You have a choice. You can create like a machine—assembling, sourcing, analyzing, recombining what already exists. Or you can create from the air. You can surprise even yourself.
Consider the pianist who has studied every composition, mastered every technique, absorbed the entire tradition. Now consider the one who sits at the keys without knowing what it means to push them—meeting the instrument, meeting the sound, meeting the moment as if for the first time.
You can innovate in a saturated field, improving something at the edge of an existing machine or industry. Or you can give yourself to innovation without knowing where you are heading, without basing your work on any plan at all.
Some will say this is a game, a gimmick, not serious. To that I say: there is no end to the misery, limitation, and suffering that come from creation based on the known. That is not creation. That is thought repurposing. That is imagination manifesting as imagination. But that which is genuinely new, genuinely fresh, genuinely original—this only comes from the ground of not knowing.
As theory or philosophy, these words mean nothing. But consider them the next time you seek to create anything:
Start from not knowing.
Take a one-minute pause. Become aware of all the drives pushing you in a certain direction. Notice where they point. Then go the other way. Begin by being lost to your own plans, lost to your conditioning. The very not knowing becomes the fresh start you were seeking—or that was seeking you—on your way to create.
One thing remains essential, and I have said it many times because it is never old: when you create in this way, you cannot claim ownership of your creation. Let this be the only test of quality.
Look at what you have made. If you say, "I don't know how this came to be—I cannot trace it back, cannot explain it—yet it resonates with my heart, with my deepest authenticity, better than anything I could have made by plan, by agenda, by program, by skill, by knowledge"—then you have touched something real.
original raw recording
