Where Does Creativity Come From?

Carl Jung, channeling from the ether, and some destructive squirrels.

Sep 26, 2025

Ideas come easily to me. About anything, really. An idea for a film, a topic to write about, a concept for a biotech company, a way to stop the squirrels from eating my parents’ front porch, etc.

A long time ago, a friend asked me where I get my ideas. I thought it was a crazy question. How are you supposed to know where creativity comes from? It’s like asking what happened before the Big Bang.

But over the years, I’ve thought and read a lot about it and now I do have an idea about the origin of ideas.

Truly transcendent ideas, the ones that are so great they sound like someone must have thought of them already, seem to come from somewhere outside of oneself. Universal consciousness, the ether — this place where all ideas already exist in some form, waiting for the right person to bring them through.

The way to access this place is by removing distractions, quieting the part of the mind that censors its output, and listening. When you’re doing it right it feels effortless, like you’re opening up a channel and allowing the work to flow through you.

Or as Rick Rubin put it, “We are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting.”1

It’s about getting in touch with something that’s both within you and beyond you. The artist is mediating the information – translating a universal truth into a personal work of art.

Milky Way Galaxy wallpaper — Where the ideas live. Photo by Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash

Carl Jung compared the creative process to “a living thing implanted in the human psyche.”2

He thought there were two types of people who approached their creativity in different ways — the Introverted Creator and the Extroverted Creator.

The Introverted Creator sees their own creativity as something internal that can be uncovered, controlled, or crafted:

There are literary works that spring wholly from the author’s intention to produce a particular result. He submits his material to a definite treatment with a definite aim in view; he adds to it and subtracts from it, emphasizing one effect, toning down another, laying on a touch of color here, another there, all the time carefully considering the overall result and paying strict attention to the laws of form and style. He exercises the keenest judgment and chooses his words with complete freedom. His material is entirely subordinated to his artistic purpose, he wants to express this and nothing else. He is wholly at one with the creative process, no matter whether he has deliberately made himself its spearhead, as it were, or whether it has made him its instrument so completely that his intentions and his faculties are indistinguishable from the act of creation itself.3

Conversely, the Extroverted Creator sees the creative act as something external, akin to possession:

[H]is hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement. The work brings with it its own form; anything he wants to add is rejected, and what he himself would like to reject is thrust back at him. While his conscious mind stands amazed and empty before this phenomenon, he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being. Yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that it is his own self speaking, his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things which he would never have entrusted to his tongue. He can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command. Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or stands outside it, as though he were a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will.4

I personally view these types as two modes that people can move back and forth between, depending on the type of work they’re creating and which stage of the creative process they’re in. The best work emerges when the initial stages function like Jung’s Extroverted Creator and the later stages as the Introverted Creator.

Recent research into the neuroscience of creativity shows that Jung was on to something — different areas of the brain are involved in different aspects of creativity. From the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology:

Creativity looks different from person to person. And even within one brain, there are different routes to a creative spark, [experimental psychologist Dr. John] Kounios explained. One involves what cognitive scientists call “System 1” (also called “Type 1”) processes: quick, unconscious thoughts—aha moments—that burst into consciousness. A second route involves “System 2” processes: thinking that is slow, deliberate, and conscious. “Creativity can use one or the other or a combination of the two,” he said. “You might use Type 1 thinking to generate ideas and Type 2 to critique and refine them.”

In other words, when you begin a project, open the channel and allow the ideas to flow through without judgement. Then, as the work progresses, you can begin to mold and shape it.

I’ve actually started putting together some classes and workshops withjen harrington that merge writing/screenwriting with our ideas on creativity and the creative process. I have one on combating writer’s block that incorporates meditation, journal prompts, and Jungian-inspired dreamwork.

We’ll be adding more in the near future. You can check out our site here if you’re so inclined.

“Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own.”

— Oliver Sacks

Well, I guess I’ll wrap this all up with my idea for those xylophiliac squirrels: