Thoughts can create such a barrier that even if you are standing before a beautiful flower, you will not be able to see it. Your eyes are covered with layers of thought. To experience the beauty of the flower you have to be in a state of meditation, not in a state of mentation. You have to be silent, utterly silent, not even a flicker of thought – and the beauty explodes, reaches to you from all directions. You are drowned in the beauty of a sunrise, of a starry night, of beautiful trees.
This is the way of meditation: encountering the present in all its tremendous beauty, just being in the present. Inside, the mind stops. Outside, the world changes totally. It is no more the ordinary world you have known before. In fact, you have not known it at all. Your mind was distorting everything, your mind was creating fantasies. Your eyes were full of fantasies and you were looking though those fantasies. They never allowed you to see that which is. If the mind is gone, even for a moment, suddenly the whole existence explodes upon you.
What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind.
Robert Grudin
Source: The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation, Pages: 55
Where are you making for? This is the question of our time. What is our vision? What kind of world do we want, for ourselves, for our children, for our children's children? What kind of world do we want for the fish and the birds, the beasts and the insects, the forests and the meadows, the crops that feed us and the flowers that bring us beauty? I believe we want to create a world large enough to be a soul home for us and for all beings, loving and large enough to give expression to the soul of the world itself, spacious and whole enough to express the lengths of God. And I believe we can. The capacity to do so is innate in us. If affairs are soul size, we can meet them because we are soul size, too.
The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination.
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