Creativity is about creating the ‘shape’ of our lives. This is as opposed to being reactive and just doing the things that family, friends and bosses seem to expect. It requires that we live a more reflective, proactive and focused life.
The Human Genome
It’s now thought that there are some 30,000 active genes in the human, a vast number but actually less than at first anticipated. Originally it was thought that the number would be around 100,000 to account for the complexity of a human being. Of these 30,000 genes we share a lot of with other species, including five with bananas!
Also researchers are finding that genes – again differently from originally thought – appear more and more to be not what ‘make us’ rather they are what we use to ‘express ourselves’. After the structure of DNA was discovered it was thought that this was a fixed template and that it determined who/what we were. Then Barbara McClintock demonstrated that genes can actually jump -jumping genes- from one chromosome to another within a cell-called transposance- and cause the amount of DNA within the genome to change and mutations to occur. So genes are not fixed but fluid and active components of our physical beings. This raises a question – what is governing our genes, and if our genes are not governing us then who is?
Quantum Physics
For a long time the model of the atom was as the model for the planets and stars, each inter-acting with each other in orbits dictated by the forces between them. Then new discoveries showed that the sub-atomic particles of the atom -such as the electron- cannot in fact be said to orbit around the nucleus of the atom as previously thought. The actual state of the atom is now being referred to as being more like ‘a cloud of possibility.’
It seems that the electron doesn’t exist as a specific particle until the observer observes it. It takes ‘consciousness’ to bring that electron into being as a particle, before that it has an existence that is determined by quantum equations giving a wave like description of the probabilities -the wave function- of where you might find that electron. It’s a diffused range of possibilities. Only when you actually ‘go in’ and observe does that electron manifest itself, at which point all the other possibilities disappear. The term used is ‘the collapse of the wave-function’. This way of thinking has been revolutionary and has led to all sorts of developments in lasers and microprocessors.
Consciousness-Based Paradigm
The conventional view is that matter is the ground of being. Scientists who are developing the conscious-based paradigm are finding the opposite, that the ground of being is ‘thought-like’ and it is consciousness that gives rise to matter. They have come to this conclusion from the discoveries of quantum physics (see above) – at it’s most fundamental level matter requires an observer (consciousness) to come into being. Unobserved there are a range of possibilities with matter only manifesting itself when one of those possibilities is selected by consciousness, at which point all the other possibilities disappear. This new theory underlines that the mind is the fundamental stuff of the universe and that matter is shaped by consciousness.
So if I am not my genes, who am I and what is consciousness?
Science has not found a a way to definitively define consciousness or what the role of an individual unit of consciousness is. Going to spiritual teachings, they tell us that that we are spiritual beings –souls- quite distinct from the body. The soul being a unit of consciousness, a ‘conscient’ entity. Linking this with the above scientific discoveries of how I as the observer influence what I observe means that we are maybe not the prisoners of matter that we thought we were after all. In fact it means that we have much more potential to create our fate -our future- than we have realised.
