You Are an Axis of Creation

Your life is a story being told by the universe. What you write is just a subplot.

Dear Living Dark readers,

To lead with the lede:

If you want to awaken your innate creativity, learn to recognize your very existence as a story: a narrative created by the universe. A tale being told within Being itself.

And now to back up slightly: At first I was inclined to open this post by calling it a “Monday morning meditation,” since I wrote it yesterday, on a Monday, and since the alliteration sounds nice. But it’s actually Tuesday when I’m publishing it, so that won’t do. And “Tuesday morning meditation” doesn’t roll off the tongue with the same alliterative charm. Whatever you call it, this post is about the connection between two levels or layers of creativity that converge in the human experience. Or rather they converge in the human phenomenon as a whole, in the very fact and nature of our existence as the kind of being that we are.

Consider: What you call “your life” is not just a mere sequence of events; it’s a story with you as the central character. However, dive deeper and you’ll find it’s a fiction. You are a dream character being spun from pure thought within absolute awareness. Only the faculty of memory holds it all together.

Nondual teacher John Wheeler offers a clear account of what’s happening here:

It is all castles in the air being constructed in thought. In a moment, we are conceiving of a past time, a past world, a past entity that was in that kind of world, a memory to hold all that and ourselves as some kind of being present in the middle of it all.

And though the impression that our memories belong or add up to a real “us” is so very vivid, careful introspection reveals what’s really going on:

In present awareness, present thoughts are appearing and disappearing. It is all purely conceptual, purely imagined. Time, the external world and the separate entity are all posited in thought. They are taken as real, but are not actually present as substantial things in themselves.

The situation is very much analogous to what we experience in a dream, where we interact with people and places, and where, as Wheeler puts it, “appropriate memories appear to corroborate everything.” But when we wake up later, we see that it was all a mental fabrication, just “appearances taken as real.” Moreover, “awareness stands beyond, free and untouched. It is not even in the dream. The dream is in it.” And then the transformative point: “It is the same with our present awareness in this apparent waking state.”

For some people, especially those who are not accustomed to the nondual style of discourse, assertions like these can feel almost freakishly outré, like outlandish delusions. But that’s just a matter of what someone is used to hearing, of their relative familiarity, or lack of it, with a certain mode of thinking and talking about life, self, and reality. Forget the verbiage, and just pause to look for yourself: What is really real in your present experience, within the inescapable cradle of your first-personhood, which is categorically all you have ever known and all that you can ever know? Dwell on this and become ruthlessly aware of when you are abstracting away into realms of theorizing and mental chatter based on baseless presuppositions instead of actually attending to what presents itself. The result might be a revelation.

So, to return to the point and reassert the bridge to writing and art: In your very essence as this separate identity, you are a story. And within this story of you, your creative endeavors are subplots. Microcosmic effusions of the prior creative effusion that is their author.

Recognizing this layered symmetry, this descending ontological scale of creation, is the key not only to unlocking your writing but to waking up. It’s the convergence point of spiritual awakening and creative artistic production. The more you understand your own story—both the narrative itself (which deserves attention in its own right; you can read your life like a novel) and the truth that it’s a story being spun from thought within your absolute identity as pure being-awareness—the more free and profound your writing and art can become, because now their relative place within your overall life experience is clear.

Fundamental issues that can hinder you are now resolved. How and why do you—or should you, or can you—write or create? Is there a reason for it? What about when you feel blocked, when Resistance rears its ugly head? These questions are moot. Creation is already happening in the very fact of your existence as this dream character. A story is already being told in the form of you. Now just loop into it with your pen by giving voice to whatever subplots want to emerge: whatever stories, novels, poems, articles, essays, memoirs, screenplays, journal entries, or scratchings in the snow are suggesting themselves for your devotion and attention, for your presence and participation as their point of entry into this world.

You are an axis of creation. Feel free to enjoy it.

Warm regards,