creativity

In a Land of Lotus Blossoms

The Mind   |   James Roberts  |   February 18, 2013, 1:14 pm

For the past several months, I’ve been part of a translation team that is working on the verses of the Lotus Sutra. I think of translating as a practice; it contains a lot of different opportunities to learn about the Buddha’s teachings and about myself at the same time. I’ve been finding that translating verses [...]

Chaos and Immediacy

The Mind  |  The University   |   Douglas Powers  |   May 3, 2012, 4:30 pm

For Deleuze, time itself is always in the newness of our immediate experience. Any sense of time that we add to the present experience is a mental construct. But any mental construct is itself experienced in the newness of each moment. So as we realize ourselves foundationally, it’s always within this newness. We are constantly living in a tension created by the immediacy of sense experience and the meaning that we create through various mental constructs. [...]
For me, authentic creativity comes from nothingness, from the space we open to possibility. Other forms of creation are reactionary, responses to immediate stimuli propelled by past habituations. They are imitations of an object or how we imagine others might respond to this object and its so-called creator. Jason brings up an important point, namely [...]

Boredom, Creativity, and Nothingness

The Mind  |  The Scene   |   Jason Tseng  |   August 25, 2011, 4:00 pm

In a recent article (which alternated between funny and cheekily serious, definitely worth a read), Scott Adams (the creator of the comic strip, Dilbert), asserts that boredom is good for us. The moments in our lives when we are not stimulated are ever dwindling–this has a huge detrimental effect on our creativity, and by extension, [...]

Ripple: a Poem

The Mind  |  The Scene   |   James Roberts  |   March 10, 2011, 12:36 pm

It isn’t common for me to write poetry, but this poem came to mind sort of suddenly during the winter Chan session here at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (CTTB). After the bell rang I rushed back to my room to write it down. A pebble wonders, Why are there ripples in the stream? [...]