Spiritual Understanding (standard:other, 816 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Aug 27 2007	Views/Reads: 5896/2338	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Giving up guilt and grieving can be a rewarding process, well worth the effort.

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writing.  Or music, drawing, painting, sculpture, what have you. 

So creativity relates to grief and guilt in this way: grief and guilt
can't always be talked out, but must be "acted out" in socially 
acceptable ways.  Art is the socially acceptable way for people to 
express the discomfort -- or even pain -- of their underlying emotions 
and thoughts.  Artistically expressed thoughts and emotions make up 
what we call "beauty". 

We all know that creativity is child-like behavior, because the child
who is free to express himself is a child who smiles.  The child whose 
behavior gives rise to repression by adults begins to accumulate a 
burden of grief or guilt.  If this grief or guilt is drained off 
promptly, by encouraging the child's creative expression, it would be 
like putting a band-aid on a cut. The child's capacity for bearing 
grief or guilt will be increased, and the child will be less likely to 
"act out" those feelings and thoughts in antisocial ways. 

What I have just illustrated is the Aristotelian derivation of
Creativity as a desirable thing.  If we drain off guilt and grieving, 
we bring beauty into our lives. 

These thoughts are not precisely original, but go back to what the
Russian novelists of the nineteenth century were trying to tell the 
world. 

--Xenocrates 

Seattle, June 29, 1991 Gerald X. Diamond


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