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Sat, 21 Oct 2023 13:31:18 GMT

The choices you make in your writing are important. Do they invite your readers in or shut them out? Consider: "When we write, we must constantly make choices: this word, instead of that one; this form, this voice, this tone....It matters what words we choose, what voice we speak in, what tone we take. It matters both for the quality of our own thought, and for the quality of our invitation to our readers. The intellectual and aesthetic choices we make when we write are also moral, spiritual choices that can hold open a door for another to enter, or pull that door shut." —Stephanie Paulsell, "Writing as a Spiritual Discipline"

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 13:02:23 GMT

The riddle of writing and creativity and the riddle of your life are essentially the same. And the answer to one is the answer to both. You don't have to force creativity any more than you have to force your own existence.

Did you choose to be born? Does a wave on the ocean create itself? No, it just happens. The ocean does it. In your very being, you are a spontaneous creative expression.

Do you choose your thoughts? Or your emotions? Or your inner imaginings? No, of course not. Your entire flow of thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories, and mental imagery is just another spontaneous expression.

So is your sense of being a separate person to whom and in whom all of this appears.

You don't own any of this. You don't own yourself. "Yourself" is a happening. Your self-awareness of it is just an act of observation, not causation. You don't exist because of "your own" effort or self-will.

Come to terms with this, and the riddle or secret of your personal creativity as a writer or artist is solved.

What you call "my creativity" is just a subset of the primary creative act that caused you to appear as a temporary wave on the surface of Being, and that is right now continuing to cause the whole phenomenon of your inner and outer life.

Just as you don't have to make an effort to exist—for this character of "me" to be here, now, awake and aware, living out its story and being the kind of person it is—so you don't have to make an effort to write or create art.

Rather, simply create space for writing to happen. Open a notebook or word processing document. Sit there and see what happens. Or while away from your writing instruments, create space in your mind for ideas to arise and combine.

Patch into the flow that's already happening. What wants to be said, to come out, to shape itself into words, sentences, paragraphs? What waves of words want to form themselves spontaneously within and upon the ocean of you? Get the knack of this, and everything aligns.

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 18:18:01 GMT

Colson Whitehead's origin story as a writer sounds uncannily close to my own. Defined by an acute longing to plunge permanently into his literary and cinematic loves, which were all Marvel comics and fantasy/SF/horror:

"You know, when I was, like, seven or eight and reading Marvel comics, thinking it'd be cool to write 'Spider-Man.' That'd be a cool job. It'd be cool to write the 'X-Men.' My parents always had the latest Stephen King or Peter Straub novel.

"And whether it was 'The Stand' or 'Carrie,' it would make its way through the household. And I thought, yeah, writing stories about werewolves and vampires, that could be a good gig. Workin' from home.

"You know, it's sort of overcast outside today and this is my perfect day, growing up. I could just watch 'Twilight Zone' reruns on UHF, read comics, science-fiction, and no one's gonna say, 'Can't you go outside like a real boy and do sports or go swimming?'"

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 13:25:51 GMT

"Rollo May (1969) posits that the daimonic comes increasingly to the fore in times of social unrest and upheaval: 'The daimonic is unleashed and comes to the fore in times of transition in a society, when the customary psychic defenses are weak or broken down entirely.' Scholar and writer Matt Cardin (2011) echoes May’s sentiment that there may be a connection between what is a time of increasing social upheaval and catastrophic events of war, violence, and climate collapse and increasingly wider interest in the personal daimon and daimonic. He contextualizes this notion for the current times, noting that the general zeitgeist of awareness of a quality of societal collapse or even apocalypse has become mainstream in recent years (Cardin wrote this in 2011, and that zeitgeist has been magnified exponentially since 2016 since the Trump presidency, COVID-19 pandemic, and continued worsening of climate conditions as well as the impact those conditions have had on society) and that it may be no mere coincidence that books, papers, and seminars on the daimonic have become increasingly popular during this time. Cardin’s suggestion that this time in history calls for daimonic engagement echoes that of the notion of Tibetan Buddhism’s Vajrayana method, said to be designed for this particular 'dark age' where only the most potent spiritual medicine can penetrate the thickly conditioned psyches of human beings. The Vajrayana, in fact, is sometimes referred to as the apocalyptic vehicle."

From Daniel Allen Glenn, "Daimonic Liberation: The Daimonic as Catalyst for Creativity, Personal Transformation, and Social Change—A Theoretical Inquiry," PhD dissertation, California Institute of Integral Studies, 2023

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 20:35:05 GMT

Session 9 ranks among my top five horror movies. Maybe in my top ten movies, period. What most impresses me is its genius in offering a horrifyingly plausible supernatural explanation for the awful violence that breaks out so often in human affairs.

In its fictional vision, the spirit of violence that "lives in the weak and the wounded" doesn't produce overtly supernatural manifestations. Instead, it simply works through the faulty and vulnerable mechanism of the human self in its everyday relationships.

Basically, the movie posits a nightmarish supernatural influence in human life that is indistinguishable in its practical effects from otherwise mundane causes.

I think that's what wormed its way under my skin when I first saw Session 9 and then reflected on its powerful impact: that its quasi-demonic account of human atrocities could well be—and in fact may as well be—true.

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:53:51 GMT

One of the most powerful acts you can take to develop a rich creative life is to give up conscious control over the ultimate shape, nature, and direction of your work.

Hand over the responsibility for those things to your deep self, your unconscious mind, your demon muse.

Recognize that your role as ego is simply to midwife and refine the material that wants to be written.

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 12:53:14 GMT

It's striking how precisely the experience of writing in flow, trusting your daimon muse, aligns with the experience of watching your life itself unfold from the vantage point of nondual spiritual realization. Like a microcosm of the whole-life phenomenon.

I created the following paragraphs by freely reassembling sentences and passages from throughout nondual teacher John Wheeler's book You Were Never Born. Even though he's talking about how to approach the living of daily life, notice how you can read it instead as advice on writing and creativity, and it still works perfectly, like a lost passage from an unknown compatriot of Ray Bradbury and Natalie Goldberg who shares a gospel of effortless creation by tapping into the core center of your unconscious muse and its embeddedness in the cosmos:

"Follow your heart and intuition. The intelligence within you will bring up whatever is bound to come up to do. Enjoy the presentation of whatever arises. You will marvel at how all things naturally unfold, and you will see its underlying harmony and inevitability."

"Basically, there is no need to worry about anything. Just do whatever comes up next! It is all happening spontaneously. What appears is a spontaneous manifestation. There is no 'you' to do anything at all. Things simply come up to be done."

"The universe has an intelligence and is guiding each one where he or she needs to be. Remain open to see what will unfold in each moment. Things unfold in marvelous ways previously unknown by the mind. You recognize a wonderful clarity and ease permeating your activities."

"Whatever happens or not, always remain poised in your real center. Whatever happens now is just what appears next in present awareness. Life and its activities arise spontaneously and effortlessly in each moment in response to the demands of the situation and circumstances."

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 16:33:16 GMT

What good are writing and art in an age of apocalyptic collapse? The modern world is coming apart at the seams. This is the felt and lived experience of millions, even billions, around the globe in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

Civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Since the turn of the third millennium, human societies all over the planet have entered a period of intense collective crisis marked by seismic cultural convulsions of a pointedly apocalyptic cast.

In such a circumstance, the concept of the muse, daimon, daemon, or inner genius can give writers, artists, and thinkers a guide to finding and living their creative callings in a way that is healing and constructive. This is especially true right now, when the centripetal forces that have turned contemporary life into a dystopian dark age threaten to smother the creative artistic impulse under the collective weight of a dying civilization.

To adopt this discipline of the daemon muse by relating to your creative energy and destiny as a separate, collaborating intelligence is to embark on a kind of monastic path, a way of life that is devoted to sheltering, nurturing, and bringing forth your unique gifts so that they can meet the world’s specific needs at a crucial inflection point in history. It may even enable you to lay the seeds of some far-future renaissance.

Moreover, it directly confronts the deep nature of the crisis that surrounds us, since one way to understand the crisis is to recognize it as the inevitable result of a collective daimon run amok and turned demonic because of fateful decisions, reaching back to the eighteenth century and the birth of modern science and social structures, that excluded the daimon muse and the visionary powers it represents from our collective map of reality.

Basically, the discipline of the daemon muse can enable us to find a life of meaning and purpose by fulfilling our unique callings in the midst of a new dark age

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 13:22:24 GMT

Friendly warning: Real spiritual awakening doesn't enhance your life. It ends it. "Spiritual seekers" are playing with fire. Here's some elucidation from Robert Wolfe. This is the strong stuff:

"What you suppose that you want is not what you really want. What you want is a discovery that will enhance your life. The discovery the sages are pointing to will end your life as you know it. It is because you suspect that this is so that you continue to look for a different kind of discovery. When you discover what is being referred to here, the 'discoverer' is annihilated. Life goes on, without you as you now know yourself to be: but it may not unfold in the way that you would now like it to unfold....

"The you that you know so well was never born. That's how life-shattering this discovery can be. The you that you suppose is you does not want its life shattered....

"But since you were not born, you have nothing to lose in discovering that self-immolating truth. You have, if only you knew it, no individuated life to be shattered....

"What is not born and does not die does not 'live a life.' The life that you are living now—from that unlikely-seeming standpoint—is not within an actual, meaningful context: that you think you are living a life is a false supposition.

"So how could the 'discovery' possibly enhance your life? All the discovery could do would be to free 'you' from 'your life.' That doesn't sound too appealing to most people. That's why most people continue to suppose that the 'me' that they think was born will discover something that will leave their life intact as it is now. Annihilation doesn't fit the bill." — Robert Wolfe, LIVING NONDUALITY

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 12:22:23 GMT

From a savvy Substack post about the disorder that has come to afflict so many writers these days, alienating us from our original voice and purpose: "Writing with a marketer in your mind is even worse (than writing with an editor in mind), as you are constantly gauging what others would like to read instead of what you’d like to write. Rather than measuring your words (as you would with an editor in your head), you’re measuring the worthiness of the entire topic, tailoring your subject to what will generate the most likes, comments and new subscribers. Without even realizing it, you start monitoring open and click rates, googling tips on how to write the perfect subject line to increase those opens, obsessing over stats as you choose your topic — and your words — with an eye for what will convert subscribers from free to paid." https://carriebancroft.substack.com/p/the-samsara-trap-of-substack-analytics

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 12:21:06 GMT

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 12:20:52 GMT