1. How do you define “spirituality”?

My definition about “spirituality” is related to the deep mind of each person’s inner world and can only be expressed by one’s own ideas. The spirituality one can feel may be invisible to others, since it is a special individual term. In addition, spirituality is the origin of one’s personal values and it makes us believe in something, just like the origin of religion. Spirituality means something different to others. For some people, it refers to attend some organized religion and get connection with church. For other people, it is more personal and related to individual activity, such as yoga, long walk or talk with someone in order to get spiritual contact.

       2.   Does spirituality differ from religion?

I think the difference between spirituality and religion is that, spirituality is more personal and religion is much like a public event or believe.  Religion is always about loyalty to institution or rules, which should be a common believe among diverse people with different cultural backgrounds. While.spirituality is about loyalty to justice or compassion. For instance, religion is about god and spirituality makes us believe in god, which means make us godly. I think religion at its best should be the community of spirituality, which means the public and common religion is composed of individual spirituality.

        3.How do you define “creativity”?

Creativity is a process to recognize or generate ideas that maybe useful in solving problems or communicating with others.  Creativity is transient in nature and is constantly evolving. I think creativity is a mix of ideas of one’s own experience and based on the motivation from previous activities. There are some reasons that people are motivated to be creative: Creativity is need for novel situation, solving problems and well connected with each others. In order to be creative, we should view things in a new way or from a different perspectives.  It is just like a novel product of personal values, experience and knowledge. I think everyone has the capability to become creative, because we all have different background and the unique background will become the source of the motivation of creativity.

        4. What is the source of creativity?

I think the source of creativity can be from intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. For the intrinsic motivation, I think personal experience plays a major role, which included what we have thought about, met with, saw and observed. We can observe novel ideas by appreciating it from the life experience given us. For the extrinsic motivation, it comes from the external world that we live in and the influence from the people or environment surround us. For instance, the religion belief around us may have a deep influence on our mind. The surrounding traditional belief may become the motivation of our creativity and make us create novel thoughts about our surroundings, which can be called the process of creativity.

After reading the article “Art as Spiritual Practice-The Mission of Art” by the author Grey, I got much more insights into the real meaning of art and its relationship to spiritual practice. The author first describes the difference between seeing and looking, and regard it as “a difference which is fundamental to artist experience” (Grey, 72). Then, he used Saint Thomas Aquinas’s 3 things needed for beauty to further explained the different art experience, through wholeness, harmony and radiance” (Grey,73). Later, the author introduced the a brief process of creative formulation, and states that artists need to be sensitive about their creative process. After introducing the process of creativity, the author brought up novel ideas that “Art can be interpreted from the standpoint of its cultural legitimacy or success.”(Grey, 92). In this relation, the author connects the process of creating art to spiritual practice, in which that the quality of an art project is based on the awareness and being that the artist is being accessed or transmitted. According to Grey,  “In order to experience art fully viewers must go through a mini ego death by placing themselves in the inspired mind of the artists” (74). I kind of disagree with this viewpoint, and I do not think that we should put ourselves in the position like an artists to understand the artwork. We should not limit our innovation in the shoes of the artist and this must restrict the diversity of the meaning of the art. We should conduct out own understanding based on our own experience or personal values, and creative spiritual practice through the way just like the author indicates in his article, from formulation, saturation, incubation, inspiration, translation to integration (Grey, 75). We should not require that the audiences to have an “inspired mind as artist” and we should create our own understanding model of art.