As I’ve gone about the task of making final edits and improvements to A Course in Demonic Creativity over the past few weeks, the text has unexpectedly begun to grow. Instead of the previously mentioned length of 30,000 words, the final version will clock in closer to 40,000. It’s an appropriate enough development, given the book’s — and this blog’s — focus on the inner genius, the daimonic muse, and the experience of creativity as an autonomous phenomenon.

The newly expanded version naturally requires a bit more editing, not only for orthographic purposes but to ensure that the whole thing fits together as a coherent and harmonious text. So I’m rescheduling its release from today to September 26. It will appear here first as a free pdf that has been intentionally formatted to look good on e-reader screens, and then a short time later (a few weeks to a month) in one or two other formats (Kindle, epub). The table of contents remains the same as previously announced.

Many thanks for your interest and patience. A lot of people have told me they’re looking forward to the book. In lieu of publishing it today, here’s its introduction:

Where does creativity come from? Why do ideas and inspiration feel as if they come from “outside,” from an external source that’s separate from  us but able to whisper ideas directly into the mind? Why have so many writers throughout history—and also composers, painters, philosophers, mystics, and scientists—spoken of being guided, accompanied, and even haunted by a force or presence that not only serves as the deep source of their creative work but exerts a kind of profound and inexorable gravitational pull on the shape of their lives?

These are all questions addressed by the ebook you’re now reading. A Course in Demonic Creativity is a book about the deep nature of creativity in art and life. Its starting point is the understanding that we all possess a higher or deeper intelligence than the everyday mind, and that learning to live and work harmoniously and energetically with this intelligence is the irreducible core of a successful artistic life, and also of a successful life as a whole, if true success is defined as fulfilling the purpose for which you were born (and failure as its soul-crushing opposite).

We can call this intelligence the unconscious mind or the silent partner. We can call it the id or the secret self. But “muse,” “daimon,” and “genius” are so much more effective at conveying its subversive and electrifying emotional charge. The hundred-year history of modern-day depth psychology that started with Freud has numbed us to the radicalness inherent in the very idea of an unconscious mind, but we can begin to reclaim the transformative power of the original psychoanalytic insight by recognizing that right now, even as our eyes dance across this page or screen, and as a matter of brute, first-person fact, each of us is sharing his or her subjective space with a second self. Presently and always, there are at least two intelligences looking out from behind our eyes.

We can also begin to intuit the uncanny impact of this recognition by recalling that the idea of demonic possession in its distinctively Christian and pre-Christian form arose from the very same thought stream that gave us the muse and the daimon. The guiding daimon of the ancient Greeks, always an ambiguous and volatile figure, became the purely evil demon of the Christians, prone to usurp the personality and destabilize the community. At the same time, aspects of it were channeled into the emerging figure of the Christian guardian angel. So if we seek to enhance our art by fashioning ourselves into conduits for this force—a common enough goal, recommended by many popular books on creativity and self-development (very few of which, however, actually mention the muse, daimon, or genius)—then we’re playing, as it were, with fire. But that certainly shouldn’t stop us. Deliberately personifying your unconscious mind, whether as an act of pure attitudinal adjustment or a more concrete matter of giving it a name and imagining its visual appearance, makes it all the more easy and manageable to hand over your creative problems to it, and then later to accept the breakthrough insights and rushes of inspiration when they emerge.

What follows is a substantial expansion and integration of material that was originally published at my blog Demon Muse, as well as at other blogs and websites. To get the feel of it, imagine a college lecture course, or better, a graduate seminar, where the point isn’t so much to lay out a strict structure of assignments and information in lesson-plan format as to engage in an open, yet focused, conversation about the subject, and to see where it takes us. The first two chapters explain the philosophical, psychological, spiritual, historical, cultural, and general theoretical background to the book’s muse-based approach to daimonic creativity. The remaining six chapters explore the practical applications of this understanding for writers and artists. In all of them, I draw extensively on the work of many other writers about creativity and related matters whose work has informed and enriched my own understanding both philosophically and experientially.

Collectively, these discussions and explorations form a course in what might be called the Way of the Muse or the Path of Deep Inspiration. I’ve given it the overarching title A Course in Demonic Creativity not only because it has a nice ring to it, but because it captures the presiding spirit. As touched on above, and as will be explained in greater detail in Chapter Two, “A Brief History of the Daimon and the Genius,” the word demon carries a host of deep meanings that have been largely lost to modern awareness, and their excavation reveals the fascinating, troubling, exhilarating, terrifying depths of what it means to be saddled with this pervasive and inescapable sense of a separate, guiding, inspiring, dominating presence within the psyche. Coming to terms with this presence, getting in stride with it, divining its leanings and desires, learning to embrace it, and identify with it, and “channel” its energy—this is the deep discipline of embodying and fulfilling your unique creative calling in life and art.

Your unconscious mind truly is your “genius.” Befriending it as such, and interacting with it as if it really is a separate, collaborating presence, puts you in a position to receive its gifts, and it in the position to give them to you. This book, drawn from my own personal experiences and studies as an author, musician, and inner explorer, is my attempt to explain what this really entails for writers and artists, and how you can verify its all for yourself.

– From A Course in Demonic Creativity (coming September 26, 2011)

Share

Related posts:

  1. Free Demon Muse ebook set for September 19 release
  2. Revised cover for demonic creativity ebook