During the recent Peace Summit in Vancouver, which was organized around His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I was fortunate to moderate a dialogue on creativity.

Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel price laureate of physics who discovered the quarks, described how mathematician or physicists made try in vain for a long time to formulate and solve a particular problem. At some point they would give up and let go of all discursive thinking. One many occasions, the solution would then suddenly arise in their mind from a non-conceptual state in a very creative and unexpected way. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré tells in his memoirs of a famous example of this. After haveing pondered for months upon a mathematical question, one day as he was on a geological expedition, when coming down the steps of a bus, the solution to the problem sprung in his mind in a flash of evidence.

He recounted how, one day, during a football game, a player suddenly picked up the ball with his hands and started running with it. Rugby was born. So, he added, creativity often comes not from playing according to the rules but from playing with the rules.

The spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle then told us that he had not seen a soccer game in 20 years, but had heard that research had shown that when shooting penalty kicks, under the eyes of a whole nation, players who will shoot immediately after the referee had blown the whistle, were less successful than those who would pose for a moment, collect their thoughts, then shooting without hesitation. “What happens in that moment of waiting is the player goes within,” Tolle told, “It’s a rudimentary expression of the creative process. It’s deep, intensely alive stillness.”

But then Tolle added that if he, lacking 10,000 hours of training in maths or football, would wait for the solution of a mathematical problem, no solution would ever arise in his mind and that he would surely miss the penalty
kick. So effortless, non-conceptual creativity certainly required a deep, long term process of maturation and training.

With some nice conversational interplay on the nature of creative change, famed British educator Sir Ken Robinson wryly responded that he “was trying to shake off this image of Eckhart Tolle on a soccer pitch, taking 10,000 hours to take his penalty kick. “And he still misses.”
It brought the house down in laughter.

Recently the Dalai Lama Center Canada organized a Peace Summit in Vancouver with the Dalai Lama and other Nobel Prize winners and speakers. One evening the rock singer and humanitarian Bob Geldof, whose Live Aid concerts have raised 100s of millions of dollars for Africa, made this passionate plea:

“For most of us, all we can do when witnessing suffering is to put our hand in our pocket. If a million of us do that, it is a lot of people, a lot of help, and governments should take note. We need to keep children alive long enough so that they can become the doctors and engineers of tomorrow. Without that something will wither and die inside of us.
Many of these children don’t have parents because of man-made mistakes like wars. In my life I have met extraordinary people such as Mother Theresa. She would tell me that she saw the suffering of Christ on the broken backs of the poor. I don’t see that. I don’t see God. I see the malignant hand of man laid bare. And if that is so, it can be remedied, because it we have done it and we can undo it. We can say: “Enough!” All this is the symptom of poverty revealed in lack of education and in ill health.
In terms of global wealth, the need is infinitesimal if the political will would be there. How many times do we have to manifest the will of the people to the politician and say: “GET-THIS-DONE!” How many times do we have to create African children’s choirs and pop concerts in order to convince human beings to join in the glory of humanity? What are we - a circus or a society?
In truth, the real need represents only a tiny proportion of national budgets. In the case of America, it is 0.16% of the national economy. It is not that Americans are selfish. Surveys show that when asked what percentage of their GDP do they believe goes into foreign aid, Americans say: “10%”. And when asked “it that enough”, they say “no”. But when they actually find out that it is only 0.16%, they are dismayed.”
The Commission for Africa has requested a doubling of aid by 2010 that will total 50 billion US dollars. Three months ago, one private bank in Britain was given 75 billion pounds within 30 minutes to save it from going under.
Yet a billion people will go down, and the cost is less that one private British company, in an economic system representing more than 50 trillion per annum. And one of the world’s richest economies can’t find a fraction of that. We really are a joke.
When we break our promise to the poor, we break the most sacred promise, because breaking this promise kills people.

Last week I went on a hike in the mountains with an eighty-one year old friend who is a brisk walker. After an hour, we reached a 10,000’ high pass with a view of a breathtaking landscape that stretched for a hundred miles in front of our enchanted eyes.
As we sat on a log and gazed at this magnificent scene, he asked me:
--"What does Buddhism mean when it states that this is ‘emptiness’?”
--"It means not the ‘absence’ of this landscape but the fact that it is ‘empty’ of autonomous and permanent existence.”
--"What is wisdom then?”
--"The understanding of this nature.”
--"What is then the difference between emptiness and wisdom?”
--"Emptiness is the true nature of phenomena, whether you recognize it or not. When you recognize this nature, this is wisdom, when you don’t recognize it, it is delusion.”
He then charmingly added: “You see, I am very impatient to learn about all these things, because I don’t have much time left.”
Then we walked back through the forest to the valley, continuing our conversation.