The strange freedom of choosing misery

Most of us are engaged, more or less unconsciously, in a continual attempt to convince ourselves that it’s impossible for us to be really, finally happy. We make an airtight case for our unhappiness, pinning it on various supposedly unalterable conditions and inescapable circumstances. Our life, we say—at least to ourselves, and sometimes to others in one way or another—simply won’t let us be happy.

But the truth is that no condition, whether objective/external or subjective/internal, ever forces our ultimate attitude or outlook. As Viktor Frankl famously observed in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” The external context where Frankl discovered this truth for himself was one of the most nightmarish imaginable: a series of Nazi concentration camps, where he was imprisoned for three years. One might expect an environment like that to torture the sense of attitudinal autonomy clean out of a person. But for Frankl, it was the crucible where a living awareness of ultimate human freedom was forged.

Importantly, a corollary of Frankl’s insight is also true, representing its complement or converse: We can actually choose to limit our own freedom of choice. Usually, we do this unconsciously. As Richard Bach observed in Illusions, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

It’s a sad and, in the end, useless thing that we do, employing our freedom to convince ourselves and others that we’re not free, that our life is a miserable trap. The door is always open, but we insist that it’s closed.

The Intimacy of Writing by Hand

  • Post category:Book News
  • Reading time:1 min read

Today I started correcting the first batch of page proofs for Writing at the Wellspring. Not with a computer keyboard, but by hand.

I love the tactile sense of intimate connection to the text that’s generated by this approach. Stephen King has talked about writing the entire first draft of Dreamcatcher by hand when he was unable to sit at a word processor while recovering from his near-fatal encounter with that van. He said this approach reconnected him with the language in a way he hadn’t felt for years.

I grok that completely. Whether writing or editing, working with text by hand is the most intimate experience you can have with it, a direct and embodied relationship. And it’s deeply satisfying for the clarity and connection it brings.

When the self is only a puppet

Those who have long inhabited, in their imaginations and fascinations, the crossover territory between religion and unitive spirituality on the one hand and supernatural horror on the other—in other words, people like me—will find much to fascinate in the following passage from Terence Gray, writing famously as Wei Wu Wei. The Ligottian vibes are especially strong in this articulation of the way the self is only a puppet:

[A] sentient being objectively is only a phantom, a dream-figure, nor is anything done via a psycho-somatic apparatus, as such, other than the production of illusory images and interpretations, for that also has only an apparent, imagined or dreamed, existence. All phenomenal “existence” is hypothetical…

“Our dreamed “selves,” autonomous in appearance, as in life, can be seen in awakened retrospect to be puppets totally devoid of volitional possibilities on their own. Nor is the dream in any degree dependent on them except as elements therein. They, who seem to think that they are living and acting autonomously, are being dreamed in their totality, they are being activated as completely and absolutely as puppets are activated by their puppeteer. Such is our apparent life, on this apparent earth, in this apparent universe.

—Wei Wu Wei, Open Secret (1965)

For comparison, here are two sections from Ligotti’s poem cycle I Have a Special Plan for This World that articulate perhaps the darkest possible angle from which an organism can intuit the nondual reality of things, including its own identity. It’s no accident that these appear next to each other, in succession, among the cycle’s thirteen numbered sections. I consider them to represent high points, veritable mountain peaks, both thematically and artistically, among Tom’s total body of work.

The muse is more interesting than your brain chemistry

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

Why is it that every time a headline says something like, “Study reveals fascinating new information about creativity,” the article proves to be not fascinating at all, but the most boring thing anyone ever thought to write?

“Researchers at XYZ Institute of Research into the BrainMind have published a new paper in the Journal of Creative Biological Studies of Brain and Mind that indicates the Ganglior Network in the basal singular portion of the brain is implicated in stochastular effusions of concatenated electrical impulses throughout the anterior dingalum. Lead researcher Dr. ABC, speaking for a ninety-seven person team distributed across twelve universities in six countries, stated, ‘These findings represent an astounding leap forward in our understanding of how creativity works. Because the concatenated electrical impulses have now been observed to be pervasive throughout the anterior dingalum, we know the Ganglior Network communicates continuously with the Markoff Parietal Network in a different region of the brain, suggesting that creativity is the result of these internal communications within the human nervous system. To put it in lay terms, whenever you receive a new idea, your brain is literally about to explode out the top of your skull.’”

Okay, I suppose that last part about a potential cranial eruption would qualify as interesting. But for some reason, the rest of it just doesn’t grab me. Call me weird or blinkered or out of touch, but I’m more interested in the muse or daemon itself, and in what it feels like to commune and collaborate with this intelligence, this force, this presence that arrives with the felt sense of a discrete entity with whom you’re partnered and allied. And I think such an interest, and such a communion, is far more exhilarating, and far more conducive to an actual experience of creative emergence and flow, than all those dry-bones attempts to explain the whole thing in terms of its possible neurobiological correlates and underpinnings.

Art as escape, art as reality

  • Post category:Uncategorized
  • Reading time:2 mins read

There’s such a deep and delicate divide between art and ideas as expressions of reality and art and ideas as escapes from reality. Their status and function in each of our lives hinges on our inner state and attitude, our relative clarity of vision and intent whenever we engage with them, whether as creators or appreciators. I’m convinced that for most of us, most of the time, including me, the escapist intent, the desire to use art and ideas to abstract away from living reality, is dominant. I could cut out more than 90% of my reading, viewing, thinking, and writing, and lose nothing of value. In fact, I’d gain clarity and peace by lopping off one of the prime fuel sources for the mad monkey mind.

This is a key self-recognition, because that monkey mind is so very good at chattering to itself about how the exact opposite is true, about the supposed supreme spiritual value of continuing to wallow in mental and artistic representations of reality instead of just dropping the whole thing and resting in the present reality of what simply and actually is. This primary, unmediated Real is what that misguided outer search via artificial means is really after all along.

Ramana Maharshi famously observed that reality is simple, but we make it complicated. He said the average person won’t be content when told the simple truth, that “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” and will instead demand the elaboration of complex religious systems. The same holds true for our daily engagement with all of life. Life is simple. Reality is simple. It’s all given right here, with no holding back, immediately and totally, all of it at this moment. But we feel that we need to think something, say something, do something, create something, see/feel/hear know something, before it’s really real. The ultimate cosmic self-punking.