In the reading “The Mission of Art” by Alex Grey he discussed the artistic process that he uses to create his pieces. He talked about how he had a hard time making a piece that expressed his spirituality. He wanted to be able to demonstration the energy that he feels when having a spiritual moment. What I found most interesting about his experience is that his idea for this piece came to him in a dream. It was astonishing that his dream was so powerful that he was able to remember it vividly enough to create a work of art out of it. Dreaming is such a crazy and somewhat unknown experience, so I like that he was able to create art from it. I always have a hard time remembering my dreams, so I am impressed that he was able to remember well enough to create something from it. Dreaming definitely has a spiritual aspect to it because our minds take us to a place that we normally do not go in our daily life. We are able to think about and experience things that we don’t even truly understand. Spirituality has to do with coming to terms with the unknown and embracing that we do not always have answers to things. While dreaming the experiences that one has are almost completely out of their control.

1. When I hear the word spirituality my mind automatically thinks about being relaxed. When I think of a spiritual person, I imagine someone who is very mellow and down to earth. Spirituality has to do with being in tune with the world that we live in and accepting the unknown as a part of it. Many spiritual people believe that this life is not the only one we will live in. Spirituality is about believing in something that one has never actually experienced.

2. Spirituality and religion have both similarities and differences. They are the same in that they both require believing in something that is unknown. However, I believe that religion has more structure to the unknown, and that a religious person may not agree with me calling it unknown. Many religions follow a bible, which has set aspects of the specific religion in it and set rules about what to do and what not to do. This would mean that a religious person believes they know about what I believe to be the unknown of religion. They have an expectation for what I believe to be unknown because of those who have come before them in their religion. Religions come with all kinds of stories and tales that people live by.

3. Creativity is about thinking for oneself and coming up with new and interesting ideas. In order to be creative, a person needs to be able to generate new and different ideas from things that they have experienced in their life. Creativity does not require a completely original idea, it could be something that one comes up with based off of something they have seen before. However, something that is a completely original idea is far more creative to me.

4. The main source of creativity is ones brain. Our brain is where we generate all of our ideas, meaning that it is the place where we are able to come up with creative ideas. Another source of creativity is things that we experience throughout our life. Most people come up with things based off of other things that they have experienced. Another source of creativity is two people working together. The power of two brains can work to bounce ideas off of one another in order to come up with creative ideas that may not have been produced with only one person.