Embrace the Unknown: On Trusting Your Daemon
Enacting your creative destiny by writing at the edge of the unseen
Dear Living Dark reader,
Here is Chapter Eight of Writing at the Wellspring. Its subject is the heady and sometimes harrowing journey of writing and creating as a journey into the darkness of the unknown, where all you can see ahead is your next step on a dimly lit path. As it turns out, that single step is all you ever need to see. In fact, it’s all that you ever can see. Any belief to the contrary is self-delusion. Better get comfortable with writing and living into the dark.
The previous chapters that I’ve published here are of course still available to paid Living Dark subscribers. The book itself is still in manuscript. Forces are aligning to bring it to the world in more traditionally published form.
Warm regards,
Embrace the Unknown
Chapter Eight of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity as Refuge and Revelation for an Age of Upheaval
The Fantasy of Control
“What we hope for is to proceed from the known to the known. We are not enthused about abandoning the known and engaging the unknown.”1 These words on spiritual awakening from the late nondual writer/teacher Robert Wolfe apply equally to spiritual seekers and to writers. Our default comfort zone is to feel as if we know what we’re doing when we start putting words on the page. We commonly assume that the order of progression for producing a completed work is something like this:
Have an idea.
Start writing.
Develop the idea in the direction that you imagined and expected when you began.
Write “THE END.”
Experience a fulfilling sense of creative accomplishment. And maybe publish the thing and receive some money.
As anyone who has gone at this writing thing for any appreciable length of time can tell you, that assumed approach reveals itself as pure fantasy at a frequency of somewhere between ninety-nine and one hundred percent of the time. In fact, what it envisions is pretty much the obverse of how writing really works. We only maintain the fantasy because it provides a comforting illusion of knowledge and control—comforting, that is, to our separate self-sense, our ego self, whose sense of things is to be mistrusted automatically and on principle, since it represents the precise opposite of what is really the case in our lives and the universe.