One of my greatest, never-ending curiosities about the world is how unfathomably large it is. I find it oddly comforting to experience that sense of ego death, of realizing how truly small my place is in the grand, grand scheme of things. It whittles away so much of my self-centered yearnings, and paradoxically, it fills me with a deep sense of purpose.
And for me, being creative is one of the best, if not the best way to experience this on a regular basis. There’s a strange moment when you’re deep in your creative flow where you feel like you don’t exist. You dissolve into nothing. You become no one, with no thought, in no time and in no space.
Meanwhile, something else takes over. Words land on the page almost effortlessly, as if they’ve been waiting for you. It feels like you’re tapping into a current, or a force beyond yourself that is too great for you to fully understand.
Prince knew this. He once said, “Music is made out of necessity. You’re not even its maker, you’re just there to bring it forth.” To him, creativity wasn’t about effort or ownership — it was about being a vessel. He spoke of it as a spiritual practice, a way of opening himself to something greater.
When he created, he wasn’t asserting his own will; he was stepping aside to let the music come through.
Michael Jackson described something similar. He was asked by an interviewer about how he wrote his best songs. As he explained, he didn’t sit down and try to force the outcome. “Something in the heavens has to say, ‘Look, this is the time that this is going to be laid on you and this is when I want you to have it.'”
He told the story of writing Billie Jean: he set the intention for a great bass hook, then let it go. Days later, the bassline arrived fully formed, as if gifted to him. He simply had to receive it.
“Where did that come from?” the interviewer asked. To which Michael replied, “From above.”
This is ego death in creativity: the moment when the self dissolves, and something larger speaks. We are not the creators — we are the channels.
Our best work doesn’t come from grasping or controlling the outcome, but from surrendering to the process. Creativity, at its core, is a gateway to something beyond us, whether you call it God, the universe, or the collective unconscious.
To create is to dissolve. To dissolve is to connect. And in that connection, we find something truer than ourselves.
Izzat Zailan 