In horticulture, the art of grafting involves fusing the stems, leaves, flowers, or fruits of one plant with the rootstock of another. The process is especially useful with plants that can’t be propagated easily by seed.

The basic principle also applies to ideas. Sometimes the best way to introduce a new concept is to marry it to one that is already firmly established. The early scientists understood this when they depicted the atom as a microscopic solar system, or when the early web developers pitched the Internet as an “information superhighway.” A concept that is fuzzy or abstract often has a better chance of flourishing if combined with one that is already well-rooted.

What’s interesting to note is that grafting, as it was traditionally defined, meant “the healing in common of wounds.” It referred to the process by which the old and the new rub against each other. It was always a time-consuming and painful thing. But if a healing took place, common suffering could become the basis for a powerful and mutually sustaining bond.

In the mystic traditions, the death of the false self is comparable to physical death. The mercy is that after the first couple of killings, you realize you’re being killed into life. Then, as Andrew Harvey has said, you begin to participate in the killing willingly. “Everyone doing a serious yoga with a master or with God directly is learning how to die in life, how to die into life. They know that the law is that the more you die, the more you live.”

The line between creativity and psychological disorder is astonishingly thin. It seems to me that in our culture we cultivate creativity as if it were a rare hothouse flower while at the same time trying to stave off mental disorder like some kind of pestilence. But they’re really two sides of the same coin. In order to tap our fullest creative potential, we have to become, as Ram Dass once put it, connoisseurs of our neuroses.