. This essay started off with the mention of the fact that seen from the earth the size of the moon and the sun is about the same. The moment I read this, a powerful feeling took hold of me and I was certain this fact had something to do with the organization of the Ṛgveda and many secrets of the Vedic ritual. Even though I had studied the Ṛgveda for years, I had never paid any attention to its structure.
I rushed to the library in the adjoining room and pulled down the Ṛgveda from the shelf. Quickly jotting down the number of hymns in each mandala (as in the table above), I found that indeed there was a structure to the organization that was related to the motions of the sun and the moon.
This structure was the key to the understanding of the great ritual of the Vedic times which I later explained in several papers (scroll down the list here) and a book titled The Astronomical Code of the Ṛgveda (which has appeared in three editions).
The details of this structure had remained forgotten for at least 3,000 years for no traditional or modern scholar had ever mentioned this. I had not thought about it either until that moment of discovery.
This unveiling of the Ṛgvedic code also provided new insights into the earliest Indian astronomy and the ancient Aśvamedha ritual.
Other stories
Here’s the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré speak of a spontaneous solution to a mathematical problem:
I left Caen, where I was living, to go on a geological excursion under the auspices of the School of Mines. The incidents of the travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for convenience sake, I verified the result at my leisure.
Roger Penrose has a similar story of how the solution to the problem of irregular tiling came to him as he was crossing a street.
Most likely, this process of discovery is not confined to humans. The Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz speaks of an experiment (quoted here) where a chimpanzee is in a room that has a banana suspended from the ceiling just out of reach, and a box elsewhere in the room:
The matter gave him no peace, and he returned to it again and again. Then suddenly — and there is no other way to describe it — his previously gloomy face ‘lit up’. His eyes now moved from the banana to the empty space beneath it on the ground, from this to the box, then back to the space, and from there to the banana. The next moment he gave a cry of joy, and somersaulted over to the box in sheer, high spirits. Completely assured of his success, he pushed the box below the banana. No man watching him could doubt the existence of a genuine ‘Aha’ experience in anthropoid apes.
Some creative moments will always remain unexplainable. The challenge is to develop a process that helps one reach the creative out-of-the-box insight in a consistent manner.
Can creativity be ordered?
If creativity is not associated with language, as averred emphatically by so many, then could it be what one might call a vibration (spandana in Sanskrit) associated with the way the mind becomes conscious of specificity? According to the philosophical school of Kashmir Śaivism, this vibration has a resonance (dhvani) that conveys meaning. It is the dhvani behind the creative moment.
It is believed that yogic practice makes it possible for the mind to access the infinite potential of the Self within. The Yoga-sūtra has an entire chapter on how to obtain extraordinary abilities (siddhi). The Indian tradition informs us that yogic practice transformed Pāṇini and Kālidāsa who were originally fools into geniuses, and this can be achieved by anyone. The skeptic may dismiss the idea of the Self and take these stories to be hagiographical gloss, yet one cannot dismiss clinically confirmed medical benefits of Yoga and the anecdotal accounts of creativity summarized in this essay are consistent with the Yogic model of the mind.
