Lao Tzu's Creative Quietism And Rediscovering the Source of True Ideas

Modern civilization has developed a near religious devotion to sensed stimuli. We go out of our way to overdose on information consumption and neural stimulation.

The default of modern cognitive theory can be described as sense-thinking: the process of storing sensory experiences as electrical memories on the brain and recombining (reasoning) them to generate conclusions or ideas.

This process is actually quite inefficient and is fundamentally reproductive and similar to how AI ‘creates’ as it does not produce original ideas so much as reorganize existing ones.

The consequence is a culture that, despite unprecedented access to information, struggles to produce genuinely new Thought. We see this in the repetition of cultural forms—especially in art, music, architecture, and entertainment—that increasingly resemble variations on established templates rather than true creative endeavors.

In order to proceed, we must first define terms.

IDEA is a Mind-quality.

IDEA doees not germinate from the recombination of stored sensed memories. Idea unfolds from its seed during a state of expanded thought—DECENTRATION—a condition made possible only through deliberate stillness and a quieting of one’s thoughts into their vibrationless Source which Mind IS.

What is described above is actually half of the entire process of meditation. The Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu identified this principle that modern psychology is only beginning to understand: the Mind operates most creatively not through continuous activity, but through a rhythm of concentration and decentration—action and rest.

This cycle has two phases.

The concentrative phase is the one modern culture almost exclusively values and knowingly practices. It is the active, inward-directed phase of Mind-thinking in which thought potential is focused to a point for the purpose of giving an Idea a thought body.

The decentrative phase is its necessary complement, and it is the phase that modern life systematically suppresses by an overload of sensed stimulation because it is unaware of it. Rather than compressing thought to a point to form a mental body, the decentrative phase involves the expanding of focused thought and sensory stimulation out into expanded space for the PURPOSE of conceiving Idea.

Decentraion is Creative Quietness.

This is not passivity or cognitive emptiness. It is a specific receptive condition in which consciousness is no longer exclusively occupied with processing incoming sensory data.

Ideas, in this framework, do not exist as products of neural synthesis. Idea exists ETERNALLY, whether it is given material expression or not. They become accessible only when the mind creates the thought-conditions necessary to receive them.

God, the Creator’s ONE Idea is CREATION AS A WHOLE. During the process of Creative Quietness—decentration—one sets aside their body to become wholly Mind, to a greater or lesser extent. In so doing, we take a part of that ONE WHOLE IDEA. Having a part of God’s one whole idea we then reverse our thought potential from its expanded condition into the concentrative one to give our Idea a thought body—and then through action, a material body.

THE CREATED UNIVERSE is God's one whole Idea divided by His thinking into millions of unit ideas, each having a differently dimensioned body but all manifesting the One by being extensions of each other.

“Lao Tzu’s Creative Quietism is nothing but the fundamental sense commonly inherent in mankind…it has come to be called Mysticism…While most of us, as we use life, try to open the universe to ourselves, Lao Tzu opens himself to the universe.”

—The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu, by Witter Bynner

Creative geniuses, when in the condition of Creative Quietism, have been called “absent-minded.” Absent-bodied or wholly-Mind would be more correct terms.

Composers, inventors, writers, and possibly you, have had the experience of ideas or knowledge arriving whole and in a timeless flash, received in a moment of sudden clarity. The common factor in these accounts is not intense concentration but its opposite: a prior state of relaxed, unfocused awareness tempered by desire for an Idea or to Know. The idea or knowledge, as people report, just suddenly came to them.

"Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration."

—Nikola Tesla

Materialist frameworks struggle to account for this natural phenomenon because they assume that Consciousness is produced entirely as a byproduct of neural activity. By their very definition of Consciousness it must follow that ideas are products of prior sensory inputs.

But if original thought were truly reducible to the recombination of stored impressions, genuinely novel ideas would be impossible.

Lao Tzu’s concept of Wu Wei, is often translated as non-action or effortless action and echoes this same principle. The Tao Te Ching repeatedly invokes stillness, emptiness, and rest as practical conditions for effective action and genuine insight.

The great thinkers throughout history—whether they understood it in the terms presented here or not—appear to have understood intuitively that creation requires two swings of the pendulum, rest and action. Rest is for conceiving and renewing, action is for manifesting our conceptions.

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Modern culture’s lack of awareness of the decentrative half of the thought-cycle has produced recognizable symptoms.

Hollywood has recently fallen victim to this and generates staggering volumes of content while producing relatively little that feels genuinely new.

It would rather remake existing works rather than risk creating new ones. This is not a failure of talent so much as it is a consequence of operating without the decentrative half of the creative cycle while simultaneously being pumped full of meaningless information around the clock.

Information consumption has become the dominant leisure activity of modern life. The individual who never stops consuming never ends up creating. We are all either inputting or outputting at any given time.

Modern systems—including AI—are extraordinarily capable of performing the concentrative, combinatorial work of sense-thinking. What they cannot do is conceive in the deeper sense which Lao Tzu eluded to, because conception in this framework requires the kind of Conscious receptivity that only emerges from a Mind-at-rest.

If human creativity is reducible to sense-thinking, then human cognitive labor is replaceable by sufficiently powerful algorithms or AI. But if the Cause of genuine creativity and Idea is of the MIND then what makes human thought irreplaceable is the capacity for all of us to touch our own divinity.

Michael R. Post, Creator of Beyond the Cosmic Veil

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