I associate creativity with movement, activity, maybe even courage. There seems to be no creativity in inactivity, although it is possible that all planetary existence began directly from a spark of creativity in the void of inactivity. But is creativity – this special ability of the mind to imagine – accessible to everyone?

There is one particular feature of perception and thinking that seems to me an absolutely inevitable prerequisite for creativity — this is the ability to imagine — imagination. A creative mind might be one that is immersed in the unique ability of thinking to imagine. This means not only stating the obvious things, i.e., that a chair is a chair and a cloud is a cloud, but being able to think, imagining a chair in terms of a chair as a fat spider or a cloud as a floating duck with whipped cream in a sky pool. Imagination is an imperative prerequisite of creative thinking, when a new movie, brilliant ideas and decisions related to life, things and the world are shown on the cinema screen of consciousness in our mind. Those that are able to pull us out of ingrained habits and prejudices, lazy thinking, automatism and boredom. So, creativity is an imaginative way of thinking (brainwork, dreaming), capable of evoking a new idea in the head and creating material otherness, but in turn pushing us out of the usual guide of rationality and logic in our minds — the standardised perception formulas, as well as standardised cultural codes and the dictatorship of the vigilant eye of society, judging everyone and everything.

Here, doubts may arise as to whether the special ability of this mind to imagine is available to everyone, stimulating and ensuring the presence of creative ideas and processes in our lives. And can each person can be creative? Even the most persistent rationally pragmatic and cynically-minded empiricist who believes only in what is, what he sees and has a scientific explanation? And how to access subjective creativity in the depths and expanses of our minds that no one has ever looked into before, as these are the depths and expanses of creativity of each individual personality? If I turn to philosophy, the threads of thought will lead me to the ideas of the British philosopher Roger Scruton. He sees the mind’s ability to imagine, which is related to creativity, manifesting in a special way of perceiving, imagining and thinking: “It is an exercise of creative imagination to see a face in a picture (when it is not there); it is not in the same sense an imaginative act to see a face in something that one also judges to be a face.” Scruton distinguishes our ordinary imagination, when we can perceive and judge an object with a back and four legs as a chair (seeing is believing), from the extraordinary imagination, a special form of imagination characteristic of creative thinking. It “involves reflection on the imaginary object as if it were not existing”, that is, for example, on the ability to arrange a bouquet of flowers for a family festive table, imagining it in your mind as a sunrise with the trill of birdsong or a gust of rain during a storm. Accordingly, it is manifested by the structure and flickering of morning sunlight in the arrangement of plants, the mirroring of the streams of birdsong in a harmonious composition of plants/objects, or the mood of a threatening storm in the colour scheme and chaotic grouping of plants; the contrasting irregularity of various forms.

It opens and activates creativity in ideas and action. So, returning to Scruton, we can distinguish direct (literal) perception from imaginative (creative) perception, and he describes the first one as literally looking at the world as it is (as it appears to direct vision), and the second one as seeing the world free in the form of imagination, “thinking of x as y”. Conclusion — the desire to know, the true wonder of everything that exists and the interest to understand visible and invisible things, as well as the burning desire to experiment, is an implicit set of the inner human nature that forces us to activate the rich abilities of creative thinking to imagine something that does not exist or that we have not understood, noticed, seen until now. Then our thinking rises to another level, to transcendental heights, beyond the ordinary, acquiring a new ability to operate with supernatural power.