This course explores the creative process. We examine – collaboratively, playfully, mindfully – the role of creativity in self-development, learning, community engagement, and writing. Using various creative approaches and practices, we follow the alchemy of creative expression across multiple domains.
The course provides an opportunity for learners to deepen their creative process, to work on their inner development, and improve their writing. Learners are encouraged to take appropriate risks, to challenge themselves creatively – especially when doing so provokes discomfort – and to be open to personal and interpersonal process. The course involves many experiential activities and many moments of possible discovery.
The core focus of the course is on the development of self-knowledge, which is the ultimate quest. Every creative tradition and cultural mythology affirms this fundamental truth. The path of self-knowledge is the most rewarding journey we can undertake, yet it is also the hardest. We are challenged by our family histories, by our cultures, by our own traumas and vulnerabilities. And yet we must persist, as all the old tales say, so that we discover the essential unity between ourselves and the cosmos. That’s what creativity has always been about. At its heart, creativity is the path of illumination. No matter how much we apply modern attitudes to the creative process, that process inexorably guides us inward, toward a confrontation with our own consciousness and with the vast story of the universe. And that journey does not end: it simply tracks every more deeply into vast and unfathomable mysteries.
And so, whatever point learners find themselves in their own odysseys of self-discovery, this course encourages them to do some self-examination. All the great tales arise from the journey inward, and our own versions of that journey will be the source of our deepest and best creativity.
Details
You will find thorough information about projects (the reading project, the writing project, and the self-awareness project), on their own dedicated pages.