An Ultimate Kind of Creativity

Daisaku Ike­da is a Bud­dhist teacher. The quo­ta­tion from him in the epi­graph, found here, deeply inspires me. I urge you to read the state­ment from which the quo­ta­tion comes in full, so here it is:

The Cre­ative Spirit

by Daisaku Ikeda

The times when I have most intense­ly felt and expe­ri­enced the inner real­i­ty of cre­ation have been those times when I have thrown myself whole­heart­ed­ly into a task, when I have car­ried through with that task to the very end. At such times, I expe­ri­ence a dra­mat­i­cal­ly expand­ed sense of self. I can almost hear the joy­ous yell of vic­to­ry issu­ing from the depths of my being. 

This sense of ful­fill­ment and joy is the crys­tal­liza­tion of all the effort—each drop of sweat, each tear—expended to reach that moment. Life’s inher­ent cre­ativ­i­ty, its dynam­ic vital­i­ty, is brought to the sur­face only through the stren­u­ous exer­tions of a life of con­sis­tent action. 

Such a way of life will meet with storms and heavy rains, times of seem­ing defeat. But the cre­ative essence of life is nev­er crushed or van­quished by such things. It is sus­tained by knowl­edge of the bril­liant rain­bow whose bright arch will even­tu­al­ly stretch across the inner expanse of your being. 

Indul­gence and indo­lence pro­duce noth­ing cre­ative. Com­plaints and eva­sions reflect a cow­ard­ly spir­it; they cor­rupt and under­mine life’s nat­ur­al cre­ative thrust. When life is denud­ed of the will to strug­gle cre­ative­ly, it sinks into a state of hell­ish destruc­tive­ness direct­ed at all that lives. 

Nev­er for an instant for­get the effort to renew your life, to build your­self anew. Cre­ativ­i­ty means to push open the heavy, groan­ing door­way of life itself. This is not an easy task. Indeed, it may be the most severe­ly chal­leng­ing strug­gle there is. For open­ing the door to your own life is in the end more dif­fi­cult than open­ing the door to all the mys­ter­ies of the universe. 

But to do so is to vin­di­cate your exis­tence as human beings. Even more, it is the mode of exis­tence that is authen­ti­cal­ly attuned to the inner­most truths of life itself; it makes us wor­thy of the gift of life. 

There is no way of life more des­o­late or more piti­ful than one of igno­rance of the fun­da­men­tal joy that issues from the strug­gle to gen­er­ate and regen­er­ate one’s own life from with­in. To be human is much more than the mere bio­log­i­cal facts of stand­ing erect and exer­cis­ing rea­son and intel­li­gence. The full and gen­uine mean­ing of our human­i­ty is found in tap­ping the cre­ative fonts of life itself. 

The strug­gle to cre­ate new life from with­in is a tru­ly won­der­ful thing. There is found the bril­liant wis­dom that guides and directs the work­ings of rea­son; the light of insight that pen­e­trates the far­thest reach­es of the uni­verse; the undaunt­ed will to see jus­tice done that meets and chal­lenges all the assaults of evil; the spir­it of unbound­ed care that embraces all who suf­fer. When these are fused with that ener­gy of com­pas­sion that pours forth from the deep­est sources of cos­mic life, an ecsta­t­ic rhythm aris­es to col­or the lives of all people. 

As you meet var­i­ous tri­als and dif­fi­cul­ties, thus pol­ish­ing all the many facets of the jew­el which is life, you will learn to walk that supreme path­way of human­i­ty. Of this, I am con­fi­dent, and I am con­fi­dent too that those who embrace life’s native cre­ativ­i­ty now stand and will con­tin­ue to stand in the van­guard of his­to­ry. Bring­ing the cre­ativ­i­ty of life to its fullest flow­er­ing is the work of human rev­o­lu­tion. Car­ry­ing out this kind of human rev­o­lu­tion is your mis­sion now as it will be through­out your lives.

We often talk about inno­va­tion as being some­thing out­side of our­selves, a nec­es­sary aspect of the work of our orga­ni­za­tions, a process to be lib­er­at­ed based on knowl­edge and human cre­ativ­i­ty. But what about inner inno­va­tion at the core of who we are? What would such inno­va­tion look like to you?

If it is, as Ike­da states, a dif­fi­cult enter­prise, sure­ly it must also be one of con­sum­mate joy, like grab­bing hold of the prin­ci­ple of life itself. 

A bell rung in the inner dark­ness and still­ness of the night may heard more clear­ly than one whose sound is cov­ered over by the out­er clat­ter­ing pur­pos­es of the day. But either way, the bell is there.

That bell must sure­ly bring us back to our­selves, to the exact matrix of rein­ven­tion and source of all inno­va­tion, a place where we real­ly can­not tell the dif­fer­ence between inner and out­er at all, where we are sim­ply part of the flow.

In fact, I might ask, who can gen­uine­ly inno­vate in their work and projects who does­n’t have a sense of that moment-to-moment inner renew­al? Who could be ready to rad­i­cal­ly re-write the rules that gov­ern what we do, what we offer, how we relate to one anoth­er, with­out the seeds of a very pri­vate per­son­al rev­o­lu­tion also being plant­ed nearby?

I think Ikeda’s nailed it, nam­ing so nat­u­ral­ly the chal­lenge and ful­fill­ment of an ulti­mate kind of cre­ativ­i­ty. Don’t you?

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