Creativity, Spirituality, and Mental Health

This practice raised many questions. First, Milner asks, Is it possible that by embracing inner poverty one can escape from the fear of actual poverty - loss of friends, reputation or livelihood? She remembered that as a girl she was interested in how the poor, who often seemed to be happy, managed to live. She queries: did the mantra really put an end to her anxiety, and was the subsequent uprush of constructive ideas an effect of its use or merely accidental? Whichever was the case, Milner concludes that the mantra forestalled an inner drive to suffer anxieties and inferiorities when she was faced with confident and self-assured people, thus averting insecurities about her self-worth.

This inner gesture, in Milner's view, was also helpful in achieving inner psychic growth, in that it required periodically losing one's sense of identity. Paradoxically, in A Life of One's Own Milner became more and more aware of what she called a central core - or "I-ness" (Dragstedt, 1998).

Emptiness and Mysticism

The notion of emptiness is central to Milner's work. She believed that far from being pathological, embracing "nothingness" can be a way to psychological health (Sayers, 2002). Milner writes both about how to "attain" or "accept" emptiness and the benefits of doing so. Moreover, emptiness is not an end goal in and of itself for Milner, but rather a means of opening oneself to something else. This something else she frequently calls "Answering Activity." Eastern religious teachings express a similar idea: emptiness paradoxically leads to an experience of fullness. Emptiness is first discussed in An Experiment in Leisure. Milner writes:

When I think of all the books I ought to read, instead of vowing to read them and then worrying because there are so many things to do, I can accept the poverty of my knowledge, accept the fact that I don't know all these things, accept the emptiness. And I can do the same when people criticize me, I can accept my poverty in their eyes, say "Yes, I am like that". And curiously enough, after doing this, I feel actually richer, instead of the lack I had felt before, while trying so hard to think up reasons why they were wrong. (Field, 1937, p. 43)

This type of emptiness is brought about though relinquishing the clinging to self. When Milner deliberately accepted loss and emptiness in the face of criticism, "the peace and richness was just as though I had come into a kingdom" (Field, 1937, p. 147).

Milner also discusses emptiness as a truth of the Gospels - that it is only by a repeated giving up of every kind of purpose, a voluntary dying upon the cross, that the human spirit can grow and achieve wisdom. Richness came only when, naked of expectancy or hope, she faced her experience: "the inescapable condition of true expression was the plunge into the abyss, the willingness to recognize that the moment of blankness and extinction was the moment of incipient fruitfulness ..."