> I believe it was Edwin Land who defined creativity as, "the sudden
> cessation of stupidity." It is not the release of its bindings that
> causes a package to spring open, but the energy stored in the package.
> IMO, creative thought is potential energy that may or may not be released.
> The triggers for creativity are what we pull to release the energy, they
> are not creativity itself. This, then is the cycle I see forming:
> Learning stores creative energy. We learn what triggers to pull to
> release it. If we learn from the experience we store creative energy...
Dear organlearners,
I have enjoyed the above very much. You are one of the few who
realise how important potential energy (in my book I will use
the term free energy) is in creativity. You have used a
striking metaphor to refer to the main issues.
I have said it many times and will do so again: if a person does
not have so much free energy that it can decrease while creating
something, then nothing will happen. This does not mean that
such a creation will never happen. It can be forced to happen by
extrenal work and control, but it will never happen on ist own
accord. The reason why things happen on this forum, is because
there are so much free energy around. And as Lon has rightfully
pointed out, the restoration of free energy comes through
creative learning.
So, if something does not happen, we can suspect two things:
1 The free energy is not sufficient.
2 Not all the triggers are operative.
You have pointed to both. I discuss both extensively in my
forthcoming book.
Allow me to add what these "triggers" are: they are what I call
the seven essentialities. If one or more of them are impaired,
the expected creation will not happen. With little free energy
available, almost nothing can be expected. With much free
energy, almost anything else can be expected, even a catastrophe.
Now why is free energy so important (and not merely chaos as the
new fashion wants it to be)? One of the seven essentialities is
wholeness. CHAOS is certainly important, but is manifested after
ENTROPY has been created. The entropy is produced by structures
belonging to a specific ORDER. Entropy production is important,
but it can only happen within the constraint of the principle of
ENERGY conservation. (Energy cannot be created or destroyed - it
can only be converted.) In other words, wholeness require that
we shall think of chaos, order, entropy and energy together. It
is through the genius of that great american scientist, one of
the greatest of all times, J W Gibbs, that we can think of all
these four things in one single quantity which he derived
(created) and called 'free energy'.
Best wishes
-- -
At de Lange
Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education
University of Pretoria
Pretoria, South Africa
email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
--"Mnr AM de Lange" <AMDELANGE@gold.up.ac.za>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>