![]() ![]() ![]() “But a big part of meditation ends up being mind wandering,” said Schooler. Mindfulness involves greater attention to such stimuli. Mind wandering, noted Schooler, involves a perceptual decoupling, in which attention to external stimuli is dampened. In a 2015 paper, aptly titled “ Mind Wandering ‘Ahas’ Versus Mindful Reasoning: Alternative Routes to Creative Solutions,” Schooler’s team actually found a negative relationship between mindfulness and problem-solving. “So it seems like mind wandering may be particularly useful for the kind of problem that you need to sleep on, where you’re sort of stuck, and you need a different kind of approach or solution.” “We found that the ideas that they had in this context, that is when they’re not actively pursuing the problem, and when they’re not at work, are more likely to involve overcoming impasses,” explained Schooler. But the shower ideas often had more of a breakthrough quality to them. “The ideas that they had in the shower were as good as the ideas that they had while they were actively trying to solve the problem,” he noted. When I connected with Schooler he made sure to clarify that the writers and physicists weren’t more creative when mind wandering versus when they were on task. In a couple of studies involving almost two hundred professional writers and physicists, he found that twenty percent of their ideas occurred when engaging in “spontaneous task-independent mind wandering.” Jonathan Schooler, a professor in the University of California’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, researches this nexus of mindfulness, creativity, and the brain. Interestingly, modern neuroscience has shown that the experiences of Hsiang-yen and Czeslaw Milosz are consistently borne out by others. For example, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, who stated, “I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would be not won by my own efforts but given as a gift.” He offered numerous examples of artists citing this receptive rather than productive quality. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received,” wrote Hyde. “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. In his seminal work The Gift, the scholar Lewis Hyde examined the seemingly random nature of inspiration. ![]() Then, having exhausted our capacity for contemplation and while engaging in a seemingly unrelated task, wisdom benevolently strikes. Desperate for a breakthrough, we grasp at solutions to no avail, bang our heads against the wall, grapple with writer’s block, and cast about desperately for answers. ![]() As we struggle with a koan, math problem, or work of art, understanding can feel distant and obscure, like a destination to which we’d like to arrive though we lack directions or even a sense of what the terrain looks like. One day while sweeping, a pebble shot out from his broom and struck a piece of bamboo and-aha!-the sound resulted in Hsiang-yen’s instant awakening.Īha moments, in which understanding arrives suddenly and with shocking clarity, are the holy grail for creatives, intellectuals, and Buddhists alike. Have you ever had a sublime idea pop into your head while doing chores? If so, you are not so different from the Zen student Hsiang-yen, who, struggling with a koan, retreated to the shrine of the 6th patriarch Huineng (regarded as the founder of the “Sudden Enlightenment” school of Zen), in order to diligently maintain it. ![]()
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