by Art McNeil

Performing activities at home, at work or in the community; without the active use of your imagination, relegates you to engaging life as a human doing, rather than a human being. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud assumed the primary human drive to be the pleasure experience. Pleasure is a chemical process brought on by endorphins released when the body sheds tension. For example, food eases the hunger tension, creating a pleasurable sensation that hopefully, will encourage you to eat again. The tension/pleasure process is nature’s way of promoting essential functions that preserve us as individuals and as a species.

A Nazi concentration camp survivor named Victor Frankel, observed people facing life and death situations over an extended period of time. His conclusions came from noticing the difference between people who died and those who found the courage to hang on. Frankel identified meaning not pleasure-seeking as the key to a healthy human existence. A dysfunctional person by contrast, has no purpose. They drift through life as creatures of habit, mindlessly filling then voiding mind and body; hoping to capture a modicum of pleasure. Others become addicted to adrenaline rushes and seek instant gratification in activities such as competitive sports, mountain climbing, or bungy jumping. They too are trapped as “humans doing”. The only difference between them and their mundane counterpart is their need for ever-increasing quantities, speed, power, and variety in order to sustain the pleasure experience. Unfortunately for them, yesterday’s rush is never enough.

Creativity comes from somewhere between the imagination and production: A small boy who regularly visited the studio of Michelangelo, asked the great artist how he knew that his classic statue “David” was buried in the original block of marble. What started as a vision was actually created by the arduous task of removing every piece of stone that didn’t look like the creator’s mental picture. When human’s are in the being mode, they inhabit a creative space that exists somewhere between the imagination at one end and their capacity to transform thought into productive activity at the other end.

People will experience spiritual numbing from a “human doing” condition, if they take up permanent residence at either end of the creativity continuum. For example, at the visionary extreme, they become chronic dreamers who can see the possibilities but are incapable of getting anything done. At the other end, people are relegated to the treadmill of uninspired production. Balancing one’s self between imagination and production is the essence of successful living. Humans become beings (i.e. life has meaning) when they are creating/contributing from a sense of purpose.

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