The Consciousness of Creativity: Are ideas alive and do they choose us?

Hi everyone, this is Ky Dickens and you're listening to The Telepathy Tapes podcast. In season one, nonspeakers showed us that telepathy is possible, shattering our assumptions about the world itself. This season, we're turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create. What if only by listening to those who've been ignored, we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going? This is The Telepathy Tapes and we're opening up the next channel.

In the last two episodes, we explored the idea that consciousness can outlive us, that it can reach across the divide of death and still connect with us. And if all that's true, what on earth is it doing with us while we're alive? Is it just a passive field that we're swimming in? Or could it be choosing us to make its will manifest to create and transform and bring something into the world that wasn't here before?

If there's one thing that we can appear to observe about the universe is that it loves to create. It loves to create, and it loves to expand and it loves to make something out of nothing, and it loves to take what is already there and transform it into something else, and then it loves to blow it up and start over again.

That's Elizabeth Gilbert, one of the most widely read authors of our time. You probably know her from her bestselling book, turned movie, "Eat, Pray, Love."

And what I believe about the nature of creativity is that ideas are conscious entities outside of ourselves that do not come from us, but to us. Artists are sort of antennae who absorb ideas.

That ideas swirl around the world looking for human collaborators, knocking on our doors and tapping on our shoulders and coming to us in the form of inspiration.

This may sound like a wild idea. But stay with me, because as fanciful as it sounds, countless artists and inventors across history have described something similar, ideas or inspiration coming to them, often fully formed from somewhere outside of themselves.

And today, we'll explore what this mysterious force might be seeking in its human collaborators, what makes it flourish, what makes it vanish, and what it might be asking of us in return.

I believe that it's like a download and all of the material that we work with comes from outside of ourselves. We participate, but it doesn't start with us.

This is legendary music producer Rick Rubin. He co-founded Def Jam Records and was co-president of Columbia Records. He's produced for seemingly everyone from LL Cool J to the Beastie Boys to Run-D.M.C., Lady Gaga, Metallica, ACDC, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Mick Jagger, Sheryl Crow, and everyone in between. He's won nine Grammys and was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world.

The best artists seem to have an antenna open to whatever the universe wants to happen now, in this moment. The information comes in and its magic. And then we're the craftsmen. We get to make the physical embodiment of it. It doesn't happen by itself. We don't channel it, and there it is. We channel it and we have to present it.

And two different artists can channel the same thing and then make what they make and it'll be two different things. If you have the same movie script and give it to several different great directors, they'll make totally different movies. Even though the script is the same, the story is the same. The download is the script.

It's not the end product. The end product is through our personal filter.

Some artists may not even be aware of their engagement with this force, but the ones we're talking with today, acknowledge it, marvel at it, and work with it. And here's Elizabeth Gilbert again.

What I like to tell people is that when you call in inspiration, let it find you at your desk already working.

I've got my desk set up and I've got my notes set up and I've got my laptop there. And the only rule is you are not allowed to stand up from this desk for 60 minutes and you are not allowed to look at the internet. A really good day of writing for me isn't about how well the writing went, it's did you sit there for 60 minutes?

Did you set an art trap? Like, were you available so that if ideas came, they could find you at your desk?

Yeah.

And then get up and walk away and say, I showed up. Like, let the record show I was here present to the possibility of a miracle today. And then the next day I do the same and the same. And eventually what happens is that I start getting into a flow.

And then here's where the big magic trick is, the first day that I get into a flow and the timer goes off and I wanna keep writing, I'm not allowed to. I have to turn the timer off and get up and walk away, and I leave a sentence, this is a Hemingway trick, you leave a sentence half finished, like you leave right in the middle of the sentence.

So when you come back to work the next day, you immediately are pulled back into the river of the thing. So if I sit there on the day when the work is flowing and I, I know this from experience, if I write for three hours and it's amazing, I've just killed any chance that I'm gonna write, the next day. I'm gonna sit down and the flow state's gonna be over 'cause I closed the loop, and I'm gonna be back sort of lost and bewildered and also tired from overworking the day before.

So part of my discipline is not overdoing it at the beginning. I have a line in my book, Big Magic, quoting a physicist who said "Art may seem like magic, but it isn't. It's magical, but it's not magic." And I humbly disagree and say that it is both of those things. It is magical and it is also magic.

Elizabeth Gilbert mentioned her book, Big Magic: Creative, Living Beyond Fear, which is about the nature of inspiration and how to approach life from the position of creativity. It's a book I love, and one of my takeaways was the idea that it's simply not possible for inspiration, creativity, big magic, whatever you wanna call it, to come only from inside ourselves.

And ideas also seem to decide how and when they want to come into the world. And that type of big magic is the reason The Telepathy Tapes became a podcast in the first place. We'll get to that story later in the episode.

I think that we did a great disservice to the notion of art when we took away the idea of an externalized genius that you're communicating with.

The Romans believed that a genius, what we call a genius, very similar to the word genie was a spirit that lived in your home and that helped you kind of like a house elf, like a little helpful spirit. And if families lived and, and resided in the same sorts of homes for a long time, that genius was passed from generation to generation.

So it would be said, this family has a genius for music. This family has a genius for political oration. Um, so the genius was inherited, not through DNA, but through the place you were living. It lived in the, in the well near where you lived. It lived in the olive tree by your house, like it was this, this, this disembodied spirit.

And the beautiful thing about that notion of an externalized genius is that the pressure is not so much on you to live up to the idea, right?

Today, we often imagine inspiration lives only inside our brains, but that's not how it used to be seen in ancient Greece, the muses were considered goddesses of inspiration, the ones who sparked poetry, music, dance, and even history itself.

And our language still remembers this. In Greek music, literally means the art of the muses and a museum was a place devoted to them.

And then the centuries went by and our German romantics absorbed that idea into themselves and they became geniuses. I am a genius. There is no external, there is no muse.

Actually, nothing's inspiring me but me. Right? I mean, it's so deeply masculine. It's so deeply western. It's so deeply empirical. I am the only actor here. Right? And not surprisingly, those people kind of lost their minds, right? And they fell into tremendous depression and despair because you can't always deliver genius because genius is also fleeting. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. It's a spirit that appears and disappears. It can't be controlled.

If it's all on your shoulders, you can only do so much. Knowing that you can tap into an infinite resource is really, uh, helpful.

The ongoing question between consciousness and ideas and creators is, do you wanna make something together?

And that relationship between a human being's effort, our will, our labor, and the mystery of creativity is what makes art. So that's how I've always experienced creativity and most creative people that I know have also always experienced it that way.

I wanted to speak with another writer who's experienced this, so I called up my brilliant friend, Liz Feldman.

She's the creator and executive producer of the hit Netflix show, Dead to Me.

So Dead to Me, came to me in a different way than any other idea that I'd had.

Dead to Me was not a concept that Liz Feldman had workshopped and written over and over. In fact, up until then, Liz was best known as a comedy writer for sitcoms.

Sitcoms are three jokes, a page that's sort of the directive. You know, it's a easy little story that starts in one place and ends in that exact place, you know, return to stasis.

So on this day, when Liz's breakthrough idea came into the world,

I had, been going through a really difficult time in my life. I had just turned 40 and I was set up on these meetings that we get set up on as writers and producers, and I was told there are these two actresses who wanna make a show together and they have all these ideas and I don't have to come up with anything.

And I showed up and I sit down and they go, "we're sick of our ideas. Do you have any?" No pressure. I was like, "Oh. God." I really didn't. I really had nothing. I didn't have anything in my back pocket. I was panicked and I sort of vamped. I stalled and then like a flash, like this weird moment of clarity, this idea sort of fell into my head.

It was weird, it dropped into my head from the ether.

And it was the rough idea for what would become Dead to Me, a show with a storyline so fresh and original, you would've thought it had been workshopped for years.

And I thought, where did that come from? Like. Why did I think of that? And, and the way I look at it now is that it, it felt like channeling, I guess. It just was sort of instant and really fast.

So I worked on it and worked on it and I, you know, kept bringing this developing thing back to these two wonderful actresses. And about three months into the process they passed and I was like, "Oh man, I really. I really liked this idea" and so I tried to, you know, go back and think of other ideas that were more in line with what people were used to me bringing to them, but I couldn't let it go, so I pitched it.

And four of the places that we went to wanted to buy it.

And her idea led to the creation of a whole new genre called Tramedy. And Dead to Me was nominated for six Emmys and a Golden Globe. And that idea chose Liz Feldman, who up to then had been known for mostly writing sitcoms. And just like I, I'd never made a podcast before. I don't think ideas pigeonhole creators based on their resumes.

If ideas can choose us out of the ether, maybe they can also choose to leave us. That would mean they're not just looking for an open antenna, but they're actually looking for the right collaborator and at the right moment.

I think we both know people in our lives who are incredibly talented and probably do some channeling of their own, where they have these brilliant ideas.

But if you don't have the engine behind it, if you don't have the inertia that you keep creating to push you forward, you know, it will sort of disappear back into the ether.

Which makes the pairing feel very personal, almost like they're watching us and know if we're ready and willing and have the right attitude.

And it makes you wonder about this relationship. If we can't give an idea what it needs, will it move on? Liz Gilbert has a remarkable story that answers this question.

So I had an idea for a novel, um, years ago, and it was gonna be the book that I was going to write after Eat Pray Love, and it was based on a story that my now ex-husband had told me. He was and is a Brazilian man who grew up in Brazil in the 1960s and told me this incredible story about, um, this massive project that the Brazilian government tried to take on in the 1960s to build a super highway right through the Amazon jungle, and what a complete catastrophe it was. Um, and the, and it was a catastrophe, not only because of corruption and disorganization, but also because the Amazon jungle refused to have a giant highway built through it. And actually swallowed the, whatever efforts they made, every time the rainy season came, it would just, the jungle would just like eat the road that they had built and eat all of their, you know, all of their equipment. And, um, and, and it just felt like so compelling and, and kinda magical and interesting to me.

So I started working on this book and then life happens and life often happens and we had an emergency in our relationship, which is that my, my then partner was not allowed admittance into the United States on his Brazilian passport. And we had to leave the country. And the only way I could get him back in the country was if we got married.

And so all of this personal stuff happened and I put the novel aside. And then I ended up writing a book about that experience, that was my book Committed. So that took two, three years. Um, and the whole time, all the notes, everything from my novel were waiting for me. I came back to start working on the book and it was gone. Um, and the, and the only way I can describe it is that it's like the spirit that imbibes a creative project, the living energy field within this thing had disappeared. And it just, it didn't matter how much I poked and prodded at it. It was gone, like the idea had just departed and turned to dust.

Um, and around that same time, I met the novelist Ann Patchett for the first time, who I had always admired. And we met at a conference and um, became friends, and I heard her speak and she was such a dazzling speaker that I ran up to her afterwards and I was like, "You're amazing." And she grab, she grabbed me and she did this very un-Ann Patchett thing, she kissed me on the lips and she said, "You're amazing and I love you." And we became friends and pen pals and the years went by and she mentioned in a letter that she was working on a novel about the Amazon jungle. And I thought, well, that's interesting. Um, and I told her that I had been working on a novel about the Amazon jungle, but that it had disappeared.

And I asked her what her book was about and she said it was too soon to know. Um, but that she was still in early stages. About a year after that, we met in person only for the second time. And we went out to breakfast. And at that point she had over a hundred pages of the book written. And I said, um, tell me about your novel.

What's it about? And she said, you first, you tell me what your Amazon novel was about. And I said It was about, um, this, uh, very lonely, spinster, brilliant woman, um, middle-aged woman from Minnesota who works for a giant multinational corporation who is desperately and quietly, um, in love with her married boss.

Uh, he gets involved in a big giant project down in the Amazon, sends a bunch of people on money down there. The people in the money disappear and he sends this character down to find the money in the people and figure out what happened. And it's also a love story. And Ann looked at me and said, "You have got to be fucking kidding me."

And I said, "Why? What's your, what's your Amazon novel about?" And she said, "It's about this very lonely, sad spinster in Minnesota, who works for a multinational corporation who is desperately and quietly in love with her married boss who, whose boss gets involved in a big shady international deal in the Amazon, sends a bunch of people and some money down there, the people and the money disappear and the woman is sent down to figure out what happens. And it's also a love story."

And you know, needless to say, this is not a genre, like this is not like a vampire romance. This is the, the specificity was insane. It was exactly the same book. And then, like pregnant women trying to figure out when they got pregnant, we started trying to figure out when she got the idea and when I lost the idea. And it was around the same exact time. And then our beautiful Big Magic theory of it is that it got exchanged in the kiss. That my novel jumped like a virus into her mind and into her antenna of consciousness because it could see that I wasn't going to do it.

Like it could see that, that it had a collaborator who didn't give it its full attention. And here was a novelist who was available and ready for the idea. And that book became State of Wonder, which is my, my favorite, Ann Patchett Novel. And for years she called it our Amazon novel. Um, that as though we had co-parented it.

Although what I think is that I was like, its incubator foster mama novelist that the idea stayed with for a while until it grew and then moved over to her. So that is the most profound example I've ever had personally of Big Magic.

But the concept of a download coming all at once is well documented in literature.

Take for instance, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She described in the book's introduction, having a waking dream, and she said the story appeared to her whole. And director James Cameron said the idea for Terminator came to him in a dream while he was sick in Rome, he saw the image of a metallic figure emerging from fire, and that single image became the basis of the entire franchise.

Artists and thinkers have long tried to catch inspiration in the fragile space between waking and sleep. Thomas Edison would drift off in a chair, steel balls clutched his hand, so when he nodded off and they fell to the floor, he'd wake up and snatch whatever ideas had just come through. Even Einstein swore by naps and daydreams as portals to the insights that reshaped our world.

But it's not just about being struck by an idea. You must have a regular practice set up in order to receive this Big Magic. And here's music producer Rick Rubin again.

The inspiration doesn't come without the work ethic part. It's like a partnership and it takes a great amount of work. If you're not dedicated to it, it will not come.

It's like fishing, you know, if you're not in the boat fishing, you're not gonna catch any fish. You have to get in the boat. You have to put your hook in the water, and you have to wait.

Liz Feldman agrees that in order to receive an idea, you must also work hard and diligently for that door of inspiration to remain open.

My father reminded me of it when I was, you know, first out here that the harder you work, the luckier you get. And that's just true because you're creating your own energetic momentum. You know, you are moving yourself forward whether you're being, you know, necessarily paid for it or not. And I just kept at it and I had always wanted to work for Ellen.

And when her talk show premiered, I was totally unemployed. I would sit at home and I would just write monologues for her just to see if I could do it. And then I had no idea that I'd have the opportunity to give her those monologues. But a few years later I did and I got the opportunity to submit a packet for her.

And I dusted off those old monologues. I wrote a new one and I sent it, you know. And it was just an exercise I was doing, but I was working. If I've ever had a stroke of genius, it was when I was open to receiving, and that might even be involuntarily because I just was at a low point or I was depleted. I honestly don't think I have any control over it.

I actually think it's the lack of control that allows me to receive. Because I often come up with ideas in that liminal state between being awake and asleep. It's not like, I'm trying to think, I'm actually trying not to think and that's when something will come to me. And you know, in the sake of Dead to Me, I was so depleted, I couldn't have tried to really think of something if I wanted to. When I have no choice but to be vulnerable and I'm living in my authenticity, that's when I've had those moments.

These aren't just ideas shared by artists, they're shared by many great thinkers. Srinivasa Ramanujan the legendary Indian mathematician, believed his equations did not come from him at all.

He saw himself as a receiver, a vessel. His job was to simply listen and to take down what was being given. He credited his inspiration to Namagiri a Hindu goddess. He said that sometimes in dreams, he would see a red screen and that a hand would write mathematical formulas on it. Other times he said the math was whispered into his ear.

He'd just wake up and write them down. And the complex formulas turned out to be right. And mind you, he had no formal math education, which makes his account even more interesting. And this concept of inspiration or ideas kind of living in the ether around us, tapping on the shoulder of someone in a state ready to receive them, might actually have a complimentary scientific theory proposed by Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

Morphic resonance is a hypothesis I first put forward in 1981. I'm suggesting that the whole universe has a kind of memory. The so-called laws of nature are actually more like habits. They evolve along with the universe. This means that when you make a new chemical compound and crystallize it the first time you make the crystals, there won't be a habit.

They haven't happened before, but after they've crystallized and it often takes months or years for the first crystals to form, then it should be easier for the same thing to crystallize again anywhere in the world. And the third and fourth and fifth time, it should get easier and easier. And this is actually just what chemists find, crystals get easier to crystallize.

Some say this can be explained because chemists have learned the right conditions and techniques to make crystal compounds form quicker. But other thinkers like Sheldrake suggest something deeper, that once a new idea or form appears in nature, it somehow becomes easier for the same form to appear again and again as if nature itself develops habits or has a collective memory of its own.

Morphic resonance also means that if you train animals like rats to learn a new trick in one place, then rats all around the world should be able to learn the same trick more quickly. Indeed, experiments have shown that does happen. So it's a kind of collective memory, and it's a bit like what the psychologist Jung called the collective unconscious in humans, a kind of collective memory on which we all draw and to which we all contribute.

Basically, what Sheldrake is describing here is that if an idea was once impossible to conceive of like a ceiling, once it's reached, it becomes the floor, and sometimes that new floor spreads out across the world, touching the feet of many waiting thinkers all at once. And history is full of examples where the same idea shows up in two places at once, as if it's in the air, looking for someone to bring it to life.

Take the telephone. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed patents for the telephone hours apart on the exact same day. Or take evolution, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace came up with a theory of natural selection completely independently on opposite sides of the world. And within weeks of each other. And even the light bulb, Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan developed almost identical carbon filament bulbs within months of each other, and they were working independently on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

It's as if ideas have their own timing, their own urgency, and when they're ready to be born, they'll knock on as many doors as it takes. Rick Rubin has witnessed this many times over his long influential career.

It happens all the time. The idea is ripe. And if you don't do it, and if it's meant to be, it will happen and it won't happen because someone overhears it.

It'll happen because there'll be another person with a good antenna who's picking it up. It's time. The universe is willing it to be. And that's how we see movements in art happen. When there's a movement in art, it doesn't happen because one artist sees another artist and starts copying them. The same types of things start arriving all over the world.

One or two people here, one or two people there, and then more people. And it takes on a life of its own. We're extensions of this universal energy. We're like the hands for this consciousness to bring these creations into the physical world. The part that's created in our brain is what to do with the information when it comes in, the information comes in and it's magic. We participate, but it doesn't start with us. All of the material that we work with comes from outside of ourselves. Everything we've ever experienced in our life that we remember and that we don't, is all part of the storehouse of information that we can grab from.

Creator of Dead to Me, Liz Feldman has also noticed this.

More often than not, when I have an idea that I don't pursue, I see it pop up somewhere else. Even sometimes when I have an idea that I do pursue, I see another version of it popping up somewhere else. So I do believe in a zeitgeist. I do believe that there's a collective consciousness and there are stories that need to be told, and I think ultimately they try to find the best vessel to tell 'em.

And sometimes this Big Magic or creative current can move through a group of close people collectively. Great athletes talk about being in the flow with their teammates, and it happens to great bands too.

Something happens when artists have played together for a long time where there's a psychic connection between them.

They'll just know when to change, and they do it all together. It's not planned out. It's not rehearsed. There's just this liquid sense of movement, where they're functioning as one. A band that I get to see do this a lot are the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They've been playing together for 40 years. They're great musicians, and the psychic connection with them is so deep that often they'll come out on stage not knowing what they're gonna play.

I don't mean what song they're gonna play, they'll just start playing something none of them have ever played before. It just comes together in the moment. Totally improvisational.

And biologist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake says, we see this in nature all the time.

I think all social animals are linked together by what I call social fields, invisible fields that link them together.

It's most obvious with flocks of birds and schools of fish. We have flocks here in England, which have hundreds of thousands of birds, and the whole group can turn almost at the same time without bumping into each other. Not only do the birds know where the others are, they know where they're going to go, and I think there's a field of which they're all part. And we're all used to the idea of invisible fields that stretch out beyond material objects. It's the gravitational field beyond the earth, the magnetic field beyond a magnet, and the radio electromagnetic waves beyond a cell phone. And in a similar way, I think our minds are field like structures, which stretch out beyond our brains invisibly, just like all the other fields.

It happens a lot in jazz too. In jazz, we get to see people maybe who haven't played much together before, but who are so in tune with an energy that's happening in the room that they know when to play, when not to play, when to leave space, when to add more, when one note's enough.

Which reminds me of another powerful voice we've heard from on the show already, a non-speaker named Kyle that you met in episode eight last season. He doesn't speak, but he can sing and play music. And when I was with him in England this past summer, I witnessed something remarkable. But first, here's his mom, Caroline, to give a bit of backstory.

My name is Caroline and I have a non-speaking son called Kyle, and we live in a lovely little village called Corian on North Cornwall Coast. He was diagnosed with non-speaking autism when he was two and a half. And I think he was about 20 years old when somebody said to me, you know, have you thought about Kyle having music therapy? And I said, no, but anyway, I'll have a go.

I'll give anything a go. And then when the music therapist came, um, I was thinking I was making tea in the kitchen, she said, Caroline, I want you to see this. And I said, okay. So I went into the living room and there was Kyle at her keyboard playing Dream, Dream, Dream and singing along to it. "All you have to do is dream, dream, dream, dream."

And I remember just being gobsmacked and just going, hang on a minute, like what? And not only was he just singing that song, he then just kind of showed us that he had a whole repertoire of songs, hundreds of songs. He'd remembered them, like he'd archived them.

And mind you, Kyle had never had a music lesson before. So after 20 years of being locked in his body, Kyle showed that he can both sing and play music.

And I think music therapy was just a way of that door being open to him. So from his first music therapy session, Kyle sort of showed us that he not only could sing with perfect pitch, but he also could play a melody on her keyboard.

So you can imagine that that was pretty like awe inspiring really.

And it wasn't just that Kyle could remember songs he'd heard, he was also improvising and composing music in real time. I spoke with Kyle's music teacher about his process when I visited them in England last summer.

I think this is the most authentic Kyle, um, in this very free flowing, improvised form of music.

So this is not a song that's out?

No. This isn't a structured, pre composed song. This is Kyle's free flow improvisation, vocal. Kyle's deciding the key and the pace and where our improvisation is gonna go. And I'll just follow.

I don't think it's a language that we know. I think it's something that he, you know, channels, maybe? He kind of pulls it from outside of the kind of learnt, rote type of singing that one would do if you learn a nursery rhyme or if you learn pop song. So it's coming from this intended place from somewhere else.

I witnessed Kyle do this twice in England, once at home and once during a live performance. And each time it felt almost like witnessing something holy. Though he doesn't use words in his daily life, a river of song moves through him. It's pure and lyrical and just unstoppable. And when he begins, it feels as though he's sweeping the room clear and making space for the music wherever it's coming from to take center stage.

Kyle will go on as long as he feels he wants to. I call that streaming consciousness. When he does that, he's taking that from the wider field, and he's bringing it here, like a journey, if you like. That's what he's here to do. He's here to kind of bring music to his physical experience.

Throughout the music world, there are incredible ideas of this type of inspiration. Paul McCartney has talked about how the song yesterday came to him all at once in a dream.

I just thought of it as I dreamed it.

Here's Sir Paul McCartney himself on an episode of McCartney, A Life in Lyrics, trying to determine the origins of the song.

Though he dreamed it, was it truly original or might it have entered his mind from somewhere else? So he first asked John Lennon if he'd heard it before.

He said, "Well, I, I dunno, I never heard it." So then I went to George Martin, he'll know, cause he's got a much wider knowledge. I said, "What's this da-da-da-da?" He said, "Well, I dunno" I dreamed it.

Anyway, after a couple of weeks of this, it became clear that no one knew it, and it didn't exist except in my head, and so I claimed it.

There are so many musicians who talk about the idea of a download. I talked to one songwriter who said, if she doesn't resonate with a song and therefore doesn't write it down and record it, she might hear it on the radio months later.

Here's Elizabeth Gilbert again.

One of my favorite interviews I ever got to do when I was a journalist was with, um, the musician, Tom Waits. What he said was that there, there were times when, when he would be driving like on that LA freeway, and this is back before a smartphone, right? Long ago, like in the seventies.

And you would hear a snippet of a beautiful song come through the atmosphere into his mind. And um, and he would, in his early days as an artist, that would make him panicked because he couldn't get it, he couldn't grab it, and he knew he was gonna lose it. And that was part of his torment of being a, a very romantically tormented artist.

But in his more mature years and middle age, when that would happen, he would say to the idea, "Can't you see that I'm driving? Do I look like I have a piano here? Like, I'm on the middle of the highway, like in in rush hour traffic, there's nothing I can do about you right now. If you're serious about wanting to be a song, you know that I spend eight hours a day in the studio.

The next time you see me in the studio, come and see me then otherwise. Stop bothering me and go bother Leonard Cohen." That was his exact line.

And it's not just catching an idea, seemingly out of thin air, sometimes an idea might actually chase you down. Here's Elizabeth Gilbert again.

So Ruth Stone was an Appalachian poet who grew up in, in rural Virginia, and I met her around 1998 or nine that I met her and she was very old by that point already. She told me this story in person and it blew my mind and I loved it and her. Um, she said she used to be working in the fields on the farm, and she would feel and hear a poem coming toward her and the experience that she had of it, the somatic experience, and I think creativity and inspiration often arrives as like a bodily experience, even more than an intellectual one was a feeling that something was galloping toward her.

She would feel this idea galloping toward her, across the, across the field, and, and if she wasn't prepared for it, it would gallop right through her. Like, it just would move through her entire body and she'd be like, whoa. And like this thing moved through and it was gone. But if she felt it galloping toward her, she would run, start running and her words "run like hell" to the house to grab a piece of paper and a pencil, and as it moved through her, she would collect it and she would write the words down on the page, um, which is already amazing. But then she said that sometimes this even more magical experience would happen where it would, it would be running through her and it would be almost through her, and she would reach out and she said she would catch it, by the tail, as it was moving through her and running away from her and pull it back into her with one hand while, with the other hand, she was writing the poem from the last word to the first, because it was coming back in through her backwards, and it would come out on the page reversed.

And that story gives me shills because it's not just about catching the poem or the idea, it's about letting it have its way with you.

It's about surrender. What all of these stories have in common is the reminder that we are partners, not owners of the creative force. Our job is not to trap ideas or hoard them or force 'em to stay, and it's not on us to determine the outcome or impact in the world.

I think that ideas wanna be made manifest, and they can't be in this realm on this planet, except through human collaboration. And I think ideas are interested in us because we seem to be able to hear them, and we don't have a lot of evidence that other animals hear them the way we hear them. One of my definitions of art that I love is "making something more beautiful than it needs to be."

It's so un pragmatic. You know, it's like why? Why are we called to adorn the world in the way that we seem to be called to adorn the world when there's no apparent, pragmatic use of it? We need a chair. You could just make a very, very pragmatic chair. And yet there are like tens of thousands of examples of human creativity, of different kinds of chairs.

Like why do we take time that we don't have in a short and mortal life, resources that we might not have to make something we just feel called to, we like to, it seems to be deeply satisfying and that's why I think ideas like working with us. So I think what an idea is looking for in a human collaborator is somebody who's game.

Somebody who is like, I'm going to do this thing for no reason and not attach too much stress to what the outcome of it is going be.

And that sentiment is where all of this stopped being theory for me and became my own story. When I first started The Telepathy Tapes journey, the world I was stepping into felt enormous.

There were researchers and parents and scientists and so many others who had been experiencing telepathy in nonspeakers for decades, but the pieces were scattered, living in separate silos and from all over the world. I was convinced that the only way to convey the magnitude of what I was witnessing was to make a multi-part documentary series.

Anything less felt like it would underserved the story. I became obsessed with this outcome, and I did what filmmakers do: I took meetings, I pitched, I tried to make the vision real, but the story did not fit into an easy box, and when the final rejection came in, I felt like I'd failed everyone, the families, the nonspeakers, the scientists, the story itself.

And I remember going to my bedroom and closing the door and saying out loud to whatever, force brings idea to life, "Okay, I've tried. I've given this everything. I've left nothing on the field, and somehow I have failed. So I'm giving this back to you, Universe. Go find another person to tell this story or to bring it into the world, because clearly I'm not the one to do it."

And this was not easy, I was saying it through tears, but I essentially gave it back to the universe. I was so obsessed with how it was supposed to go that I couldn't see anything else, and just days after I let go, it hit me with total clarity. This story wanted to be a podcast. It wanted to be longer and much more deeply personal and even portable.

Something people could experience in their most private collected moments on walks or in cars. And it was only when I surrendered that the path forward revealed itself. I had never made a podcast before, but the idea didn't care. It wanted to be made, and it knew how it wanted to get into the world.

This is the, the central paradox of a creative life: it's both effort and surrender, simultaneously. Two completely opposite polarities of human thought. And I actually think that duality becomes, it's like a battery. This is the positive and negative charge that creativity has to bounce between in order to create art or any kind of inspiration, any kind of idea.

So it makes me have to kind of blow my brain out into a much bigger arena of consciousness where I can hold these two opposite thoughts while I'm working and writing, which is, this is the most important thing and this is not important at all. And both of those things have to be simultaneously true, because if you only surrender, right? And you don't bring your effort and you don't bring your labor and you don't bring your discipline, um, then the thing never happens. And if you only bring your labor and your effort and your discipline, you burn yourself out because you become so obsessed with this idea that you are the master of the universe making this thing or a total failure, you know?

So a lot of it is about releasing outcome and recognizing that the outcome of the thing is none of your business, but the labor is. And the, so the surrender is surrendering, what is this going to become? Is this going to be profitable? Is anybody gonna be interested in this? Am I going to be criticized?

Um, am I not even gonna be seen enough to be criticized? You know, all of these what ifs that your fear starts to generate that push creativity away. So yes, surrender is an equal 50% of of the operation.

Here's writer and executive producer Liz Feldman again.

It's the experience of creating that is the gift and the result or the outcome is just the bow that you tie around the gift, and I've learned that I can't put my value or the value of the work in the outcome.

I have to put the value in the experience that I had along the way. Truly, I wasn't trying to make a hit show. I in no way thought that it would sort of break that barrier. I was just imagining that it could reach people, and I really had that as my intention and making the show.

Creativity is a gift in this universe, and you're entitled to engage with it and play with it, but you're actually not entitled to the outcome.

The Bhagavad Gita says that you are entitled to the labor, you are not entitled to the fruit of the labor. And there you go. And I love that they say that you're entitled to the labor. Um, this multi-thousand year old wisdom text. It doesn't say you're obliged to the labor. It doesn't say that you are forced to labor.

It says you're entitled. What a beautiful way to say it. You're entitled to the joy of the labor. That the work itself becomes its own reward, but you are not entitled to anything after that. And this is a really difficult thing for a modern Western mind to wrap itself around because so much of our culture is about what we are entitled to.

And so much of our anger in our culture comes from what we think we are entitled to.

Creating for creativity's sake, that might be one of the secrets to a happy life. And yes, that might mean untethering yourself from the outcome of what you're creating, whether it's respect or acclaim or riches or fame.

And it's funny 'cause when I was writing this episode, I kind of looked back on my life and realize that energetically pouring myself into creative pursuits, even if they might not end up being profitable, ever has kind of been like a shield or even like a superpower, buffering me from the pain and disappointment that comes from just living life.

And what's amazing for me at least, is when I'm working on something, even though I'm often alone in a room, I don't feel alone. I actually feel fully seen as if the act connects me to something vast and bigger. And here's Liz Gilbert again.

The thing that's happening at this moment in history is this epidemic of loneliness and deep loneliness, and I don't think that's because people are not connecting to other human beings 'cause there's plenty of that.

I think it's because people are not connecting to the unseen world. And that humans who don't connect to the unseen world suffer tremendous despair and loneliness. The loneliest times of my life, there was someone in the room and usually someone in the bed. There's no deeper loneliness that I have ever experienced than when I am not in connection with somebody who's in the room with me.

The deepest sense of wellbeing and wholeness and connection that I have ever experienced is when I appear to be alone, and when I appear to be doing nothing at all, but sitting in deep silence and I am opening myself to receiving multiple layers of guidance and miracle from every corner of the cosmos, and that is not because I am special, special, that is because I am paying attention.

Liz Feldman, the creator of Dead to Me and No Good Deed, has also experienced firsthand this relationship between reduced anxiety, loneliness, and creativity.

I definitely suffer from anxiety and I have noticed unequivocably, that it peaks when I'm not working, when I'm not being creative, when I'm not in collaboration with other people.

And you know, during the writer's strike, I really had a difficult time. I was anxious, I was depressed. I was really untethered from my purpose, from, you know, the thing that makes my souling sing. And as soon as I went back to work, I was myself again. And I don't wanna just be a workaholic, but it's not just the work, it is the creativity.

I am my happiest when I am creating, even if that means I'm making up a silly story to tell my daughter.

There's one more voice I wanna bring back into this conversation.

Martha Beck has triple degrees from Harvard, you know, like we all do.

You met Martha Beck in the first episode this season. She had a near death experience while under anesthesia that transformed her, recalibrating her life to be all about joy.

And though she was on an impressive academic track at Harvard, she became so much more, including Oprah Winfrey calling her her life coach. But most recently she wrote a book on this exact topic and the takeaway is that creativity reduces anxiety.

The book is called Beyond Anxiety, and I, I wrote it because there has been a, a huge upsurge in the level of anxiety that humans are experiencing everywhere in the world, and a lot of my clients were experiencing it, and I wanted to understand it and see what I could do to help.

What I realized as I did the research is that most of anxiety is based in the part of the brain that tells stories, which is the left hemisphere, and it's always about something bad is gonna happen in the future. I'm gonna lose something. I'm bad, I've done something wrong. These are all story based thoughts.

You don't find frogs and eagles worrying about these things. So that's in the left hemisphere of the brain. And then I realized that the same mechanism that gets activated in anxiety, the same physiological structures on the left hemisphere are mirrored on the right hemisphere, but when you activate them in the right hemisphere, they, they exhibit themselves as creativity. So the counterpart to anxiety is creativity, and I realized there's a lot of research that shows anxiety shuts down creativity. There's virtually no research to see if the opposite happens, if creativity shuts down anxiety. And so I started doing my own research, doing experiments, this was during the pandemic, so I had a lot of audiences on Zoom where I could ask and do my own sort of little, um, numeric exercises to see if people turned on the creative parts of their brains, would their anxiety drop?

And without exception it did. It drops to zero in most people, if I would give them just little brain challenges that I knew would activate the right hemisphere of the brain.

Which, by the way, takes in the whole brain. It's not the right or the left. The left hemisphere cuts out the information that's coming from the right or it can, the right hemisphere is inclusive and connective, and it, it, it embraces everything we know and puts it together in creative ways. The reason I called the book Beyond Anxiety is that a third of it is about anxiety, and two thirds of it are about what happens when you abandon anxiety, when you are a traitor to suffering. And what happens, is the most explosive, joyful creativity. And the parts of the brain that do the creative stuff are contiguous with and sometimes overlapping the parts that experience mystical states.

And so that starts to happen. And there's just a rapid transformation from a tiny, scared creature into a vast field of energy that is working with this little human mechanism to create things that have never existed before. We've known for a long time, anxiety shuts down creativity, but I believe it's also true that creativity shuts down anxiety.

And I could tell you all the brain stuff, but it would take a long time. The point I wanna make is that when we choose creativity, and we leave anxiety, we abandon our anxiety, we not only start making things that the world has never seen before, we actually begin to overlap with the parts of the world and with our own consciousness that experience mystical states.

Creativity as a balm for anxiety and a bridge to the mystical is something that everyone in this episode agrees with and feels intuitively. Creativity is the blueprint of reality itself. Everything began as a thought first. Our cities, our medicine, our inventions, and laws, art, all of it came into being through creativity.

And maybe that's not only true of human history, but of the galaxy, the planet, and the universe. Maybe all of it was someone or something's thought or creation. Here's Elizabeth Gilbert again.

We call the universe creation, right? So there's an energy that's happening from the farthest distant galaxies.

Creation isn't something that happened once and then ended. It's this ongoing story that's constantly in evolution.

Nearly every spiritual tradition tells us the same story. The world was first imagined, then spoken into form, a thought became matter, or creation.

And my beloved friend Martha Beck, defines magic as "the thing that wants to happen next."

That's all magic is. It's just the thing that wants to happen next. The next thing that wants to be born, that wants to create.

So when you create, it makes sense that you feel most alive. Never lonely. Never anxious. You're not just making something, you're sinking with the deepest rhythm of the universe.

You're remembering what you're made of.

So when I create, I am in that energy field, which means that I am part of and one with the infinite universal creation. And that's why creativity is such an essential part of our experience here on Earth. There's a lot of other stuff we're here to learn too. We're here to learn how to love and be loved.

We're here to learn how to love through pain. You're going to have to experience loss and death, justice and injustice, and love and hate. I mean, all of these things are happening in this field of consciousness and it's a wild ride. But if you want to be part of creation, create.

Creativity is our birthright.

For some reason, there's this mythology, art is made by these geniuses who specialize in art, but that's not true. People who make art are ordinary people, and we can all do it. Now, I can't say, you know, we can all make them Mona Lisa. If we practice whatever the thing is that we want to create, we will get better and better at creating that thing.

We could become the best version of ourselves doing that.

And Martha Beck says, this connection to creativity does not need to be done with massive endeavors. Even small acts of creativity can bring you to this place.

The smaller the better. And if you just go out and start weeding your garden and imagining what's gonna grow there and putting your body in positions where it's interacting with the creation of something alive. Those things will take you right into the place of creative imagination and the mystery.

And so, if ideas really do have a will of their own, if they move through the world, like living things, searching for the right person to bring them to, that makes you wonder what else might be moving through us, and what if everything we've talked about today isn't just true for ideas, but for abilities? Next time we explore the world of savants. People who seem to have access to extraordinary skills or information they never learned, like musicians who can play back a symphony after hearing it once.

Or artists who can draw a city skyline from memory after a single helicopter ride. Are they simply born different or are they tapping into something larger? A collective field of memory or knowledge that's available to all of us if we just knew how to tune in?

If you wanna go deeper, ask me anything or get ad free episodes, subscribe at TheTelepathyTapes.Supercast.com or tap the Supercast link in the show notes.

It takes a village to make this podcast and I wanna thank our producers, Jessie Stead, Jil Pasiecnik and Katherine Ellis. Original music is by Rachel Cantu. Mix and mastering is by Michael Rubino. Original artwork is by Ben Kendora Design. Our

Our associate producer is Selena Kennedy,

and I'm Ky Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.

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