CENTER FOR CONSCIOUS CREATIVITY
"Human creativity is the ultimate economic resource. Each of us has creative potential that we love to exercise and that can be turned in valuable ends." Richard Florida
www.consciouscreativity.org
"The Transformational Power of Art and Media"
by Kate McCallum
Much like the great artists and thinkers of the Renaissance era, today’s artists and media makers stand on a threshold of creating and disseminating content, stories, and expressive experiences filled with elements and ideas that have the potential to empower a transformational impact on civilization and humanity in ways parallel to the last great evolutionary period, which occurred only a few hundred years ago. We are literally poised to create a "Re-Renaissance" of sorts.
The Center for Conscious Creativity (c3) was founded on the premise that the arts and media contain great potential and power to substantially aid in the enlightenment and transformation of humanity. To assist in this mission, the goal of c3 is to create a neutral and supportive space to bring together consciousness experts, spiritual teachers, philosophers and futurists together with artists and media makers in order to synergize and create a shared experience of deepening, not only within the media and art itself, but within the individual creators of such.
Essential to this endeavor is the inner practice, the inner work and the inner growth of an individual. One of the means by which to accomplish this is to create opportunities for information to be shared and transmitted. This is the primary goal of c3.
Media carries a variety of qualities; it can entrain, entertain, inform and transform. Literally, by watching certain visual images and/or listening to various types of music, brainwaves and heart rates shift. More and more studies are being done on the healing power of music and sound, and music is now being scientifically created to aid in medical recovery and healing. The effect of media on the physical body, (not to exclude the other aspects of our being), in turn affects our emotional body, as well as our mental and spiritual selves. Thus, one can surmise that media that entrains has a direct effect on the body’s physical mechanism. An exciting new discipline is also on the rise called Neuroesthetics. Neuroesthetics is a rapidly growing sub-discipline of neuroscience which seeks to explain and understand the esthetics of domains such as art and music at the neurological level. The field was pioneered by Semir Zeki of the University College London. Neuroesthetics directs attention to the bodily structure and response of an organism in an encounter with esthetic phenomenon such as art.
Tools such as neuroimaging and genetic analysis contribute to developing neuroesthetic knowledge. Thus, we are again poised to truly uncover the power of the arts to transform at even the biological level.
Media that primarily serves to entertain us has been the staple of much of this past century’s creation of content, and has contributed to the creation and success of the multi-billion dollar "entertainment industry."
Movies, television, games, and art containing stories that move us to laugh, groan, cry, feel fear or anger, etc. proliferate in our communication environment. A great story can, however, touch us deeply, change us and help us more fully understand the nature of the human experience. This type of media primarily affects our emotional selves.
Media that informs falls into the categories of news, documentaries, and non-fiction content…. This is media, or what we might call cognitive content, created to provide us with information and serves to activate, stimulate, and expand the mental body.
Finally, media that transforms is media that has a direct bearing on the Soul, or whole self. Be it via cognitive information, purely expressive content, or fictional storytelling, this media shifts our perceptions, our way of seeing the world and our reality, and offers up more heartfelt awareness towards the unique realization that we are all truly a part of a creative, dynamic, and experientially intriguing world.
This type of experience is the result of a highly personal, subjective and experiential experience, based on an individual’s unique response to any and/or all the above aforementioned content. However, it is believed that a certain specific type of content is more apt to create this experience than others.
Again, let us revisit history once more and ponder upon the similarities of our times. In doing so, we can bring to awareness the fact that we are now simply at a new turn of the evolutionary spiral with the advent of electricity, computers and the technological revolution, which has provided us with a variety of tools by which to better understand and comprehend our world.
In looking back at the Renaissance period, two important historical events stand out that are reminiscent of today’s opportunities, especially in light of the work of the c3.. One being the creation of the Florentine Camerata Society, founded in the late 1500’s.
The Florentine Camerata was a society made up of great artists, humanists, philosophers, merchants, and innovative thinkers of the time. Under the patronage of Count Giovanni de' Bardi they gathered and discussed, and ultimately guided trends in the arts, especially music and drama. They met mainly in the late Renaissance from about 1573 until the late 1580s, at the house of Bardi, and their gatherings had the reputation of having all the most famous men of Florence as frequent guests. Known members of the group, besides Bardi, included Giulio Caccini, Pietro Strozzi, and Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei).
Unifying them was the belief that music had become corrupt, and by returning to the forms and style of the ancient Greeks, the art of music could be improved, and thereby society could be improved as well. They were influenced by Girolamo Mei, the foremost scholar of ancient Greece at the time, who held-among other things -- that ancient Greek drama was predominantly sung rather than spoken. While he may have been mistaken, the result was an efflorescence of musical activity unlike anything else at the time, mostly in an attempt to recover the ancient methods.
It was the goal of the members of the Camerata Society to create a new art form that would help to transform humanity….. and what we now can count to their credit is the art form known as opera.
These thinkers went back to the great Greek mystery plays for inspiration and combined them with an evolving style of music and sound played on newly created instruments. These stories were designed to make the audience think and recall a greater sense of truth and awareness.
The other intriguing event to occur during these illuminating times was the translation and dispersion of a very important body of work called The Corpus Hermeticum. The Hermetic tradition represents a lineage of Hellenistic Gnosticism. The central texts of the tradition, the Corpus Hermeticum were lost to the West in classical times. Their rediscovery and translation during the late-fifteenth century by the Renaissance court of Cosimo de Medici, provided a seminal force in the development of Renaissance thought and culture. The fifteen tracts of the Corpus Hermeticum, along with the Perfect Sermon or Asclepius, are the foundation documents of the Hermetic tradition. This material inspired the great artists and thinkers of the day.
Today, the c3 holds the vision of becoming a modern day Camerata Society, a vibrant community for creators and those wishing to aid in the transformation and evolution of humanity by providing resources to further study and explore the wisdom traditions, but also to encourage artists and creators to offer up their own gifts, talents and skills in service to this collective vision.
Our modern day "Corpus Hermeticum" now symbolizes the whole of all the great human potential content to which we have access in the form of the perennial ancient wisdom, as well as scientific knowledge, contemporary teachings, and inspiration. The Guttenberg Press, which in its time was the leading technology of change, created a wave of advanced enlightenment and education by exposing the masses to the printed word. The Guttenberg Press of today could be metaphorically represented by the internet and its essential contribution towards the democratization of media born from the ever-evolving digital distribution pipeline and the affordability of the technology needed to create the content. Thus, the concept of a "Re-Renaissance," and the extraordinary potential to utilize these gifts and tools for humanity’s greatest good.
The arts, in their earliest expression, were closely aligned with spiritual truths and were used as ritual and or dedicated to the adoration of the gods and goddesses. Now we have the opportunity to reclaim the sacred power of the arts in an effort to help bring about more consciously created creativity and expression which can and will have a tremendous effect on humanity.
Today’s artists and content creators have the opportunity to take on the mantle of reflecting back to humanity its true identity by creating media that honestly reflects the totality of the human experience. The great ancient wisdom that for so many years has been bound in books or available only through verbal transmissions, can now be born out to a greater audience.
Content can be beautifully disseminated through digital storytelling, filmmaking, music and the arts.
Sung in operas, recorded on CDs and DVDs, written in our books and publications, woven into our electronic games, captured in photos, paintings, sculptures, danced or performed live in theatres, and sent across the world through the web, cell phones, I-pods, V-pods and on….and on…. the gateways have opened wide.
Futurist and technology experts can help us prepare for what is coming on the landscape of invention. It is through the mastery of these tools and using them well, that we can truly help evolve humanity’s destiny towards a more peaceful, compassionate, and unified planet.
The c3 is dedicated to continuing to build and create a think-tank and resource center for the support of those artists, media-makers and experts in consciousness and futurist studies; towards the exploration and creation of a more powerful expression in creativity, the arts and media; to contribute to the new Golden Age of humanity that we stand on the threshold of co-creating.
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both
together go to the making of genius.
Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
Wolfgang Amadeus
