Thank you for writing this, and thank you for making it available as a free ebook. Is this an offering to your own muse/daemon/secret inner self? If so I hope your creative life has been amply rewarded. It was a terrific read – insightful, authortitative and accessible, pulling together many mysterious threads into a coherent narrative, and one that rang viscerally true. It’s a trail I’ve been following blindly most of my life, but I couldn’t have put it so eloquently into words as you have done here. This is surely essential reading for all creative writers. If it’s okay with you, I’ll make sure I link to your work in a future blog – me being an occasional doe eyed cheerleader for the cause of the unknowable femme fatal of my inner life.

There were many things in your book that touched upon my own experience, names I’ve stumbled across in my search for anwers to the chronic condition that ails me – the singular need to write; Jung, Hillman, Harpur, Wilbur. Each name ringing like a syncronistic bell.

I could go on at length, but this is only supposed to be a comment so I must summon all my unnatural powers of brevity. One of the things that rang especially true here was that I too have struggled with the apparent conflict between the Buddhist path (which I find to be otherwise deeply insightful) and the need of a writer to tune in to the chattering of his muse, or rather to discern between the useless chattering of his monkey brain, and the more emotionally enriching intercourse between a man and his conduit to the anima mundi. It’s an interesting paradox, that the wisest of human beings have safely plotted a course out of reality’s sufferings, while our most deeply insightful and instinctual opposite numbers in the deamonic realm seem intent on plotting a way back in. It makes you wonder if we’re missing something?

But that’s another story.

Once again, my sincere thanks, and my respects.

Michael

Nice article. After reading the article, I think I need to balance what I am doing with something I can make some money at, but also enjoy.

Is this a valid rational assumption in expanding co-dependence; or did my compass stop pointing North?

I did not plan on being “a” Copernicas or Darwin; but if the Human ego needs another whack, shortening its pedistal; then I gladly provide the impliment for its enlittlement. “My daimon told me to do it”.
-B.R

“Midwifery”, and “I am doomed to an anonymity of being ten typing fingers”.

I/”I”? just had “an involuntary thought/realization”, added from another of your pages on hibernation, or writers block…

Its not writers block, its that our Daimon is, pregnant.
Okay, here goes…
1. Our experiences and encounters in the world/Universe around us, “impregnate” our Daimon.
2. While I-self is “stuck”, the Daimon is “pregnant”.
3. Eventually, “our Daimon creates”; gives birth.
4. “Ego edits”; raising the new “life” to maturity until it can go out into the world on its own, to then impregnate other people’s Daimons. which is then step one again; other Daimons, through their human, impregnate our Daimon. The cycle of life continues round and round again.

In other thoughts…

-Do I have a Daimon, or does my Daimon have a mairionette, who thinks is a human? Or,
-Do we “marry” our Daimon, or work for a Monarch?
We can either be happy by being aware of our Daimon, with eventual induced eudaimonia, or we can ignore our Daimon, and live “short, nasty, barbaric lives”.
-So, is Free Will a farce?

Thank you. The gravitational force that is this blog is providing to be maddening, joyously thought provoking experience.
-Mr. Ben RUDOLPH

Most writers attempt to write consciously, or attempt to access the subconscious by incapacitating what they see as a conscious interference or barrier (via drugs, alcohol, whatever). To borrow Ms. Rosoff’s analogy above, this is like a disabled rider on the horse.

BOTH rider and horse must be up to the task for the best result, but most creatives can’t quite manage that. Why? Much has to do with our struggle with ego, which Ms. Rosoff describes as ‘confronting difficult fact’.

Glad I found this blog. Bookmarked.