Mining Experience
We think we are done when we have written a good story, but the truth is, writing a good story is the beginning of writing a really good story.
Not all of us are writers, but all of us are storytellers. I’m writing this to give everyone permission to repeat yourself, to share your stories over and over with each other — because what you are really doing is mining the experience, something essential to our lives.
~ Laura Lentz
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I advise all practitioners who are interested in Buddhism not to become Buddhists immediately… It will not work. The reason is that these things do not correspond to the essence of Dharma practice: they are merely means used to accumulate merit.
What we really want is to develop a good heart — bodhicitta — to have perfect vision and to understand emptiness, wisdom.
~ KHANDRO LA
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… The spiritual geniuses of the ages and of the everyday simply don’t let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of its facts. They say, ‘Yes, and …,’ and they wake up the next day, and the day after that, to live accordingly.
~ Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith
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In contradistinction to man, the animal is the living being that follows its own inner laws beyond good and evil.
And herein lies the superiority of the animal.
Marie-Louise von Franz said that the greatest consciousness,“is like a return to the animal, but on a higher level.”
~ Barbara Hannah, The Archetypal Symbolism of Animals.
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Getting to the central issue, the core truth of our search in a story or in any creation or in our lives, takes many passes and attempts. We proceed by repetition, by incremental deepening of vision, which almost never happens in one go. Plumbing our depths takes persistence over time. We may have little epiphanies one after the other, but we can almost always go deeper.
This is why we need a practice that we cultivate over time, why we must recount the same stories, paint the same themes, practice the same moves, because we explore slightly more deeply each time. New insights slip into the old patterns. Those insights were waiting for us to get more fluid and relaxed before they showed themselves.
The creative process is not a one-off experience. It’s the result of many approaches to a part of ourselves that holds insights and revelations the conscious mind can’t see, whatever our discipline. The level we normally live on functions on the surface, but anyone who practices an art knows that there are ways to access understandings and connections that highlight beauties and revelations we hardly notice in our daily round.
Passing through that door from the quotidian to the inspirational takes dedicated practice, which unless you love doing it and are capable of self discipline, you won’t be able to manage it. It’s true that there are people whose access to the dream state is easy and natural and whose creativity survived the transition to maturity, but they are rare.
Most of us were taken in hand by the educational system so that we forgot how to cultivate inspiration. We even forgot what naturally inspired us. Finding your way back to your natural passions means unlearning inculcated habits of functioning and learning new ones. It means uncovering your undiscovered self.
Living at human depths are insights and passions for existence that ask questions and offer connections to deeper meaning, but we have to be able to go there. We have to find how to clear that path for ourselves. There are as many strategies as there are people. It’s possible to teach basic approaches to creativity but mainly by removing obstacles, not by prescribing rules and ironclad methods.
Creativity is a natural human activity but in our age we’re expected to be more predictable, more perfunctory, you could say. If we want to create we should think less in terms of talent and more in terms of freedom of consciousness.
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Volume five of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
Here are three reviews of my writing:
David Price has become one of my favorite writers once I discovered his work on the Medium site a few years ago. I’m amazed at how he continually is able to spark my consciousness with thoughts, ideas and observations of our world and the range of possibilities in the human experience. The best way to sum it up might be to say that through his words and images, Mr Price has a knack for providing rich sustenance for the human soul.
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Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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This book encourages in the true sense of that word as no other I have known the creative process in oneself as spiritual necessity. David Price’s writing is beautifully alive, articulate, kind. The form is prose; the feel is poetic, flowing, metaphoric. There is not a dry line in it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who longs to crack the shell around their own creativity, to become more sensitive, creative, and alive themselves.
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Plus this comment:
There is something about your writing, an ineffable quality I can’t quite place. It’s brilliant.
— Shain Thomas
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It is this version:
