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Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within
Read in 19 min.
Listen in 24 min.
Learn the key ideas of the book by Osho

Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within

An exciting journey into the creative process

Osho, who died in 1990, was one of the most important spiritual leaders of the last century. The Sunday Times listed him as one of the 1,000 makers of the 20th century, while Tom Robbins said he was “the most dangerous man in history since Jesus Christ”. Osho’s philosophical and spiritual teachings place great emphasis on creativity, and on the ways in which we are able to literally create the meaning of our lives. In Creativity. Unleashing The Forces Within, Osho uses simple words, and clear-cut sentences, to persuade us that we can all become creative people. It doesn’t matter if we know how to paint or dance, because even the most mundane tasks can be creative, if we put effort, love, and dedication into what we do.

Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within
Read in 19 min.
Listen in 24 min.
IDEA CHIAVE 1/11

Less logic, more poetry: becoming a child again, in order to unleash our creativity

In order to become more enlightened, Osho says that human beings need to grow in three dimensions: awareness of who we are, compassion in our emotions, and creativity in our actions. This is the only way that people, their lives, and their approach to the world will become poetry; and becoming poetry means being alive, knowing how to love, and to be more human. Poetry is the opposite of logic, which is cold and arid. When humans become too logical, the essence of humanity itself vanishes. 

Yet this seems to be the direction we are taking. Even though we are all born creative, society does not allow us to remain this way, and stamps out our creativity, while teaching us the supposedly correct way of doing things. From kindergarten to university, everything is geared towards ensuring that the left, logical side of our brain dominates over the right side, where creativity is developed. Education needs to be completely revolutionised: we need to bring more joy to classrooms, and start giving less importance to logical reasoning. We should not encourage people to become more logical, but more intelligent. Answers and reactions should be evaluated according to different criteria, because an answer is almost never right or wrong, whereas it may very well be either stupid or intelligent.

When we are taught logic, we become producers, rather than creators. A producer is someone who knows the right way to get something done, and to achieve the best result with minimum effort. A creator, on the other hand, consistently tries to find their own path and, although they may sometimes veer off course, they always learn and become richer, because they do something that nobody else before them has done. In short, we need to become children again, and hold on tight to the creative nature that we are born with, before it is taken away from us. Creativity needs freedom to thrive, so we need to dismantle everything that society has taught us, and free ourselves of our prejudices, even if this requires a great deal of courage. Creativity is the greatest form of rebellion that exists. If we want to create, we must free ourselves of all our social conditioning. A creative person is unable to follow a predetermined path; they must find their own, losing themselves, and rediscovering themselves in the jungle of life.

  

The key ideas of "Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within"

01.
Less logic, more poetry: becoming a child again, in order to unleash our creativity
02.
Instead of carrying out meaningless tasks, it is better to do nothing, so that our creativity is able to emerge
03.
Relaxation, inaction, and celebration: feeling alive in the here and now, in order to create spontaneously
04.
Abandoning our ego, and recognising others, in order to channel energy into our creative process
05.
Creativity cannot coexist with fame, wealth, ego, and perfectionism
06.
We can all be creative: it is not the 'what' that matters, but the 'how'
07.
The less we believe we know, the more we are open to exploring, and the more creative we become
08.
We need to let go of psychological memories, in order to make room for new and unexplored experiences
09.
We must be the leading actors of our life, and create, rather than simply seek, a purpose
10.
Quotes
11.
Take-home message
 
 
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