Creativity, Artists & the No-Mind

“All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”         – Eckhart Tolle

ENLIGHTENMENT: RISING ABOVE THOUGHT by Eckhart Tolle

Isn't thinking essential in order to survive in this world?

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task
is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 8o to go percent of most people's
thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative
nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It
causes a serious leakage of vital energy.
This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What characterizes an
addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that you have the choice to stop. It seems
stronger than you. It also gives you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns
into pain.
The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind. To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it -who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says: "One day, when this, that, or the
other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace." Even when the ego seems to be
concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely
because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an
end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you'll see
that this is how it works.
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment
as long as you are your mind.
Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of
consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need
thought. Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when
needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before. You use it mostly for
practical purposes, but you are free of the involuntary internal dialogue, and there is inner
stillness. When you do use your mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed,
you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and stillness, between mind and nomind.

No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think
creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power. Thought alone, when
it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly becomes barren,
insane, destructive.
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds,
gathering, storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all
creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from
inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great
scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude.
The surprising result of a nation-wide inquiry among America's most eminent
mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking
"plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself." So I
would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because
they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking!
It wasn’t through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your
body were created and are being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far
greater than the mind. How can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch across
contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 100 pages each? The more
we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence
at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a
most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.

My note*
For me, Whenever I TRY to create artistically or force creativity it is never as beautiful as when it just happens... when I just let go.
In acting: I have to stop thinking and be in the now or the acting will be horrible. The thinking shows through the camera. The director will tell you "let go and just be in the now".
In Modeling: If you are "thinking" as you pose your pictures will look like you were "thinking" ... trying to hard. The photographer will tell you "stop thinking about your poses".
In Writing: I have to let go mentally and just be in the now and let it come to me... or I will be staring at a blank screen "thinking about what I want to write about"
In Singing (yes, I've been in the studio lol) : The engineer told me "Don't think about the lyrics and just sing from inside"
In Painting: etc...
In Crisis Situations: etc...

This can go on and on and on ... I think you get the point ;) Don't psyche yourself out ... go to the no-mind.

Creativity, Artist, & the No-mind