The Psychology of Creativity Course Outline
1) Foundations of Creativity – creativity as yoga with 3 components:
(a) heightened consciousness;
(b) inspired action;
(c) skilled execution.
- Examples of creativity in everyday life –
at home, in workplace, in business, in sports, in the arts
- Conditions for achieving creativity.
2) Planes and parts of the being
- The Divine Shakti and the psychic as sources of creativity
- The formation of an inner personality receptive to the influence
of these two
- Roots of creative nspiration in
the mind, the emotions, the will and the body
- Purusha and prakriti as awareness and power of action at each level
- Coexistence of the two in the creative act.
3) Impediments to Creativity I – Habits:
- Types of habits – mental, vital and physical
- How to become conscous of habits and how to overcome these.
4) Impediments to Creativity II – Conditioning:
- Social habits which have been internalized from the environment
and from the past
- Becoming conscious of these and how to overcome them.
5) Purification and refinement of the senses
as instruments of knowledge and aesthetic awareness.
6) Gestalt awareness
- Organization of wholes and parts - proportion
- The awareness of beauty as ordered and proportional
arrangements of foreground and background.
7) Creativity and swadharma
- Gita’s teaching of swabhava and swadharma
- Becoming aware of these in oneself as inborn areas of inspired action
- Creative empowerment through swadharma.
8) Exercises for development of heightened consciousness
- The emergence of the liberated purusha and its power to open to conceptual
intuition – stillness, mind maps .
9) Exercises for development of inspired action –
- Gita’s doctrine of nishkama karma,
- Separating the purusha and prakriti
- Receptivity to the higher or inner sources of creativity in action
- Spontaneity arising out of stillness
- Intuitive action at different levels of consciousness.
10) Exercises for development of skill in the instruments
- How to develop the consciousness of the thinking mind, the emotional being,
application of the will, the eyes, the hands and other parts of the body.