The Writer's Paradox: Personal Is Universal
The Writer's Paradox: Personal Is Universal
What is deepest in you is deepest in others. Write from that.
Dear Living Dark readers,
Here’s a brief meditation on a subject of considerable significance for all writers and creators—and also, as it so happens, for all seekers of spiritual awakening: the relationship between you and others, between your personal depths, desires, and dreams, and the world of otherness in which you perceive yourself to be immersed and with which you perceive yourself to be confronted. How can you write effectively to that, in a way that bridges this gap between yourself and others to forge a link and communicate your vision?
This has been an issue of significant, longstanding importance in my own life as a writer and a human being. Here is my current understanding and position on it.
Creativity involves a hidden paradox. So does authentic spirituality. Understanding it gives you the key to both.
The secret is this: What is most private and personal in you is also what is most universal. What is deepest in you is deepest in all people—and in the world itself. The deeper you look into yourself, the more you find what is most important to everyone. The most private you, “the real you,” isn’t isolated and alone. It’s your secret point of contact with the whole cosmos. When you speak, write, think, perceive, and act from your deepest, truest self, you automatically speak to other people’s deepest desires and concerns as well.
This is the source and essence of creativity on the part of both the creator and the audience. It’s also the meaning of spirituality and religion. Richard Strauss described it as “the source of Infinite and Eternal energy from which you and I and all things proceed,” and he noted that in addition to being the source of the musical inspiration that he received in his highest moments, “religion calls it God.
The practical implications are radical.
In making art, music, or literature, the more you base your work on pandering to others to win their attention or extract their money, the more you miss the mark, because paradoxically the effort to project your motivation outward and shape your work purely for appealing to others serves only to alienate them and make the work sterile. In other words, it has the opposite of the intended effect. Real creative connection with others comes not from chasing after it outwardly but from accessing what is most personal within you and expressing this in some truthful form. “What is most personal is most creative,” said the renowned film director Bong Joon-ho, quoting wisdom he remembered gaining from Martin Scorsese. People will recognize themselves in what you honestly express from your most private self. The psychologist Carl Rogers put it this way: “What is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.”
People will recognize themselves in what you honestly express from your most private self.
The same holds for spirituality. In meditation, for instance, the only way to find what’s real in your life is to inquire back into yourself so deeply that you go beyond yourself. Trace your “I” back to its source, and you find not only your own essence but that of your brother, sister, parents, spouse, children, neighbors, coworkers, friends, enemies, strangers, and all people everywhere.
This changes everything, not just theoretically but practically, and not just in creativity or religion but in both. It fundamentally alters how you see, treat, and relate to everyone, because now you realize that in pursuing your own highest fulfillment, your own greatest happiness, your own implanted destiny, whether in creative endeavors or spiritual ones, you are simultaneously pursuing everyone else’s. Equally as important, you realize that in pursuing everyone else’s good and fulfillment, you are pursuing your own. “Anyone trying to live a spiritual life,” said the beloved spiritual writer Henri Nouwen, “will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal.”
This is why Ramana Maharshi, the renowned twentieth-century Indian sage, could assert that “realization of the Self is the greatest help that can be rendered to humanity”—because such self-realization is not egoic self-absorption but a going beyond the self to realize your transcendent identity with that which is the ultimate identity of all people and the world at large. It is a true, deep, and self-evident knowing that, in the words of Alan Watts, “the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever that is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.”
Writers, artists, and sages have always known this, though some have consciously grasped it and articulated it more clearly than others. I end with half a dozen such articulations that not only state the point but, in so doing, demonstrate it. These are the sources of the quotations above, showing each in its wider context.
Richard Strauss (composer)
When in my most inspired moods, I have definite compelling visions, involving a higher selfhood. I feel at such moments that I am tapping the source of Infinite and Eternal energy from which you and I and all things proceed. Religion calls it God.
— Arthur M. Abell, Talks with the Great Composers (1955)
Henri Nouwen (Catholic priest, writer, professor, theologian)
Anyone trying to live a spiritual life will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal. What we live in the most intimate places of our beings is not just for us but for all people. That is why our inner lives are lives for others. That is why our solitude is a gift to our community, and that is why our most secret thoughts affect our common life.
— Henry Nouwen, Bread for the Journey (1997)
Bong Joon-ho (filmmaker)
When I was young and studying cinema, there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart, which is, “The most personal is the most creative.” That quote was from our great Martin Scorsese.
— Bong Joon-ho, from his acceptance speech for Best Director at the 2020 Academy Awards
Carl Rogers (psychologist)
There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own. . . . In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.
— Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (1961)
Ramana Maharshi (sage)
Realization of the Self is the greatest help that can be rendered to humanity. Therefore, the saints are said to be helpful, though they remain in forests.
— Arthur Osborne, The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words (1962)
Alan Watts (writer, speaker, philosophical entertainer, laughing Buddha)
To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it. You feel, in other words, that the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you, whatever that is, are intimately bound up. That in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving, you express that which it is that moves the sun and other stars.
— Alan Watts, “On Being God,” a talk recorded in 1971 in New York City at a conference on Western psychological therapy and Eastern religion
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