Sufism, Vol. 1 Sufis: The People Of The Path Chapter 8: A Certain Milieu, Question 3

The third question:

Question 3

I WANT TO BE CREATIVE. WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Become a child again and you will be creative. All children are creative. Creativity needs freedom -- freedom from the mind, freedom from knowledge, freedom from prejudices.

A creative person is one who can try the new. A creative person is not a robopath. Robopaths are never creative, they are repetitive. So become a child again.

And you will be surprised that all children are creative; all children, wherever they are born, are creative. But we don't allow their creativity, we crush and kill their creativity, we jump upon them. We start teaching them the right way to do things.

Remember, a creative person always goes on trying the wrong ways. If you always follow the right way to do a thing you will never be creative -- because the right way means the way discovered by others. And the right way means that of course you will be able to make something, you will become a producer, a manufacturer, you will be a technician, but you will not be a creator.

What is the difference between a producer and a creator? A producer knows the right way of doing a thing, the most economical way of doing a thing; with the least effort he can create more results. He is a producer. A creator fools around. He does not know what is the right way to do a thing so he goes on seeking and searching again and again in different directions. Many times he moves in a wrong direction, but wherever he moves, he learns. He becomes more and more rich. He does something which nobody has ever done before. If he had followed the right way to do things he would not have been able to do it.

Listen to this small story....

A Sunday school teacher asked her students to draw a picture of the Holy Family.

After the pictures were brought to her, she saw that some of the youngsters had drawn the conventional pictures -- the Holy Family in the manger, the Holy Family riding on the mule, and the like.

But she called up one little boy to ask him to explain his drawing, which showed an airplane with four heads sticking out of the plane windows.

She said, 'I can understand why you drew three of the heads to show Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. But who's the fourth head?'

'Oh,' answered the boy, 'that's Pontius the Pilot!'

Now this is beautiful. This is what creativity is. He has discovered something.

But only children can do that. You will be afraid to do it. You will look foolish. A creator has to be able to look foolish. A creator has to risk his so-called respectability. That's why you always see that poets, painters, dancers, musicians, are not very respectable people. And when they become respectable, when a Nobel Prize is given to them, they are no longer creative. From that moment creativity disappears.

What happens? Have you ever seen a Nobel Prize winner writing another thing which is of any value? Have you ever seen any respectable person doing something creative? He becomes afraid. If he does something wrong, or if something goes wrong, what will happen to his prestige? He cannot afford that. So when an artist becomes respectable he becomes dead.

Only those who are ready to put their prestige, their pride, their respectability, again and again at stake, and can go on into something which nobody thinks is worth going into.... Creators are always thought to be mad people. The world recognises them, but very late. It goes on thinking that something is wrong. Creators are eccentric people.

And remember again, each child is born with all the capacities to become a creator. Without any exception all children try to be creators but we don't allow, them. Immediately we start teaching them the right way to do a thing -- and once they have learned the right way to do a thing they become robopaths. Then they go on doing the right thing again and again and again, and the more they do it, the more efficient they become. And the more efficient they become, the more respected they are.

Somewhere between the age of seven and fourteen a great change happens in a child. Psychologists have been searching into the phenomenon... why does it happen and what happens?

You have two minds, two hemispheres. The left hemisphere of the mind is uncreative. It is technically very capable but as far as creativity is concerned it is absolutely impotent. It can only do a thing once it has learned it, and it can do it very efficiently, perfectly; it is mechanical. This left hemisphere is the hemisphere of reasoning, logic, mathematics. It is the hemisphere of calculation, cleverness, of discipline, order.

The right hemisphere is just the opposite of it. It is the hemisphere of chaos, not of order; it is the hemisphere of poetry, not of prose, it is the hemisphere of love, not of logic. It has a great feeling for beauty, it has a great insight into orginality -- but it is not efficient, it cannot be efficient. The creator cannot be efficient, he has to go on experimenting.

The creator cannot settle anywhere. The creator is a vagabond; he carries his tent on his shoulders. Yes, he can stay for an overnight stay, but by the morning he is gone again -- that's why I call him a vagabond. He is never a householder. He cannot settle. Settling means death to him. He is always ready to take a risk. Risk is his love affair.

But this is the right-side hemisphere. The right-side hemisphere is functioning when the child is born; the left-side hemisphere is not functioning. Then we start teaching the child -- unknowingly, unscientifically. Down the ages we have learned the trick of how to shift the energy from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere; how to put a stop to the right hemisphere and how to start the left hemisphere. That's what our whole schooling is. From kindergarten to university that's what our whole training and so called education is. It is an effort to destroy the right hemisphere and to help the left hemisphere. Somewhere between the ages of seven and fourteen we succeed and the child is killed, the child is destroyed.

Then the child is wild no more -- he becomes a citizen. Then he learns the ways of discipline, language, logic, prose. He starts competing in the school, becomes an egoist, starts learning all the neurotic things that are prevalent in the society, becomes more interested in power, money, starts thinking how to become more educated so that he can become more powerful, how to have more money, how to have a big house, and all that. He shifts.

Then the right hemisphere functions less and less -- or functions only when you are in dream, fast asleep. Or sometimes when you have taken a drug.

The great appeal of drugs in the West is only because the West has succeeded in destroying the right hemisphere completely because of compulsory education. The West has become too educated -- that means it has gone to the very excess, to one side. It has become extreme. Now there seems to be no possibility. Unless you introduce some ways which can help the right hemisphere to be revived again in the universities and colleges and the schools, drugs are not going to go. There is no possibility of prohibiting drugs by law alone. There is no way to enforce it unless the inner balance is put right again.

The appeal of the drug is that it immediately shifts gear -- from the left hemisphere your energy moves to the right hemisphere. That's all the drug can do. Alcohol has been doing it for centuries but now far better drugs are available -- LSD, marijuana, psilocybin. and even better drugs will be available in the future.

And the criminal is not the drug-taker, the criminal is the politician and the educationalist. It is they who are guilty. They have forced the human mind into one extreme -- into such an extreme that now there is a need to revolt. And the need is so great! Poetry has completely disappeared from people's life, beauty has disappeared, love has disappeared... money, power, pull, they have become the only gods.

How can humanity go on living without love and without poetry and without joy and without celebration? Not for long.

And the new generation all over the world is doing a great service by showing the stupidity of your so-called education. It is not a coincidence that drug-takers almost always become drop-outs. They disappear from the universities, colleges. It is not a coincidence -- this is part of the same revolt.

And once a man has learned the joys of drugs it becomes very difficult for him to drop them. Drugs can be dropped only if better ways can be found which can release your poetry. Meditation is a better way -- less destructive, less harmful, than any kind of chemical. In fact, it is not harmful at all, it is beneficial. Meditation also does the same thing: it shifts your mind from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. It releases your inner capacity of creativity.

A great calamity that is going to be in the world through drugs can be avoided by only one thing -- that is, meditation. There is no other way. If meditation becomes more and more prevalent and enters peoples' lives more and more, drugs will disappear. And education must start to be not so absolutely against the right hemisphere and its functioning.

If the children are taught that both are their minds, and if they are taught how to use both, and if they are taught when to use which.... There are situations when only the left-side brain is needed, when you need to calculate -- in the marketplace, in the everyday business of life. and there are times when you need the right hemisphere.

And remember always, the right hemisphere is the end and the left hemisphere is the means. The left hemisphere has to serve the right hemisphere, the right hemisphere is the master -- because you earn money only because you want to enjoy your life and celebrate your life. You want a certain bank balance only so that you can love. You work only so that you can play -- play remains the goal. You work only so that you can relax. Relaxation remains the goal, work is not the goal.

The work ethic is a hangover from the past. It has to be dropped. And the educational world has to go through a real revolution. People should not be forced. Children should not be forced into repetitive patterns. What is your education? Have you ever looked into it? Have you ever pondered over it? It is simply a training in memory. You don't become intelligent through it, you become more and more unintelligent. You become stupid. Each child enters the school very intelligent but it is very rare that a person comes out of university and is still intelligent -- it is very rare. The university almost always succeeds. Yes, you come with degrees but you have purchased those degrees at a great cost: you have lost your intelligence, you have lost your joy, you have lost life -- because you have lost the functioning of the right-side hemisphere.

And what have you learned? Information. Your mind is full of memory. You can repeat, you can reproduce -- that's what your examinations are. The person is thought to be very intelligent if he can vomit all that has been thrown into him. First he has to be forced to swallow, go on swallowing, and then in the examination papers, vomit. If you can vomit efficiently, you are intelligent. If you can vomit exactly that which has been given to you, you are intelligent.

Now this is something to be understood: you can vomit the same thing only if you have not digested it, remember. If you have digested it you cannot vomit the same thing, something else may come. Blood may come but not the same Vrindavan bread. That will not come. It has disappeared. So you have to simply keep it down there in your stomach without digesting it. Then you are thought to be very, very intelligent. The most stupid are thought to be the most intelligent. It is a very sorry thing, a sorry state of things.

The intelligent may not fit. Do you know Albert Einstein could not pass his matriculation examination? Such a creative intelligence -- it was difficult for him to behave in the stupid way that everybody else was behaving in.

All your so-called gold medallists in the schools, colleges, universities, disappear. They never prove to be of any use. Their glory ends with their gold medals. Then they are never found anywhere. Life owes nothing to them.

What happens to these people? You have destroyed them. They have purchased the certificates and they have lost all. Now they will be carrying their certificates and degrees.

This kind of education has to be totally transformed. More joy has to be brought to the schoolroom, more chaos has to be brought to the university -- more dance, more song, more poetry, more creativity, more intelligence. Such dependence on memory has to be dropped.

People should be watched and people should be helped to be more intelligent. When a person responds in a new way he should be valued. There should be no right answer. There is none. There is only a stupid answer and an intelligent answer. The very categorisation of right and wrong is wrong; there is no right answer and there is no wrong answer. Either the answer is stupid, repetitive, or the answer is creative, responsive, intelligent. Even if the repetitive answer seems to be right it should not be valued much because it is repetitive. And even though the intelligent answer may not be perfectly right, may not fit with the old ideas, it has to be praised because it is new. It shows intelligence.

You ask me: I want to BE CREATIVE. WHAT SHOULD I DO? Undo all that the society has done to you; undo all that your parents and your teachers have done to you; undo all that the policeman and the politician and the priest have done to you -- and you will again become creative, you will again have that thrill that you had in the very beginning. It is still waiting there, repressed. It can uncoil.

And when that creative energy uncoils in you, you are religious. To me a religious person is one who is a creative person. Everybody is born creative but very few people remain creative.

It is for you to come out of the trap. You can. Of course, you will need great courage because when you start undoing what the society has done to you, you will lose respect. You will not be thought to be respectable. You will start becoming bizarre; you will look bizarre to people. You will look like a freak. People will think, 'Something has gone wrong with the poor man.' This is the greatest courage -- to go into a life where people start thinking you are bizarre.

Difficulties will be there. You can ask Indivar. He has come from Australia. He was a renowned psychoanalyst there for twenty years and now he is in much difficulty. His wife thinks that he has gone mad; his children have become suspicious that Dad has gone mad; his colleagues are no longer in sympathy -- there is no question of respect, even sympathy is missing. The bosses where he works in the clinic are ready to throw him out any moment. And for the first time he is happy and for the first time he is doing something that he enjoys -- and for the first time something from the right hemisphere is released in him.

Just the other night he was there and when I touched his head I could feel the shift. It is no longer the left hemisphere, it is the right hemisphere where more energy is moving. His poetry is coming back. He is becoming a child again.

But naturally you have to risk. If you want to be creative you will have to risk all. But it is worth it. A little creativity is more worthwhile than this whole world and its kingdom. The joy that comes by creating something new, whatsoever it is -- a small song, a small painting, anything.... When you create something new you participate with the creator because God is the creator. When you create, you are in tune with God. When you create really, God creates through you -- that's why great joy arises. When you repeat, you repeat alone. God is not there. You are a desert, you are a machine. When you create, God simply enters your heart. You become a hollow bamboo and he starts playing on you and you become a flute. Great song is possible.

Everybody is carrying that song and unless that song is sung, you will never feel fulfilled.

My sannyas is nothing but an initiation into creativity, initiation into danger, initiation into a new kind of life that has not been taught to you -- in fact, against everything which has been taught to you.

My whole struggle is against this so-called neurotic society. I would like you to become uneducated again.

Sufism

VOL. 1, SUFIS: THE PEOPLE OF THE PATH

Chapter-8

A Certain Milieu