With Our Clown Nature in Mind

In this article, David MacMurray Smith seeks to open a door into a discussion about our clown nature. He proposes that our clown nature is an inherent set of characteristics naturally resident within us as a circumstance of being human and, further, that it plays an integral role in helping us to realize and develop the potential of our human minds. The article looks at ways the clown nature can help free our minds from limited thinking and then explores some ways that the clown nature supports the integration and evolution of a more expressive and fully embodied mind. The article begins with a philosophical viewpoint from German novelist/poet/painter Hermann Hesse about the mind’s expansive capabilities. It then unpacks this philosophy using the lens of a clown routine to help demonstrate how the clown’s performance awakens the clown nature in us all and provides us with the agency to animate the capability of the human mind to pass beyond its present boundaries. Then it moves on to speculate some about the makeup of the human mind and how it consists of a thinking brain and a thinking body that are united into action through our physical being. The author takes the view that the body and mind are virtually inseparable within an integrated, cohesively functioning organic system that is the frame and format for the expression, realization, and continuous emergence of our minds. Further, without the characteristics of our clown nature, this whole organic system of our minds would not be able to function.