The common understanding, as it is accepted in society and even in science, is that thought, thinking, is the creative process through imagination and the whole infinite expansion of knowledge, experience, and advancement. I question that, to say the least. To me, it is very clear that the thought process in itself is never creative, and by that I mean it can never lead to the new, to the insights, to that which is alive. It can advance infinitely the old, recombine, change, amend, expand. But if there is a problem, a core root problem like the fact of disease, which the whole health industry is addressing, or the fact of war, which the whole war industry is addressing—I say industry to keep it plain, but it’s a vast area of systems—then no matter how much advancement of thought process will be invested, the core root of disease will not be solved, and the core root of war will not be solved.
In fact, the opposite will happen. It will only reinforce the root problem and ground it further under the so-called advancements. This can be easily seen with simple inquiry rooted in integrity and not in a biased agenda. So if thinking indeed is a tool within the creative process but can never be the creative process itself or the creative—I almost want to say miracle because creation is a miracle, but let’s keep it very plain—an insight into something that is completely new doesn’t come on the shoulders or the building of layers of thoughts, which is ideas, knowledge, and so on. The insight comes, yes or no, when the thought process stops, stops not by force, by faking it, stops meaning reaching the edge of its capacity.
When the clear seeing of the limitation of thought is there, it naturally, without force, subsides, and the observation goes beyond the thought. Now, if you consider thought as the knowledge and that which is beyond thinking as the realm of unknown, not knowing, then insights come from not knowing, not from ignorance, from the quality of attention, observation, perception beyond that which is seen through thought. That is the new, that is the unknown, and that can come to be with thinking, with structures, with knowledge, with anything that builds structure into it or manifests it into existence, but not from that. This must be clear.
