And by “poet” I mean the painter, the sculptor. All that is creative in man is becoming reduced to producing more and more commodities. The creative is losing its grip and the productive is becoming the goal of life.
The divine can be approached only through the creative. Why? – because it is the creator. If you want to know the divine you will have to have something similar, because only the same can meet the same. You will have to learn a little rhythm of creativity. When the musician is really in a creative mood, in a creative space, he disappears; existence starts playing on his flute. Suddenly his flute is no longer in his own hands, it is in Krishna’s hands. And then the flute brings something from the beyond, something virgin, something utterly new. When the painter disappears then his hands are just instruments for existence.
God is the creativity, so if you really want to enter into the world of God you will have to learn the ways of creativity – and that has disappeared. Instead of creativity we value productivity: we talk about how to produce more. Production can give you things, but cannot give you values. Production can make you rich outwardly, but it will impoverish you inwardly. Production is not creation. Production is very mediocre; any stupid person can do it, one simply needs to learn the knack of it.
Creativity is intelligence. The deeper you go in creativity the more meditative you become.
And the poet has died, the poet exists no more. And what exists in the name of poetry is almost prose. What exists in the name of painting is more or less insane. You can see Picasso, Dali and others – it is pathological! Picasso is a genius, but ill, pathological. His painting is nothing but a catharsis; it helps him, it is a kind of vomiting. When you have something wrong with your stomach the vomiting relieves you. It helped Picasso; if he had been prevented from painting he would have gone mad. Painting was good for him, it saved him from becoming insane, it released his insanity onto the canvas. But what about others who will be purchasing those paintings, hanging them in their bedrooms and looking at them? They will start becoming ill at ease.
It is a totally different creativity I am talking about. A Taj Mahal…just watching it on a fullmoon night, and great meditation is bound to arise in you. Or the temples of Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri – just meditating on them and you will be surprised that all your sexuality is transformed into love. They are miracles of creativity. They were not created by pathological people, they were created by those who had attained.