As explored in Part 1 of this series, communications from your unconscious mind are recognizable as such by the fact that they occur spontaneously. From your point of view — that is, the viewpoint of you-as-conscious-ego — the voice of the unconscious arrives in the form of involuntary promptings from a separate, independent, autonomous source within your subjectivity. This source — to restate the fundamental insight that animates this blog — is, or is equivalent to, the muse, daimon/daemon, and personal genius of classical antiquity.
(It’s also equivalent to a few additional and equally potent metaphors that we haven’t talked about yet, such as the Spanish duende as described by Federico Garcia Lorca. See “A Writer’s Guide to the Psyche, Part 1” and Part 2 for more detail about the daimon and such.)
Learning the specific “language” of your unconscious mind is therefore crucial to the cultivation of an empowered creative life. It doesn’t do you much good if your genius is trying to speak to you but you can’t understand it, or if you don’t even recognize the sound of its voice.
What you have to do is figure out, via careful attentiveness to your inner states of mind and emotion, the form(s) and the channel(s) by which and in which your inner partner wants to communicate and collaborate. We’ve already explored the general idea and some specific techniques by which you can get to know your daemon’s character (see “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1,” Part 2, and Part 3). Now it’s time to take a look at what’s effectively the converse side of things by considering the specific ways in which your daemon tries to make itself and its wishes known to you.
The daemon’s language: involuntary feelings and images
In line with its quality of involuntariness, the unconscious mind communicates primarily through feelings — intuitions, moods, emotions — and images. Or rather, it communicates through a combination of these: images infused with emotion. Feelings attached to images. They’re utterly inseparable from each other, as in our dreams, where we experience not just a sensory virtual reality but an all-pervading emotion or set of emotions. In dreams, sensory imagery is permeated by emotional resonances. There’s no distinction between them. The sight, sound, smell, and tactile feel of a dark house in a dream is indistinguishable from its emotional tone, which grips us utterly and inescapably, and informs us with thoughts and knowledge about the setting and events that we could not possibly, literally know.
Consciousness encounters an intrusion from the psychic outside in the form of feeling and image, and a creative direction is handed to you, if you want to accept it.
Dreams are of course the arena where we experience communion with the unconscious in its most unmediated state, but the same communion also occurs in waking life, and when it does, we can recognize it by the presence of a dominant emotion and/or image that grips our imagination, and that we are helpless to resist or argue with. This can take the form of nagging hunches, moods, or mental pictures that refuse to go away, and that thereby scream to be recognized and channeled. Or they can emerge sometimes as dramatic psychological-spiritual upheavals, as in the now-classic case of Jung’s transformative daimonic outbreak early in his career, exquisitely chronicled in his legendary (and finally published) Red Book, and the case of Sandra Lee Dennis’s terrifying imaginal eruptions as recounted in her Embrace of the Daimon (2001).
In either instance — an emotionally charged mental picture or a full-blown imaginal explosion — consciousness encounters an intrusion from the psychic outside in the form of feeling and image, and a creative direction from somewhere beyond your conscious ability to choose and control is handed to you, if you want to accept it.
Tuning into your muse’s communications on this wavelength entails giving deliberate attention to both the inner theater of your imaginal eye and the flux of moods-emotions-feelings that accompanies it. Writing teacher James Bonnet, author of Stealing Fire from the Gods: A Dynamic New Story Model for Writers and Filmmakers (2006; 1999), explains it this way:
The key to all of this is your feelings. Feelings are at the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious worlds, and while playing with your creative ideas, the positive and negative intuitive feelings you are experiencing are important messages from your inner creative self. If you learn how to read these feelings, then playing with your creative ideas becomes a direct means of contact. Getting in touch with your feelings is getting in touch with your self. Getting in touch with your self through your feelings is the heart and soul of the creative process. And it is the key to unlocking the power of story within you. . . . The important thing is to engage your feelings because that puts you in touch with your inner creative self and the energy behind those images.
– James Bonnet, “Unlocking the Power of Story within You“
Novelist and writing teacher John Gardner also wrote of the significance of intense mental imagery, or of something related to it, in On Becoming a Novelist (1983) when he emphasized the centrality of the “fictive dream,” the mental-imaginal movie that it is the novelist’s task and calling to enter as deeply as possible, and to channel with all accuracy, grace, and skill onto the page so that it can be recreated in the imagination of the reader.
Gardner, we will recall, wrote the highly laudatory preface to the current edition of Dorothea Brande’s 1934 classic Becoming a Writer that appears in bookstores, and which I have previously and repeatedly referred to here at Demon Muse because of the book’s focus on the pressing necessity and practical means of training yourself in creative work as if you were two (or even three) minds housed in a single body. Ms. Brande’s recommended discipline of morning writing, in which you commit to pouring your first waking thoughts with their density of unconscious content directly onto the page, might prove particularly useful as a means of training yourself to hear and understand your creative demon’s native language.
The demon with a typographic mind
Of course, for some people — myself most emphatically included — the unconscious mind, despite its predilection for speaking in raw emotions and images, makes itself known rather paradoxically by speaking in slightly mediated form as a persistent idea or train of thought. I’m one of those people who possess an innately verbal, conceptual, and reflective cast of mind, and this means many of the things that move me strongly, whether they come from within or without, tend to be expressed in words, which for me arise almost instantly to cloak emotions and images in a verbal overlay.
So I’ve had to learn to pay attention to my looping chains of thought, which are varied and numerous on any given day. For me and people like me — and there are still some of us around, even amid the current civilization-wide rise of the image and death of the classically typographic mind — a valid and necessary way of training ourselves to hear the daimon speak is to become deliberately aware of the thoughts that involuntarily grip us, and then to read their persistent themes as clues to creative direction and daimonic destiny.
Tangentially, or perhaps not, it can be useful in this endeavor to learn one of the available techniques for increasing real-time awareness of your thoughts and inner states, e.g., the teachings of Eckhart Tolle, the general practice of mindfulness, training in Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way,” or any type of meditation practice.
A valid and necessary way of training ourselves to hear the daimon speak is to become deliberately aware of the thoughts that involuntarily grip us.
Also tangentially, and as probable fodder for another post, you’ll note that this attitude toward language is quite distinct from the usual Zen/nondual/mystical dismissal of mental talk as nothing but the perpetual insane chatter of the “mad monkey,” the ceaseless verbal mind that babbles endlessly about nothing, and whose insanity and emptiness it is our proper task to see through, by which activity we thereby quiet that mind as we dissociate from it and realize our true identity, which is higher or deeper than words and conceptual thought. Indeed, a great deal of our mental chatter really is useless and distracting, and we really will benefit from recognizing it as such in accordance with tried and tested techniques of inner liberation. But it’s a grave mistake to assume that this warrants, therefore, a dogmatic dismissal of every last scrap of our self-propelling inner talk.
The very recommendation to pursue such a goal smacks of the same rejection of deep psychic reality that, e.g., Dennis talks about in Embrace of the Daimon when she notes that religion, “a realm we might suppose open to imaginal reality,” actually has a long history of distrusting and suppressing the imagination, and that this is far from being solely a Western phenomenon, since the relatively recent and ongoing incorporation of the Eastern religious sensibility and related practices into Western religion has confronted Westerners with the fact that “Most forms of Buddhism (the Tibetan tradition being an exception) reject the imaginal even more emphatically than Christian tradition” because this aspect of psychic reality “is viewed as a delusion that Buddhist practitioners attempt to ‘deconstruct’ along with all experience.”
Branding all involuntary inner talk as empty chatter to be seen through and abandoned is as damaging to creativity as that wholesale rejection of the imaginal. This is a long-running antagonism in the realm of spiritual-philosophical-religious thought and discourse, not just generically but in my own experience and that of many others. As mentioned above, it’s also a theme that we may well return to in a separate Demon Muse post.
“A generally intensified emotional sensibility”
But even in the case of hyper-verbal people like me and my ilk, what’s really fundamental is the deep emotional charge with which these demon-driven words and thoughts are invested. It’s like Dorothy Canfield described in her 1920 account of the origin of one of her popular stories. She said that for her, the act of writing fiction always started with a heightened emotional responsiveness to the world:
No two of my stories are ever constructed in exactly the same way, but broadly viewed they all have exactly the same genesis, and I confess I cannot conceive of any creative fiction written from any other beginning [...than...] that of a generally intensified emotional sensibility, such as every human being experiences with more or less frequency. Everybody knows such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply. . . .
I have no idea whence this tide comes, or where it goes, but when it begins to rise in my heart, I know that a story is hovering in the offing.
– Dorothy Canfield, “How ‘Flint and Fire’ Started and Grew,” available in, e.g., The Creative Process, ed. Brewster Ghiselin
Serious students of supernatural fiction may hear in Canfield’s words a distinct echo of H.P. Lovecraft’s repeated descriptions of a sense of transcendent longing and heightened responsiveness to architectural and natural beauty, and of his assertion that this state of inner inflamedness is in fact
the impulse which justifies authorship. . . . The time to begin writing is when the events of the world seem to suggest things larger than the world — strangenesses and patterns and rhythms and uniquities of combination which no one ever saw or heard before, but which are so vast and marvellous and beautiful that they absolutely demand proclamation with a fanfare of silver trumpets. Space and time become vitalised with literary significance when they begin to make us subtly homesick for something ‘out of space, out of time.’ . . . To find those other lives, other worlds, and other dreamlands, is the true author’s task. That is what literature is; and if any piece of writing is motivated by anything apart from this mystic and never-finished quest, it is base and unjustified imitation.
– H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters II (1925-1929)
Not everybody works in the emotionally rarefied vein of cosmic wonder and horror that Lovecraft mined, but we can abstract from his (and Canfield’s) words the general principle that we will do well to stay on the lookout for this sense of being charged by a deep emotional responsiveness, and that when it arises, we should act on it.
Regardless of the exact way or ways in which you experience this state, whenever you do experience it, you can know that your unconscious mind is seeping through the cracks in your egoic shell to infuse your daylight experience with a dose of nightworld significance. And that, my friends, is exactly the realm of infinite inner richness and raw, self-evident meaningfulness that you’re looking to tap in your writing and other creative work.
Concluded in Part 3
BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS POST:
IMAGE CREDIT:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Related posts:
