Creativity & Love Part 1: https://youtu.be/NKNaHHMODcY
Creativity & Love Part 2: https://youtu.be/v0mU7nVicGI
Creativity & Love Part 3: https://youtu.be/zCNkgELHhHc
CREATIVITY & LOVE Texts
Genesis: 1
In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth—when the earth was astonishingly empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep, and the Divine Presence hovered upon the surface of the waters—God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (1934-1983): A World of Love: The Purpose of Creation:
Why did God create the world? … God had absolutely no need to create the world. God Himself is absolute perfection, and has no need for anything, even creation. When He created the world, He therefore performed the most perfect possible act of altruism and love. … God has no needs or wants, and therefore, there was nothing about Him that creation could satisfy. It was therefore the most perfect possible act of love.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935): Creation and study: Lights of Holiness,Vol.I,p 179.
Whoever is endowed with the soul of a creator must create works of imagination and thought. He cannot confine himself in shallow studies alone. For the flame of the soul rises by itself and one cannot impede it on its course.
Scope for thought—this is the constant claim that a thinking person addresses to himself.
Superficial study sometimes narrows thought, it aborts it at birth. It is this that aggravates the sickness of narrowness of thought.
With all one’s strength, one must liberate oneself from this, in order to free the soul from its narrow confines, to redeem it from its Egypt, from the house of bondage.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935): The Inner Spark: Lights of Holiness, Vol.I, p. 179.
The inner essence of the soul, which reflects, which lives the true spiritual life, must have absolute inner freedom. It experiences its freedom, which is life, through its originality in thought, which is its inner spark that can be fanned to a flame through study and concentration. But the inner spark is the basis of imagination and thought. If the autonomous spark should not be given scope to express itself, then whatever may be acquired from the outside will be of no avail.
This spark must be guarded in its purity, and the thought expressing the inner self, in its profound truth, its greatness and majesty, must be aroused. This holy spark must not be quenched through any study or probing.
The uniqueness of the inner soul, in its own authenticity—this is the highest expression of the seed of divine light, the light planted for the righteous, from which will bud and blossom the fruit of the tree of life.
Knowledge in our inner being continues to stream forth. It creates, it acts.
The higher creative individual does not create. He only transfers.
Dr. Rollo May (1909-1994): The Courage to Create:
If you do not express your own original [creative] ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.
A chief characteristic of this courage is that it requires a centeredness within our own being, without which we would feel ourselves to be in a vacuum. The “emptiness” within corresponds to an apathy without; and apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice. That is why we must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.