Since Michael got me thinking about the writing thang again, I thought I'd try to start a thread *about* writing, and hope that it doesn't devolve into mere ankle-biting.
Writing is a Class I narcotic. If you can get into the flow of it, it's a more powerful high than any street drug you can name. I've tried many of them in my day, so I speak with some experience on this subject. :-) And the "high" comes -- at least for me -- from a phenomenon I call "reversing the flow." It's IMO what artists do that transforms what they do from mere doing into art. Most of our lives we spend "taking in" the flow of life. We are bombarded by so many sights, sounds, and experiences. They flow seemingly from "outside" of us *into* us, where we process them mentally and physically and turn them into our perception of reality. And we also turn them into our philosophy about life, whether we think of it in those terms or not. Each of these experiences *shapes* us, *colors* us, and transforms us in many ways. And ALL of these experiences are still floating around in our brains somewhere, ready to be accessed if we can only find the key to get back into them. For me, one of the mechanisms that provides that key is writing. When I sit down and try to write about a past spiritual experience, often magic happens and it becomes a present spiritual experience. When you find the key to these formative spiritual experiences in your brain, you can allow them to "come out," and express themselves in your writing. And that process feels very much to me like "reversing the flow." Instead of "taking in" the experiences the world has presented you, you get to "send them out" instead. You get to feel the same energies, but now flowing *from* you back out into the world they came from. It's a real rush. Trying to capture the elusiveness of a very high alternate reality state of attention in words, it's as if the only way my brain can accomplish that is by putting me *back* into that same alternate reality state of attention. And the wonderful thing is that it's *still there*. By writing about it I can pull that state of attention into the present, "put it on" like a suit of clothes, and "wear" it again while writing the story. It's just the damndest thing. It's pretty much my favorite thing these days, now that I've kinda weaned myself from chasing gurus. One of the most fun things for me, which you don't get to see often here on this forum because I don't post those kinds of writing here, is to write characters. What makes that fun is that I do a kind of mental trick when I do so. I "put on" the character, assume their identity, and "wear" them for the duration of the story or scene I'm writing. That's what made the writing of the two scorpion stories in Road Trip Mind so much fun for me. The first one came out fairly spontaneously, during that short "time window" after an experience where you can still remember it clearly. The event in question had been a particularly powerful desert trip with Rama, and I was still reeling from it, so much so that I wasn't sure I still had an "I" to reel. I had actually made an audio tape of some of the things said on that trip, and after transcribing it I knew I wanted to turn it into a story, but every attempt to start writing it failed until I hit upon a quirky idea. Why not tell my story from someone else's point of view? Tell about the same events, but "as seen by" someone else. And so, being me, I chose an Anza-Borrego Desert scorpion as my narrator. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a wise-ass scorpion living in Carrizo Gorge, and "put on" his mindset. Then I managed to "wear" it while writing the story. The whole story, as it turned out, because it all came out in one short burst of binge-writing. And man! was that FUN. What a high -- being not only someone else, but someone not even of your species. Unfortunately, both in real life and in my story, the evening didn't turn out so well for my narrator-scorpion. He got smushed. And on some level I missed him, because I'd had so much FUN being him. Then, years later, when I was struggling to find a way to *end* Road Trip Mind, my Native American girlfriend read the first scorpion story and said, "You should write about him again." That idea stuck in my head, even though I had killed him off in the first story. So I just reincarnated him. The last story in RTM is written from the point of view of his next incarnation. Talk about FUN! I was sitting there in a Santa Fe bar laughing out loud as I got to be him again, and that story just came out, again all in one session of binge-writing. What a high. I think the waitress thought I was high on something. And I was. I was high on writing. Which brings me back to the original subject. *Can* we think of writing not only as a way to capture and convey spiritual experience to others, but as a *spiritual experience in itself*? I think we can. Musicians certainly do it. Painters are famous for doing it. Both sets of artists have a long history of talking about the experience *of* composing music, or creating a painting. Well, I'm just suggesting that writers can, too. Good spiritual writing (and probably good writing, period) is IMO achieved by getting the fuck out of one's own way. The more *self* you've got "in the way" when you reverse the flow, the less able you are to write effectively. To allow the creative flow *to* flow, you've kinda got to drop being a self, and just be. It sounds like work, but it isn't. It's a real high. And unlike drugs, not only is the first one free, all the subsequent ones are, too.
