Unraveling the Illusion of Resistance and Tapping the Flow of Creation (Cosmic Creativity 2)
Unraveling the Illusion of Resistance and Tapping the Flow of Creation (Cosmic Creativity 2)
Resistance is a con. Seeing through it puts you in touch with the source of all creativity.
Dear Living Dark readers,
First, some publication news: I’m pleased to announce that Volume 2 of my Journals is now a reality. Available editions include Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. Booklife by Publishers Weekly praised the first volume as “epic and intimate, a portrait of a mind and a milieu, with deep dives into the creative mind, the nature of the weird, and how to find one’s way in a world that’s sick.” You can read the introduction to the combined two-volume set right here. If you want to know the private background behind my books and this newsletter, here’s your guide.
Second, a proviso about today’s post: The angle of the essay below is idiosyncratic (even more than usual, I mean). It approaches the subject of creative Resistance and how to understand it—and how to see through it to the deep source of all creativity—from a perspective that is highly personal and, I think, unconventional. Rather than focusing on practical aspects of dealing with Resistance and creative block in daily work, it addresses the matter at the foundational level of the psyche, where these hindrances are attached to the very drive to write itself. (Amusingly and/or ironically, it took me nearly a month to write this thing, during which time I sometimes felt defeated by it and considered giving up. Apparently my personal Angel of Resistance has a snarky sense of humor.)
I note this up front simply to alert you to the fact that the progression of thought in this essay follows its own internal logic. I fashioned it from things that came to me in private journal writing two years ago. On the paradoxical principle that what is most personal and private is also that which will connect most deeply with other people when shared, I trust my thoughts here will speak to some things that are meaningful to you. But if what I describe about Resistance indicating a potential falseness in one’s base creative motive sounds foreign, I hope you’ll at least remain open to the argument and follow it to the end, where maybe we’ll come together again.
Also be aware that what I say in this post interacts in various ways with several recent posts about writing versus not writing and the tension between the desire to create and the desire for spiritual awakening or liberation:
NOTE: This is the second entry in a multi-part series. Read Part 1 first. To find all the entries in this series, search for “cosmic creativity” using the search box at the top of this page.
The hollowing out of the creative drive
The concept of Resistance struck me so deeply when I first encountered it around 2009—seven years after the initial publication of Pressfield’s The War of Art—because I had already been grappling with the firsthand experience of it for many years. As reflected intermittently throughout my journals, in the early aughts I began to encounter a pointed, piercing sense of block on my creative output, both authorial and musical. It took an exceptionally insidious form, because it was not just a matter of feeling sterile, incapable, bereft of ideas, or otherwise prevented in any of the usual forms from starting or finishing a given piece of work that I really wanted to pursue. Rather, it was an attack on my very sense of wanting to pursue any given work at all. It felt like a draining of my core motivation, a hollowing out of my creative drive. Simply put, I was hit by wave after wave of felt uselessness, the powerful, spontaneous feeling and accompanying notion that writing a story or essay, or composing a song, or sometimes even writing in my journal, was flatly, absolutely, wearyingly, gallingly pointless.
Being attuned as I am to the wavelength of philosophical reflection, I both inhabited this experience (even as it also inhabited me) and studied it. I strove to understand it without rejecting it out of hand, even as I suffered from it. And it was the suffering that kept me from simply accepting it. I could easily see that there were no reasons to consider it flatly wrong, disordered, or suspect out of hand, because the question of whether creative output was a necessary and automatic good had some intrinsic validity. The thought that nothing really, ultimately mattered about my creative ideas and projects, either the completion or the abandoning of them, seemed to have real merit, theoretically speaking. And yet the living fact that I suffered from a sense of inner suffocation and mounting despair at my growing roster of creative misfires, stillbirths, and wholesale failures to launch took a toll. The pain of it kept me digging for answers, for clarity, for some position of stable, defensible affirmation, whether of my creative drive’s authentic uselessness (in which case I was off the hook) or its authentic value and meaningfulness (in which case I was off-course and careening into personal disaster).
I was hit by wave after wave of felt uselessness, the powerful, spontaneous feeling and accompanying notion that writing was pointless.
To put some flesh on these bones, here are three representative excerpts from my journal, spanning eighteen years and thus demonstrating that this has been a chronic issue. I share them on the chance and assumption that aspects of them will resonate with things you have encountered in your own creative journey.