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In his lectures on creativity, Swami Kriyananda gives the following instructions: go to your center; then relate to the center of what you want to know or express. If the concentration is complete, the right answers will come.

He explains how he used this process to write a song about St. Francis. He held the thought of the saint in his mind and received the notes of a melody. He later discovered that the first several notes were like the theme song from Franco Zeffirelli’s film about St. Francis, Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Kriyananda has also written Renaissance and Celtic tunes without knowing those types of music.¹⁸³ He testifies,

I don’t know where the melodies come from. But I do know when they are right. For example, I wanted to write a melody for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which would, of course, need a Persian melody. I was thinking about it, and I woke up with a beautiful melody in my mind. A few years ago I sang it to somebody from Iran, and he said, “Oh, but that’s Persian.” I hadn’t heard Persian music before, but I knew he was right. It’s as though melodies are given to me—I don’t create them, but I listen and hear them.¹⁸⁴

Harpist Derek Bell says that Kriyananda’s music is intuitive:

He more or less hints at that when he makes that wonderful statement about “Deirdre of the Sorrows.” He says, “I didn’t know what I should write for her, so I sat down and let her sing it to me.”¹⁸⁵

Kriyananda also makes a remark applicable to engineers, scientists, and business executives:

Clarity begins with asking the right questions. It comes with knowing exactly what the problem is, and then, offering that problem up into the creative flow, in the full expectation of receiving a solution.¹⁸⁶

Watson and Crick kept “asking the right questions” until they codified the exact structure of the double helix, a problem they solved by building a model and applying Watson’s insight that the two strands should be contrasting rather than identical.¹⁸⁷ Crick says the “key questions” were, “What are genes made of? How are they copied exactly? And how do they control, or at least influence, the synthesis of proteins?”¹⁸⁸ Charles Link invented a new type of paper clip by asking what design would solve two problems: the sharp end digging into papers and the large end required to face up for use.¹⁸⁹ The inventor of McDonald’s asked, “Where can I get a consistent hamburger on the road?” Businessman Marc Stuer explains, “That’s how he invented McDonald’s. Not by having the answer, but by keeping the question open.”¹⁹⁰ Ray and Myers comment, “Implicitly or explicitly, creativity always begins with a question.¹⁹¹