Thoughts on Creativity, Spirit, and the Ethical Life

By George Lowell Tollefson

This is a collection of miscellaneous notes by the author of The Immaterial Structure of Human Experience, The Limits of Reason, and The Thinking Process. These thoughts represent an exploration of spiritual and creative concerns, covering such topics as literature, art, philosophy, and human behavior.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palo Flechado Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224913602

George Lowell Tollefson

Lowell Tollefson, a former philosophy professor, lives in New Mexico and writes on the subject of philosophy.

Book preview

PREFACE

These are random notes on the topics indicated in the title. They are in the order in which they were originally produced, with the exception that twenty-three previously written analyses of literary works have been distributed among them. The notes are followed by a synopsis of the immaterialist philosophy.

Thoughts on Creativity, Spirit,

and the Ethical Life

Who is the individual in pain, sweat, and sorrow? She is the spirit that broods and rejoices through all things. She is a pinpoint through whom every position, every part of the whole, can be located. They live because she lives. And she lives because they live.

Religions endure because of the truths within them which are represented by their false symbolism.

Humankind thinks in symbols, even in its most rational moments.

Creative intelligences should be admired. But they are few. What is within the reach of every person is the development and maintenance of a good moral character.

Envy is unproductive. Every life is unique, and, when rightly understood, exhibits its interesting elements.

Spirit is in beautiful, refined things. It brings out their harmony, which is its unity.

There are things which can be conveyed in art which cannot be understood conceptually. For art penetrates beyond the outer shell of thought.

The short duration of a human life facilitates spiritual and intellectual progress. A person can rarely transcend the structure of her own vision, which is continually being refined and rendered more limiting. This isolation of the individual mind is necessary. But it can only be transcended by a new and separate awareness. Hence the superseding of one life by another.

Reason is fallible. It cannot know everything. But it is the most important and reliable tool available to human awareness. Imagination and access to emotional transcendence are necessary for creativity and insight. But it is reason which exercises judgment and clarifies discernment.

If God created the universe as separate with its attributes of space and time, then where is God? And when was this done? Whatever may be called God must be that from which the universe emanates.

Why does the Pythagorean Theorem, c² = a² + b², work when similar theorems at higher powers are understood not to? If this theorem is simplified to the relationship between the sides of a square and its diagonal, c² = 2a², it can be seen that the entire equation is composed of pairs of equal quantities.

The square roots are, of course, pairs of equal quantities in both c² and a². And the two a²’s are a pair of equal addends. So, reverting to the original formula, c² = a² + b², it can be seen that a² + b² equals c². The addends, a² and b², are unequal. But they are together equal to the paired and multiplied roots of c². Moreover, they are equal to the paired addends of 2a². So every aspect of the equation can be understood in terms of equal pairs.

Yet this does not hold with the equation c³ = a³ + b³ because the higher power of 3 does not exhibit a relation of pairs of equals. For example, 2² is 2 × 2. But 2³ is 2 × 2 followed by 2 × 4, which latter operation does not express a relation of equal pairs. Neither is this the case with c⁴ = a⁴ + b⁴.

Though it is true that the roots of c⁴ are c² and c², which are an equal pair, and the same is true of a⁴ and b⁴, this involves a double operation in which c is squared. Then the result is squared again. This is because c⁴ is c × c followed by c(c²) followed by c(c³). Thus inequality is introduced. This is true of any equation similar to c² = a² + b², but at a higher power.

A person who is devoted to the life of the mind should not exhibit a lack of control over the body. The physical appetites, though exercised, must be kept in reasonable subordinacy to the will.

As universal consciousness, spirit cannot be defined as a person. But, since all things emanate from spirit, including person, it can be related to as a person. For what is potential within spirit can be actual to an individual awareness.

To worship anything is to pay obeisance to the institution in which it is enshrined. Universal awareness and being can only be loved and celebrated. It is not worshiped.

Every individual person represents the dignity of universal consciousness and being. But few are those who express it.

It is sometimes necessary to commit an act which is cruel in its effect. But it is not permissible to do so for the sake of the cruelty. Such an emotion diminishes the person who harbors it. For he wrongfully seeks to have dominion over another.

The biosphere is an organism made up of individual but interconnected creatures, just as one of those creatures is an organism made up of individual but interconnected cells. To bring irremediable harm to the biosphere is to become a cancer within it.

There is a means to an increase in understanding which lies deeper than imagination or reason. For insights may arise as emotional impulses which are then fleshed out by imagination and reason. These emotional impulses exhibit no material precedent, though they may alter the course of material events.

To live in the material is human. To become mired in it is animal.

Genius may involve high intelligence, talent, and perseverance. But its origin is unknown to the mind. For all these advantages may exist without genius and often do.

Cézanne’s greatness as a painter was hard won. For he not only had to labor to create it. It was necessary for him to discover where it lay. This neither he nor anyone else could imagine prior to the discovery. It was simply felt as a direction, an inclination of emotion.

There are only men and women of genius. There are no gods but universal awareness.

Good art presents the imagination with emotions and sensations which, with some pertinent direction given by the work, the admirer must further organize meaningfully. The freedom within prescribed bounds which the admirer’s imagination has in doing this is the measure of its creative involvement. The breadth and subtlety of the artist’s means in producing the work is its greatness as art.

Beware the beguiling nature of time. Materially it has a long train, before and after. For it is an expression of the limitations of the mind. Without it, the intellect could not find a purpose. But simple consciousness, and thus simple being, is without these limitations. They are the eternal now, the singularity from which time unfolds and into which it returns.

Great spirits, like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, the Buddha, and the writers of the Upanishads have been given a transcending insight with which to guide human understanding. But they always come surrounded by a motley company of followers who cannot see as they do.

Michelangelo not only expressed the emotional torment of his age. He understood the struggle of the human spirit in material confinement.

Many are born athletes of the mind. Few bother to train.

Philosophers endure long bouts in the wastes of abstraction because, like artists with their messy paints, they can see the vision beyond.

The gift of writing is the true mother of civilization. But then musical notation was born. And the generations could sing.

Hemingway’s genius lay in his sensual and emotional sensitivity brought under a careful rhetorical discipline. His weakness lay in the insecurity of an ungoverned ego. He was also traumatized by his severe wounding in war and sought ever after to repeat the intensity, or sensory acuteness, of that experience.

Pissarro’s paintings are Impressionist masterpieces. They are spiritually liberating. But there is also a burden of heat, hard labor, and smell of sweat in them.

Every great artist, knowingly or otherwise, seeks the spiritual essence of the material. It is as though she would turn herself inside out and expose the internal structure that gives form to her flesh.

Great art is quite literally timeless. For it exists not only prior to its expression. It exists prior to its conception. Like the life of a human being, it is brought out of the timeless into an unfolding succession. Here it lives for a time. But in the spirit it never dies.

A true scientist not only follows the well-worn path of procedure, where it is the method more than the investigator which creates. He deviates from the path and cuts through the tangle of unknown imaginings.

Philosophy is the art of conceptual serenity. Or at least it seeks to be.

Reason is the discipline of imagination. It renders imagination useful. For it is reason which ensures that the imagination should behave like a horse under harness. A carriage could not go anywhere without a horse. But it is the harness which determines where it goes and the pace at which it does so.

Everything in the universe changes. If this is to be doubted, then everything intimately familiar changes. Motion is change. Every action and thought is change. So how can there not be an evolution of living forms? How can there not be termination, or death? It is in the nature of material phenomena.

There can be no complete distinction between the human and God. Awareness is God, even when it is limited. The material emanates from the immaterial, matter from spirit, body from consciousness. Not the other way around. The desire to give priority to matter is an attempt to make permanent what can only be subject to change, to consider what is derivative independent, to render what is subordinate dominant. Consciousness simply is. It neither comes nor goes. But the phenomena subject to awareness arise and pass out of existence. That is why consciousness cannot be defined, or put into a box and assigned limits. For it is itself the box which prescribes limits to whatever it surveys.

All of civilization is a move toward the subjectivization of experience. It is an attempt to bring the world into a harmonious unity. But what of the abruptness of the genius of Newton, Darwin, or Rembrandt? Does such a person not draw upon a unity which is greater than that which he creates? Does not a Mozart or a Bach bring to the world something which was not known to exist there?

What is the mystery behind the incomprehensibility of the origin of their work? And what is the reason why the work is inevitably incomplete, however polished and unified it may seem? For it may always be paralleled or superseded. The mind’s revolutions are a continual turning about in a great hall of spirit. This source can never be exhausted. Hence the continual reinterpretation of experience.

Philosophy is the final overarching art. Unfortunately, it is only attempted by a few. And it is rarely well finessed.

Universal consciousness, spirit, is the deepest self. In the material rush of life, it is little regarded. Yet to do so is an exercise in self-amnesia among meaningless things. Neither can it be worshiped. For that extreme is also untenable. It is alienation and a turning away from what is true, which is simply that spirit is the person. Though it is also much more than the person.

Among genuinely creative spirits there is something which is overlooked by others. It is indiscernible to the mind. For it is an inexplicable inclination to turn to the right where the left appears to be a clearer way. It arises from a source beyond knowledge. Abraham heard it: a directive from within him, which could not be ignored.

Monet drew upon it and formed it into paint, as did Cézanne. Galileo wrought its physical relations in mathematics. Yet from none of the things into which it is embodied does it come. Rather, it informs them. The Cold Mountain poet Han-shan knew what it was, though it eluded him in life.

Sad to say, human beings would not be the complex, emotionally sophisticated creatures that they are, were it not for the heaviness of heart, sickness, horror, physical pain, and death encountered in material existence. In proof of this, and in contradistinction to a professed desire for peace of spirit and mind, it is just such a wrenching tangle of trials informing the arts, high and low, that people flock to experience.

Wisdom is an intelligent and comprehensive understanding of one’s circumstances. Cunning is the dull but focused ability to take advantage of others. In any one person, these two faculties are in inverse proportion to one another.

The soldier who gives her life to save those of her fellows does so because she has come to identify her own person so closely with others that, in such a moment of unreflective action, she is attempting to protect herself.

Any material attempt to set forth the nature of spirit would fail were it not for the impulse behind the attempt. The impulse is spirit.

Each of Hemingway’s four important novels involves a reversal in perspective. Robert Cohn is not the villain in The Sun Also Rises. He is a victim of the misbehavior of the others. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederick and Catherine’s escape to neutral Switzerland does not end the chaotic condition which war has imposed upon them and the world. Catherine dies

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Pablo is not corrupted into becoming self-interested, as Robert Jordan and Pilar appear to believe. He is self-interested from the beginning, as revealed by the story of their early days Pilar relates to Jordan. And in The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago is a symbol, not of defeat, but of triumph through his accommodation and acceptance of his human condition.

The long short story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber exhibits a similar turn about in emphasis. For the Macomber character is not the deeper study. It is the cynical professional hunter Robert Wilson, who is shocked at Margot’s killing of her husband. His shock reveals the nature of his cynicism. It is a form of pessimistic idealism. For it is Wilson’s underlying idealism which is shocked.

In matters of human motivation and character, what is obvious is almost always not the case.

Creative artists do not always recognize the full implications of their work. For example, painters think in terms of the images, color, lines, and forms they employ. The work is felt into being. And much of what is felt comes from they do not know where.

The greatest art has its being not in the material creation of the work, nor in the mind of the creator. For it is logically prior to these. It is neither before, concurrent, nor after. It simply is. And it comes to the artist through an impulse, or series of impulses, which are felt in terms of an inclination.

There is, of course, a material element in art: that which is generally referred to as worldly experience, which includes study and thought. But these are like so many bricks which cannot of themselves alone define a structure, nor the mortar which holds them together. Hence art reflects an age and a particular culture. But it also lends spirit to the age and the culture. It is the life of these. For, though life must have a material structure, it is not the structure. That is its temporal dwelling place and no more.

Human beings reason when they think logically. Any other form of systematic thinking is imagery sequencing. People share this latter faculty in varying degrees with other forms of sentient life.

The principal mode of continuing human evolution is now by means of culture.

It is better to live a life disciplined to received principles little understood, than it is to live a life of cunning.

Cunning is the animal capacity to counter or make use of another person’s anticipated move and to do it in one’s own interest, where no personal harm from another is expected.

The more a person learns to recognize and follow impulses from her deeper self, the greater beauty of character she achieves. Others will not understand the change. And many may oppose it. But it is worth the effort and sacrifice, as any elevated awareness knows.

A spiritually transcendent development of character cannot be conferred by any institutional or conventional practice because it must come from within.

It is permissible to judge another in one’s own defense. But it inappropriate to share that judgment with others, unless it is needed in their defense as well.

There is no such thing as a community of one. But there is a oneness of community, which is seldom achieved and even more rarely sustained.

What has been referred to as a marriage made in heaven begins in the mind, not the groin. Matters of the heart are subordinate to the mind as well, though they may indicate what has not been thought of. For intelligent recognition is superior to unclear emotion and blind impulse.

In human beings, a development of intellect has outgrown the animal nature. As a result, a tension has arisen, the resolution of which is essential to humanity, the planet, and any portion of the universe in which people may be present. The intellect can achieve control over itself, its subordinate physical impulses, and its material ego. For it must. Only when it does can the intellectually enhanced powers of destruction unleashed by animal desire and defensiveness be arrested.

Honesty is the hardest virtue to practice. No one can do so at one hundred percent. And few give it any thought or significant effort, other than to create a social facade of probity.

The only hope for the human race is spiritual transcendence. This involves a sincere and determined reliance upon the deepest inner self. Yet few are aware there is such a thing. They live their lives like marionettes, moved hither and thither by superficial social proddings.

Every young person learns to develop a mask, a suit of armor with which to engage the world. As a result, no one knows who the other person really is. And, as a general rule, neither of them knows himself.

The universal spirit is not only within. It is the only reality. The rest is mere superficiality and show, a temporal display, like fireworks that are soon returned to darkness.

Among Ernest Hemingway’s short stories is a series of vignettes. Some of these are the purest form of word painting. One is called Evacuation Along the Karagatch Road. It begins, Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. No end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned.

In a few words a picture of confusion and misery emerges, of human beings caught in circumstances beyond their control. Rain and mud. Carts and animals jammed together for miles, the carts loaded with everything the people own. What is the cause of such desperation? What would bring so many people together in such a deplorable way? Clearly, it is war.

The vignette states, The old men and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle moving. The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge. Carts were jammed solid on the bridge with camels bobbing along through them. Greek cavalry herded along the procession. Women and kids were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles.

There are no fighting age men in this procession. There are only old men, women, and children. The young men are somewhere else, their families left to uprooted and uncontrollable circumstances. It would seem that, with everything lost to these people—their homes, the routines and security of normal life—the weather must also be against them.

Hemingway individualizes the suffering: There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation. What a fragile possession civilization truly is. It is like a pane of glass—transparent, but easily shattered into slivers of pain.

A great writer often leaves behind a residue of second rate works. These tarnish the gleaming surface of her purest expressions or reflections. So a distinction should always be made between what is pure and what is not. Such a line of demarcation must be widely promulgated and known, so as not to confuse the general public.

In its purest form, unalloyed to mind, Kant’s source of sensation can neither be derived nor explained. And, as he would have it, time and space are intuitions, as is the manifold of sensation. But this is not so. For the former are not simply received. They are products of the mind in accordance with its limitations.

First, time is developed from the necessary sequencing of the mind’s focus in its independent apprehension of individual sensations and groupings of sensations. Then there is a mental construction of space out of groupings of sensations into objects. And there is a subsequent recognition of temporal sequence in accordance with changes in the relations of the objects.

Consequently, it can be held that there are two mental sources of time, but only one of space. Initially, there is the non-incremental sense of time born of the necessary sequencing of sensation. Following this, sensations are reorganized in terms of space. And time is recognized accordingly. For its incremental measure is determined by the ever-changing phenomena of spatial relations. Beyond these limitations wrought by the mind, there is neither time nor space. There is simply the whole of sensation in an unfragmented, timeless unity.

The mind sees with imagination. And it uses reason to organize what it sees. The former is fertile but weak in application. The latter, taken by itself, is strong. But it is utterly sterile.

The word philosophy does not express anything about the possession of wisdom. It merely indicates a love of it. A philosopher is anyone who loves wisdom and likes to think about it in order to untangle its relations.

Philosophy should continue to be a search for a better life, as the ancients originally conceived it. That is achieved by an acquisition of wisdom. And the quest for wisdom is an investigation into the relationship between humanity and its circumstances. It is not a metascience in the manner of logical positivism.

Since philosophy is concerned with the whole of mental life, the whole of experience encountered by the mind, it must include that which is not explained by a material perspective, such as consciousness and the power of art. Whereas, positivism represents an investigation into material circumstances alone: those circumstances which are either known through the senses or are considered to be derived from the mind’s powers of phenomenal representation. For this reason, logical positivism’s limited perspective is insufficient to address the whole of philosophical concern.

In addition to this, it purports to derive its authority from Immanuel Kant. But upon closer investigation, it can be seen that his methodology did not preclude metaphysics, as logical positivists believe. It simply indicated that metaphysics should not become a confection of rational speculation. Rather, it should be limited to a fleshing out of phenomenal experience where that experience does not itself supply a direct means of doing so.

This is to say that, where the mental life of humankind does not exhibit a meaningful unity, such a unity should nonetheless be sought. In other words, as in the example of consciousness and art not being adequately explained in material terms, metaphysics should be employed to bring them into a satisfactory union with empirical experience.

In determining the quality of a person, only a sound mind and a good character matter. And the one cannot be had without the other. A sound mind will necessitate a good character. For a low character implies a deficiency of the mind, which either does not see what is lacking in behavior or why it should not be in such a state.

Behavior is the expression of character. Though a proper demeanor can be feigned, it cannot be sustained. True character will inevitably be revealed.

El Greco captured the otherworldliness of renaissance Spain. This can be seen in the poets, Luis de Leon and Lope de Vega as well. Now contrast it with the extreme worldliness portrayed in Bernal Diaz’s The Conquest of New Spain.

There may well be no such thing as perfection. Perfection is a vague human term, difficult to define in terms of a concrete reference. Good, better, best. These are comparatives. The concept better applies to something which is more of what it is than something which is less so. But best, in the sense of absolute best, would apply to something absolute, which is merely an idealization.

Chance is a concept which is applied to the two extremes of human knowledge. For it appears to occur where understanding falters. For example, at the very small and precise, one arrives where accustomed causal relations break down. They simply are not tailored to this kind of minute observation. At the very large, diffuse, and complex, the same problem occurs. There is either too much, the material is too divergent, or there are too many factors involved to be brought under a reasonable collation.

It is for these considerations that it becomes permissible to assert that there is no such thing as chance. Chance is simply incomplete understanding. But, since such a claim may alarm the wary observer who would insist that some things are inherently not causal, but nonetheless regular in appearance, it is equally acceptable to allow that causal relations are essentially approximations, however precise they may appear to be in quotidian circumstances.

Mathematics is an ideal science and does not submit to a scrutiny based on observation. Rather, it follows rules of logic, one principle following another according to reason alone. But what happens when it is applied to a science of observation, like physics? Is there not a danger that the ideal nature of that which is being used to lend structure to this latter science will be overlooked in its ideality? In other words, however close they may be in appearance to what is observed, can it be maintained that geometrical figures truly represent physical relations? And are there such things as instantaneous velocities and mathematical limits?

Take a dark, pathless way into the forest, and you will find what you are looking for. In such a manner has the heart been known to lead, and lead true. When this occurs, there is nothing more convincing in demonstrating that there is a power, whatever it may be, which lies beyond human awareness. It is from this that the man or woman of genius greedily borrows, with or without gratitude.

Creativity is like life. It must occur. For it is always becoming, even when leading toward failure or death.

How sweet it is to follow Plotinus’ speculations concerning beauty and the good to the purest fount of being. But how can one know what lies beyond human awareness? Reason is not enough. There must be a starting point in experience—that which can be referenced for a sense of intellectual security when a train of thought grows ever so lean from a lack of material sustenance.

A general perusal of biographies of genius makes it clear that such creativity does not arise alone from a high intelligence quotient. Many are those of such a preeminent faculty who never achieve anything exceptional. So it is evident that other factors must play a role. Two of these are focus and determination.

Another (though this is not always the case) is thriving in an era of high national confidence. Goya is an exception to this rule. But perhaps most important is that ineffable quality of insight which comes from one does not know where. It is merely felt along the mind in a peculiar manner which says, this is right, this is the way.

Einstein’s concern was that scientific theory must be deterministic (causal), regardless of whether or not physical experience is completely deterministic. This seems valid. However, it does appear that any exceedingly minute examination of physical phenomena will uncover