How to become inspired

Inspiration does not come out of the blue. Everybody can become inspired, but you have to work for it. The essence is: fill your brain. Once your brain has been filled with the right stuff, ideas will get flushed out. This is the main lesson from Dijksterhuis’s book Inspiration and this is how creativity works. But all this is yet very abstract, although in my past blogs I have written already a little bit about the practice of inspiration. In order to get a better idea of how inspiration works, let me now follow the process step by step. Again this blog is based on Dijksterhuis’s book, but I don’t literally follow it. Below is how I see it after having read the book.
Ideally, we can discern six steps in the process of inspiration. Once, Gandhi was travelling somewhere in South Africa, but was thrown out of the train because he travelled first-class and non-whites were not allowed to do so, even when they had a first-class ticket (as Gandhi had). This inspired Gandhi to fight for the rights of the Indian people in South Africa. Fighting against repression became his leading theme of life, his evocation. However, how often doesn’t it happen that people think that they feel a calling, an evocation, to do something, to become someone, like a philosophical blogger, or someone who fights against repression, but then they see so many obstacles, or their plans are so vague that they don’t know how to realize their calling. Or after some time the evocation simply fades away. The process that started with your evocation can only go on when your motivation is big enough to try to overcome the obstacles, to avoid that your evocation fades away, etc.. In other words, you must be so motivated that you really begin to work on your plan. Such a motivation can be intrinsic or extrinsic. In Gandhi’s case it was both. He was simply outraged about his treatment in the train (intrinsic motivation) and if he didn’t want to accept the injustice done to him, he would have to change the law (extrinsic motivation).
If we have come that far, so if we have a theme of action and a motivation to act on it, the actual inspiration process starts. We can work on it hap snap, but then probably we’ll not come very far. In order to reach your goal, you must concentrate on it. For Gandhi this meant that he had to study the South African laws and the problems of the Indian population in SA caused by those laws; he had to win the support of the Indians in SA; and so on. However, such a concentration on the problem and on the world it belongs to can only be effective, if you are open to the opportunities that the world offers you. Look with an open eye at the world and let yourself being stimulated by the world you are in. By doing so, Gandhi developed his methods of nonviolent action. But often, ideas do not develop immediately after you have studied a problem, have listed your action possibilities, etc. Often it doesn’t immediately pop up in your mind what to do. You need some time to process the information you got. It needs some incubation period in your mind. This is not an activity you can do, for it is an unconscious process in your unconscious mind. I don’t know how Gandhi did it, but in India he lived some time in an ashram, a place of retreat. Moreover, Gandhi spent a lot of time spinning yarn, which is just the type of quiet activity that stimulates your unconscious mind. And when you do all this, then sooner or later, you’ll get ideas what to do, with a sense of eureka or in a flow.
And the sixth step? In fact, it’s not a step. It’s the grease that makes the steps seamlessly go into one another: transpiration. Or simply: work hard.