Sunday, January 29, 2006
Today's Writer's Tip: Don't Be Afraid to be Influenced By, and have Influence Upon, your Reality
I realized something liberating, or may I say (without evidence but from the direction of more love) that someone dear whispered in my ear. I considered that if my stories have fearful present life connections, such as my awareness of mortality and fears and fantasies of death rising in a story about a man dying, then I might have choices for what this can mean. Fear says they are premonitions.
I recently had the creepy experience of working on a story about a world virus plague just months before the fears and possibilities of a bird flu pandemic ascended in the headlines. But my story may have been a contribution to the energy of humanity facing a long-standing problem. After all, the SARS virus scare, founded in some reality, did come and go, and a friend's husband was quarantined briefly after returning from the east at that time, and all is now well. He also avoided a flight used on 911. The river flows, flow with the river around the stones. So I'm happy to note that the world funding appeal for international support of bird flu research and containment exceeded its goals into the billions of dollars eagerly offered by many nations.
What is going on behind the scenes? It is an old and time-honered plot device that an author's stories start coming true, happening to them, and the boundary between reality and fiction, fact and fantasy, becomes not necessarily blurred (for that can be unhealthy) but scrutably interlaced. Something on the order of Swedenborg's concept of correspondances, in which different levels of reality have different meanings and uses for the same object or event. This kind of thinking is otherwise associated with figuring out the symbolism of dreams or myths or archetypes.
There are apparently sympathetic interlacings of pure energetic parallelism between strikingly different ways of being. For example, an attribute of the tribal shaman is that they are an ordinary person, chatting about getting the firewood and hunting for food, until it suits their topic to shift to otherworldly adventures, and back again, without batting an eyelash. Early anthropologists interpreted this as the feeble supernatural thinking of peoples without scientific explanations. Later anthropologists might apprentice in shamanic rituals and subsequently write books in the style of a shaman, claiming to be changed.
A leading example might be Hank Wesselman, who began revealing in 1995 in "Spirit Walker" his experiences of telepathically experiencing the life of a post-apocalyptic future tribal shaman self, in an America that was returned to forest and jungle over decayed and buried cities. Apparently people of the future had weather problems and/or wars, and forgot how to make metal, and all the metal used to make the cities rusted so everything fell apart. My conviction is that Wesselman tapped into a nonphysical representation of his current life needs, a kind of completely mirroring personal mythology and pedagogical alternate universe. Sorry if this sounds invalidating, but as I've been forced to consider more than once, we have to get over our biases that symbols are somehow less real than physical realities, because in fact they may be more real, especially if real is defined as impact upon change and evolution. Surely therein lies power.
I am skeptical of Wesselman's claim to a physical future due to its supportive so-called facts like this one about all metal being lost to rust. How poetic (something unused or disused or improperly maintained becomes rusty, returns to dust, etc.) But isn't metal extracted from natural rust to begin with, iron oxides like goethite and hematite? Can no one think to burn the rust piles and see what happens? Did Wesselman's unconscious think that iron comes from iron deposits? Terrestrial iron is almost non-existent, it's all in forms of rust. If you do find a chunk of iron in nature, you're advised to save it, not melt it into girders to begin your highway back to civilization. A natural iron chunk on Earth is most likely extraterrestrial, non-siliceous material that bounces out of the solar junk ring known as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Iron meteors are worth a lot of cash in modern science culture. Shamans may have used them to channel alternate identities for the purposes of inner archetypal journeying that doesn't have to jibe with physical reality. The symbolism is good for this, but I'm only guessing here.
My story about the world plague has a transcendent happy ending by the way, it just takes a while to get there so I tired and longed for something more cheerful to work on for a while. I have to juggle these reality interactive projects of mine, stories and essays and journals. Unfortunately or fortunately, most of my stories deal with major consciousness transitions, and what would those often imply if not describe but death. So my fears of mortality can rise while writing some stories, such as the one about the businessman dying from cigarette smoking and the priest who learns from him as they hatch a thought experiment to alter reality and it does. Again, it holds a happy transcendent ending, but all this talk of death makes me nervous. Perhaps I need the concept of shamanic or symbolic death. Death as ultimate healer, dying to the past, like in the tarot. Conscious manipulation of the unconscious through the subconscious, stuff like that.
In 1998 I changed so much after a period of composing music and writing spiritual essays that I had to think of myself as having died. I went through a period of feeling between worlds, and I was sloppy around the house. I became a more complex and interesting person after that time of a few months, which included most seriously feeling, though not entirely believing, that I was the reincarnation of the medieval philosopher Hildegard of Bingen and the 20th century New England inventor and occult dabbler John Hayes Hammond Jr. I had my reasons, what can I say. I was a consenting adult playing with, and seduced by, the mind. I had already read years ago of the so-called Holy Lands fever from which police in Jerusalem have learned to accept and deal with tourists who snap into thinking they are Jesus or John the Baptist or one of the Disciples. It passes, they just need to take care of the person. I suppose the closest I ever came to thinking I was in the Bible was as a teenager. I stumbled upon and loved to think about Ezekial, who saw a chariot of fire with these weird angels with four faces, man ox eagle lion. He also did weird things including eating rituals that I considered to be brilliant performance art, though not necessarily anything that I would want to do. I only went so far as to write a song about being Ezekial, singing to a cheap red electric guitar that I bought from a friend in High School and kept for many years. Yeah, that was cool.
Hey I know, what if I just end these ponderances here. I want to go work on a story that I'm more intrigued by than afraid of now. Thanks for visiting.
regards,
Carl
PS - Hey, I just realized, a dying process actually was completed yesterday. My grandmother passed away after a long decline. Now she's pretty cool in and of herself, but in my dreams her farmhouse lawn was more than once the setting for meeting shamans, isn't that interesting? One took me backward time-travelling, and I blacked out / woke up, but not before I felt time slicing through me similar to how it feels when you pass your hand through solid objects like glass or walls when you're out of body. Um, and if you haven't done this, well it feels like what you'd imagine the description would feel like.
I recently had the creepy experience of working on a story about a world virus plague just months before the fears and possibilities of a bird flu pandemic ascended in the headlines. But my story may have been a contribution to the energy of humanity facing a long-standing problem. After all, the SARS virus scare, founded in some reality, did come and go, and a friend's husband was quarantined briefly after returning from the east at that time, and all is now well. He also avoided a flight used on 911. The river flows, flow with the river around the stones. So I'm happy to note that the world funding appeal for international support of bird flu research and containment exceeded its goals into the billions of dollars eagerly offered by many nations.
What is going on behind the scenes? It is an old and time-honered plot device that an author's stories start coming true, happening to them, and the boundary between reality and fiction, fact and fantasy, becomes not necessarily blurred (for that can be unhealthy) but scrutably interlaced. Something on the order of Swedenborg's concept of correspondances, in which different levels of reality have different meanings and uses for the same object or event. This kind of thinking is otherwise associated with figuring out the symbolism of dreams or myths or archetypes.
There are apparently sympathetic interlacings of pure energetic parallelism between strikingly different ways of being. For example, an attribute of the tribal shaman is that they are an ordinary person, chatting about getting the firewood and hunting for food, until it suits their topic to shift to otherworldly adventures, and back again, without batting an eyelash. Early anthropologists interpreted this as the feeble supernatural thinking of peoples without scientific explanations. Later anthropologists might apprentice in shamanic rituals and subsequently write books in the style of a shaman, claiming to be changed.
A leading example might be Hank Wesselman, who began revealing in 1995 in "Spirit Walker" his experiences of telepathically experiencing the life of a post-apocalyptic future tribal shaman self, in an America that was returned to forest and jungle over decayed and buried cities. Apparently people of the future had weather problems and/or wars, and forgot how to make metal, and all the metal used to make the cities rusted so everything fell apart. My conviction is that Wesselman tapped into a nonphysical representation of his current life needs, a kind of completely mirroring personal mythology and pedagogical alternate universe. Sorry if this sounds invalidating, but as I've been forced to consider more than once, we have to get over our biases that symbols are somehow less real than physical realities, because in fact they may be more real, especially if real is defined as impact upon change and evolution. Surely therein lies power.
I am skeptical of Wesselman's claim to a physical future due to its supportive so-called facts like this one about all metal being lost to rust. How poetic (something unused or disused or improperly maintained becomes rusty, returns to dust, etc.) But isn't metal extracted from natural rust to begin with, iron oxides like goethite and hematite? Can no one think to burn the rust piles and see what happens? Did Wesselman's unconscious think that iron comes from iron deposits? Terrestrial iron is almost non-existent, it's all in forms of rust. If you do find a chunk of iron in nature, you're advised to save it, not melt it into girders to begin your highway back to civilization. A natural iron chunk on Earth is most likely extraterrestrial, non-siliceous material that bounces out of the solar junk ring known as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Iron meteors are worth a lot of cash in modern science culture. Shamans may have used them to channel alternate identities for the purposes of inner archetypal journeying that doesn't have to jibe with physical reality. The symbolism is good for this, but I'm only guessing here.
My story about the world plague has a transcendent happy ending by the way, it just takes a while to get there so I tired and longed for something more cheerful to work on for a while. I have to juggle these reality interactive projects of mine, stories and essays and journals. Unfortunately or fortunately, most of my stories deal with major consciousness transitions, and what would those often imply if not describe but death. So my fears of mortality can rise while writing some stories, such as the one about the businessman dying from cigarette smoking and the priest who learns from him as they hatch a thought experiment to alter reality and it does. Again, it holds a happy transcendent ending, but all this talk of death makes me nervous. Perhaps I need the concept of shamanic or symbolic death. Death as ultimate healer, dying to the past, like in the tarot. Conscious manipulation of the unconscious through the subconscious, stuff like that.
In 1998 I changed so much after a period of composing music and writing spiritual essays that I had to think of myself as having died. I went through a period of feeling between worlds, and I was sloppy around the house. I became a more complex and interesting person after that time of a few months, which included most seriously feeling, though not entirely believing, that I was the reincarnation of the medieval philosopher Hildegard of Bingen and the 20th century New England inventor and occult dabbler John Hayes Hammond Jr. I had my reasons, what can I say. I was a consenting adult playing with, and seduced by, the mind. I had already read years ago of the so-called Holy Lands fever from which police in Jerusalem have learned to accept and deal with tourists who snap into thinking they are Jesus or John the Baptist or one of the Disciples. It passes, they just need to take care of the person. I suppose the closest I ever came to thinking I was in the Bible was as a teenager. I stumbled upon and loved to think about Ezekial, who saw a chariot of fire with these weird angels with four faces, man ox eagle lion. He also did weird things including eating rituals that I considered to be brilliant performance art, though not necessarily anything that I would want to do. I only went so far as to write a song about being Ezekial, singing to a cheap red electric guitar that I bought from a friend in High School and kept for many years. Yeah, that was cool.
Hey I know, what if I just end these ponderances here. I want to go work on a story that I'm more intrigued by than afraid of now. Thanks for visiting.
regards,
Carl
PS - Hey, I just realized, a dying process actually was completed yesterday. My grandmother passed away after a long decline. Now she's pretty cool in and of herself, but in my dreams her farmhouse lawn was more than once the setting for meeting shamans, isn't that interesting? One took me backward time-travelling, and I blacked out / woke up, but not before I felt time slicing through me similar to how it feels when you pass your hand through solid objects like glass or walls when you're out of body. Um, and if you haven't done this, well it feels like what you'd imagine the description would feel like.
