You might remember Miyagi teaching Daniel in The Karate Kid his first lesson… in waxing the car.
“Wax on, right hand. Wax off, left hand. Wax on, wax off. Breathe in through nose, out the mouth. Wax on, wax off. Don’t forget to breathe, very important.”
It’s a classic gongfu film senario. The acolyte becomes the master, not through some direct means but by infusing experiences and developing instincts, tapping into something in the core that he didn’t know was there.
What if this lesson also applied to our imagination? What if we all had a creative portal and all we had to do was open it?
Master film-maker David Lynch and poet/musician Donovan both think we do, and although they couldn’t be more different, as artists or as people, they express very similar ideas in video interviews for The Atlantic’s Where Ideas Come From issue.
David Lynch talks about how ideas already exist (as thoughts) and we all have millions of them floating around. We just need to learn how to catch them and piece the fragments together. He thinks it’s important to develop our consciousness with practices like meditation to bring us deeper into our thoughts and infuse what we find there.
Donovan tells the story of his development as an artist and how he discovered at some stage that through meditation he could create the circumstances for his art to happen and could open a portal of creativity where he could “catch” melodies and use them to create his songs.
He quotes the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi:
“You can follow the bubbles of your thoughts down to where they originate”
Pic: Wash Me (Yallingup) by creativespark
