Creativity: I-Power, a creative-thinking process developed by Marty Edelston (links above), works. Marty's Boardroom, Inc. is one of the most productive companies in the USA.

I-Power asks a person to reflect on making things better. Each employee is asked to reflect on the immediate past - "How can you make it better for me? How can I make it better for you? And, how could our working unit (whatever the group is) do it better?"

He asks for honesty, openness, and integrity as well as a certain grittiness and toughness to give and receive one's perceived truth.

Marty Edelston has deep-seated intuitions about the power of the intellect to discern higher, better, and more integrative paths. I-Power is based on it. It is one of many possible paths to creative thinking.

The effect is actually quite overwhelming. It is like a religious experience to open paths to continuous improvement and new insights.

Good business thrives on it. Continuous improvement is the very nature of business.¹

Creativity and business: Over the years, the practice of business in the USA has been like the practice of government. Most businesses separate themselves from any religious affirmation; however, good businesses expect people to be ethical, fair, and honest. Though the doors of business are wisely openned to people of all faiths and even people with no faith, the most basic tenets of faith are affirmed.

Yet, the very nature of business requires a certain level of creativity if the business is to remain robust, fresh and relevant. Creativity requires one to look within the basics of business. We go inside and examine the order, relations and dynamics of the people, the places and the things - conditions - or - events.

Perfected Moments: The process of thinking about thinking requires a certain detachment. Often people close their eyes and "go within" their minds. Perhaps the best label of such a process is "interiority." The challenge is to gain insights that lead to improvement, then to wisdom, and then, at its best, to moments of perfection.

Historically, discussions of perfected states have been the domain of theologians and religionists.

Opacity: Theologians, psychologists, and philosophers are supposed to know a lot about interiority. Strange as it may seem, most do not know much about process of creativity and interiority. Be it prayer, the mind, sleep or constants and universals, virtually every one from every faith statement falls short in showing us a path to our interior self and our creative essence.

This opacity is confusing the world.

Physicists, chemists, biologists and other kinds of scientists (and mathematicians) focus on the conditions of interior space; and, we all could learn a lot from them. But, these people do not focus on the ideals, the intuition about a many-sided perfection even deeper within interior space – they focus on what can be seen, observed, measured or hypothesized, based upon the mathematics of the known order, relations and dynamics.

Religion has little to say to scientisits or business about the essence of their work. Yet, the power of any religion is when one's faith actually informs and gives deeper meaning to life, especially to the deep interior space that informs a deeper perfection. Surprisingly, most religions do it very poorly; and fanatical or fundamentalist religions (where an arrogant, self-righteousness dominates and there is no openness to understand others approaches to the same universals) do it most poorly and even sometimes quite dangerously.

Fundamentals versus fundamentalism: Those who live with guns and bombs perhaps understand creativity and interiority the least.

The first principle of life and interiority is continuity and order (this being the most basic nature of a Creator-Sustainer).

People who create chaos and destroy life have no real connectness to science and they place the universals of their faith within very truncated, implosive boxes. This applies to all faiths; yet today, it especially applies to those who proclaim Allah, their Prophet Mohammed, their Hadith and the Qur'an on one hand then kill in Allah's name with the other.

They are among the worst of theologians and religionists. Ironically they actually understand virtually nothing about the depth of universals that are necessarily the expression and extension of the God they worship.

Why single these people out?

When Marty says that we live in an increasingly hostile world, these people stand out among all others within our global village for their willy-nilly and calculated violence and their total disregard for any human life that does not affirm their "theology¹."

Yet, they stand with another crowd of people whom they probably hate more vehemently than all others.

Terrorists and the solipsistic religious elitists stand with the most arrogant among the Hollywood-types – television, film and video producers – who lift up exploitation as an artform and subtely and not-so-subtlely pull down entire cultures. When their onerous productions are imbibed, people see that exteriority, the superficial, and all flavors of evil and debauchery to be "just part of life." These producers placate evil; they encourage the morally deficient. They confuse the marginal and they weaken the strong.

Producers that focus on the underbelly of life stand side-by-side with the terrorists. One is obvious in their disregard for life while the others can, at times, be beguilingly subtle and seductive.

Creativity is the heart of the living. There have been many scientific writings to attempt to answer the question, "What is life?" Of course, that question is the center of most theological and philosophical inquiries.

Perhaps the best answer to the question is also the most simple. Life is creativity. It is not self-sustaining; it is self-renewing.

There is a deep source for the continuity of life and the best way for us to know about it is not just inspired writings of people filled with religious experiences; that has to be tempered with the constants and universals that exist within science and mathematics that suggest and point to a higher order or a deeper, more integrative understanding about life.

We all fall short of a perfect understanding of ourself, our business, and our world; but surely, if one were to analyze the constants and universals and generalize upon the most embracing description consistent across religion, science and philosophy, we would all embrace that which gives rise to order-continuity, relations-symmetry, and dynamics-harmony.

In that light, if we were to look at where the terrorists and those exploitive producers stand, they are the inverse. They create chaos. There is no balance, no symmetry. And, there is no harmony. And that describes the path to the extremes of evil. Perhaps the best summary description would be, "They reverse live; they are evil."

Creativity, seeking even just a fleeting moment of perfection that opens to new insight, is our access to know ourself, to renew our life, and to know our God.

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COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS.  I invite your comments and questions.