Creativity

"Creativity is the way God is you in time and space.  It is the way you are godly as well.
     Let me be very clear:  By creativity I am not talking about being able to draw, paint, write, dance or any other activity.  Lots of people can do these things very well without ever tapping into creativity.  The creativity I am talking about, the creativity that is essential to loving-kindness, is the realization that you in and of yourself are a creative act.  Why is this realization necessary for the practice of loving-kindness?  Because realizing your own creativity takes you out of the past, out of the known, beyond the labels of gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and the like.  Creativity is the breaking down of all you know so that the new, the unknown, may emerge.  And the experience of that breaking down is essential to loving- kindness because it allows you to engage the moment - and everyone and everything in it - fresh, without the baggage of the past.
     Unless and until you can tap into creativity, you cannot engage the world with loving-kindness.  You can fake it, you can act in ways that appear loving and kind, but your actions are always tainted by the drive for self- preservation.  You will experience creativity not as a gift but as an achievement.  You will feel inflated rather than humbled.  You will feel important, and you will want to be seen by others as important.  And this makes loving-kindness impossible.
     Creativity, then, is a paradoxical phenomenon, because it relies on your own uniqueness while at the same time eliminating the ego that knows itself to be unique.  The paradox is resolved, however, in the creative engagement with life.  In this act of creative engagement, narrow egoic mind - the mind that equates uniqueness with separateness and superiority - gives way to the spacious mind, which recognizes that your uniqueness is matched by the uniqueness of everything else."