Chapter 7 - Dynamics of the Creative Trance

Summary

We live an unpredictable unrepeatable yet creative existence. Revealing the underlying patterns of our thoughts and behavior, nonlinear dynamics provides models to understand our lives and our creativity as ever-evolving human beings in a constantly changing universe. As the writer James Baldwin said, “the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” The creative trance, modeled as a creative chaos, brings forth new work and personal transformation. With its disciplines of chaos theory and complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics explains processes like creativity that do not progress in a straight line, cannot be predicted, never exactly repeat themselves, and yet have the capacity for originality and transformation. There are aspects of nonlinear dynamics such attractors, fractals, self-organization, emergence, the butterfly effect, and self-organized criticality that strongly correlate with the creative process, insights, the power of memories, global transformation, catharsis, and transforming panic attacks into creativity.