Try to be surprised. As we know, creative individuals tend to face experience with openness, bordering on what Goethe called “naïveté.” This suggestion is similar to the one Don Juan gave to his apprentices, a practice he called “stopping the world” (Castaneda 1971). It consists in registering sensory stimuli without labeling them according to culturally defined conventions; for instance, looking at a tree without thinking of it as a “tree,” or letting any previous knowledge about trees enter into consciousness. It turns out that this exercise is extremely difficult, if not impossible to carry
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