Travel Tales on Love and Meditation

Friday 24 September 2010

A swarming mind: the writer's tool

Something has been driving me crazy lately. My imagination.
When it comes to meditation, the imagination blossoms, much like the body. The deeper I go, the more there is empty space. I'm not sure I want to go there.
My ambition is to be a writer, to publish many novels and follow in the footsteps of my heroes; Roald Dahl, Truman Capote, George Orwell, Stephen King. I want to be prolific, to write stories that capture the imagination, stories about daring adventures and far off lands.
In a spiritual sense, there is a lot that is misguided about the above paragraph. And it bothers me a great deal.
Firstly - ambition. To want to be higher than others, ahead, a leader - in many ways denies the spirit of zen. Everyone is the same, everyone is beautiful. The trick here, however difficult to avoid, is to focus on the stories, not the reward. Create only for yourself. Is this a paradox? Can you truly write with no audience in mind? Is writing really just masturbation of the subconscious?
Secondly - heroes. Walk your own path, don't follow in the footsteps of others. Be an individual. To hone my skill I need to read. To read means joining the plethora of inter-textual meanings, phrases and characters. Apparently it's related to Post-modernism - the collective consciousness. Good for spirituality when you're working on positivity, bad when it comes to original stories that publishers buy.
Thirdly (and most importantly) - thinking. The mind is the primary tool of a writer. Delving into it distracts from the present, the realm of the now, the release of all problems, the abstraction of past and future. Whenever I write, I begin to suffer. Indeed, can writing truly stem from non-suffering. If you don't suffer, what do you have to write about?

Still, I'll work it out. Eventually.

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