11.4 Meditation enhances the Creative

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11.4 Meditation enhances the Creative

A. Role of Will power

Interviewer: “Earlier you minimized the part will power has to play in the unfolding of your Subject’s life. Could you speak a little more about this phenomenon? What role, if any, does ‘will power’ play in the maximizing of your Subject’s creative potentials?”

Experimenter: “My first reaction is to say that ‘will power’ is a myth. Any attempt that I’ve made at controlling my Subject’s creative output has been a dismal failure. Just as I think that I’ve convinced him that he is a Writer, he suddenly becomes a Scientist or Painter, Bookkeeper or Businessman. It seems the best I can do, as Experimenter, is to assist him to increase his vitality so that he can manifest most efficiently. While I can not really choose which Creative Activity that my Subject will throw himself into next, I can tell him to do certain things, which might enhance his creative potentials. Or I can tell him not to participate in actions which I consider detrimental to the Creative.”

Interviewer: “So will power works from behind rather than in front, from the bottom rather than from the top?”

Experimenter: “Precisely. I play the role of Mother to my Subject’s role as Son. I encourage him with love and affection, but he must make his own way in the world. I have as much control over my Subject as the Mother has over her Son. The Mother can feed her son with good food and encourage him to cultivate good healthy habits, but she has no control over what he is actually going to do with his life - at least my idealized notion of the perfect Mother.”

Will like a gardener, not a general- Cultivation not Domination

Interviewer: “Could we say that the results of the Experiment have encouraged the types of behavior associated with Cultivation, while discouraging those associated with Domination.”

Experimenter: “Definitely. My dominator side has been tamed by the behavior of my Subject. Will power seems to be most effective when used like a gardener tending his plants, rather than like a general waging war. From my over 20 years experience in observing the relation between the Experimenter and Subject, I would say: “Cultivate your Person; don’t dominate him. Water him with good food, exercise and meditation; and watch him grow.”

Interviewer: “Would you say that your research has shown that Cultivation is a more effective strategy than Domination? At least in terms of the complex of selves that are tied to our Person.”

Experimenter: “The research hasn’t shown this. My own experience with my Person has demonstrated this. The Experiment only showed that Sleep seemed to be influenced by factors other than Will Power.”

Interviewer: “But your own experience showed that Cultivating your Person was better than Dominating him.”

Experimenter realizes he is not his Person

Experimenter: “I couldn’t really control him at all. Any Control that I attempted to exert only resulted in an energy drain, a blockage. It was as if the Judge drained power from the Creative Vitality. I found that I could only encourage him to manifest, but not tell him what to do. Maybe this is when I began to realize that I am not my Person.”

Thought Police: “See I told you that he was crazy.”

“Restrain him - Before he gets violent.”

“Inject him with drugs - Before he goes insane.”

Experimenter only cares about Creative Output, not Personal Happiness

Experimenter: “I realized that my only goal was to increase the quality and quantity of my Subject’s creative output. I didn’t really care if my Subject was happy or sad. As a matter of fact, it makes better reading material, because my Subject was so human. He is full of pride, greedy, lustful, lazy, control hungry, a father, lover, and creator. He lived Life and continued to create. This is what I am most proud of my Person for. I really don’t care that much about his moods except as they have an effect upon production. This is why I have prescribed a steady amount of Meditation for my Subject. This seems to neutralize his extreme mood swings, somewhat tranquilizing our Patient, er I mean Subject. I hope he cooperates. In the past his Meditation has been irregular. He has not taken his Medicine, his Meditaticine. But then recently I took a different approach.”

B. Guardians push my Person into Meditation

Guardian #1: “You did not take ‘a different approach’.”

G#2: “How presumptuous!”

G#3: “How pretentious! How utterly absurd!”

G#1: “Did you hear that Mabel? He thinks that he did something.”

#2: “We had to knock him over the head to get him to cooperate.”

#3: “It wasn’t easy.”

#2: “We dovetailed multiple strains to overwhelm him with evidence

#3: “He couldn’t deny.”

New Meditating Tai Chi Partner

Guardian #1: “First we induced Phil to show up at the Park to practice with our Subject.”

#3: “Phil had been meditating regularly for over 25 years,

#2: “Since he was a teenager.”

#3: “He said that Meditation was like an orgasm on top of his head.”

#2: “A great carrot on the end of the stick for our Subject.”

#1: “Internal orgasm - Not Bad - as an enticement.”

#2: “This reminded our Subject of similar experiences that he’d had.”

#3: “He wondered why he had stopped meditating.”

#2: “So did we.”

Evil Manager

Guardian #2: “Then we put it in the mind of the ‘Evil’ Manager,”

#3: “To disturb our Subject’s Life with his ‘evil’ schemes.”

#2: “These schemes served their purpose, all right.”

#1: “Which was to wake our Subject up in the middle of the night -

#3: “With potential night mares in his brain -”

#2: “Our Subject,

#3: “Inspired by the pleasures of Phil and the pains of the Evil Manager,

#2: “Decided he had no choice but to Meditate.”

Meditation, the Cloth which wipes the Mirror Clean

Guardian #3: “In these moments of quietude,”

#2: “Our Subject finally realized that Meditation was the Cloth

#1: “That Washed the Mirror of his Mind clean from the Daily Debris -

#3: “The red dust.”

#2: “As well as polishing off the other verbal filters erected in the past -”

#1: “Which still distort his perception of reality.”

#3: “All of this might have been enough,”

#1: “To wake him up to the value of Meditation,”

#2: “To snap him out of his trance that he is his Person.”

#3: “But to make sure he understood,”

#2: “We decided to reveal some of the discoveries of his Experiment at this time.”

Experimental results too clear to ignore, inspiring this

#1: “This was not easy.”

#2: “Getting Phil to arrive at Tai Chi-

#3: “Arranging for the Evil Manager to work his evil ways -”

#2: “And then to get him to do this scientific research at the same exact time.”

#1: “The results of the Experiment were too clear for him to ignore -”

#2: “He had no idea -”

#3: “It was a complete surprise -”

#2: “It knocked him off balance enough

#1: “That he had to write about it

#2: “In this little Notebook."

#3: “At this time.”

#1: “In this Place.”

All in unison: “Now!!!”

#1: “Which is the only place you should ever be.”

#2: “Hello Out There. Are you still Listening?”

#3: “Or have we put you to Sleep?”

#1: “With our lack of urgency?”

#2: “Or are we torturing you with trivia?"

All in unison: “Good Night.”

C. The Power of Meditation

Meditation enhances the Creative 3

Interviewer: “Before you geek out too much, which experimental results are you speaking of?”

Experimenter: “The Meditation Data Stream has an extremely high positive correlation, 33%, with the Creative 3, i.e. Writing, Science, and Art. (See the scatter plot below. It is based upon the monthly readings of the Longest Data Set, i.e. from 1976 -> 2001 as are all of the graphs in this section).

Scientist: “The 33% positive correlation is visually apparent. More importantly the slope of the Best Fit Line, represented by the arrow, is very steep. See the scatter plot below. It is identical to the one above except that the upward limit of the horizontal axis has been changed from 0.8 to 5.0 to match the scale of the vertical axis. The steep slope is much more visually apparent in this representation. The slope says that 2.5 hours of creative Time is equivalent to 1 hour of meditation.”

Experimenter: “This said to me that a little Meditation encouraged a lot of Creative Time. The ratio of Meditation to Creative was about 2 to 5. A half hour of Meditation was worth one and a quarter hours of Creative Time. While I wasn’t fool enough to think that there would be an exact payoff, I figured any Meditation, that I could entice my Subject to do, would, at the very least, enhance his Creative Time. With no other interfering mechanisms this seemed an ideal way to further pump up the Creative, which was my goal.”

Meditation and Exercise enhance each other

Scientist: “In addition to being positively correlated with the Creative, Meditation was even more positively connected with Exercise. This positive connection continued across all the Data Sets. See the scatter plot below based on the Longest Data Set, as before. Again the slope is fairly steep - 2 Meditation for 3 Exercises.”

Experimenter: “Again it seemed that the conclusion was obvious - Meditation augments Exercise as well as the Creative.”

Scientist: “It could also be the other way around that the Creative and Exercise augment Meditation.”

Experimenter: “Whatever the causality, it seems that encouraging my Subject to Meditate would seem to have a positive effect on his Exercise rather than detrimental.”

Exercise augments the Creative

Experimenter: “Further it seems that Exercise and the Creative 3 are also extremely positively correlated at 55% over the 25 years of the Experiment. See the scatter plot below.

Scientist: “In this case the ratio of Exercise to Creative is 5 to 4. While the slope is not as steep, the correlation is higher than with Meditation to the Creative.”

Experimenter: “My simplistic conclusion was that the Data indicated that Exercise also enhances the Creative. This is what I wanted. Thus I concluded that Exercise and Meditation both enhanced the Creative rather than competing with it. Further they enhanced each other rather than competing. This is very counter intuitive seeing as how they exist in a closed system with limited time.”

Meditation enhances Helping Out

Scientist: “Meditation also enhances Helping Out. This result was even more surprising than the rest. Helping Out had primarily to do with the Time my Subject spent ‘helping out’ around the home, but also included any other time spent helping anyone else.”

Experimenter: “In short, while much of my Subject’s discretionary time was spent on himself and his projects, this category only included time he spent serving the common good. This high correlation, +52%, was and is startling.”

Scientist: “Again any Meditation is doubled in the Helping out category, a high payoff, to be sure.”

Helping Out enhances the Creative

Experimenter: “As might be expected Helping Out also enhances Creative Time as shown in the Scatter Plot below.

Scientist: “The Correlation is still high, +42%, over the 25 years, between Helping Out and the Creative, while the slope of the Best Fit Line is much more shallow. Help to Creative is 5 to 4, much less than the payoff from Mediation or Exercise but still quite substantial.”

Exercise and Helping out enhance each other

Experimenter: “Helping out and Exercise both have a strong positive correlation with Meditation and the Creative 3. As might be expected they also enhance each other. {See the Scatter Plot below.}”

Scientist: “The Correlation between Exercise and Home/Help is very high, +57%. The ratio of Exercise to Help is 2 to 1. {An hour of Exercise inspires a half an hour of Helping Out - Or is it the other way around.}”

D. The Healthy 3

The Healthy 3, Meditation, Exercise, and Helping Out

Experimenter: “Does Helping out inspire Exercise? Does Exercise inspire Helping Out? Or does Meditation inspire both Exercise and Helping Out? Or do the three act as a mutual support group, as an alliance of mutually supporting friends? Let us see how the three operate as a group. We will call the combination of these three Data Streams, the Healthy 3. The Healthy 3 is a Data Stream that equals the sum of Meditation, Exercise, and Helping Out.

Scientist: “We have a picture of this Data Stream, the Healthy 3, broken down into its three component parts. The top line represents the Healthy 3, which is a sum of the rest.”

Experimenter: “The pulse of the Data is self apparent. There is an initial pulse of Meditation in the late 1970’s, which is reflected in both Exercise and Home/Help. There is another pulse of Meditation after 1988 which also seems to be reflected in a rise in both Exercise and Helping Out.”

An excellent relation between the Healthy 3 and the Creative 3

Scientist: “As would be expected, the relation of the Healthy 3 to the Creative 3 is excellent as is shown by the Scatter Plot below.”

Scientist: “The correlation is high at +54%. The ratio is shallow. 3 parts Creative to 5 parts Healthful activities.”

Experimenter: “To me this meant that if I could entice my Subject to Meditate more that he would also Exercise more. With this extra vitality he would Help Out more gaining more merit and with this the blessings of the gods, who would send the Muse down to sleep with my Subject. Anyway it seemed like a win-win situation to me. Further these results inspired my Subject on his latest creative project. It seemed important that this information be spread. In fact this is why my Subject is writing this paper, right now.”

Scientist: “Looking at the quarter century of data combining the Creative 3 and the Healthful 3, we see the same pulse we saw before. A pulse of creative and healthful activities before 1984 followed, approximately, by a 4-year lull. Then both the Healthful and Creative Actives begin growing.”

Experimenter: “The positive correlation is easy to see. It is almost as if an outside force was squashing all this energy between 1984 and 1988. Of course there were a few other external factors, as one might suspect, which influenced this pulse. After all something had to fill in this valley of time. We are dealing with the closed system of the 24 hour days.”

A picture of the Creative 3 as a sum of component parts

Scientist: “Before examining these other factors, let us look at a picture of the component parts of the Creative 3. The Healthful 3 are positively correlated and so rise and fall together. The Creative 3 are negatively correlated and so rise and fall to fill in the gaps. Below is a picture of this ‘negative’ bundle.”

Positive Healthful Bundle reacts positively with negative Creative Bundle

Experimenter: “Thus we have a positive bundle interacting positively with a negative bundle. Below is a picture of this mess.”

Scientist: “The Healthful 3 rise and fall together. While the Creative 3 rise and fall opposite each other, collectively they rise and fall with the Healthful 3. This is visually apparent in the above graph. As mentioned before, a pulse like behavior is what characterizes these positive correlations visually.”

Experimenter: “This is an exciting result. As a bundle the Creative 3 have a strong positive correlation with the Healthful 3. Their individual relations aren’t nearly so strong as they are as a bundle.”

Summary

Experimenter: “Before going on let us summarize what we’ve learned so far.”

Scientist: “Meditation, as an Action, has strong positive correlations with Exercise, Helping Out, and the Creative 3, which are also positively linked with each other. The interactions between these 4 Data Streams are all extremely positive.

Experimenter: “Further a little bit of Meditation goes a long way.”

Scientist: “A half hour of Meditation added on to a day increases the Creative 3 by over an hour; augments Helping Out by a little less than an hour: and Exercise by a little over a half an hour.”

Experimenter: “The point is that Meditation in no ways competes with these activities but instead increase the probability of their happening. I will repeat, Meditation does not seem to absorb time but instead seems to increase available time. This is counter-intuitive. It is evidence for the ‘cooperation’ versus the competition theory of evolution. One states that the strongest and biggest survive, while the other states that those who join together survive.”

Scientist: “We can’t say if this Meditation mechanism occurs through increasing time efficiency or increased vitality. These high positive correlations might even be due to other mechanisms.”

Experimenter: “Which we shall explore in the next section.”

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