Creativity, Discovery and Making Associations

“Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science.” Thomas Kuhn

This is SDSSJ0737+3216, the smallest galaxy ever identified to date. For me after many years of simple googling, in less than 2 months, I have leapt into the 21st century, starting two blogs, entered the Google empire though Blogger, Google Pages, and now Google Reader. I have learned to customize this blog template, added a background image, header picture, animated gifs, label cloud, stat counter, audio and video links etc. (Watch this blogspace)

Thursday I discovered Makoto Fujimura's blog and found Kuhn's quotation in the greater context of an important association between science and art, creativity. Dean Keith Simonton states that “[h]ighly creative individuals are said to have a flat hierarchy of associations in comparison to the steep hierarchy of associations of those with low creativity.” It doesn't matter whether artist or scientist, the creative impulse is the ability to level the playing surface and see things together and make discoveries or connections. In spirituality it is to see the divine activity within the mundane of life. The astronomer Hans Kepler spoke of "thinking God's thoughts after him". Isaac Newton hoped that his famous Principia would "persuade thinking men to believe in a deity". Charles Darwin opened his Origin of Species with a quote from Francis Bacon, "Let no man ... think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God's word, or in the book of God's works."

Creativity, discovery and making associations can all be about finding God. This surprisingly, or maybe not, is part of the gifts of a spiritual director or companion. The ability to see or discover patterns or make associations and this is intrinsically part of spiritual growth. Discernment is recognizing the hand of God. This blog has truly become a place of semi-formed or yet to be formed or discovered or created ideas and associations.