Inner Sparks

Don read me an article from Scientific American  this morning called “Inner Sparks” which is an interview with Charles J. Limb, a surgeon and sax player  working at Johns Hopkins Medical Center studying human creativity by studying skilled musicians improvising music while having their brains scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.  The study highlights the parts of the brain that “light up” when improvising and the parts that “shut down.”  During improvisation the medial prefrontal cortex turns on and the lateral prefrontal cortex is inhibited.  The lateral prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain involved in conscious self-monitoring, self-inhibition, and the evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of what you’re about to do.   The article highlights one of the reasons creative endeavors are so satisfying.  In the flow of creativity, we are not judging, condemning or questioning ourselves.

I will never be a skilled musician.  In addition to creativity, it takes musical skill, practice and focus.  But what fascinated me about this article is that I’ve experienced this cognitive shift in my own life, an increased urge to engage in creative activity and a very noticeable decrease in my level of inhibition.  It is definitely not a given that these two shifts result in a miraculous ability to create masterpieces, it may just be a superb opportunity to embarrass myself.   But, oddly enough, being embarrassed is no longer enough to inhibit sharing my enthusiasm for the amazing beauty of life and my excitement about the potential power of unconditional love.

It may be that the nerve damage which is creating pain has also damaged these parts of my brain, or it may be that the deep shifts in my psyche as the result of surrendering to the deepest part of my Self have shifted my perspective.  In any case, I’m willing to exchange ecstatic love for constricted struggling.  I suspect this willingness could be an embarrassment to those connected to me.

Possibly responding to the embarrassing “born again” quality of my enthusiasm, my daughter sent me an article this morning about Rick Perry.  The Texas governor officially proclaimed April 22 to April 24, 2011 as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.    It is an interesting example of how anything that smacks of the spiritual, especially for lovers of rationality, evokes a sense of separation from the practical.  While I certainly think praying for the wisdom to meet our lives with an inspired level of creativity can be concretely effective, the hard part of Governor Perry’s prayer is that he’s asking “for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.”  Our normal way of life is what got us into this mess.  It will take looking from a decidedly “not normal” perspective to actually heal anything, let alone rebuild our communities.

This “not normal” perspective is the one beyond the limits of our rational minds.  Higher level creativity springs from wholeness of heart, mind and spirit.  The intuitive ability to perceive any situation and determine an effective response is heightened and the urge to respond with merely learned or habitual responses is inhibited.  It is a place that calls for authenticity, a demanding willingness to participate in life and to face each moment as fearlessly as we can.  It is recognizing that sometimes we will still create messes and we will still have to clean them up, hopefully having gained a higher level of clarity about what works and what doesn’t.

God isn’t going to fix it, but the creativity of the universe is ours for the asking if we have the courage to reach for it.  It means abandoning a lot of what we thought we knew, as well as our blind spots, our fear, and our sense of limitation.  It means opening to the kind of love Christ modeled but that hasn’t been tried yet by the rest of us.