Time and the Creative Tension

Abstract

This chapter deals with creative emergence—a maturity beyond the larval (temporal) stage. The process of getting out of the temporalizing habit, that is, manufacturing a world through temporal synthesis, is a process of dis-adjustment and aversion, which is the first, but by no means an easy, step. We begin by questioning and de-valorizing clock time. This does not mean that we stop living by clock time—that is absurd and obviously impossible. It means that we become critical of it through a process of careful observation in which the immediate data of our consciousness begins to surface. It is the immediate data of consciousness that learns to resist chronic time and not some mental decision to do so. But what is immediate data of consciousness? Behind the uniformity of social chatter and cultural pulls and pushes that organize the mental plane, there is a continual upsurge of pre-representational flow that has no name or image. Once past convention and entrenched habit we become intuitively attuned to this flow. Our task is to learn to pay attention to this flow unmanaged and unmediated by the concept. This is the creative tension in teacher practice.