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Today a mandala ritual was posted by Maureen Doallas, link to her blog below:
To kick off this discussion, let me explain the intention of this art/ritual from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Prayers are said throughout the building of the mandala, which is a sacred art form created from the colored sands of precious and semi-precious stones. The mandala form itself has meaning, depending upon the choices -- buddha families, kalachakra, etc.
When the ritual building is completed, the lamas ritualistically destroy their work. The destruction serves as a reminder that everything is impermanent. However, in the destruction, prayers are also said, and if the practitioner is adept the metaphor will be transformational, as in, no longer a metaphor.
The sands used to build the mandala are gathered and usually dispersed in a nearby body of water, if possible, where more prayers are said. It is a moving ritual.
Rituals, when done with high intention and belief, have the power to transform. I open this for discussion!
Link:
Saturday Short presents a sand mandala of the deity Chakrasamvara, created by Lama Karma Tenzin at the Rubin Museum in New York City. It took Lama Karma more than two weeks to create the artwork and just two minutes to destroy it.
http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2013/05/saturday-short.html
Image below and info on this art ritual: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~kb/mandala/mandala.htm
A great list of books! I will add a couple (lifted from amazon because I can never remember titles!):
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power & Creativity of Your Dark Side by David Richo
Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation by Frederick Franck
The Paintings of Henry Miller: Paint as You Like and Die Happy by Henry Miller
Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World by Natalie Goldberg
Betty Edwards derived much of what she wrote in terms of exercises from Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw. If drawing is your thing his book on drawing can work you for a lifetime.
I found a good deal of insight into creativity by reading autobiography of painters, writers.
I would love to see some of your work Lynn.
To answer your question, I began thinking about creativity while I was getting my BFA at Carnegie Mellon - the free and open atmosphere in the art dept. was perfect for creativity but I studied it more seriously afterwards when I began to teach drawing. At that time the right/left brain research had been published, as well as Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. As I helped students understand the seeing and thinking processes for drawing I realized I had been teaching about the right brain functions all along.
I have drawn since about 7 years old and actually have always been curious about my ability and why the majority of people thought it either genius or strange. So it's been a continual personal study that has intensified in the last 20 years especially when I discovered that the most relevant information on the topic was from scientists and mathematicians.
Ultimately I found that what I knew as the creativity process is the same as how the universe works, according to various theories like chaos, complexity, relativity, quantum physics,etc. the processes are equivalent. We are, after all, children of the universe, so we should resemble our mother/father!
Some of my favorite books are:
On Creativity by quantum physicist David Bohm
Creativity and Intuition by physicist Hideki Yukawa
The Act of Creation Arthur Koestler
The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field Jacques Hadamard
The Divine Proportion H. E. Huntley
The Universe and the Teacup K.C. Cole
good question, Stephanie
Lynn
Very interesting, thank you for sharing: "While studying creativity, learning and the right brain I came across the idea of ritual and it appeared that there is a good reason why it is a universal religious activity. It appears to be a way of blocking the dominant left brain thinking in order to access the deeper holistic right brain which allows you to go into a trance, and/or access what people consider God." Where were you studying creativity? A book? Course? University?
Best,
Stephanie Renee dos Santos
www.stephaniereneedossantos.com
While studying creativity, learning and the right brain I came across the idea of ritual and it appeared that there is a good reason why it is a universal religious activity. It appears to be a way of blocking the dominant left brain thinking in order to access the deeper holistic right brain which allows you to go into a trance, and/or access what people consider God. On thinking about this, I believe my pen and ink stipple technique for drawing set me into a trancelike mindset and could be considered ritual. It was a repetitive activity that occupied (what I consider) my monkeybrain so that the right was free to travel. Back when I was doing this I had no idea what I was doing except that it felt good. It taught me so much because the products I created were mind-blowing.
The first time I tried this technique was when I was doing a diptych on what I thought were the knarling and twisting locust trees on our property. Almost done, I felt a strange sensation and realized it was because I had awakened from my trance and really saw my images. I was blown away- OMG what was I drawing? Could it really be that? I realized I had not really been drawing locust trees at all!
(Before I tell you I'll give you a hint of what I drew - years later I was wondering when I began the drawing - it was as a newlywed and sometime before I got pregnant with my first child)
So yeah, my drawing could be called abstract, yet it was also a rather explicit piece of porn! When I caught myself waking up from the trance, I was almost done and I was drawing a most perfect buttocks! Shocked, I began to deny the form, or black out the remaining part. The rest I just left - all the anatomically correct parts, intertwining, balanced and harmonious, done in such a perfect way that I'm not sure I would have done them so perfectly if I was conscious.
The other drawing was just a matter of alternating darks and lights, patches of tightly packed stipple marks with patches of few openly spaced marks. After a point I saw I was drawing tubelike forms amidst foggy cloud like forms. My husband came home from his insulator job, saw the drawing and proclaimed "I worked there! It looks just like the nuclear plant I'm working at!" His job was covering pipe at industrial and commercial sites. So he took a picture of his worksite and it looked just like my drawing!
Nothing like first hand research on something you don't even know you are researching - makes it all the more truthful. But anyway, I believe ritual aids in allowing your brain to access your greater wisdom - although in my case, the next time I draw like this I might try to make a little wish or something in order to gently guide the process into a certain kind of wisdom!