“How to Marry Your Muse: An Interview with Jan Phillips,” Sounds True. An award-winning photographer, writer, artist, and national workshop leader shares her ideas on establishing a right relationship with your unconscious collaborator. “The whole point about the concept of ‘marrying your Muse’ is to recognize that our relationship with the inner world is every bit as important as our relationship with the outer world. If we want to experience the Muse, to really know and feel her as a collaborator in our creative work, then we have to commit our time and attention to her on a regular basis.”
“Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno,” Scott McDowell, 99%. This article draws practical tips from a new ebook about Brian Eno’s career and creative process, and relates his advice to recent discoveries in neuroscience about the necessity of building a relaxation phase into your creative cycle.
“5 Steps to Subconscious-Driven Creativity,” Patrick Ross, The Artist’s Road. An excellent procedure for directly engaging your unconscious mind by formulating targeted questions and handing them over to it.
“Writing above Your Head,” Clayton Luz, Glimmer Train. “Writing above your head makes something happen inside; it’s a process of self-realization, a self-knowing what Steven Pressfield artfully described as giving ‘birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our daimon, our genius.’”
“Finding a ‘Muse’ at the Beinecke,” Iva Popa, Yale Daily News. “For the next several months, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library will be providing insight into ‘the science of the soul.’ A new exhibition at the Beinecke, ‘Psyche and Muse,’ features a collection of pictures, handwritten letters, postcards, manuscripts and books belonging to influential figures from the history and development of psychology, ranging from Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung.”
“Daimonic Imagination, Uncanny Intelligence.” This was a conference held on May 6-7 at the University of Kent. A number of abstracts, PowerPoints, and full papers that were presented are now available online. The original call for papers itself is richly evocative and informative in its own right, and is well worth quoting at length:
In this inter-disciplinary conference we will be addressing the question of inspired creativity. In many traditions the fount of creative vision and the source of divinatory insight is located in an intelligent ‘other’, whether this is termed god, angel, spirit, muse or daimon, or whether it is seen as an aspect of the human imagination and the activation of the ‘unconscious’ in a Jungian sense. From the artistic genius to the tarot reader, the sense of communication with another order of reality is commonly attested. Such communication may take the form of a flash of intuitive insight, psychic or clairvoyant ability, or spiritual possession. In art and literature many forms have been given to the daimonic intelligence, from angels to aliens, and in the realm of new age practices encounters with spiritual beings are facilitated through an increasing variety of methods including shamanism, hypnotherapy, mediumship, psychedelics, channelling and spirit materialisation. Theories of divinatory practices such as astrology, tarot or I Ching often assume a spirit or god-like intelligence at work in symbolic interpretation, and guardian angels abound in self-help literature.
This conference is not concerned with ‘proving’ or ‘disproving’ the existence of such beings. Rather, we would invite papers that address the theme of how the ‘numinous other’ is conveyed and depicted, how its voice is heard, how it informs, and has always informed, human experience. We would like to engage the imagination and open up discussion, particularly around the subject of how researchers might best approach the study of such marginalised and culturally anomalous visions and experiences, and what their value might be.
Image credit: “Dark as my soul can be” used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) from formerlydumb
