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. Read the rest of this entry »
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