The state of creativity. How to return to a creative state more often Vision has magical properties

There are those who believe that creative people have special secret powers and innate talents. But it's not. Everyone has creativity. We made a selection of 30 commandments, following which you can awaken your creative power and make your life brighter.

1. Creativity starts in the heart

Listening to our cherished desires, and attentively, we get the opportunity not only to engage in the creativity we dream about, but also to dream that this creativity will reach a significant scale.

2. Creativity needs to be nurtured constantly.

Talent or interest is a living part of you, like a hand, or an ear, or an eye. All this must be used, it must be nourished, otherwise it will atrophy and you will not be what you should be.

A way to train your creativity every day is the 1 page a day creative notebook. Source - MIF's creative Instagram @miftvorchestvo

3. Vision is magical

Magic is the ability to see results without seeing the process leading to them. It is vision, inner vision, that allows you to notice what the work lacks, and also helps to see what no one has seen before. This is an incredible human gift - to see beyond the present and the past and from that distant, unknown, to extract something that has not existed until now.

The great 20th-century composer Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote: “We just need to close our eyes and listen for a while. Around us, in the air, there is always something that has never been heard before.

4. The best place to start a creative process is to end it.

Let each new creation arise in your mind as if from nothing. The form, structure of creation, the impressions and sensations that it leaves, its very life - all this immediately comes through, even in the most simple picture. Imagine the result. Add elements. Take the risk of removing some of the old ones. Examine the imaginary creature from the inside, from the outside. You will learn a lot about your concept.

The ability to imagine your creation in a complete form makes it possible to work with knowledge of the matter, and not build work on assumptions. This knowledge is the reason why many professional creators are so self-confident.

5. Creativity is not a problem, problem solving is not creativity

Someone decides the same things all his life, someone acquires new ones. The main motivating force for them is the acuteness of the problem. As soon as the worst is smoothed out, the motivation to act weakens. Dealing with problems as a way of life is obviously a losing option, because it leads to the fading of activity, moreover, aimed at solving problems!

When you get your hands on a big and appetizing problem, you don't have to think anymore - you already have an obsession. What if you didn't have any problems? What would you think then? What did you do?

6. The stubbornness of artists makes this world a better place.

Fortunately for us, artists are stubborn people. The best-selling author was advised by her therapist to focus on a career as a secretary, but she continued to write (that's me). The famous director was removed from the documentary project, but he continued to make films (Martin Scorsese). The talented actress was expelled from the Boston University acting program (Oscar winner Geena Davis). The lawyer who "should" be wasting time on "cases" proved that he should have been writing too (John Grisham). These artists listened to their inner voice, and several external voices whispered - or shouted that they also knew who we really were. These people strengthened our confidence and changed our destinies.

7. There is a place for creativity always and everywhere

Text doesn't care where you create it. Important, that . You do it. The same is true for drawing. One artist lost a whole year because he "could not work without a workshop." When the workshop appeared and he returned to work, he created several rather large paintings, but many more - beautiful miniatures in charcoal and pencil, which he could even draw on a TV bedside table if he so desired. But he did not work - and not because there was no workshop, but because he simply did not work. There is a place for creativity in any life, no matter how eventful and full of people or, conversely, boring and empty it may be.

8. The art of small steps

If you are an aspiring musician and want to learn how to play the piano, then sit down at it and touch the keys. Great. Tomorrow you can sit down at the piano again and touch the keys. Five minutes a day is better than zero. Five minutes can turn into ten, just like a light hug can turn into something more passionate.

I can’t write a whole book today, but one page is enough. I won't be able to become an accomplished pianist right away, but I can set aside 15 minutes for music lessons. You may not be able to count on a solo exhibition in Soho today, but you are quite capable of drawing your Cocker Spaniel, imposingly nestled in an old leather chair, or sketching the hand of a loved one. You can start.

9. Magic in action

Goethe said: "Whenever you think or believe you can do something, get down to business, for there is magic, grace and power in action."

10. There is always an opportunity to do something positive.

The inconvenient truth is that there is always an opportunity to do something positive - yes, hell, always, even if we are not in the mood for it. Optimism in relation to yourself and your capabilities is already a conscious choice. We can make this choice, believe in the best, not the worst, but for this we need to hear the negative soundtrack sounding in our head and decide to change it.

11. Use constructive and practical thinking

Constructive thinking is the generation of raw ideas, without any evaluations and judgments. The strategy is that you need to come up with as many ideas as possible, both obvious and the most crazy, and criticism is inappropriate at this time. As you come up with more ideas, change your approach to include hands-on thinking. It is necessary to identify which of them have the greatest value. Edison once claimed to have come up with 3,000 different theories for electric lighting. Each of them looked reasonable, but he settled on the most practical and profitable. His first goal was to create as many opportunities as possible, and then he went into evaluation - identifying the most healthy and viable idea.

12. Thinking without judgment is dynamic and flexible

A creative person is able to think freely and flexibly. He allows for unlimited deployment of ideas, their organization into lines, a kind of hitchhiking of options, any combination of them for the invention of new ones, until he comes to the final breakthrough result, forcing to exclaim "Eureka!". Ideas replace each other, giving rise to additional ideas and their combinations, which multiplies the possibilities.

13. Test creativity with emotion

Measuring your success is very important. A great way to measure success is to determine how you want to feel. Take some time and jot down a list of emotions you want from your business. Perhaps it will be something similar to this one.

• Liberty
• Happiness
• completeness
• Cheerfulness
• Self confidence
• Security
• Creation
• completeness

Check your feelings against this list regularly. Does the business give you the feelings you want? For example, do you feel secure? If so, then you have succeeded in your determination. Congratulations! And if not, try to understand why. What can be done to change how you feel?

14. Headphones help muffle the noise of the outside world

Headphones, with or without music, create a kind of buffer around you. This is especially useful if you are a woman and are trying to work on a novel in a cafe. For a certain type of sociable people (meaning men), the sight of a lady with frowning eyebrows, typing something frantically on a laptop in a public place, evokes the only association: you need to come up and get to know each other. Headphones are a great way to keep these well-meaning but very annoying citizens at bay.

“I always write novels with headphones on. Sometimes I even remember that it would not be bad to connect them to something. Headphones help to muffle the noise of the surrounding world. And when they are connected to the player, they drive music at a terrible speed right into my brain, circling the forms of my thoughts with a clear outline and giving strength to the sentences that appear on the page.

15. You are your job

You change and your work becomes different. As you develop, so does your creativity. Your work lives and breathes because you live and breathe. As you live life to the fullest, you enhance the collective human experience. As William Blake wrote, "everything that lives, lives not alone, not for itself." There is no longer any difference between you and others, between what you give and what you receive. It's all the same, an ever-changing dance, a constant conversation in which no more can be said where one begins and the other ends.

16. Each artist - an artbook

Your artbook is your ticket to creative freedom. This is your "sandbox" where you can try out new artistic media and techniques, new colors and their effects, try your hand at different formats without limiting yourself. If you have inspiration, write poetry. Let thoughts find verbal expression as well as graphic expression.

Anton Orlov (Moscow)

If you continue to follow the review of installation kits on the forum site, then here's one more thing for you to think about ...

XMBForum

A very notable development is XMBForum, an eXtreme Message Board available from http://www.xmbforum.com.

Possibilities

The general scheme of XMBForum is the same as that of the forums described in previous issues of the magazine - categorization of forums, user registration, moderators and administrator, a search service and a private messaging system (here it is called & qoutU2U messenger "). There are very useful and in some ways unique services, for example, Buddy List - a window "who you know on the forum." By specifying the logins of any forum members in the Buddy List, you can track which of these members is currently working with the forum, and who has temporarily disconnected from it. There is also a "Bookmarks" system: in order to speed up access to individual topics of the forum, links to them can be placed on a special page, different for each user.

Registered users can "subscribe" to all new messages in a particular topic, ensuring that they follow the discussion by e-mail without having to visit the forum site, and the administrator has a means of mass mailing letters to users. Like in Invision Power Board, in XMBForum you can display the pages of the forum in the form "For printing" - without design, only with the text of messages.

In general terms, XMBForum is approximately equal in functionality to PHPBB, but differs somewhat from it in details. For example, in XMBForum, visitors cannot post as "Guests", that is, without registration, but with an arbitrary name: you must either register or send messages anonymously (the latter is prohibited by default, but can be allowed by the forum administrator).

But the set of services for registered users in XMBForum is somewhat richer than in PHPBB. There is no concept of “user groups” here, however, the administrator can create forums, access to which will be protected by a password or only for certain members.

The set of settings available to the administrator via the “Control panel” link that appears in the corner of the screen after logging in with an administrator login and password is also quite standard - interface colors and fonts (“Themes” section), prohibited words (“Censors” section), appointment of moderators (section "Moderators"), blocking access to the forum (section "IP Banning"), user ranks (section "User ranks") and something else. Please note that the administrator can specify his own appearance parameters for each forum, ranging from colors to allowing the use of HTML tags in messages.

An interesting feature is available to the XMBForum administrator: he can set up “page templates” through the forum interface (“Templates” section), that is, directly edit the HTML code of the forum pages. Therefore, it is quite easy to radically change the appearance of forum pages, add other links, images and texts to them, of course, if you know HTML and are able to distinguish a variable name from a tag.

Forum interface texts can be displayed in three languages ​​- English, Spanish and Italian. The forum language is chosen by the administrator by default, and each user can order the forum to communicate with him in the language of the available ones in which he wishes. The files themselves with the texts of the forum pages are stored in the lang folder of the main forum directory and are named LanguageName.lang.php.

Installation

Installing XMBForum requires a lot of manual steps. First you need to create a database for the forum - manually, through the hoster's web interface or using programs like MySQLFront. Then you need to upload the forum files to the hosting. However, the third step is not to launch the automatic installer, but to edit the config.php file from the forum distribution kit - it is in it that all database access settings are stored, and there is no interface for working with this file! Open config.php in a text editor, make the necessary changes according to the comments in the file and upload the modified file to the forum files folder on your site.

And only after editing the configuration file, you can open the installer with a browser - in XMBForum it is called newinstall.php. If you have correctly filled in config.php, then after selecting the Install link on the installer page, the forum database will contain the tables needed by its scripts to work, and the installation will be completed. Immediately after installation, be sure to delete the newinstall.php file from the forum files folder! If you do not do this, the forum will work, however, anyone who visits this page with a browser will be able to destroy absolutely all forum data. Unfortunately, the forum itself will not remind you of this, so do not forget to destroy the installer you no longer need.

Immediately after installation, go to the registration section and register. Hurry up - after all, the first registrant is automatically appointed as the administrator of the forum, and only he! If someone somehow sneaks ahead of you, then in order to deprive him of the status of the ruler of the forum, you will have to perform a complete reinstallation of the forum, removing the database and creating it again.

And then start setting up. When creating forums, be sure to open the full settings page by clicking the "More options" link, since it is on it that you can allow or forbid adding files to messages, as well as allow or forbid placing "anonymous messages" in the forum, without specifying a name and password. If you want other than registered members to be able to communicate in the forum, be sure to enable "Anonymous Posting".

Well, if you want to improve the forum, translate its interface into Russian. Make a copy of the file in the language most familiar to you from the lang folder, open it in a text editor and translate. Don't forget to name the file Russian.lang.php before uploading it back to the lang folder.

If you want, you can even just "run" this file through an automatic translator like "Socrates" or "Promt" and then edit it a bit. Unlike the language files of other forums, in XMBForum such a file will survive: variable names with interface text in XMBForum are not meaningful words.

Conclusion

Good forum. There is almost everything you need, and even more. Some services are generally unique. And if you spend a couple of hours and Russify the interface, then in general this forum will be almost the leader. However, some concepts of work are somewhat different from those accepted in PHPBB and others like it. In addition, for those who are not familiar with HTML and PHP, it will be difficult to make some settings. In addition, sometimes errors occur during the work of the forum, caused by insufficiently thorough debugging of its scripts, but, hopefully, the authors of the development will fix this soon.

clones

On the basis of XBMForum, some third-party developers have made their own forums. For example, this is Magic Lantern (http://www.aventure-media.co.uk). In addition to all the functions of XMBForum, it has very detailed services for statistics of the forum, displaying all messages of the last day on one page, and some others. In addition, Magic Lantern has more detailed documentation. However, the Magic Lantern color scheme can be very inconvenient for users with lower brightness monitors.

Installing and configuring Lantern is exactly the same as XMBForum, except that the installation file is called Install.html, and the file that needs to be deleted after installation is cinst.php. Do not forget to correctly fill in the config.php file in a text editor before running the installer - in Magic Lantern, the default value of the $cookiedomain (forum website URL) variable in this file is different from an empty string, and if you do not specify the correct data in this variable, then registration and the work of registered users will be impossible!

This is another interesting forum, popular in certain circles... Perhaps, among all such developments, you will like it.

Phorum, available from http://www.phorum.org, is an interesting and quite popular development. Communication services based on Phorum can be found on many resources of the Web, including the Runet. The popularity of Phorum is largely due to the originality of this development - it has features that are absent in almost all other similar packages.

Possibilities

• in Phorum, it is very easy to view messages not one after another, but in a “tree”, that is, display a list of titles and names of authors of messages in a topic on one page, and then study only the messages of interest from this list (with a large topic size, this method work can be very beneficial for those users who pay for Internet access based on the amount of downloaded information);
• there is also a "traditional" type of forum - with full texts of messages one after another on one page;
• it is possible to divide forums into “categories” (called “Folders” in Phorum) with a list of categories displayed on the first page of the forum;
• there is a system of registration and authorization of visitors;
• if desired, the administrator can restrict viewing or posting messages to the forum for unregistered participants, or, conversely, allow all visitors to write messages to the forum without any authorization, even for those who want to go through it (this mode is called "Public");
• for each forum, you can customize your own page colors and interface language;
• the administrator can appoint registered users as moderators of certain forums;
• forum moderators have the opportunity to set the pre-moderation mode - in this case, all new messages placed in the forum will first be sent to the moderator, and only after his approval will they be displayed on the forum pages;
• you can attach files to forum messages and topics (for each of the forums, this feature is configured separately);
• you can create add-ons-modules for Phorum - for example, Phorum comes with a module for automatically replacing words when posting messages on the forum.

Interestingly, there is no link to the admin section on the forum pages - to go to it, you need to go to the admin folder of the main forum directory (if the forum address is http://www.*****.ru/forum, then the admin section is located at address http://www.*****.ru/forum/admin). The section itself is quite extensive (although, of course, less than PHPBB or Invision Board) and allows you to create and delete forums, define access rights to them, customize interface colors or assign moderators.

Please note that when a post is deleted by a moderator, all replies to this post made by clicking the "Post Reply" link are also deleted.

Phorum's interface is English by default, but translating it into another language is not particularly difficult. Files with interface texts are stored in the lang folder of the main forum directory and are named LanguageName.php. If you decide to do translation, then make a copy of the blank.php file located there (this is a kind of template for translators) and translate its contents into the desired language, after which, giving this copy an appropriate name, place it in the lang folder. After that, when creating each new forum, you can specify a new interface language for it.

Please note that the interface language for each forum is specified separately on its settings page (by default it is the one specified in the "Global settings" section of the administrator section), so if you translate the interface after Phorum starts working, you will have to install for each of the forums in the "Manage Forums / Folders" - "Forum Name" - "Edit Properties" section, the new value of the Language File parameter (in this section, to go to the list of forums in a category, click the "Browse" link, not the category name) .

Installation

Phorum installation proceeds according to the standard scheme: manually create a database for the forum - upload forum files - go to the administrative section with a browser - enter the necessary database access parameters, the desired administrator login and password into the windows of the installed installer - configure the forum settings. After installation, the administrator section will be accessible only with a password, so there is no need to delete any files from the forum directory.

The docs folder of the main forum directory contains quite detailed instructions for working with the forum and setting it up - naturally, in English. Please note that when you create a new category, it is not displayed on the forum pages by default. This is done so that new categories can be created and filled with content while the forum is running, without closing it from visitors.

After creating a new category and filling it with forums, don't forget to click on the "Make Visible" link in the forums and categories management interface, accessible from the "Manage Forums/Folders" link in the admin section.

And one more important point. Some Phorum management tools are not presented in the admin interface, but are included in its delivery! So, in the includes folder of the main directory of the forum there are files, by modifying which you can set certain operation parameters for the forum. These files are the following:

auth.php, auth_db.php, auth_plain.php - scripts that allow you to deny access to certain parts of the forum to visitors who do not know a specific login or password (the contents of these files must be manually inserted into the corresponding pages of the forum);

bad_emails.php - a file with a list of e-mail addresses that are forbidden to be specified during registration;

bad_hosts.php - a file with a list of IP addresses from which it is forbidden to work with the forum;

bad_names.php - a file with a list of logins that are prohibited from using during registration;

censor.php - a file with a list of words that, when placed in messages, should be replaced with character combinations "@!#$"

footer.php and header.php - HTML code for the top and bottom of the forum pages.

Editing these files in a text editor is not particularly difficult.

The rest of the files in this folder contain the output code for the forum pages. They can also be modified, but first you have to carefully understand the logic of their program code, which can be difficult even for experienced programmers.

The forum is beyond competition for those who are impressed by the presentation of forum messages in the form of a "tree" with division into "branches", pre-moderation of forums or sending all new messages of the topic to e-mail. For the rest, this is just one of the forums with not so great opportunities.

To be continued

CREATIVITY IS A STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Creativity is a very paradoxical state of consciousness and being. It is action through non-action. It means to let something happen through you. It's not doing, it's allowing.

A poet is much closer to God than a theologian, a dancer is much closer. The philosopher is farthest away, because the more you think, the thicker the wall that separates you from the whole. The more you think, the more you. It is nothing but all the thoughts collected from the past. When you are not, God is. This is creativity.

Creativity simply means that you are in total relaxation. It does not mean inaction, it means relaxation – because from relaxation great action is born. But that will not be your business, you will be just a guide.

And a person who is not creative only dies, that's all. There is no depth in his life. His life is not yet life, but only a preface; the book of his life has not yet begun. He was born, it is true, but he is not yet alive.

You create a child - this is not creativity. You die, the child remains, life goes on. But it is not enough to continue if you do not start transcending yourself – and transcendence happens only when something from the beyond comes into contact with you.

The quintessence of wisdom is to act in harmony with nature. This is the message of all the great mystics: Lao Tzu, Buddha, Bahauddin, Sosan, Sanai, to act in harmony with nature. Animals act unconsciously in harmony with nature. Man has to act consciously in harmony with nature, because man has consciousness. Man may choose not to act in harmony with nature, hence his great responsibility.

A person has a responsibility. Only man has responsibility, and this is his glory. No other animal is responsible – it just works in harmony, it is impossible to get lost. An animal cannot get lost; it is still incapable of delusion. He has no consciousness yet. It works like you do in deep sleep.

In deep sleep, you also fall into harmony with nature. That is why deep sleep is so refreshing, relaxing. Only a few minutes of deep sleep, and you are again so fresh and young, and all the dust that has accumulated on you, all fatigue and boredom disappear. You have touched the source.

Until a person feels completely free, he will not express his unconscious.

Once you stop feeling responsible, you become natural. And psychiatry is a huge help; she relaxes you. Whatever you have suppressed floats to the surface and evaporates from the surface. After psychoanalysis, you become less burdened, more natural, more in harmony with nature and with yourself. This is the meaning of being healthy.

But this is a step backwards, a regression. It's down to the basement. There is another way to transcend, and that is climbing up to the attic. You can transcend yourself by remaining consciously in touch with nature.

And this is the essence of wisdom - to be in harmony with nature, with the natural rhythm of the universe. And when you are in harmony with the natural rhythm of the universe, you are a poet, you are an artist, you are a musician, you are a dancer.

Try it. Take the time to sit by the tree and consciously attune with it. Become one with nature; let the boundaries dissolve. Become a tree, become a grass, become a wind – and suddenly you will see something happening that has never happened before. Your eyes become psychedelic: the trees are greener than they've ever been before, the roses are rosier, and everything seems radiant...

This is the state of creativity. This can be called its main quality - to be in harmony with nature, to be in tune with life, with the universe.

You can call it "creative silence" - a process that combines two apparently opposite things: extreme activity and extreme relaxation.

From the book Ideas for a million, if you're lucky - for two author Bocharsky Konstantin

Torments of creativity "The Secret of the Firm" N8 (143), FEBRUARY 2006 company: "Likor" scope: sale of stationery problem: how to motivate account managers to think outside the box The company "Likor" has set itself the goal of increasing profits. It required employees