30. The realm of good ideas
30. The realm of good ideas
Strategies, the Bhagavad Gita, and a horse metaphor
Don't you love how it feels to get a new idea about something? Does it even really matter what the idea is about?
Actually, I think this feeling -- the flash of insight, the momentary escape from an otherwise closed and analytical worldview -- is so satisfying, it may play a role in keeping people hooked by otherwise inane pursuits. The joy of a solved problem or a breakthrough, no matter the context, is an experience that we will actively seek out or even grow attached to. Sort of how a person might stay in a bad relationship because "the sex is good," I think it's worth pondering the toils we are willing to endure in hopes that we may arrive at some new discovery.
Toils! Yes, I said toils. Because, let's be honest, writing itself can be a fairly inane activity. When there's no creative juice flowing, it's a dry and monotonous labor.
Aha!
I want to live my life so that the feeling of "I have an idea!" is always within reach, amidst all the ways that I be-do-be-do. I want to sail the Aha-rich seas and live off what I catch.
The tagline for my personal site is "the inspired life is worth living." This is something I believe to be true. Inspiration gives life meaning--and it certainly gives it forward thrust. I'm here to pursue this for myself and do my best to help others. I believe that true inspiration is the close companion to love, and these are the forces that make incarnated life more divine.
Inspiration is a topic I am continually fascinated by, and it's something that my writing clients and I often talk about.
In this post I'll share some strategies that help me towards this ideal. As usual, I'm writing with writers in mind, but I think it applies to other pursuits.
Lower the bar
People have too high an expectation for what they believe to be valuable. Ideals tend to be lofty. Because of their purity, if held too tightly, they’re inspirational non-starters.
Not knowing how to position yourself in relation to a lofty idea can be intimidating, or even depressing. Nothing in the real world could ever be good enough because it can't match the perfection of the unmanifest archetype.
Sometimes a person's entrypoint towards an inspiration doesn't feel big enough. You're given an idea: a multi-volume space epic. Aha! And you have the notion for a starting point: a scene of a couple bumping into each other on a busy street. It's natural for the mind to compare the two, and conclude... that scene is really not very interesting. I need to improve on that idea and then I'll write about it. Besides, that topic has been done before.
Whether or not a topic has been done before has no applicability to how you will do it. And if you haven't put it into words yet, you're not giving anyone else the opportunity to judge for themselves.
Pro tip: Most of the time, the first idea is just a starter idea anyway. Once you engage the idea and put it into words, it can have space to become what it wants to. If you never start, you'll never know.
Just induce movement and take provocative action.
Anything is better than nothing. Even bad material is proof of doing the work. It builds discipline.
Induce movement by:
1. Toss yourself some requirements.
Write three pages about the immense heart opening I had that one time while listening to Cabron by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
2. Fulfill the requirements. Or don't. Just use them as a starting point, then follow what's most interesting until you find something that's worth expanding on.
Another way to induce movement: change one (and only one) aspect of your environment.
Suppose you feel stifled because you've been at a project for too long. To stop would be to give up. To continue linearly would be a slog.
Don't change something out of a desire to procrastinate or distract. But if you have built the discipline, it's just a matter of:
- Move to a different room.
- Get a cup of coffee.
- Stretch for ten minutes and breathe deeply.
- Follow through on the writing.
Basically, the Po approach.
Flow comes after initiating a series of movements.
Don't expect perfection
In fact, don't have expectations at all. To do this, get beyond the mind's default configuration.
The mind's default resting state is a kind of noisy certainty that defaults toward familiar solutions and always seeks cognitive shortcuts.
We're all familiar with this background chatter. It's annoying, and this annoyance is why, without cultivating the discipline to step outside the false perfection of foregone mental conclusions, we rabidly seek out distractions. The multiplication of memes on social media is proof of this. Mental chatter grows back like weeds in a garden.
From within the standpoint of mental chatter, our thoughts would very much appear to be significant. Cognitive noise affirms that we are conscious, living, and engaged. But the opposite is true. Moments of inspiration are moments of true consciousness.
If you've ever had the experience of a youtube or social media blackhole, you'll know what I mean by mental chatter being the mere illusion of consciousness -- you start off by watching an interview with David Foster Wallace, then the algorithm hooks you, then again, and again, until for some reason you're now watching a classic pro wrestling showdown from the 1980s. Where did that 20 minutes go?
Have an open mind
"Openminded" to me means having a conscious resting place outside the gridlock of focus.
A bit of context:
The Hindu epic Mahabharata tells the story of the Kurukshetra War between the Pandavas and Kauravas. It has a lot of teachings on dharma and philosophy. One major character is King Dhritarashtra, the blind king of Hastinapur and the father of the Kauravas. He plays a significant role in the epic through his struggles with desire and attachment.
The thing is, the king is blind. The army serving under this blind king is who Arjuna must fight against in the battle of the Bhagavad Gita, a battle that makes god his charioteer and pits him against his own family and those he looks up to.
Fighting against such people would all seem like very bad karma. To which, Krishna's response is, well, he calls him a hypocrite and a coward. The divine revelation is that Arjuna is fighting for his swakarma, the karma of self, something beyond everyday rules and laws.
To win, Krisha endeavors him to fight the battle without being attached to the results.
I took a deep study of the Bhagavad Gita in the context of Hatha Yoga and my teacher pointed to this point as something worth pondering -- how realistic is it to tell someone to go into battle without being attached?
It would be easy (but incorrect) to think of nonattachment as a lack of engagement. Battle is something that musters a person's full directional energy: run! go! kill! You're fighting for a cause. How in the hell do you fight whole-hog for a cause--the hardest of your life-- and yet let be what is?
Also, how does this relate to writing?
Engaged nonattachment is something you can put into practice by showing up.
Your practice is your battlefield of nonattachment.
Have an idea? Great, start there.
Have no idea? Great, start anywhere in the known universe. Jam loosy-goosy with whatever shows up first - how your lunch is sitting, what you wish you could write about, the reason behind the sudden decline in pacific kelp and the role that urchins may play.
Get confused by what you write? Write for longer stretches of time.
Let the process be one of weaving yourself back into some sense of project-centeredness. A way of using the presencing of words on the page as a digestion of the thoughtforms that happen to land.
Know your tendencies and circumvent them
Routine can either feed your creativity or deaden it. Do you work best in the early morning? Then sleeping in is an act of creative denial.
If you believe creativity is something that fulfills a purpose higher than your personal agenda, such actions may be bad karmic juju.
My typical process
Freewriting is a drum I continue to pound, despite being fully aware that most people dismiss it as an elementary practice. I do this because of the experiences I have had when I chose to write without stopping. It's been a solid way to cultivate discipline with the flow state.
Writing this way connects with a part of me beyond my ordinary mind. Ideas happen in the moment. Not outside the experience of creation.
The mind, being blind, rests in the forgone conclusion of "no." Choosing to write regardless of what comes shifts the "no" into "maybe something." I open myself to uncertainty, discovery, curiosity, engagement in process without judgement. That engenders a flow, and it's an act of love. Simple, but true.
1. I get an idea. Not a full idea, just a starting point. I think of this as the seed.
2. I write it down and either engage it immediately or leave it so I can enter it later.
3. I write one pass through. I write until it's done.
Later, I'll take a second pass through - revising, rewriting.
At the end of my life, I don't think what will matter most is that I had good ideas--it will be whether I engaged the process. Being a person who engages a creative process shifts my whole identity. I'm more interested in who I am than what I have.
It's less about the output and more about how you embody it
Back in college, an actor friend who was directing me in a Sam Shepard play described the acting experience as putting on a wetsuit that's too tight. You needed to wear it, stretch into it, let it conform to you. He had us do things to get us into our characters besides just run through lines. At one point, he had us walk around in-character in a taped-off area on the stage, continually moving, engaging with each other in the space without saying anything.
To me, he whispered in my ear, "I want you to feel like you're carrying a hatchet in your hand."
My character had nothing to do with any actual hatchets. But the direction cued me in to a feeling that helped shift how I embodied the role.
Just between you and me, I am a terrible actor. Although the direction helped me embody the role, I hadn't learned how to be fluid with the fact of stage performance.
You're in the center of a dark room. All the lights are on you.
It would seem stupid to tell someone 'ah, be natural.'
But basically that's where you need to get to. Like the horse that learns to walk through a busy city center. Horses are prey animals, and they are naturally wary of their surroundings -- they have to go through an awkward phase that gets them to tolerate and then eventually to collaborate with a rider. Eventually, they give the rider permission, "OK, I'll hand the reins over to you. In exchange, I'm trusting you to keep me safe."
They learn to trust that more and more, until eventually they grow more able to disregard the noise of the world.
Well, there's a metaphor here for writers. First, you trust the process as an artificial thing, then it becomes part of the way you operate.