“Creativity and Enthusiasm”
Extract from the book
Facets of a Diamond: Reflections of a Healer
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There are many everyday expressions that show an unconscious relationship between giving birth to a baby and giving birth to an idea, both of them being acts of creativity. For example we speak of someone having a fertile imagination, as being a fertile source of new ideas. We use the word pregnant to refer to a profusion of ideas, teeming with ideas. Fertile, imaginative, inventive. We speak of seminal in relationship to having the power to originate ideas, to be creative. We speak of the birth of an idea, and of Beethoven laboring to give birth to a symphony.
It is interesting that from the Indo-European root gen, to give birth, to beget, are derived such words as generate (including the generation of ideas), genius (one full of ideas), germ (of an idea), and pregnant itself. We also speak of conceiving an idea, and of concepts.
For our acts of creativity to be truly Creative, that is, therapeutic, they must arise out of a deep desire to conceive them, to generate them, to incubate them, and then to deliver them into the world. This generative impulse must be as strong, as overriding, as the maternal instinct, of which it is, in its own way, a particular example.
But if there is an inhibition of this deep desire to give birth to the products of our creativity, then there will be no real therapy. This is what I find so often to be the case: the sufferer does not want to beget and give birth to his creativity, to the songs from his Creativity.
This comes about as a result of a particular problem concerning the thyroid meridian, whose negative attribute is that of depression. Specifically it relates to Thyroid 1, the enthusiasm problem. When the sufferer is imbued with enthusiasm, his creativity is high. He is fecund and fertile. But when his enthusiasm is low, he at best just goes through the motions of being creative, but with little effect – it is but a pseudo-pregnancy, and any labor is only false.
Enthusiasm is defined as “intensity of feeling in favor of a person, principle, cause, etc.; passionate eagerness in any pursuit.” Another definition for us is “poetical fervor.” It is derived from en, in, and theos, God – hence inspired, filled with spirit. And it is this spirit that, as it were, inseminates the creator, that drives him passionately to deliver his products of creativity, his babies, into the world – all as manifestations of the spirit by which he feels possessed.
Without this spirit, this enthusiasm, there can be no “poetical fervor,” no acts of high Creativity, no true healing.
It is of little value to sing or dance or meditate or to carry out any other spiritual endeavor if the spirit is not in it, for then it is not really a spiritual endeavor at all.
It is for this reason that it is critically important to assess whether the sufferer has enthusiasm – can enthusiastically embrace the therapy, whatever it may be. If it is not there, if it has been inhibited, then he must correct the specific trauma that caused him to make the choice against enthusiasm, against being inspired, against being filled with spirit.
And let us not forget that the therapist himself must be filled with enthusiasm – overflowing with it. He must be possessed by “poetical fervor.”
