Most of us, including myself, have an idea of what we'd like to create when we start out, and get upset if we can't express things the way we want to, or feel we should. We may also feel that a great artist knows what she's doing, can reproduce certain results infinitely, and that she will produce exactly what she set out to do after having seen/heard/felt it in her mind, in her imagination.
While technique is an important tool for creation, and one that needs continuous refining through working, practising and perfectioning, it is but one aspect of creating. I've found that real satisfaction and fulfillment come from giving it all I have in terms of energy, technical skills etc, and then allowing the unintentional to enter into it, to contribute its share.

This means allowing spirit to co-create, making for surprises, and things getting created that I could never even have dreamt of in my wildest dreams. This truly makes me feel connected to something greater, makes me feel part of the intelligence of the universe, or what some people may term God.

Illustrating this point is the picture below. I was filming my statue of Sarasvati, the goddess of rivers, art, music and wisdom, when suddenly I saw another goddess of the river appear in the stone next to her.
(here she is on the right). It was an incredible moment!

In healing this unintentional is often termed spontaneous healing. When doctors and scientists can't find a rational explanation, they have, in the past, often chosen to ignore it, but this aspect of healing is now beginning to receive some attention.
You can read more about it in this book (I'm afraid it's in German):
„Spontan Heilung- Warum das Unmögliche doch geschieht" by Katarina Michel and Peter Michel.

 

"As an artist, I have experienced how the wrong colour in a picture, the breaking off of a piece of stone in a sculpture, wrong notes in improvising, or other mistakes in one of my works can cause a bifurcation point, a moment of truth. The same is true for scientific experiments, by the way. These "mistakes" reorganize a work and make it more authentic. What I first deemed a (terrible) mistake later proved to be ingenious. Looking at it subsequently from a distance and from a different perspective, allowed me to perceive this. The commonly prevailing attitude is a different one. Mistakes are regarded as wrong answers, we try to eliminate accidents out of our lives and failing is reason for shame.

I do not believe that we will ever crack the genetic code of human beings, animals or plants to the last detail. We may be capable of calculating why a tree has a certain shape of leaves, a special type of rind, a particular diameter of stem. But why it bifurcates at a certain point, why it reaches a certain height, why it has a certain number of leaves will remain a mystery. If this were not the case, we would be living in an utterly computable and predictable world, as if in a world of machines. And let us be honest: as much as we might wish to shape and control our lives, would we not die of boredom? Where would liveliness, joy and amazement go? Is it not the unpredictable and erratic which make life worth living?

I, for one, am glad that life will always offer me uncalled for and unplanned experiences, causing a range of feelings, from devastating to uplifting. I believe that unforeseeable experiences carry a great treasure in them, which a large part of our culture draws from in art and music. This is the actual place, where free will, inspiration, evolution and creativity are located. Just imagine the universe unfolding and evolving exactly as man conceived it."

 From "The Intelligence of the Universe in a Coffee Cup", by Tessa I. Richter