Page 8 - The Circle / July 2016

8
the CIRCLE | JULY 2016
by which it was presented to them. The Cambodian children had engaged the parable with the knowing of the body through their senses. This kind of knowing is common to children all over the world.
The third reason the parable was able to help unlock the children’s deep worries had to do with another commonality. We humans, children and adults, all experience the existential limits of aloneness, death, the threat of freedom, and the need for meaning. The parable was open to these boundaries, which limit but define us. The children got in touch with this fact of life, which helped them heal. They also sensed that the storyteller was comfortable with and open to anything about life and death that they needed to express. This opened the door a bit wider.
A fourth commonality was that the parable was presented in a deeply playful and respectful way. The children of the world all understand play and can pick up on the nonverbal signs that show when authentic play is about to begin. The Cambodian children shifted easily into this mode when the nonverbal cues for play were given.
A fifth commonality was that the parable appealed to their natural spirituality. It is becoming more and more clear that all children have a special ability to access their
spirituality, even if this is repressed and demeaned when they move into adulthood. It was clear in this case that the children accepted the parable’s invitation to engage their spirituality.
Love was also understood in common. The children responded to the love that created the parable and the love by which it was presented, which was also signaled nonverbally. This emotional tone made the parable a safe and stimulating place to be while they wondered about life and death, which indirectly allowed them to open the door to the deep self a bit wider.
Finally, all the children of the world use the creative process to make meaning. When the Cambodian children were invited to use the parable to create existential meaning, they recognized this nonverbal invitation to creativity and felt the safety within the parable and the
way it was presented; this allowed them to open up and play their way into its creativity, which engendered their own creativity to help renew their lives.
With these seven commonalities in mind, let me say a few more words about the creative process. We need to do this because I mean something more integrated and more broadly human than is usually meant by the words “creative process.”
THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS
What I mean by the creative process is related to the psychological, the social, the biological, and the spiritual dimensions of all human beings. My claim is that the creative process involves all four dimensions. The internal flowing of the process is psychological. The social expression of the process is found in playing. The biological dimension is found in loving, as expressed in the creating of the body, but it is not limited to that. The creating of the spirit is expressed in the silent but creative contemplation of the divine.
If I speak of the flow of creativity, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi