To repeat a point we explored previously in “Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (1),” it’s vital in creative work that you learn to embrace the recurring fallow periods during which you feel like you’re not getting anything done, since these are the times when your unconscious genius is performing its magic by going to work on things you’ve learned and planned through conscious effort, and is transmuting them via a process of psychological alchemy into the stuff of inspired originality.
However, and as also stated previously, we’ve got to recognize that not all waiting is alike. It’s common to think of waiting as a passive activity, a non-action that’s indistinguishable from idleness. But the type of waiting that’s involved in creative work is anything but idle. In fact, it’s highly active, so much so that you may be just as well served by thinking of it as an aggressive courting of your demon muse, a kind of “come-on” that encourages your inner partner to provide the hoped-for influx of inspiration.
For an helpfully illustrative analogy, I direct your attention to field of religion, where we find millions of people engaged in a type of waiting that’s directly analagous, not just broadly but quite specifically, to the type of waiting we need to learn in regard to our daemonic inner collaborator.
Lessons from religion
Two examples, one from the East and one from the West, will suffice to establish the point — which, remember, is the importance of waiting for inspiration from your demon muse in a manner that’s not passively idle but aggressively alert.
Zen: Waiting for enlightenment
In Zen Buddhism, zazen meditation is framed as a method of waiting for enlightenment, which cannot be actively achieved but must be actively courted. Practitioners learn the basic mechanics of sitting meditation, the correct posture and breathing and all that, and also the correct mental and emotional attitudes. See for example the beautiful commentaries on these matters in Shunryu Suzuki-roshi’s 1970 classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
Rule number one in the attitudinal department is that you aren’t meditating to attain enlightenment, but to clear a space in which it can spontaneously happen, since the very idea of attaining some sort of transformation, or indeed anything at all, for your little ego self is a symptom and expression of the very condition of cosmic delusion for which enlightenment is the cure. Enlightenment has to happen on its own, outside the sphere of a person’s effort, because it’s an experience that reveals a reality that categorically transcends everything about who and what you perceive yourself to be. It breaks through from beyond the ego’s shell.
A famous Zen story tells of a monk who was obsessed with meditating. He spent far more hours in his monastery’s meditation hall than any of the other monks, sitting morning, noon, and night, and stealing every spare moment to sit some more. One day the monastery’s resident master asked him, “Why do you meditate so much?” The monk replied, “Because I want to become a Buddha” — that is, he wanted to attain enlightenment. Hearing this, the master immediately snatched up a floor tile from the meditation hall and began scrubbing it furiously with the sleeve of his robe. The monk asked in astonishment, “What are you doing?” and the master told him, “I’m trying to make a mirror.” The astonished monk exclaimed, “But you can’t turn a floor tile into a mirror by polishing it!” Whereupon the master, dropping the tile, bellowed back, “You can’t make a Buddha by meditating!”
So what, then, is the purpose of meditating? Since I’m not a Zen Buddhist (except of the informal sort), I’ll answer by passing on an oft-quoted remark from American Zen master Richard Baker-roshi, who famously said, “Enlightenment is an accident. Meditation makes you more accident-prone.”
Christianity: Waiting for Jesus, and Jesus on waiting
Along the same lines, in a section of author Eckhart Tolle’s groundbreaking spiritual self-help book The Power of Now titled “The esoteric meaning of waiting,” Tolle draws attention to “a qualitatively different kind of waiting [than laziness or boredom], one that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will miss it.” He says this in the context of commenting on Jesus’ parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25:1-13), which he (Tolle) interprets symbolically as a heads-up about the importance of waiting attentively for divine illumination.
And speaking of Jesus, we’re all familiar with the Christian doctrine of his eventual return. Hundreds of millions of Christians live in anticipation of this event, some with a spiritual or metaphorical attitude and others with a literal expectation of seeing the clouds part and a man in a glowing white robe descend from a spatially located heaven. In both cases, the religious life is invested with a quality of alert expectancy for the arrival of something that’s completely beyond a person’s ability to control. It will just happen when it happens, and show up when it shows up. The Christian’s proper task, whether conceived mystically/metaphorically or literally, is to remain watchful and receptive. As the synoptic Jesus tells his listeners in the famous apocalyptic passages of Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21, nobody, not even the angels, knows the day or the hour when the “end of the age” will come. “Therefore keep watch,” he says, and “be ready,” because you don’t know when the great event will happen.
The point: Stay alert for what wants to be said through you
I assume the relevance of these religious and spiritual themes to the topic at hand is obvious. The quality of your mindstate is crucial when you’re waiting for creative inspiration to spark. If you’re not paying attention, not mindfully watching and waiting for the inspiration to arise so that you can greet it and engage with it somehow or other, you may well miss it.
Author and photographer David Ulrich, in his masterful manual on the deep nature of the creative process, The Widening Stream, explains the process of active waiting on creativity like this:
Creativity requires that we enter a region of risk, not depending on what we know or leaning on our comforting habits or past formulas. Seeking a creative response, we sit quietly in front of ourselves and the task at hand, waiting but not-waiting…taking the risk of just being. Sometimes we experiment and play; sometimes we do nothing. Eventually, something wells up from within, a new impulse, a fresh response that can help and guide us. If we alternate doing with not-doing, activity with rest, insights will come in response to our deepest questions and most perplexing problems. And it does work. All we must do is try.
– David Ulrich, The Widening Stream: The Seven Stages of Creativity (2002)
Note well that failure to pay attention and wait actively for the motions of your demon muse may result not only in your failing to hear it when it speaks, but in its failure to speak at all. To put it another way, if you’re not ready when a moment of inspiration arises, it may pass over you in search of a more alert and receptive point of entry. Remember, our supervening concept here at Demon Muse is the personification of creativity as a separate and independent force. If you adopt this attitude, whether you think of it as employing a useful psychological metaphor or recognizing something “really real,” then one logical corollary is the recognition that creativity not only chooses to visit you according to its own wishes but can choose not to visit you, if you misuse, ignore, or otherwise abuse it.
The tendency of ideas to coalesce from the cultural ether, as it were, and pop up from independent sources in strikingly synchronicitous fashion is well established. The independent and simultaneous invention of the differential calculus by Newton and Leibniz in the 17th century is only the most famous example. So if you want to increase your odds of being chosen to say what’s wanting to be said through you, then take a hint and discipline yourself to hear your inner voice, whether by learning to meditate, praying directly to your muse (something that a number of real writers really do), rearranging your life and/or schedule to allow for more mental “breathing room,” or taking some other concrete action.
Working, waiting, and courting the muse
“We are working not for work’s sake, producing not for production’s sake. What we are trying to do is to find a way to release the truth that lies in all of us.” – Ray Bradbury
Importantly, this state of stillness infused with alert expectancy can and often should be accompanied by active engagement in any number of concrete pursuits. A painter practicing brushstrokes. A composer studying music theory. A scientist conducting primary research and/or studying to gain a comprehensive knowledge of his or her field. A writer pounding out endless pages in order to refine his or her sheer ability to string words together gracefully and effortlessly. These and a thousand other activities represent what might be called waiting-as-preparation (or vice versa), waiting as the active attempt to mold oneself into a vessel capable of holding and channeling inspiration productively. After all, what good is inspiration if you don’t have the technical facility to embody it when it shows up? “Have you trained yourself so that you can say what you want to say without getting hamstrung?” asks Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing. “We are working not for work’s sake, producing not for production’s sake. What we are trying to do is to find a way to release the truth that lies in all of us.”
Ulrich amplifies this point when he offers several examples of artists honing their craft: “the artist in the cluttered working studio, the carpenter in the well-equipped woodshop, the chef in the within-arms-reach-of-everything kitchen, the dancer in the mirrored hall with polished, spacious floors, the writer seated at his or her simple desk, or a writer like myself seated at a digital command module with a scanner, laser printer, full-page monitor, and several computers within easy reach.” He observes that “all these scenarios and many others invite a way of working for each individual that may encourage the muse to appear, invite inspiration and new understanding, and help incur fresh combinations of form and language.” All of this, he says, constitutes “the work of craft,” which includes both learning the technical requirements and processes of our work and searching for “the suitable — the right and true — sense of form to clothe our ideas.”
Novelist Steven Pressfield, author of the brilliant guide to creativity The War of Art (and also The Legend of Bagger Vance and several bestselling historical novels), says much the same thing in a March 2010 blog post about the awesome creative power of habit. And he says it in a way that resonates beautifully with our overarching model of a personified spirit — muse, daemon, genius — of creativity:
We usually think of habits as bad. A drug habit, an alcohol habit. But habits can be tremendously positive too. The habit of going to the gym, of meditating, of daily visiting someone who could use a little kindly attention.
What I’m trying to do, myself, day-by-day in my professional regimen, is to reinforce the habit of a regular work schedule. I don’t succeed all the time. Days definitely get away from me. But the goal never changes and I never let up. I want to build a groove, I want to establish a positive, momentum-generating pattern.
. . . . The Muse favors habit. Each day when she looks down on us from Mt. Olympus, her first question is: Where is that S.O.B. who was sniveling and beseeching my aid yesterday? If she sees us in our studio, at our desk, making our calls, a warm glow suffuses her immortal heart. Ah, she says to herself, a true devotee! The Muse is like any other boss; she values talent, yes, but what she favors even more is devotion, dedication, perseverance. When she sees our butts in our seats, she can’t help herself; “Okay, okay, I’ll give this poor sucker a couple of ideas today.”
– Steven Pressfield, “Habit,” at Writing Wednesdays, March 31, 2010
It all winds down, therefore, to a kind of punchline: “Hurry up and wait!” Or to take that old chesntnut of an ironical joke, “Don’t do something. Just sit there.”
Taken in the right sense, both pieces of advice can advance you to a new level of deep and fulfilling alignment with your creative demon, if you’ll just put them into practice.
BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:
IMAGE CREDITS:
- “Waiting” – Used under Creative Commons from pangalactic gargleblaster
- “Spirit of Meditation” – Used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney
- “Christ in Clouds” – Used under Creative Commons from Diego_3336
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