The Logic of the Creativity Ritual

As an anthropologist, I view creativity and ritual as essentially opposed in many senses. Ritual is about repetition; it is a rule-based and (relatively) invariant performance of a physical movement or movements again and again. Creativity, of course, is all about the new — the unexpected, the breaking of rules, the violation of standardised patterns.

Yet these two phenomena can go together. In fact, ritual can be your secret weapon for increasing your creative intelligence and living a more creative life.

For one thing, making a ritual you associate with creativity part of your daily existence can help to embed a creative philosophy in your mind and enable you to see yourself as an inherently creative being.

More importantly still, rituals can serve to activate a “generative state” — an altered state of consciousness which fosters creative ideas. If that ritual has a counterintuitive component it is all the more powerful. One scientific study found that making a sandwich in the opposite way to usual immediately before taking a creative thinking test helps to significantly increase test scores. Of course, a physical movement more universal and ancient (not to mention doable) is preferable to making a sandwich, which is where my methods come in. Check out the video to see how to perform a simple ritual to help foster creative thought.

Finally, you can actually generate ideas through ritual, though that is a more sophisticated process to be discussed elsewhere.

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WRITTEN BY

Dr. Michael Bloomfield

Co-founder of Creative Being