Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights

by Willis Harman, Howard Rheingold

Insight is the mind's magic in action, solving problems, understanding relationships, creating new images-with a speed and certainty unavailable to ordinary consciousness. Breakthrough insights go even further. They take a quantum leap beyond ordinary creativity and our previous ways of looking at things-to a whole new method of resolving our difficulties. Almost all of us have experienced such moments in relation to work-oriented or personal problems, and wish we could have them more often-in fact, we can. According to Willis Harman, Ph.D., president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and Howard Rheingold, human behavior columnist for Esquire, the main reasons we fail to have this kind of breakthrough experience more frequently are that we don't believe we can, and we don't apply the known techniques which can generate these insights.

In Higher Creativity, the authors discuss this self-imposed limitation and argue persuasively for an enlarged image of everyone's creative potential. They examine the secret history of inspiration through contemporary and historical accounts of profound creative breakthroughs, and finally they describe a surprisingly simple and reproducible sequence that has often triggered these insights for outstanding innovators in business, science, and the arts. These apparently special people became special by harnessing, sometimes quite accidentally, the awesome power of the unconscious in the service of higher creativity. Following their example and using historically validated procedures for reprogramming the unconscious, you can learn to capture the lightning for personal breakthrough in your own life.

Genres: Psychology, Writing

273 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1984

Reviews

[Gregg Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to give books stars sometimes. I mean, you could have a really crappy book with one brilliant idea in it that changes your life, and so how many stars do you give that book?

Anyway, this review is for you geniuses out there. (You know who you are.) There's a quote by Edward Bulwer-Lytton:

Talent does what it can. Genius does what it must.

Higher Creativity addresses genius. Forget Malcolm Gladwell's '10,000 hours will turn anybody into a genius.' Genius is fundamentally different than talent and effort. Think Mozart and Schubert. Those guys barely lived 10,000 hours and look at their bodies of work.

Okay, here's some of the deep stuff in the book.

Openness to experience implies a tolerance for ambiguity where ambiguity exists, and the ability to receive much conflicting information without forcing closure in the form of "I agree." "I disagree," "I believe," "I don't believe." "It can't be true," "Science says..." —the authors

Here's Rudyard Kipling talking about his muse or daemon:

Mine came to me early when I sat bewildered among other notions and said: "Take this and no other." I obeyed, and was rewarded...

After that I learned to lean upon him and recognize the sign of his approach. If ever I held back, Ananias fashion, anything of myself (even though I had to throw it out afterwards) I paid for it by missing what I then knew the tale lacked...

My Daemon was with me in the Jungle books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw. I know that he did not, because when those books were finished they said so themselves with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off...Note here: When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.

Along the same lines, Richard Wagner:

After a night spent in fever and sleeplessness I forced myself to take a long walk through the country. It looked dreary and desolate. Upon my return I lay down on a hard couch. Sleep would not come, but I sank into a kind of somnolence, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing noise formed itself into a musical sound, the chord of E flat major, whence developed melodic passages of increasing motion. I awoke in sudden terror, recognizing that the orchestral prelude to Das Rheingold, which must have been long lain latent within me, had at last been revealed to me.

And lastly Nikola Tesla:

When natural inclination develops into a passionate desire, one advances towards his goal in seven-league boots.

I read the latest books on creativity. But you know what, why would you read books by today's popularizers when you can probe the minds of Beethoven and Shakespeare and Einstein?

Higher Creativity probes just such minds. I wish I could say the book is loaded with such deep insights as those quoted above. Alas, it is not. But the few gems it does contain made it well worth the read.

[Zlati · Rating 5 out of 5]

To say this book is brilliant is an understatement. If everything written in here is grasped and applied, life on personal and societal level will transform. How inspiring and uplifting is to get your hands on a humanistic, scientific, psychological and simultaneously spiritual book. Thank you Willis Harman for your open mindedness and thank you psychedelics for expanding that man’s mind even further.
Bless

[lenka · Rating 5 out of 5]

possibly the most important book i’ve read in my entire life.

[Brie Doyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of goodness, but a lot of weed whacking to get to the goodness.

[Alexey · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is not really a bad book. But reading the last chapter, "The Harvest," is enough to remind me of what I already knew before.

I didn't really like a language expression, as I am on a sort of lecture on how I have to live... Everyone basically....

[Jennifer Kirkeby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scientific insight for the average person. I’m very interested in this topic. I liked the optional action items

[Vickie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because the book was published years ago, its not current in terminology or scientific theory. However, there is meat in the meal worth chewing the cud over. It does give one desire for the legalization of marijuana nationally for the purpose of the altered consciousness, should one desire to change their state of mind. It points out some very real contradictions in our society about what is admired and loved in creative works versus the accusations of legal or illegal use of mind altering chemistry for the purpose of changing perspective.

Wish I had read this years ago. But, all things in their time.

For anyone needing to bolster their self confidence in a world full of negative judgments and frightening probabilities, this is the book for you. Aside from the terminology and jargon, there is good information on visualization for the restoring of the broken down soul, by mining the love and intelligence stored in the unconscious mind. Highly recommended.

[Rick]

very good

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that just hit me at the right time in my life.