Welcome back! If you joined us in our previous exploration of the creative process, you’ll remember our journey into the rhythmic dance of “do-be-do-be-do,” the balance between action and stillness that fuels our imagination. Now, we continue this journey by diving deeper into the realm of quantum creativity and the profound power of unconscious processing. Whether you’re new to this discussion or following along from our first article, prepare to unlock the secrets behind those spontaneous flashes of insight and the unseen forces that shape our most brilliant ideas.

Let’s explore how the unconscious mind operates beyond the limits of our conscious awareness and discover how this quantum dance can lead to your next big “Eureka!” moment.

Preparation begins with an intuition, a vague feeling about the answer to a possible problem. There is a question, a curiosity at work, but it’s not burning. However, as you keep doing the relevant groundwork—gathering information, asking questions about the existing structure, and so forth—your curiosity takes on a growing intensity.

When you get well acquainted with the field and yet the feeling persists that you are on the verge of a discovery, urgency appears; the questions begin to nag at you as the dismantling of existing belief system(s) begins to take place. At this point, says psychologist Carl Rogers, your mind becomes open, setting the stage for unbridled possibilities and acceptance of the new. We can see a good example of the importance of an open mind in 17th-century physicist Johannes Kepler, who came up with the revolutionary idea that the planets in our solar system move in ellipses around the sun. Long before Kepler’s final insight, he had logically considered the possibility of the ellipse as an option for planetary orbits, but had discarded the idea as a “cartload “cartload of dung.” He was not yet prepared for the new. He lacked an open mind—until he didn’t.

Wallas and many other researchers believe that incubation involves unconscious mental processing. Quantum physics gives us an explanation: Unconscious processing is quantum processing—it takes place in the nonlocal realm of many possibilities at once. When Niels Bohr was working on his model of the atom, he saw the solar system in a dream, suggesting unconscious incubation in his psyche. Behaviourally, we can equate incubation with relaxation— “sitting quietly, doing nothing”—as opposed to preparation, which is active work.

The third stage, where discontinuity enters, is of course, the most spectacular. The transition from unconscious possibilities to conscious insight, from stage two to stage three, requires downward causation, which acts discontinuously.

Finally, manifestation involves working with the insight, checking the solution, and ending up with a product—the manifest novelty. With manifestation comes a restructuring of the belief system, or at least an extension of the repertoire of learned contexts. In this way it is like the dance of Shiva, the destroyer and creator in Hindu mythology

Could the brain do all this on its own, as materialists claim? No materialist model can distinguish unconscious from conscious; the neurophysiology of experience (let alone creative experience) is a “hard” problem that is beyond the reach of scientific materialism to explain. Furthermore, brain-based explanations suffer from inconsistency. How does the brain search for meaning if it is a material machine, since matter cannot process meaning? How does the brain pull together “ideas” from different brain areas without nonlocal capacity? How does an idea “enter” consciousness if there is no distinction between conscious and unconscious? Face it. A brain-based explanation of creativity is a prime example of what is now called “fact-free science”. It’s the same basis some conservatives provide for their regular denials of global climate change.

Creative ideas come to us, in physicist Nikola Tesla’s phrase, “like a bolt of lightning.” Creative thoughts that shift our contexts or reveal new meaning are discontinuous leaps from our ordinary stream-of-consciousness thoughts.

Henri Poincaré pondered a mathematical problem for days, but nothing happened in his conscious, step-by-step thinking. But later, on a trip, a new context for mathematical functions came to him unexpectedly, discontinuously, as he was boarding a bus. He later reported the idea had no connection to his thoughts at the time, or to his previous thinking on the subject.

The king of Syracuse, in ancient Greece, wanted to find out if a certain crown was made of real gold, and who but his favorite scientist, Archimedes, could determine this without mutilating the crown? It is said that Archimedes suddenly hit upon the idea for an answer when he set foot in a full bathtub and the tub overflowed. So exalted was he that he ran naked in the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I found it! I found it!”) The solution Archimedes discovered started a new branch of hydrostatics.

The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss provides an example of the discontinuity of a creative insight in this way: Finally, two days ago, I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible. Notice the insistence on the role of the “grace of God.” This undoubtedly reflects Gauss’s keen awareness that he did not make the discovery via step-by-step thinking.

The composer Brahms also saw the discontinuity of his insight as help from God. He described his creative experience composing his most famous music with these words: Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. Measure by measure the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare, inspired moods.

Here is an equally compelling quote about the suddenness of creativity from the great composer, Tchaikovsky: Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. … It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any way but [by] this simile.

The English romantic poet P. B. Shelley expressed the discontinuity of writing poetry succinctly: “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will write poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it.”

Objective Data

From the objective standpoint of scientific materialism, subjective reports of discontinuous shifts in consciousness like those cited above are suspect as evidence for the discontinuity in creativity, but there is objective evidence, too, of such quantum leaps of creativity!

There is the phenomenon of quantum healing (spontaneous healing without medical intervention) that must be seen as a creative breakthrough, as the following case history shows. A patient designated as S.R. was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. S.R. was pregnant and did not want to lose the baby. So she refused chemotherapy and found a new doctor under whose supervision she had surgery, even radiation treatment, but the situation continued to get worse.

Her physician was researching LSD therapy for cancer. S.R. took a guided LSD trip during which the doctor encouraged her to go deep inside herself and communicate with the life in her womb. As S.R. did that, her physician asked if she had the right to cut off the new life. It was then that S.R. had the sudden flash of insight: She had the choice to live or die—a quantum leap. She chose life. It took a while after this insight, and a lot of lifestyle changes, but she was healed—quantum healing. You can deny the veracity of what she did or said, but the hard fact remains that she was healed without medical intervention. Incidentally, she also gave birth to a healthy child. Thanks to Dr. Deepak Chopra and researchers at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, there is now much documented data of such quantum healing—spontaneous healing without medical intervention.

Another source of objective data in support of quantum leaps of creativity consists of the many fossil gaps that are found between otherwise continuous fossil lineages.

There is also another source of suggestive support for the discontinuity of creativity. Mythology, said the philosopher William Irwin Thompson, is the history of the soul (consciousness). The importance of discontinuity in creative acts is immortalized in India by the Valmiki myth: Ratnakar was a hunter who once killed two birds who were making love.

He became so moved after realizing what evil he had done those lines of poetry spontaneously came out of his mouth and he was transformed. Later he became known as Valmiki and wrote the great Indian epic of the Ramayana. In the West, very tellingly, there is the myth of Newton’s apple—the falling of an apple is said to have triggered a discontinuous shift in Newton’s discovery of gravity.

The Evidence for Unconscious Processing

To scientific materialist’s dreams don’t count; they are too subjective to take seriously. However, objective scientific evidence of the unconscious is mounting.

First, psychologist Nicholas Humphrey found a human subject with defects in his cortex that had caused him to become blind in the left visual field of both eyes. But the man could point to a light on his blind side with accuracy and could also use blindsight to distinguish crosses from circles and horizontal lines from vertical ones. But when asked how he “saw” these things, the man insisted that he just guessed, in spite of the fact that his hit rate was far beyond mere chance. Cognitive scientists now agree that this phenomenon, known as blind sight, represents unconscious processing—processing optical stimuli without awareness.

Secondly, research done on the brain’s electrical responses to a variety of subliminal messages provides further physiological and cognitive evidence for unconscious processing. A meaningful picture (for example, a bee) flashed on a screen for a thousandth of a second elicits a stronger response than a more neutral picture (such as an abstract geometrical figure). Furthermore, when subjects were asked to free-associate after these subliminal exposures, they used words like sting and honey. Clearly, there must have been unconscious processing of the picture of the bee without awareness to elicit responses like “sting”!

Thirdly, cognitive experiments using words with multiple meanings support the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. In conscious processing there is collapse and awareness—subject-object split. In unconscious processing, in which consciousness is present in the absence of awareness, there is no collapse of the possibility wave. In a representative experiment, cognitivist Anthony Marcel used strings of three words in which the middle word was ambiguously associated with the other two words; his subjects watched a screen as the three words were flashed one at a time at intervals of either 600 milliseconds or 1.5 seconds between flashings.

The subjects were then asked to push a button when they consciously recognized the last word of the series. However, when the researchers masked the middle word by a pattern that made it impossible to see with awareness, though unconscious perception continued, there was no longer any appreciable difference in reaction time between the congruent and the incongruent cases. This is surprising because presumably both meanings of the ambiguous word were available, regardless of the biasing context, yet neither meaning was chosen over the other. Apparently, then, choice, and therefore quantum collapse, is a concomitant of conscious experience but not of unconscious processing.

The conclusion is simple, straightforward, and astounding: quantum events remain in possibility until consciousness looks at and actualizes them—even if that takes place after what we assume as the fact!

When we perceive something in the world, an external stimulus produces a brain image for which we find a correlated mental state, thereby giving it meaning. When we use our imagination, we start with an intention and find a match for it in language or visual representations in the brain’s memory repertoire; eventually, we see a visual image even though there is no external object. Every once in a while, we fall into intuitive states of primary awareness, unleashing images or thoughts we’ve never considered before. Now, using the brain’s neuroplasticity, we can make new maps of these mental states. As a pundit once said, “Genius is the capacity to treat objects of the imagination as real and even to manipulate them as such.”

Now you can understand what Coleridge meant when he distinguished between fancy and imagination. Fancy a frivolous expression of the intellect is just, the playful doodling of the ego. But imagination, said Coleridge, springs “from elemental parts of the spirit shared by all.” In our ego mode, we make known images from our past experiences. But when we elude the ego, as we do in a dream state, we may more easily fall into primary awareness of the quantum self. Then we can explore truly creative imagery and manifest the unknown. When we dream, the otherwise vigilant ego relaxes, allowing us to dip into the unknown in ways that the conscious mind rarely permits. In dreams, the unconscious becomes the major player.

One of the major ideas, the importance of do-be-do-be-do in the creative process, came to me in a dream. I was observing a group of very active abstract figures, who were dancing, gambolling, and frolicking about. A voice in the background introduced them as the angels of doing. But soon these figures were replaced by other abstract figures—quieter, more relaxed ones. The voice proclaimed them angels of being. But then the angels of doing came back, only to be replaced again by the angels of being, and the two groups continued to alternate. When I woke up my mind sang, “do-be-do-be-do.”

In dealing with the wholeness of the act of creativity, we must note not only what is discontinuous and extraordinary (the quantum leaps) but also what seems to be continuous and mundane. Charles Darwin’s autobiography describes a creative moment of insight when, while reading Malthus’s “Essay on Population,” Darwin came to recognize the crucial role of fecundity in the theory of natural selection in biological evolution: The fact that species producing multiple offspring to replace themselves would quickly lead to an overpopulated planet were it not for limited resources, which means that individuals compete with each other for those limited resources. But according to creativity researcher Howard Gruber, a study of Darwin’s notebooks shows that, while this was the final moment of insight, it was part of a gradual process interspersed with many smaller insights. Of what does the entire creative process consist, then?

Researcher Graham Wallas was one of the first to suggest that creative acts involve four stages, a view that is now commonly accepted. To this we must add do-be-do-be-do, many repetitions of preparation and unconscious processing.

These four stages are: preparation; incubation; sudden insight; and manifestation. Let’s take a closer look at them now.

• Stage 1: Preparation.
  Gather facts and existing ideas about your problem and think, think, think. Talk with experts; attend workshops. Churn your ideas, looking at them in every way that comes to mind. Give your imagination free rein.
• Stage 2: Incubation.
  The problem is not going away, so while it’s percolating in your mind, you can play, sleep, and do things that relax you. (Include especially bath, bus, and apple tree—they have demonstrated relevance: Archimedes made his “Eureka” discovery while taking a bath; the mathematician Henri Poincaré had a major insight while boarding a bus; and Newton discovered gravity while sitting under an apple tree.)
• Stage 2a: Do-be-do-be-do.
  Alternative doing (preparation, imagination) and being (unconscious processing) in tandem many times until insight comes. History has not recorded this past of the process, but Archimedes, Poincare, and Newton, and indeed creatives generally use this step.
• Stage 3: Sudden insight.
  Eureka! Right when you least expect it, illumination dawns. The surprise of this moment is a hallmark of discontinuity.
• Stage 4: Manifestation.
  The fun is over—or is it just beginning? Verify, evaluate, and manifest what you’ve come up with. In other words, make a product of your insight.

As we journey through the stages of creativity, from preparation to the delightful dance of do-be-do-be-do, we begin to see that creativity isn’t merely a mechanical process of assembling ideas—it’s an intricate, almost mystical dance between the conscious and unconscious mind. But what fuels these leaps from ordinary to extraordinary, from known to unknown? How do we truly harness the power of the unconscious mind, tapping into the vast, unseen potentials that lie just beyond our conscious grasp?

To delve deeper into this intriguing landscape, we must turn our focus to the quantum underpinnings of creativity itself. In our next exploration, “Exploring Quantum Creativity and the Power of Unconscious Processing,” we’ll uncover how the unseen forces of the mind—like a bolt of lightning—strike to reveal profound insights, and how the unconscious mind plays a pivotal role in shaping these sudden, transformative moments of genius. Let’s continue our journey into the heart of creativity, where the mysterious meets the miraculous.