Page 46 - NAMAH-Jul-2019

Insight

The Creative Soul

Nolini Kanta Gupta

Abstract
One must be creative if one is not to become dead matter. Our inmost reality is a dynamo of creative
energy and its matrix is our very soul. . There is genius in every soul. We have to pull ourselves out of
the social maelstrom and be what we are. As we act through the soul and not through imitation we
find the highest freedom and delight. This is the domain of the creative soul.

The difference between living organism to be dead matter nor mere shadowy illusions
and dead matter is that while the former is we must be creative. A misconception that
endowed with creative activity, the latter has vitiated our outlook in general and has
has only passive receptivity. Life adds, been the most potent cause of a sterilising
synthetises, new-creates – gives more than atavism in the moral evolution of humanity
what it receives; matter only sums up, gathers, is that creativity is an aristocratic virtue,
reflects, gives just what it receives. Life is that it belongs only to the chosen few. A
living, glad and green through its creative great poet or a mighty man of action creates
genius. Creation in some form or other must indeed, but such a creator does not appear very
be the core of everything that seeks vitality frequently. A Shakespeare or a Napoleon is
and growth, vigour and delight. Not only so, a rare phenomenon; they are, in reality, an
but a thing in order to be real must possess exception to the general run of mankind. It
a creative function. We consider a shadow is enough if we others can understand and
or an echo unreal precisely because they do follow them — Mahajano yena gatah — let the
not create but merely image or repeat, they great souls initiate and create, the common
do not bring out anything new but simply souls have only to repeat and imitate.
reflect what is given. The whole of existence
is real because it is eternally creative But this is not as it should be, nor is it the truth
of the matter. Every individual soul, however
So the problem that concerns man, the riddle placed it may be, is by nature creative; every
that humanity has to solve is how to find out individual being lives to discover and to create.
and follow the path of creativity. If we are not The inmost reality of man is not a passive

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