Writing: A Search For Truth
A writer needs to be expansive, able to take in the world that he or she sees unfolding on the streets, in the stores, along the seashores. This curiosity about everyone about anything is enriching in untold ways.
This ability to see what is happening as it is happening not only enriches the writer but also disrupts the culture — which, over time, has grown complacent, accepting its most ridiculous perversions as normal, perversions that strike against human decency, like war and aggression and exploitation, like chicanery in commerce and dishonesty in politics.
My Evolution As A Writer
Here, briefly, is how my own curiosity and expansive thinking emerged within various phases of my life to improve my writing:
When I was a young man in college, I voraciously read every book I could find in the library about existentialism. I became cynical about the way the world worked, and, ultimately, settled on nihilism as my primary philosophy.
As a result of my literary leanings, suicidal ideation colored my thoughts when things did not go well for me, which was often.
Then, after college, working first as a journalist and then later as a psychotherapist, I was forced to expand my world view.
Driven by egoism and aspiration, I found a good way to structure my time was to focus on self-improvement and the pursuit of health and wealth.
Years later, another shift happened. Through experience, I had learned that since nothing was the way it seemed.
Meaning, as far as I could tell, was a contrived affair and most of the enticements offered by success in society were merely trash and trinkets masquerading as valuables.
Still, rather than returning to the nihilistic leanings of my youth and agreeing with Sartre and Camus that life is absurd, I began to wonder if there was more to life than met the eye.
At this point, a deep and abiding interest in spirituality emerged.
Although I followed many false gurus, got distracted by sensationalist spiritual literature about acquiring siddhis, and got thoroughly confused by the intrigues of spiritual groups and conniving New Age movements engineered by hucksters eager to profit from a large following, it slowly dawned on me that the meaning of life was rather simple: to become aware of my experiences unfolding in real time.
When I hit this more expansive level of thinking, it finally fashioned me into a writer.
Before then I was dabbler; content with a mastery of the mechanics of syntax and content with voicing glib narrations that won reader’s approval for their creative twists.
It was only when I embraced the concept of awareness and practiced observation and began to deeply reflect on all the philosophical books that I loved to read that writing began to flow through me rather than from me.
Writing Emerges as Self-Talk
Although I had been writing throughout my adult life and have taken numerous classes from highly-respected teachers, my writing only flowered when my own self-talk began to flourish.
Through the act of explaining things to others, I found a way to channel my thoughts into a more sequential pattern.
By establishing a cause-effect chain of thinking, my writing gained a lot more structure.
This new coherence led to fluency of ideas, deeper listening, keener observation, more intense critical thinking, and far more reflective reading.
Sequential Self-Talk Transforms into Thinking
Most of our self-talk is often a boring repetition of familiar memories or a projection of future fantasies.
But when writing, what is trite and meaningless is quickly edited out and interest in deeper understanding arises.
Over a sufficiently long period of time, mulling over a theme, everything morphs into a logical progression of ideas, and this experience is so engaging that it put me into a flow state, a time-out-of-time experience during which my identity disappeared and there was only the movement of consciousness trying to make sense of the world.
Thinking Births Awareness
Writing, when I am true to it, makes me wiser and kinder. I see the world as it is, not the way that I want it to be. I see the hidden wounds behind people who bluster. I see new possibilities everywhere.
Ultimately, then, I write to think, and I think to make sense of the world, and, as I do, I become more aware, more deliberate, more coordinated in how I handle my affairs, and more convincing in how I communicate my vision of what is possible for humanity.
When writers improve, we positively contribute to the evolution of everyone who reads our words for every new idea is a frail yet noble yearning to get closer to echoing the truth.
The world may not be new, but we are new in the world; consequently, by writing, we inject a fresh perspective about what things mean and what we should do about it.
