Alex Grey: "The artist's mission is to make the soul perceptible. Our scientific, materialist culture trains us to develop the eyes of outer perception. Visionary art encourages the development of our inner sight. To find the visionary realm, we use the intuitive inner eye: The eye of contemplation; the eye of the soul. William Blake, visionary poet and painter called it the Divine Imagination and believed it was the eternal part of us. Sufi master Ib’n Arabi called our creative imagination an angel or “the place where god meets God.” All the most inspiring ideas we have as artists originate here."
Eckhart Tolle: "True creativity flows only from stillness. When stillness becomes conscious, the spiritual dimension enters your life and you begin to be guided by an intelligence far greater than the human mind."⠀
Mary Oliver: "Oliver is very clear about the need for writers to pay close, reverential attention to the world. Themes and images will come from this attention, she says. We’ll make the connections, find the metaphors. This blend of reverential attention to the world around us and to the craft of writing is how one turns expressions into art.
This is creativity.
“A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curious, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry,” Oliver concludes. “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision — a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”