Inner Truth: The Creative Spirit

The times when I have most intensely felt and experienced the inner reality of creation have been those times when I have thrown myself wholeheartedly into a task, when I have carried through with that task to the very end. At such times, I can almost hear the joyous yell of victory issuing from the depths of my being. 

This sense of fulfillment and joy is the crystallisation of all the effort—each drop of sweat, each tear—expended to reach that moment. Life’s inherent creativity, its dynamic vitality, is brought to the surface only through the strenuous exertions of a life of consistent action. 

Such a way of life will meet with storms and heavy rains, times of seeming defeat. But the creative essence of life is never crushed or vanquished by such things. It is sustained by knowledge of the brilliant rainbow whose bright arch will eventually stretch across the inner expanse of your being. 

Indulgence and indolence produce nothing creative. Complaints and evasions reflect a cowardly spirit; they corrupt and undermine life’s natural creative thrust. When life is denuded of the will to struggle creatively, it sinks into a state of hellish destructiveness directed at all that lives. 

Never for an instant forget the effort to renew your life, to build yourself anew. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway of life itself. This is not an easy task. Indeed, it may be the most severely challenging struggle there is. For opening the door to your own life is in the end more difficult than opening the door to all the mysteries of the universe. 

But to do so is to vindicate your existence as human beings. It is the mode of existence that makes us worthy of the gift of life. 

There is no way of life more desolate or more pitiful than one of ignorance of the fundamental joy that issues from the struggle to generate and regenerate one’s own life from within. To be human is much more than standing erect and exercising reason and intelligence. The full and genuine meaning of our humanity is found in tapping the creative fonts of life itself. 

Daisaku Ikeda is president of the Soka Gakkai International Buddhist association, a peace-builder and a prolific writer.