Creativity Jijiji

Are artists time travelers? Creativity Jijiji interviews Suzanne Clores

• Chris Mchale • Episode 13

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What if genius isn't talent at all, but a glitch in time? A portal opening to futures not yet arrived? Throughout history, extraordinary artists and thinkers have described their creative process not as invention but as transmission – receiving fully-formed visions, melodies, equations and ideas from somewhere beyond themselves.

William Blake claimed he could see "the past and the present and the future all existing at once." Mozart reportedly heard entire symphonies in his mind before writing a single note. Bob Dylan has described his songs as arriving almost complete. These accounts suggest something profoundly mysterious about the creative process – that it might be less about making something new and more about accessing something that already exists somewhere else in time.

In this mind-expanding conversation with Suzanne Clores, we explore the possibility that time isn't linear but more like a landscape that certain sensitive individuals can traverse. Remote viewers can sketch events months before they happen. Artists produce work that seems impossibly ahead of their era. Scientists suddenly grasp concepts that won't be proven for decades. What if these exceptional minds aren't creating at all, but translating visions from beyond our timeline?

The implications are both thrilling and unsettling. If time truly operates this way, our understanding of reality itself must shift. Perhaps genius isn't a rare gift bestowed on few but a capacity we all possess in varying degrees – the ability to step outside our moment and glimpse what lies beyond, bringing back treasures from these journeys into the unknown. Whether through meditation, artistic practice, or natural sensitivity, we may all have the potential to access this extraordinary dimension of experience. Visit theextraordinaryproject.net to explore more of these fascinating ideas. And subscribe to our podcast as we continue to explore the mystery of creativty

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Chris McHale:

Rise up, o young men of the new age. Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings, for we have hirelings in the camp, the court and the university who would, if they could, forever depress mental and prolonged corporal war Painters on you I call Sculptors, architects. Suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works.

Chris McHale:

Imagine this A poet sits at his desk in 18th century London, staring into the void of his candlelit room. He is not alone. Around him, figures shimmer in the dim light. Visions of the past whispers from the future. He does not just write, he transcribes. His words dismissed in his time will one day be revered as prophetic. Now shift to a composer, his ears filled with music no one else can hear. He scribbles furiously, capturing melodies that seem to arrive fully formed, as if dictated from another realm. And today, right now, a scientist deciphers equations that don't yet belong to this era. A novelist dreams of worlds that, in time, will feel eerily familiar. What if genius is not just intellect or talent, but something stranger, a glitch in time, a portal, a connection to the future before it arrives. A portal, a connection to the future before it arrives.

Chris McHale:

Welcome to this episode of Creativity Jijiji, where we explore genius as a form of time travel. Our guest, suzanne Cloris, has spent her career investigating extraordinary experiences, the flashes of insight, the prophetic dreams, the eerie knowing. Together, we are going to ask this question Does genius allow us to tap into a future that already exists? Buckle up, we're about to step beyond time itself. I wanted just to work through some topics with you, because I'm really curious what you've got to say, because your work explores extraordinary experiences. This is the way I see it. So do you see the possibility that genius could be sort of a temporal anomaly, like a mind is able to access the future? You know, because, as we talked about, some artists describe their inspiration as transmission rather than an act of creation. I certainly understand that. So do you think it's possible that genius might be tapping into a future that already exists?

Suxanne Clores:

Yeah, so I've had a lot of conversations about this, as you might imagine, because of the waters I've been swimming in, the different scientists I've been talking to for the last decade. That was part of the Extraordinary Project. I really wanted it to be like an umbrella for all of these phenomena, all of these experiences, whether it's a random person waking up from a dream where they're positive, that they had a conversation with their deceased brother, or a person like you say, a genius, a creative maker, who receives a download and a transmission I think is the word you used one of the ideas that is being bandied about right now in the world of edge science and futurism, and it's it's an idea, it's a hypothesis. You know, all of these, these ideas, are hypotheses, but I've been thinking a lot about it because it's so visual that time is like a landscape. Right, it's not linear, we know that it isn't linear already but like it's a landscape and so, depending on what direction you choose to go, there are experiences, people, information, kind of waiting for you on this landscape, right? So I just loved that as a visual.

Suxanne Clores:

It's almost like, oh, am I going to hike to this mountain today, or am I going to hike to the lake today. Which way am I going to go? And I feel like that connects to your question because, yeah, mozart, dylan, these people and every creative person I know like we all have connections to multiple selves and and so each version, you know, you get a new day. You sit down, you are chris and you're writing music, right, like it's almost like you've showed up on the landscape and you're like where, what am I going to pull down from it today? And you're like what am I going to pull down from it today? What am I feeling? What am I picking up, right, like what's the vibe? And then you make something. And I love that idea because I just feel like it takes a lot of pressure off of you as the creator. You know it's a relationship, you know it's a relationship.

Suxanne Clores:

Sometimes, when I write or when I compose, the walls of my room soften, turning almost translucent. The edges of reality stretches and wavers like ripples in water. I'm floating, not in a dream, not in a hallucination, but in a space without edges, without limits, without time. This is my creative space. But what is it? Where am I? Nowhere really. Myself ceases to exist, and that's when I connect. That's when every artist connects Echoes of every painting yet to be painted, every song yet to be sung, every word yet to be written. They're all hovering there, waiting, pulsing, shimmering with possibility, a melody not created but remembered. I began to understand that artists were travelers. I began to understand that artists were travelers drifting through a multi-dimensional landscape and, as Suzanne says, catching glimpses of the infinite and pulling pieces of it back with them into the world. Are you familiar with William Blake?

Speaker 3:

Oh yes.

Chris McHale:

Oh yeah, You're Blakey.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I actually, you know, I wouldn't say I'm a Blake aficionado at all, but I was very drawn to his work from a young age because I felt like he was trying to capture something important and germane to all of us the way we work. And I recently saw an exhibit at the Block Museum up at Northwestern maybe like five years ago, maybe longer ago of a lot of his drawings, and they're so trippy.

Suxanne Clores:

They're so trippy, they're so trippy yeah, the trippy trippy is the word. Like I was, I was raised in london and at a time when, you know, it was still safe for kids to wander around. So from a pretty early age I was free to find my own way around london and, uh, one of my haunts was the take gallery Gallery along the Thames and their collection of Blake was like I don't know, I would sit for hours, I would try to draw it, you know, and I would try to understand it, and it was just completely mysterious to me. And you know, he claimed that he could see visions. He could see, you know, the past and the present and the future all existing at once. I mean, that's pretty much a Blake quote, if I remember correctly. So he was right where we're talking about. So, in a sense, do you think his poetry almost like and I have worked with how are you?

Suxanne Clores:

going to do this and she's someone who has found missing people before, who has, you know, predicted world events, you know, done a number of things and and it's it's almost like you know she has to ask herself the part that William Blake was talking about, like going through all of these phases of time. You have to ask that part of yourself to go to a certain place at a certain time and observe the details, see what you see, write down your impressions and your sensations, and all of that information is valuable information. So I think the thing about Blake that seemed so powerful to me as a young person was like he sort of knew. I don't think anyone taught him how to do that. You'd probably know before I would. Did he study with anyone who taught him how to do that, or was he just like an interior explorer?

Chris McHale:

William

Chris McHale:

Blake was sent to drawing school, but his true education came when he apprenticed with a printer. That was where his hands met the ink, where his sleeves were permanently smudged with black, where he learned to carve letters into metal and press them into paper. The mechanics of printing weren't just tools to him, they were revelations. The scent of printer's ink, the slow, deliberate process of transferring an image, of seeing words emerge from metal it shaped him. Blake wasn't just an artist, he was a maker. An important difference he engraved his poetry as he wrote it. Something that never existed appeared before his eyes like a vision, and those blazing, mystical images were never separate from his hands. He didn't just see them, he etched. Just see them, he etched them into reality.

Chris McHale:

Here's the thing about William Blake he didn't just follow a printer's career. He followed an intention, a pull, a force that wasn't from this world or wasn't from his time. He was spirit-driven, and where others measured their skill by technique, william Blake measured his by revelation. Maybe that's why he was never recognized in his time. His work sat way on the edges of recognition until long after he was gone, because Blake didn't train to fit into this world. He didn't train to fit into this world. He didn't train to fit into his timeline, he trained to transcend it. Suzanne was speaking of remote viewers and I wondered if, in a sense, if Blake was remote, viewing his visionary futures. I mean, is this totally unconscious on the part of the remote viewer? When you said, the remote viewer gives themselves almost permission to move forward and backward along a timeline and then they get information. They're not really conscious when they're doing that, right, they're just writing the information down that they're getting. Is that the way you understand it?

Speaker 3:

I mean they're conscious, but it's like, yeah, it's kind of wild, it's like some people, you know, some people do go into a light trance. Other people are just born that way, and I think this remote viewer was just born that way. She, she just can it's. And I think probably blake was born that way too. He was an artist and a poet and so um, so he made different things, but yeah, so, as you know, a remote viewer is someone who can, um, perceive information across space and time, like that's just, that's the simplest definition without Wow, that's simple, interesting word to put it on that.

Speaker 3:

But I mean like without the parameter, without like ordinary sensory prompts, or without getting information in typical ways that we all get information.

Suxanne Clores:

Do you think that is this a gift, or do you think people can train themselves to do this kind of work?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's like any gift, like musical ability. I think everyone has some. Some people have a lot and they'll go very far, and other people can basically sing happy birthday and that's the end of it. I think it's very similar. Some people are. You know, everyone has intuition. If you really want to work on it, if you have dreams of becoming a remote viewer, you can practice and you can improve your sensitivity. It's almost like meditating too. Are you a meditator? I forget.

Suxanne Clores:

Not really. I have an ambition to be, but I never quite have the discipline to really do it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean it ends up being like I think that a lot of people feel that way. It's like you do what you can, we do what works for you, but some people really want to be great meditators. You know what I mean, and so yeah, some people don't yeah.

Chris McHale:

I know, I know what you mean yeah, so let me so.

Suxanne Clores:

So it's this thing of time, you know, which is, you know it's interesting because, well, first of all, remote viewing, you know, scares the fuck out of me. To be honest with you, I don't know if I could deal with being a remote viewer, because I have a really hard time just dealing with the day as it is you know, without without bringing a million different things into my life.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, there's a very famous drawing of the 9-11 attack that was done by a remote viewer three months before it happened. She didn't know what it was, so you're getting these impressions. It's not like she saw the event, but she was doing a view and you know, views use transcripts. The traditional viewers write all of their impressions on a transcript, so sometimes that can be a very crude drawing. Sometimes that can be little phrases, echoes of conversation they hear in their ear.

Speaker 3:

It is quite a creative process, um, but I think the difference is that an artist would then make art out of that and a viewer kind of brings it into um data, you know. And so she, she drew what basically looked like the twin towers and you know two long rectangles next to each other, and then like something that looked like the twin towers and you know two long rectangles next to each other, and then like something that looked like an electric fan, like a, like a crude electric fan kind of crashing into them. And after the event, I guess whoever who her um tasker was, went through and found the, found the image, and so there are flaws to that practice and to that method, of course, but I think, to get to your point. I think what you're saying is like do people see the future on a regular basis? And I think the answer is yes.

Suxanne Clores:

I felt like we were close, so close to what I had been thinking. The conversation had been circling the idea of brushing against something just out of reach, and maybe it would always be just out of reach out of a reach we could understand, but not maybe out of reach of something we could feel. Remote viewers access different parts of a timeline. They don't just imagine, they see, they feel it's not about creating from nothing, but capturing something that already exists, something from the past or something from the future, and then they bring it back, put it down, sketch it, paint it. That's their art. And we were talking about art and we were talking about the same thing Remote viewers seeing something along a timeline, artists seeing something along a timeline.

Suxanne Clores:

I always believed that artists weren't just inventors, they were receivers. They reached into something vast, outside of time, outside of their dimension, outside of their moment, and brought back what they found and astounded us with what they found, because we had never seen anything like it before. So where did it come from? It had come from the future is what we were talking about.

Suxanne Clores:

Suzanne's work led her to an artist named Ingo Swann, who didn't separate the act of seeing from the act of creating. To him, painting wasn't just self-expression. It was transmission, a message from somewhere else pulled into form. I thought about that. I thought about the sketches and the paintings and the songs and the poems that seemed to arrive fully formed, like they'd been waiting for someone to catch them, pull them out of the air. Maybe that's what art really is not just creation, but translation, pulling something from the unseen and giving it shape. And maybe, just maybe, time wasn't a straight line at all, maybe it was a place where artists could step in and out of hands, reaching forward, reaching backwards, reaching up and down, all directions at once, finding these images, finding these bits of language and words and languages and sounds and songs and poems, finding all that, bringing it back and giving it actual shape in our time.

Speaker 3:

Pieces of this project are research fellowships and I recently had the Ingo Swann Research Fellowship down at the University of West Georgia Ingo Swann Research Fellowship down at the University of West Georgia and most people don't know who Ingo Swann is, but he was a Manhattan-based painter in the 70s, 60s, 70s, 80s was really his time, I think as a painter and he was very into psychic research and very into this idea of multidimensionals or interdimensional information, not only symphonies available to us or images, but languages, entire lives, other people lives.

Speaker 3:

I've I've heard this a lot, not just from the swan archives, but you know a lot of parapsychology archives talk about this. During the heyday of parapsychology that was like, which is now a shunned science, you know. But that is there. There are huge bodies of literature saying just that, um, that the, the information is available. It comes up a lot too with with um children who remember past lives, supposedly like their own past lives. I know that was something we discussed a little bit maybe, but I think the idea is the same, like the information is kind of in parallel, as you say.

Suxanne Clores:

I mean, I believe all time is concurrent. You know, basically that's what I've always believed. In other words, my grandparents are still alive. At the same time, I'm alive and George Washington's wandering around there too, somewhere. You know, we're all alive and I use the word connection. You know it's like we've used different words, but to me it's really about connection. So a lot of what you're talking about raises, could raise, ethical questions, right? I mean, if you can really master some of this, you know you could use it for not good. Are there people out there using this stuff for not good?

Speaker 3:

I mean probably, but I also think it's part of the conversation. I think that when you do kind of tap in to your altered state or your state of connection and you do find that this will happen, even if you meditate for years, like you do have access to other people's information, it just kind of floats in, it's just part of what happens. I mean, you can look in, like Vedic scriptures, and you'll see evidence of this. It's part of what happens when you cultivate this part of your mind and it's supposed to be unifying, to be unifying Right, um.

Speaker 3:

But I think that there are important ethics to consider generally. Like you're right, I agree, like we are not emotionally responsible. I feel like people are not emotionally responsible in the way that they used to be. I don't even know if it's emotional. It would be ethically responsible too. But generally you don't really have permission to access other people's space unless they give it to you. Right, you have to, unless they give you permission. So, like with the remote viewer, she can't view someone ethically unless they give her permission to do so.

Suxanne Clores:

Do you think that we're going to ever be able to unlock that kind of ability consciously? Do you think that that's possible? We could get to that place where we can consciously do that.

Speaker 3:

I think that you'll always have to shift into an altered state, but I think you can get better at that. I think you can shift more easily and you can consciously make that choice to shift and it'll be easier to walk back and forth through those doorways. I do think that that's true do think that that's true.

Suxanne Clores:

And and what would happen? I mean, what would happen if we lived in a world where people could do that? Just, it was just part of our existence?

Speaker 3:

I mean, I think we'd all have to get better boundaries, but I also think it could be really beautiful. I feel like there could be really interesting new kinds of relationships and connections with people that have the potential to create good. That's what I think.

Suxanne Clores:

I've always thought that maybe reincarnation was the answer to the mysteries of exceptional genius. I mean, how do you explain Shakespeare, mozart, beethoven, van Gogh, bob Dylan? It's as if they had lived multiple lifetimes is the way I always thought about it and accumulated their rare skill across centuries, arriving in this world already carrying the weight of mastery. But after talking with Suzanne Cloris, I began to see another possibility, one even more intriguing. What if artists slip back and forth a long time? What if their true skills isn't just talent but an ability to move between moments, pulling from the past, from the past glimpsing the future? And maybe the real magic of heightened creativity lies in doing the creativity with awareness or, at the very least, a heightened sense of what's possible. My guest today on Creativity to Gigi was Suzanne Glores, a fascinating mind exploring these very ideas. Visit the Extraordinary Project at theextraordinaryprojectnet to connect with her work and, of course, visit us at studio to ggio. And please subscribe to this podcast and stay connected to the conversation. I'm Chris McHale, and thanks for listening.

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