Elizabeth Gilbert: On Nurturing Creativity

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Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses. We think we need to introduce the idea of creativity either being an external separate force or something that is part of the individual ego; in fact, it belongs to no phenomenal object, subtle or gross, at all but rather to God, consciousness, flowing through us unimpeded.

Through looking at societies from the past - Ancient Greece and Rome - people have believed that creativity was an external, disembodied creative spirit called a daemon.

Then with the advent of the Renaissance, man became the center of the universe and it was believed that creativity was essentially something that came from the individual self.

Elizabeth Gilbert instead proposes a third way; that the maddening capriciousness of the creative process can be 'downright paranormal' and thus comes through the individual from an unknown and transcendent source.