Creative Ground

Creative Ground’s collaborators pull from a full range of resources to best understand, explore and access human potential and creativity.  Provided here is a sample of these resources for further study.

Amabile, Teresa M. Creativity in Context. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.

“Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity, but extrinsic motivation is detrimental. The most crucial social psychological factors in creativity may be those that either lead people to concentrate on the intrinsically interesting aspects of a task or lead them to concentrate on some extrinsic goal”

Amabile, Teresa M. and Hennessey, Beth A. “The Conditions of Creativity.” In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.) The Nature of Creativity (pp 11-37). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

“People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself – not by external pressures.”

Anderson, H.H. (Ed.), Creativity and its Cultivation. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

“Creativity, the emergence of originals and of individuality, is found in every living cell. Creativity is in each one of us. “

Costa, Arthur L. and Kallick, Bena, Editors. Discovering and Exploring Habits of Mind. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2000.

“Educational outcomes in traditional settings focus on how many answers a student knows. When we teach for the habits of mind, we are interested in how students behave when they don’t know the answer….We are interested in enhancing the way students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it. We want students to learn how to develop a critical stance with their work: editing, thinking flexibly and learning from another person’s perspective. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information but knowing how to act on it.”

Csikszentmihalyi, M. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins, 1996

“If I had to express in one word what makes the creative personality different from others, it would be complexity. Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.”

Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

“In drawing, you will delve deeply into a part of your mind too often obscured by endless details of daily life.  From this experience you will develop your ability to perceive things freshly in their totality, to see underlying patterns and possibilities for new combinations.  Creative solutions to problems, whether personal or professional, will be accessible through new modes of thinking and new ways of using the power of your whole brain.”

Fox, Matthew.  Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts For the Peoples of the Earth. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

“In creativity, we take in the 19 billion year history of blessing that the Universe has bestowed on us and give it out again in new forms, in ways that have passed through our unique imaginations, and times, our unique hands and heads, hearts and voices. As (Meister)Eckhart put it, “ What is truthful cannot come from outside in; it must come from inside out and pass through the inner form.” All artists know this and all persons need to learn it.”

Fox, Matthew.  Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet.  New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin, 2002.

“Creativity is a choice. Creativity is not a particular gift given to certain people only. It is a personal choice and a cultural choice. An individual choice and a family, professional, and a societal choice, and at this time in history it is a species choice. We choose whether to let creativity flow or not—in our educational systems, our media, our politics our economics, our religion, our very psyches.”

Fromm, Erich. The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1993.

“The condition of creativeness is the willingness to be born every day. We are always torn between the wish to regress to the womb and the wish to be fully born. Every act of birth requires the courage to let go of something, to let go of the womb, to let go of the lap, to let go of the hand, to let go eventually of all certainties, and to rely upon one thing only: one’s own power to be aware and to respond; that is, one’s own creativity.”

Fromm, Erich “The Creative Attitude.” In H.H. Anderson (Ed.), Creativity and its Cultivation (pp. 44-54). New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

“To see creatively, means to see objectively. Only when one has reached a degree of inner maturity, which reduces projection and distortion to a minimum, can one experience creatively.”

Greene, Maxine “Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts And Social Change.”  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass-A Wiley Company, 1995.

“To tap into the imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real. It is to see beyond what the imaginer has called normal or “common-sensible” and to carve out new orders of experience. Doing so, a person may become freed to glimpse what might be, to form notions of what should be and what is not yet.”

Lawlor, Robert. Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Rochester, VT:  Inner Traditions International, Ltd., 1991.

“Ritual creates a space in society for the full play of the Dreamtime: dark and light, cruel and beautiful, grandiose and impoverished.  Developing those destructive and constructive potentials in ritual does not spill them out into the external world, to exhaust themselves and the earth in endless cycles of actualization.”

MacKinnon, Donald W. In Search of Human Effectiveness: Identifying and Developing Creativity. The Creative Education Foundation, Inc., 1978.

“The most salient mark of a creative person is courage. It is not physical courage of the type that might be rewarded by the Congressional Medal of Honor. Rather it is personal courage, courage of the mind and spirit, psychological or spiritual courage that is the radix of a creative person: the courage to question what is generally accepted; the courage to be destructive in order that something better can be constructed; the courage to think thoughts unlike anyone else’s; the courage to be open to experience both from within and from without; the courage to follow one’s intuition rather than logic; the courage to imagine the impossible and try to achieve it; the courage to stand aside from the collectivity and be in conflict with it if necessary; the courage to become and to be oneself.”

Maslow, Abraham H. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: The Viking Press, 1971.

“…what I’m talking about is the job of trying to make ourselves into people who don’t need to staticize the world, who don’t need to freeze it and to make it stable, who don’t need to do what their daddies did, who are able confidently to face tomorrow not knowing what’s going to come, not knowing what will happen, with confidence enough in ourselves that we will be able to improvise in that situation which has never existed before.”

May, Rollo. The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Limited, 1975.

“The creative process must be explored as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity, as Webster’s rightly indicates, is basically the process of making, of bringing into being.”

McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

“If the detached, highly focused attention of the left hemisphere is brought to bear on living things, and later not resolved into the whole picture by right-hemisphere action, which yields depth and context, it is destructive.  We become like insects.”

Medina, John. The Brain Rules. Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2008.

“The brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to two things at the same time.  Businesses and schools praise multitasking, but research clearly shows that it reduces productivity and increases mistakes.  Try creating an interruption-free zone during the day–turn off your email, phone, IM program or Blackberry–and see whether you get more done.”

Rogers, C. “Toward a Theory of Creativity.” In H.H. Anderson (Ed.) Creativity and its Cultivation (pp. 69-82). New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

“The mainspring of creativity seems to be man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. It exits in every individual and awaits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed.”

Samuels, Mike and Nancy. Seeing with the Mind’s Eye. New York, NY:  Random House/Book Works, 1977.

“When people’s eyes are open, they see landscapes in the outer world.  When people’s eyes are closed, they see landscapes with their mind’s eye.  People spend hours looking at outer landscapes, but there is just as much to see in the inner landscapes.  The landscapes are different but they are equally valid.”

Senge, Peter, Scharmer, C. Otto, Jaworksi, Joseph, Flowers, Better Sue. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of Poential. New York: Currency Doubleday, 2004.

“1) Creativity is essential for health, happiness and success in all areas of life, including business; 2) Creativity is within everyone; and 3) Even though it’s within everyone it’s covered over by the ‘Voice of Judgment’ as presented in Michael Ray’s popular course in creativity at the Stanford Business School. ”

Sinnott, Edmund W. “The Creativeness of Life.” In H.H. Anderson (Ed.) Creativity and its Cultivation (pp. 12-29). New York: Harper & Row, 1959.

“Life itself is the creative process by virtue of its organizing, pattern-forming, questing quality, its most distinctive character.”

Sternberg, Robert J., Editor. Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

“Essentially all people of normal intelligence have the potential to be creative to some degree. Few people realize anything close to their potential in this regard. Creative expression is desirable because it usually contributes positively to the quality of life of the individual who engages in it and often enriches the lives of others as well.”

Tharp, Twyla.  The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.

“I believe we all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations.  These strands are as solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except they govern our creative impulses.  The determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them.”

Torrance, E.P. “The Nature of Creativity as Manifest in its Testing.” In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.) The Nature of Creativity (pp 11-37). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

“The essence of creativity is being in love with what one is doing and this makes possible all the other characteristics of the creative person: courage, independence of thought and judgment, honesty, perseverance, curiosity, and willingness to take risks.”

Trungpa, Chogyam.  Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.  Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1984.

“The key to warriorship and the first principle of Shambhala vision is not being afraid of who you are.  Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.”

Williams, Heather C.  Drawing as a Sacred Activity.  Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002.

“Is right good and left bad?  No.  You want to use the attributes of both sides on your brain….When your right brain becomes too dominant, your drawing (and your life) takes on a vague aimless look.  Drawings (and life) are exciting when right and left brain work together, back and forth creating depth and movement on paper and in life.”