Reflect for a moment on the quality of mind that is least creative—when the mind buzzes like the white noise on a TV screen. This is “monkey mind,” a cacophony of voices and sensations. Everything seems possible and nothing gets done.

Contrast that to the clarity of a moment of insight, when suddenly an organic structure emerges from what had been before a mess of scenes or ideas, when the melody line or a sentence comes to mind. We may describe these as “thoughts” that “emerge.” But if we pay attention to our own experiences—and to the accounts of exceptionally creative people—what we discover is a kind of dialogue.

[Rainer] Rilke himself offers an excellent example of this inner dialogue. In the winter of 1911–1912, he was in retreat at a medieval castle on the Adriatic coast in northeastern Italy. The estate’s owner—a patron of the poet named Marie Taxis—noted that he got off to a hard start: “A great sadness befell him,” she wrote, “and he began to suspect that this winter would fail to produce anything.”

“Things must first get bad,” Rilke told Taxis, “worse, worst, beyond what any language can hold. I creep about all day in the thickets of my life, screaming like a wild man and clapping my hands. You would not believe what hair-raising creatures this flushes up.”

The “hair-raising creatures” sound very much like the monkeys of the mind, loose and wild. The fright of encountering them in a feral state is common at the start of a retreat, whether it’s a thirty-minute meditation, a three-hour work session, or, as for Rilke, an extended journey of solitude. The static can be acutely uncomfortable. Freed of the social roles of everyday life—those flashlights that guide us through caves—we suddenly encounter the darkness itself, the creatures in its depths.

The heroic work, our teachers enjoin us, is to stay with the discomfort. That’s what Rilke did—and something changed. One morning, Taxis noted, the poet received “a tedious business letter. Wishing to deal with it right away, he had to sit down and devote himself to figures and other dry matters. Outside, a strong bora was blowing … Descending from the castle to the bastions overlooking the sea, Rilke walked back and forth deep in thought, preoccupied with his answer to the letter. Then all at once … it seemed to him as though in the roar of the wind a voice had called out to him: ‘If I cried out, who could hear me up there among the angelic orders?’” Rilke went straight to work and by the end of the day had the first of his Duino Elegies.

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?
And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart
I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence

      Having a poem descend “as though in the roar of the wind” may seem about as common as being struck by lightning. But what happened to Rilke is a dramatic instance of something rather typical. Over and over again, we hear creative people recounting in their aha moments—the crucial advance, the illumination from the metaphorical light bulb—that an image or a line or an idea presented itself, that it came not from the “I” but as though from a distinct source. These visitations seem to produce far superior results than anything one consciously constructs or creates.

—Joshua Wolf Shenk

Transcribed by me from pages 109–110 of Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, ©2014 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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