Audacious Creativity
With new situations, we may feel overstimulation because they are unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things in the past have turned out to be upsetting. Naturally, HSPs and intuitives reject many new concepts or ideas without trying for fear of suffering a negative reaction they experienced from the same (or similar) experience in the past. With these blinders, we can miss out on a lot. I think back to 2015 – 2016 while I was going through my deepest depression after the house fire and death of my father. Aside from my son graduating kindergarten, I cannot recall any other substantial memory – good or bad for over a year. What a missed opportunity. But given my new understanding of myself I feel confident in saying it is becoming necessary in our current now time to challenge our comfortable way of thinking, and allow ourselves to consider or explore that which we do not know.
All of the societal pressures currently overwhelming our daily lives calls for a paradigm shift in our thinking and the audacity to push beyond what we know now. Remember, at one time the idea of radio frequencies seemed crazy, and Copernicus and Galleleo were prosecuted for going against old theories! The inspiration behind inventions varies, but Einstein famously said that intuition is a sacred gift, whereas the rational mind is a faithful servant. If we understand Einstein to be correct about other things, I would deduce that he may have been on to something about intuition here.
“From Copernicus to Darwin to Freud, science has a special way of deflating human hubris by proposing what is frequently perceived, at the time, as dangerous or pernicious ideas. Today, cognitive neuroscience presents us with a new challenging idea, whose accommodation will require substantial personal and societal effort — the discovery of the intrinsic limits of the human brain.” - Stanislas Dehaene Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, Consciousness and the Brain.
While I believe in the need for subject matter experts in any field to help pave the way for others, what all of the above have in common is that they all had a high level of curiosity required as the first step toward breaking through with new information. Carla A. Woolf has coined the term “Audacious Creativity,” where she explains that we must each believe that we can give ourselves permission to engage and push through the barriers of our already explored scales of creativity, which is the same as dismissing the belief that only certain people are endowed with the capacity to create new knowledge theories.
We can start by addressing the fallacy that we are limited by an invisible wall (culture, our own coping skills) that tells us that approval must be granted from the correct channels or fields of knowledge for creativity to occur. This is not to discredit those who have paved the way for us and laid out some of the very basic laws that we now come to understand as truth. The point is not to limit our progress by this self-imposed restriction on our own creative ability to move the needle in any particular direction. The goal then is to two-fold: first, to give ourselves permission to think of things that may be beyond our “scope.” And, two, to have the framework to be able to distinguish between what is true and what is not.
Considering the advancements that were made over the last 100 years, it seems shortsighted to think that we know all we will ever know at this point in time in our history. Consider the example of quantum physics, which was discovered in the 1920s. At the time, it looked like wasting time and money. But it is now part of the very foundation of what we now know about computing and continues to unfold in other areas of study. I would argue that a key component of what is missing from our traditional understanding of physics and our 3D knowledge of the world lacks an understanding of the quantum and dimensions. More on this later, in the meantime here are some fun examples of various inventions over history:
Microwaves were invented to use for communication purposes during World War II. Now we know that they can also heat up our left-overs!
Galaleo figures out microscopes, which he applied to space.
Thanks to x rays in airports, torque powered cordless drills and GPS are now mainstream.
Radium and x rays discovered by Madam Curie.
Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who invented the periodic table of elements (via a dream).
Kekulé, a German organic chemist, who discovered that benzene was a ring structure, not a chain. (Also via a dream).