Writing

I too have done some thinking about the nature of the writing process and how it relates to the path of inner growth and spiritual development. A while back in a study group meeting our subject was Tarot Key 5, The Hierophant and establishing contact with the Inner Teacher (Spiritual Intuition).

What follows are excerpts from a paper I did on the subject for our study group :

GENERAL CONCEPTS ON INTUITION:

Goal: The goal is to establish contact with your inner teacher, and arrive at a degree of understanding and discrimination allowing you to distinguish the Inner Voice of true intuition from telepathic invasions from other entities, incarnate, or discarnate, human, or non-human.

Preliminary Steps: Fine Tuning your Receiver You are not ready to hear the inner voice until you have used all your thinking and feeling faculties first. If you try to listen before using all your faculties, you won't get a dependable answer. So the preliminary steps are:

K0 (The Fool): Approach the problem/question/area to explore/ with a sense of adventure and enthusiasm. Remember, from the Fool's vista, you cannot fail. Growth and experience are your destiny.

K1 (The Magician): Observe intently and be willing to look at reality, to concentrate on the living moment. What is it you with to know? What problem are you trying to solve?

K2 (The High Priestess): Be willing and able to recollect everything that is involved with what you have observed.

K3 (The Empress): Creatively imagine all possible solutions. Use concrete imagery (sights, sounds, smells, feelings) as detailed as you can imagine.

K4 (The Emperor): Use Reason. Measure it, classify it, organize it. Be scientific. When you reason intensively, you initiate a process which leads to intuition. Reason is what fine tunes the radio receiving set of your mind.

Establish a state of letting go and opening up: Keep your sense of humor, because intuition is blocked by being overly emotionally concerned. Humor helps relax the emotions, the desires, and the thinking processes.

K5 (The Hierophant): HUMILITY. Exercise true humility and be willing to let go of what you think must be. (What you "think" you want, and what you "think" you know).

SHUT UP. Let go of the past, let go in order to quiet the thoughts and emotions. LISTEN. Establish purposeful, positive, reception, not passive inertness.

Reality Check: Perform a reality check on what you have received. True intuition never flatters; it often points out our shortcomings. True intuition always reveals itself as a PRINCIPLE that pertains to our problem so that we may SEE FOR OURSELVES what we ought to do.

When you distinguish a true intuition, take steps to carry it out into ACTION.

You can also perform a "Reality Check" on others who make claims of special guidance or knowledge from "above", in the same way: Do they listen attentively to what other people have to say? Do their claims agree with fact and reason? Do they show self discipline and good sense?

"No bad listener ever hears the Voice of the Hierophant"

Ok. So how does all this stuff fit in with the writing process? Writing is much more than just putting words to paper. 

Writing is a PROCESS OF DISCOVERY. 

for example:

K0: You must have something you want to express, a vision and a desire to go down into the valley to toil and express your vision.

K1: A key to good writing is having a focused thesis. A focused subject and thesis form the crucial seed thought which you elaborate when writing the exposition.

K2: Having a database of either facts and evidence (for expository writing), or a storehouse of recollections (for poetry and fiction) is crucial.

K3: Creative Imagination is absolutely necessary for inventing arguments or coming up with unique ways of saying things.

K4: Get it down on paper and organize it. Look at what you've written and organize your ideas based on reason. Edit your first draft for unity of content and coherency. By systematizing your imagery, your tuning your subconscious to a specific vibration and to be receptive to spiritual intuitions from your Higher Self on that vibratory rate.

K5: As you work with the draft, the organized words, phrases, and ideas get fed back to your subconscious. From this systematized information new ideas will come to you - intuitions and new avenues of exposition will make themselves known to you if you are receptive to them. The way to make yourself receptive to new creative ideas (and avoid writer's block) is to know when to kill the editor/critic (letting go of what you think you want and what you think you know - like the two kneeling figures in Key 5).

With regards to an internet listserv, the emails we get are "seed thoughts", and then our own writing process elaborates these concepts as it fine tunes our "receiver" to spiritual intuition. Now if we can only get out of the way of ourselves and LISTEN, then we're getting some where.

And when you receive the intuition, it enables you to begin exercise true discrimination (K6), because you've begun to establish the contact from the Archangel Raphael to the woman to the man of K6.