Exploring the unique roles of trust and play in private creativity: From the complexity-ambiguity-metaphor link to the trust-play-creativity link

<title>Abstract</title> I explore the Eastern philosophy of wisdom to balance with the orthodox Western philosophy of science toward a geocentric integration of both the West and the East at the most fundamental level. In particular, the unique Eastern epistemological frame of Yin-Yang Balancing has the unique potential to reframe ambiguity from a problem (inconsistency) to a solution (completeness). Built upon the Eastern philosophy of wisdom, I propose a process model for the link between trust and creativity, especially in a private context rather than the typical public context. This model highlights the essence of trust as a leap of faith to bridge the unknown with the known, uncertainty with certainty, and ambiguity with clarity via the mechanisms of psychological relaxation and cognitive improvisation to mediate between trust, play and creativity. The tentative sketch of the Eastern philosophy of wisdom and its application to the trust-play-creativity link are the two contributions of this study. The central theme is that the Eastern philosophy of wisdom is primarily concerned with the creation of novel knowledge as open-ended and open-minded exploration via trust and play, while the Western philosophy of science is primarily concerned with the evaluation of the extant knowledge as close-ended and close-minded exploitation via control and routine.