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Culture, Crises, and Creativity is an extraordinary vision of existence that explodes the popular myth of our cultural omniscience, omnipotence, and permanence. There comes a time, suggests Rudhyar, when for the sake of our spiritual heritage, we should consider breaking away from established patterns and values that have been imposed upon us through our culture. "Spirit creates, culture reproduces."
This iconoclastic disrupting of established habit patterns will produce unavoidable crises, but crises appear to be necessary to the creative process. Rudhyar writes: "The process of civilization is one of transcendence, and transcendence implies crisis; just as the act of walking implies a fall from a position of equilibrium and a recovery. Dissatisfaction, fall, recovery are inherent in the process of civilization; and Man, archetypically, is the Civilizer."
