Introduction

Have you ever wondered what it means to create?

You may associate it with creating art, playing music, writing a new story, or developing a new business.

Creativity is part of our human constitution; it starts from the moment we start living. A child moves, and something emerges, a sense of a world beyond its fingers. We discover a world, but that world also feels like it was created by our movements.

Creation/discovery is a paradox; because it is paradoxical, it can be creative. Would creativity be possible if fitting into any logic?

By studying psychology and discovering Donald Winnicott's work, I proposed a new theory of creativity and the products and objects we make. Creativity is a production linked to bringing to the world something that was not there before.

Transitional objects are one of the places we find creativity, being the first objects children play with. Toys, blankets, and stuffed animals become part of the life of a child, to the point that any parent knows taking them away will cause distress to them.

Overview

I have arrived at an ontological position to think creativity, one that refers to the tension of different logics of our experience, the logic of our senses, the logic of our reason, the logic of our dreams and the logic of our relationships.

Therefore, we can understand a creative process by working on four areas:

• Body sensations: Connecting with who we are right now, in our bodies and perception
• Our connections and meaningful people: feeling who matters to us, and for whom we work.
• Our dreams and deep desires: relaxing into a dreamlike, relaxed mental state, allowing associations and images to tell us what moves inside.
• Our ideas, concepts and clear thoughts: as a last step, our mental processes clarify what we have found and link it with concepts and theories.

As you can see, the circles overlap and share a centre. That centre of paradoxical tension is what we aim to achieve: a place where the different parts come together.

As we take time to feel these four paradoxical positions, we do things with the insights, and slowly, a process starts to emerge in us; we begin to discover a movement, an interest, a productive pulse coming up.

As we practice these steps, it becomes more and more fluid, and what we make more coherent. When creating a theory/practice or learning one, using this circle to make your own connections and interpretations is helpful.

A bigger picture comes below with the process I call 'Intra-gration.'


The transitional space contains another layer of paradoxes: it moves between the personal, the I, the collective, the we, the external individual, the it, and the external collective, its.

This model modifies Ken Wilbers's integral approach, which aims to connect all the areas of Western and Oriental knowledge. I do not want to delve into his model, but I want to mention how useful it is to see where our traditions are speaking, what type of perspectives we are taking, and how they are many times more parallel than contradictory.

Although I find his ideas fascinating, I have a slightly different interpretation. For that reason, I drew the sections with an open space and a confluence of circles to mark that there are 'spaces between' the spaces of academic knowledge.

These four spaces (and their sub-spaces) make a lot of sense when conducting evidence-based qualitative or quantitative research. Wilber's work is handy for organising diverse and dispersed knowledge.

However, when trying to be creative, these spaces feel stiff and do not represent our fluidity and paradoxical work.