Our Theater Within A Theater

One way to illustrate how we as a whole don't even come close to reaching our own creative capacity is to consider our dreams. If you think of your dream as a movie  you would begin to see that your role in it consists of being the writer, director, actor, costume designer, set designer, casting agent and the list goes on. This can be seen as activity developed by our unconscious mind. On top of all of that we also act as audience members in our own production. This can be seen as our conscious awareness. 

Our creativity works in the same way. Within the theater of our mind lives another smaller but very powerful inner-theater. Our unconscious mind. We have a conscious awareness of our creative process as well as an unconscious awareness that gathers and ignores information. We could never consider every possibility at the same time so we must process this information quickly and efficiently. 

Our inner-theater makes choices for us and at times decides what information we value and wish to retain. It then offers these ideas up to our conscious mind and we decide again from this "conscious awareness" if it is relevant. But it is important to realize that this "conscious awareness" is now directly effected by fear of judgment, intimidation, shyness,... All the things we struggle with and that limit us during the creative process. But if we realize we ultimately have control over these unconscious values because we are the programers of them, it may help us trust and improve our own creative capacity. 

Our unconscious mind is in a sense programed to react to information by our own conscious values. If we understand that exploring new ideas, by enriching ourselves through taking hard thoughtful looks at our successes and failures and by really listening and seeking out fresh data; We begin to program our unconscious mind. We can actively begin to develop our own creative capacity and reach better solutions more quickly. If we begin to realize we are programming ourselves with the impressions and values we gather throughout our day, we can then see how we are reprogramming our unconscious mind to build and deliver better more qualified information to our conscious awareness. What we do with the information once we get it is another story.