Creativity East-West: the riddle of the impossible muse

Ever had time vanish on you while doing something that mattered—writing, coding, cooking, fixing, painting—only to look up hours later and wonder who had been steering? It wasn’t a goddess whispering in your ear or some ghost in the machine, but a sly partner hiding in plain sight: the one who shows up when the self finally steps aside. This article follows that accomplice through Borges’s infinite shelves, Beethoven’s silence, and even science itself—until she finally drops the mask.

Who is the muse? We talk about her as if she were a person, some winged goddess whispering inspiration into our ears. She has been blamed for poems and praised for symphonies. Her absence is cursed. She is sometimes invoked with wine, sometimes with coffee, but always with longing. But who is she really? And why, whenever she appears, do we seem to lose ourselves?

That is the riddle of creativity.

Every creative pursuit has a vanishing point. Writers call it flow. Musicians call it being “in the music.” Scientists talk about forgetting themselves in the problem. However it’s named, it’s the moment when the “I” quietly slips out of the room and the work takes over.

Oddly enough, this self-forgetting seems to come more naturally in passionate creation than in idle relaxation. It happens in the thick of striving, even in the frustration of chasing something impossibly out of reach. When we identify with the call of our muse, the self has left the stage, because the muse has taken over the microphone.

The paradox of creativity is that our most personal work arrives when the person disappears.

Here East and West meet. The Western hunger for ideals can feel punishing: goals always receding, work never finished. Eastern wisdom offers a counterweight: from Buddhism, the insight of no-self; from Taoism, wu-wei, or “effortless action.” Through seamlessness, striving becomes bearable. Even failure belongs.

But how do we bridge this divide without flattening either side? How can the driven pursuit of perfection and the quiet surrender to the present meet without contradiction?

For that, the muse must reveal herself. Who is she, really?

We like to imagine creativity as flow: words pouring out, brushstrokes falling into place, equations resolving themselves. And yes, flow feels like grace. But creativity is just as real when nothing flows, when sentences collapse and resistance sets in. The muse doesn’t only wear silk; she also wears heavy boots.

Ask anyone who’s ever made something that mattered: it’s one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. We romanticize the flash of genius, but genius without sweat is just a daydream. What counts is devotion—the long hours, the false starts, the revisions. And in a world flooded with content, quality matters more than ever. Attention is scarce. A work only earns it if it respects the reader’s attention and carries the weight of care. That care is the muse’s true face, hidden inside the grind.

Resistance isn’t the absence of the muse, but the muse in disguise. Flow is the present with arms wide open; friction is the present with arms crossed. Either way, creation happens. The only illusion is thinking I am doing it.

The Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges captured this beautifully in The Library of Babel. He imagines an infinite library containing every possible book: In such a universe, any possible arrangement of letters, every conceivable text, is already bound and shelved. Originality is impossible, so writing becomes discovery rather than invention. The writer must vanish for the pages to write themselves.

Borges once admitted: “I do not know which of us has written this page.” This is what it feels like when the self dissolves into the muse. The writer doesn’t create but uncovers. To lose oneself in writing is to walk among those boundless shelves until the book finds you.

In the end, the best writing isn’t a message ferried from one shore to another, but a bridge that rises under both feet at once. On it, writer and reader catch the same reflection—the infinite, smiling back at them, knowingly.

Consider Beethoven. Deafness took away his hearing, but not his music. He composed symphonies he could not physically hear, works that remain among the most thunderous in history. Where did they come from? Not from “Beethoven the individual,” whose ears betrayed him. The music came from silence itself.

Silence was the muse. Beethoven’s body, mind, and memory were its instruments, but the source was deeper. In silence, sound was already latent. Just as in the blank page, words are already possible. Beethoven did not create; he was created by the music.

That is what it means to lose the self to the muse: to discover that even deafness cannot interrupt the present.

Long before Borges and Beethoven, Plato suggested something similar in his Theory of Forms. Every book, every symphony, every work of art is but a shadow of a higher, ideal Form. A particular book is imperfect, fragile, subject to error, but it points beyond itself to the timeless Form of the Book.

Writers striving for perfection are, in this Platonic picture, not just arranging words but reaching for something eternal and unified. We never reach it, yet the striving is not wasted. The sculptor who forgets to eat, the mathematician who neglects sleep—all are examples of the ideal burning up the seeker.

On the surface this looks typically Western and dualistic: the flawed self straining after perfection, blind to the wholeness that was never lacking. Eastern thought seems opposite: dissolve the self into the now. But the contradiction is thinner than it looks. Ardent striving and radical acceptance both erase the striver. When you give yourself fully—whether to ideals or to stillness—the self vanishes.

Science, too, is devotion. It reaches for an objective reality—though Rational Nondualism reminds us that such a world “out there” can never be known, since every fact is bound to consciousness.

Kurt Gödel even proved mathematically that no logical system can be both consistent and complete. There will always be truths beyond its reach. For some, this was devastating; for others, liberating. Perfection is impossible.

Yet this doesn’t make science futile. Like the artist’s muse, the scientist’s passion dissolves the self. Striving for truth, even if unreachable, bears fruit. The ideal of truth, like Plato’s Form, is never attained, yet in the very act of pursuit, the pursuer disappears and something is gained.

Science is Borges’s library in another language. Patterns are uncovered, not invented; equations, like stories, already lie in wait. The joy of science, as of art, is to be carried by discovery. Here too the muse is no goddess descending from Olympus. It’s what wears the mask of reality, erasing the self in devotion, leaving the scientist transparent to the infinite.

Borges’s shelves, Beethoven’s silence, Plato’s Forms—all circle the same paradox: the self vanishing not by defeat but by devotion. And that is where East and West finally meet on common ground—the radical middle way, where devotion no longer belongs to the self but to the present itself.

This is why we shouldn’t idolize flow. Flow is lovely, yes—but friction has its own strange fertility. Devotion means showing up daily: pen in hand, bow on string, chalk on blackboard. Resistance burns away the self as reliably as inspiration does.

And let’s be honest: the work of creation has never been a spa treatment. Michelangelo didn’t float in bliss while painting the Sistine Chapel; he spent years hunched on scaffolding, his neck twisted, his muscles in knots, paint dripping into his eyes. Yet what emerged leaves no one in doubt: this was not just the work of aching hands, but of the eternal speaking through them.

To imagine that nonduality means never feeling tension in the body—some kind of “forever in savasana, sipping matcha” ideal—is to confuse comfort with clarity. If anything, Michelangelo could have used an ergonomics department—or at least a decent stretching routine—but the point is that real depth isn’t about erasing discomfort. It embraces it. The muse can just as easily work through a cramp as through a chant.

The same is true today: a programmer bleary-eyed at 3 a.m., still chasing a bug that refuses to die, or a dancer rehearsing until blisters bloom—both are living proof that friction and fatigue can be part of devotion. What matters isn’t perfect posture or endless ease; it’s that the ego steps aside so the work can breathe through you.

And when Western striving learns from Eastern no-self, the load lightens. You still wrestle with the paragraph, the theorem, the canvas—but without the self demanding victory. The striving continues, but it no longer wounds. It becomes bearable because it is no longer yours to carry.

A friend once told me: “If you want to know your true passion, notice the first thing you think about in the morning”—before quickly adding, with a grin, “not involving biology.”

For me, what I notice keeps shaping itself into a bridge—one I keep building between nondual realization and reason. It wobbles, it creaks, but it’s where I lose myself. Rational Nondualism grew out of that effort, though it will remain forever unfinished, because the real crossing to awakening belongs to the reader.

This bridge-dream isn’t just personal. It’s also cultural. East and West have circled each other for centuries—one speaking of wholeness, the other chasing ideals. Maybe they were never enemies, just waiting for a bridge sturdy enough to hold them both. That bridge is nothing other than the radical middle way. And what is that bridge made of?

Time for the muse to reveal herself.

The muse is not as fickle as the poets made her sound. She doesn’t hide in some far-off Olympus or backstage green room. She’s closer than that—and always has been.

Here’s the secret: the muse is not something you chase. She was never late, never absent. She works quietly, day and night, under your nose. She wears every mask—flow, friction, silence, reality, beauty—until, finally, she drops the last one.

And what remains? Not a goddess, not a phantom, but the simplest thing: the present, seen and accepted for what it is. What you once begged for, what you once named “inspiration,” is nothing more—and nothing less—than the quiet surrender of all demands to the present. And then you laugh: She was hiding in plain sight, doing the typing all along! You just fell for her words, so you slid the keyboard her way.

Because the muse is presence itself.

Presence is the present without demands—just as it is. The magic of creation begins the moment you let it take the lead. Presence points you to the book already waiting on Borges’s infinite shelf, to the symphony resounding in Beethoven’s silence—and you follow, happily, no questions asked.

And why not? Presence is the true caretaker, the only real agent. When your passion lets it shine, the illusory agent called “self” slips away without a trace.

That’s also why the greatest works of art feel the most personal. Art demands honesty; when the ego no longer holds the pen, presence shows itself through the work. Presence brings authenticity, and authenticity is instantly recognized.

Once you’ve seen her true face, you realize the muse doesn’t vanish when the curtain falls. She stays with you even after the performance.

The beauty of recognizing the muse as presence is knowing it isn’t confined to rare flashes of “being in the zone.” Presence is just as near when the printer jams on the last page, the autocorrect insists it knows better than you, or the dog refuses to come in from the rain. In those moments too, you can release the wish for things to be otherwise—and still find the quiet joy of simply being.

It is not even “my presence” or “your presence,” but presence itself—the quality of being before it splits into subject and object. The now as it is. The present without bargaining. Brahman unmasked. It has always been writing, painting, composing, calculating through you. And when you trust it, the bridge builds itself right under your feet.

The bridge is alive. And since you’ve read this far, you’re already walking it.

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