Where Does Creative Inspiration Come From?

My reasoned possibility for a theory of spirituality

In the days of Ancient Greece, it was said that all artistic sparks were sent by the Muses, a collection of goddesses that poets would attempt to summon in order to acquire just a touch of their inspiration. It is well accepted now that the ancient polytheistic gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Scandinavia, etc, were simply the creations of a young humanity attempting, through the means of story, to understand the natural phenomenon of the awesome and terrifying world we were making our home. With this interpretation we can too understand the Muses as attempts to explain magnificent natural phenomena, but they remain distinct from most of their peers in that their particular natural phenomenon has yet to be explained, still.

The same way the Greeks chose to believe in the Muses, many of us have our own beliefs about the origin of creative inspiration. For some, it is the Holy Spirit, for others “original” inspiration does not exist at all but instead every idea is merely a recycled iteration of something that came before. To the latter, I might ask, what then of the first story ever told? Surely, at one time between the unspeaking ape and The Odyssey, some individual, or perhaps a collection thereof, spoke aloud the world's first fiction, referring here not to any kind of useful deception, but something which was told for no other reason than for the sake of telling it. Where did that one come from? Where did its contents arise from if no other story had been told before? If your premise is that nothing in the human imagination is ever new, then I would be very interested in your argument as to how the whole telling of fiction got started in the first place.

Admittedly, I suppose, assuming the first stories were those told of the gods, we might be able to trace a line through all fiction back to those which were actively thought up as someone’s best effort to reason out how the sun travels across the sky. Still, can we be certain that’s always all there is to it?

For now, I am going to proceed with the assumption that some creative ideas might indeed be original and scribble on with my pondering on this essay’s title question: Where does the inspiration for those original ideas originate from?

One suggestion is that “it comes from God,” but that doesn’t really do it for me. I’ve always considered myself an atheist, even more staunchly so when I was younger and especially in regard to any specific named gods or monotheistic organized religion, the latter of which in particular has a frequent habit of rubbing me the wrong way. Over the years, however, I’ve encountered things that I have not been able to explain: a remarkably intuitive tarot reading, a medium with information seemingly impossible to acquire except from the dead, and – more pertinently to my purpose here – a remarkable experience with creative inspiration.

I am very accustomed to how it feels to invent a story through active thought. I do it all the time and enjoy it immensely. But my novel, The Legend of Leanna Page, didn’t originate that way. I almost have a difficult time claiming it as my own, that’s how little I feel like I invented it. How it happened still amazes me.

I was reading this epistolary novel from 1897 in which one of the characters briefly refers to an old story she recalls that her current environment reminded her of, and she describes it in five words. To quote it here would be a spoiler, so you’ll just have to trust me. I had no idea what the author was referring to, but it was an intriguing five words and it seemed to catch my subconscious’ attention. I didn’t dwell on it, I tried to keep reading, but within seconds I suddenly felt like I remembered something. This entire story had flooded my mind, complete with a wide cast of characters, a beginning, middle, and end, and an exciting fantastical setting. Years and drafts later, the legend as its being published now is very true to that initial spark. It was all so clear so quickly that, in that original moment, I had to stop reading to look up what the author was referring to in case I really had just remembered something from a high school literature class or something of the like. It was an easy enough puzzle to solve. He was referring to Walter Scott’s “Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field” which, to be clear, is nothing like The Legend of Leanna Page. It was then I realized the story was, in some way, mine, and that I needed to write it.

But where did The Legend of Leanna Page come from? Given that I hardly feel qualified to answer the question, I’ve literally punted the whole series of books onto a fictional author who can give it all some kind of backstory. It seems a worthy question to ponder.

The scientifically-minded atheist in me wants to say that it’s all just a matter of neurons firing in the brain, but given that we do have ways, albeit limited perhaps, of understanding what types of neurons have what effect in what parts of the brain and, to my knowledge, none yet account for the content of sudden inspiration, it seems just as unhelpful to point to the vague idea of brain chemistry as it does to point to the vague idea of a god. Especially since the idea that “it’s all brain chemistry” does not account for the other types of encounters with the unexplained, both those answers commit the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority, either science or a god, while disregarding any evidence that would complicate their assertion.

On the issue of spirituality at large, I have become decidedly agnostic. I think it is likely impossible for us to ever really know what, if anything, is out there. In fact, I would say the only way to be entirely certain that someone’s theory regarding the spiritual is false is if they offer it to you while claiming to be entirely certain that it is the truth. Still, that doesn’t mean we can’t try to figure it out.

On a recent dive into philosophy, I developed an enormous respect for the ancients’ devotion to Reason. I was amazed at what it allowed them to discover. Did you know, long before we had any way of knowing that matter was made up of atoms, Democritus figured it out by just thinking about it? It made me wonder if I could do something similar with spirituality.

I did ultimately come up with something. So, again, without any particular proof, I offer this as a possibility:

We know that there are things floating about in the air that we do not have the ability to directly perceive. There are gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, radio waves, plus whatever Wi-Fi is, some of which has the ability to hold information and carry it across the world. Now, I find it unlikely that there are any identifiable consciousnesses floating about, unperceived, and affecting our reality. Similarly, I don’t see the molten, volcanic age of Earth, prior even to oxygen or the primordial soup that became life, being guided by some cosmic intelligence. If that had been the case, it seems to me it all might have happened faster, as every religious creation myth suggests. Supposing then that whatever spiritual existence there may currently be has not always been, we then must wonder when – and how – it would have begun.

This is when I remember the notion of light waves.

Suppose there is another type of wave, similar to radio waves, which instead carry spiritual (for lack of a better word) energies across the globe. It seems plausible to me that the same way we emit pheromones, all life may also emit some kind of spiritual energy wave. I imagine as life evolved from bacteria to tree to fish to mammal, the world could have, and continues to, become remarkably saturated with the “spirits” of all this life whose “spirit-waves” don’t easily disappear once being released into the atmosphere. Perhaps then, like the many species of fish who can see ultraviolet light, the human brain is unique in that we are capable of directly receiving information delivered through this type of wave. Perhaps this is why we are the animal that tells stories.

Perhaps, when we stumble across an intriguing suggestion, there is some part of our subconscious which is capable of sending up a signal and summoning ideas from this vast wealth of narrative and poetic energy, sourced from plant, animal, and person, past, present, and possibly even future!, alike. Perhaps it is from this that we can suddenly be hit with creative inspiration. If we presume further that some individuals are more tuned-in to the spirit-waves than most, this could too explain the ability to speak with the dead, whose waves which were emitted during their life would still float among us, and the ability for some to read so intuitively into a stranger’s life.

One of the human experiences that seems to connect people all around the globe is some feeling of creative and spiritual awe. It connects us to nature, to our ancestors, and even to visions of the future. I’d very much like to know where that feeling arises from so we could harness it more effectively and accurately.

I don’t know that we’ll ever be certain of the truth, but until further evidence arises and alternate proposals can be explored, this feels to me like a satisfactory answer.