Creative or artistic intelligence is the ability to imagine and make something new: ideas, images, music, stories, objects and ways of doing things. The psychologist Howard Gardner did not count creativity as an intelligence of its own, seeing the arts as drawing on several of his intelligences at once, but the widened list Therapeutic Shamanism uses includes it. In this approach creativity is close to the heart of shamanic journeying, which is a co-creation between the journeyer’s imagination and something real beyond them, and great art, like a great journey, moves us because it carries something of Soul.
What is creative intelligence? #
The capacity to come up with what is new: new ideas, new solutions, new images, music and objects. People sometimes speak of ‘artistic intelligence’ for the same gift in the arts.
Gardner did not put either on his list. In his view three of his intelligences are particularly notable in the arts, musical, bodily-kinesthetic and spatial, though each can be put to many other uses.1 Creativity he saw as something different from intelligence. In his definition, people are creative when they solve problems, make things or raise new questions in a field in a way that is new at first and is eventually accepted, and the test is whether the field is changed. Creativity is always in a particular field: hardly anyone is creative in everything. Following the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Gardner adds that creativity is partly a judgement made by others, by the people and institutions who know a field, and that it usually takes about ten years to master a field and up to another ten to change it.2
Others disagree, and Gardner records their objection: that being deeply absorbed in making something, as a child is when drawing, is itself creative work, whatever anyone else makes of it. The list of intelligences Therapeutic Shamanism uses counts creative intelligence in its own right, alongside Gardner’s and the emotional and collaborative intelligences. See What are the different kinds of intelligence, and how has the list grown?
Are humans the most creative of the Peoples? #
On this one, yes. When a widened list of intelligences is run across the Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, creative intelligence is one of only two on which humans come out clearly ahead, the other being logical-mathematical intelligence. Many animals are creative and inventive, but the sheer number and variety of the ideas, philosophies, music and objects humans come up with is exceptional. That is not necessarily a good thing: the same gift has led to enormous problems in the world as well.
Part of what lies behind it is the human ability to shapeshift in the imagination. Humans can separate their awareness from their own nature, to a unique extent, and use their imagination to think their way into being something else, with a curious, restless and inventive nature to match. Oak Tree does not spend its time wondering what it is like to be Waterfall; humans wonder all the time.3 Without that ability, stories, plays, films and a lot of paintings would be meaningless, and shamanism itself would be impossible.4 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
How is creativity linked to shamanic journeying? #
Closely. Journeying needs a deliberate move away from logical, fact-bound thinking into what can be called creative right-brain allowing: the mode of dreams, imagery, art, poetry, music and imagination.5 People who are already artistic often take to journeying more quickly, because they are used to working that way, but being artistic is not a requirement. Anyone who can imagine can journey, and the ability grows with practice.
The left-brain and right-brain language needs a caution. Neuroscientists have found no evidence that one hemisphere is dominant in any individual person in terms of brain activity, and both are active in everything we do. What is still well established is that the two hemispheres process the world differently, and the real question is which of the two ways of perceiving we have been trained to pay attention to. In Therapeutic Shamanism ‘left-brain’ and ‘right-brain’ are shorthand for those two ways of being.6 See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
The link with art goes further. The shamanic realms exist at the edge of our awareness, and to interact with them at all we have to give what is there form and detail. An artist painting a story from the life of a saint has to choose the scene, the light, the clothes and the faces, and brings the style of their era and their own personality to it. A shaman does something very similar in a journey. The difference is in what makes the work great: a great painting owes much to its artistic licence, whilst a great journey is great to the extent that it is a true representation of what is there, which is why the shaman tries to bring as little of their own material as possible and to stay aware of what they do bring.7 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Why does great art move us? #
Because it suggests more than it spells out. Great art is rarely photorealistic; it gives the impression of things and asks the viewer to do part of the work, what art historians call ‘the beholder’s share’. The viewer turns smears of pigment into a world and responds to it in their own way, so the art becomes a collaboration between artist and viewer. The same is true of great music, poetry and photography, and of great journeys: the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is largely beyond language, the realm of metaphor and imagery, akin to poetry, painting or music.8 See Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World?
There is a further reason. Human-made things have no Lower-World Soul of their own, but they can be modelled on Soul. The closer something made by people is to the Stories of the Lower-World, the more it moves us, because what is close to Soul calls to our Soul. That is why a mobile phone does not move anyone’s Soul but great art can, and why some paintings, poems, pieces of music and films move us far more than others.9 See What is shamanic art, and what does rock art tell us?
Is creativity a way of expressing Soul? #
It can be. A talent for painting, photography, playing an instrument, writing, cooking, teaching, dancing, singing, listening to people or anything else is one thing; getting good at it usually takes hard work, practice and some struggle. What keeps people going is that doing something well that they have a talent for makes them feel alive: it is their Soul finding a way to express itself in the world.10 See What does rewilding Soul mean, and how do we discover our gifts and life direction?
The mythologist Joseph Campbell, asked in a television interview with Bill Moyers about the peak moments of his life, named two races he ran as a young athlete, times when everything flowed and something came through in his relationship to what he called “the harmony of being”. Musicians, painters, mathematicians and philosophers describe such peak experiences too. In Therapeutic Shamanism the point of them is not the thrill but the message: when someone is being what they were meant to be, something greater than them comes through, along with a sense of rightness and of being part of something bigger.11 See What are moments of awakening?
