Are you part of the creative solution or an unconscious reactionary?

The question was asked first on LinkedIn where other answers can be found. My answer was:

“Thank you for your inspired question.

I believe that the movement from unconscious reactionary to creative solution occurs most effectively during the process of making decisions, not choices or judgments. Since most people do not recognize the reasons for this distinction, the likelihood of remaining in reactionary mode is high, even when the effectiveness of creative solutions have been experienced before.

The gamers I know usually deal with logic that involves limited, static choices or statistically valid judgments over long periods of time and over larger and larger numbers of people. They may simulate reality but in the end they are working in an artificially ideal world. Not that that alone is a problem. It is important to articulate the desires of our ideals in the face of the apparent limitations of our material world.

The problem arises when the "reality" they settle for is a compromise between the material and ideal. In the decision-making process I work with, gamers, choice-makers, judgment makers, are forced to stop at stage 8 by the very inherent constraints of their approaches. There the battle must continue until the "no-win" predicament is recognized, when all reasonable hypotheses are tested and produce the same ultimate outcome. Hopefully, sooner than later, we will come to the realization that reasoning itself is ultimately limited to its hypothetical processes of imitating reality.

To go beyond that stage requires a deeper understanding of how creativity is tapped. Plato, the dramatist of reason, recognized "divine madness" in four modes of responding to inspiration: poesy, eros, catharsis, and prophecy.

Translating these types into modern language, poesy becomes value creation; eros becomes mission; catharsis becomes purposeful relationships; and prophecy becomes vision. However, when the link between these modes of responding to inspiration are severed from their divine origin or no longer understood or function as such, as in our modern secular society, we are left with value, mission, purpose, and vision propositions on which to base choice or judgments, but not decisions.

If we will but remember two of the central, summarizing "commandments" of the Judeo/Christian culture, the link may be repaired: Love God with all of your mind, your heart, your soul, and your spirit, and your neighbor as yourself.

Loving God with all our minds opens us to inspiration of poesy and we come to know what to create. Loving God with all our hearts opens us to inspiration of eros and we come to know whom to create it for. Loving God with all our souls opens us to inspiration of catharsis and we come to know how best to create. And loving God with all our spirits opens us to inspiration of prophecy and we come to know why we create.

By accepting the graces of inspiring insights, we join in the creative solutions that are available. By denying them by conscious, or worse unconscious, oversights, we become reactionary in relation to the divine as opposed to responsive.

Generally speaking, then, making the decision to live together in peace will mean that creative solutions have been arrived at through collaboration to grow value together rather than build barriers to it; to love peace more than war; to forgive and forget past dysfunctional relationships in favor of present mutual purposes; and to share visions of the present and future in a way that allow prophecies to be effectively articulated and achieved.

To move beyond the general solution, each of us must cross the swaying walk bridge over the fog-bound gorge alone, willing to discover whether there are others waiting our arrival on the other side to do the specific work we find for us there.”

What do you think?

Please include your comment here or contact me to discuss.

Thanks.
John Darrouzet