The art of gullibility

The person who wants to enhance his creative processes must allow himself to indulge in the practice of catching similarities…This leads me to discuss another requirement for the creative person which is even more difficult to accept: gullibility…Gullibility…includes ruling out criticism and suspending judgment for a certain period of time, but it also goes beyond that stage; it also goes beyond accepting similarities as accidental or due to mere coincidence. It includes a primitive, pristine regard for similarities that are differentiated from the manifold of the universe in the context of a hypothesis—however seemingly absurd and rudimentally conceived—that the similarity has a meaning. In addition, gullibility means a willingness to explore everything: to be open, innocent, and naive before rejecting anything. It means accepting (at least temporarily or until proved wrong) that there are certain underlying orderly arrangements in everything beyond and within us. More than the inventing of new things, creativity often implies the discovery of these underlying orderly arrangements.

—Silvano Arieti, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis