19 February 2022
Here I am, writing this early post for my new Substack presence that I call Soul Planet Channel in a mode of what I, as a writing teacher, called the skill of Free Writing. You could also call it Prewriting, but the freedom sought here is the freedom to let yourself stumble, make mistakes, say things in clumsy ways, and occasionally to tap into unexpected sources of intuitive brilliance. Pre- isn’t always Free- when you have too high expectations for the outcome.
The initial idea behind Free Writing is that before we can come up with our polished, coherent statements of BIG TRUTHS, we need to take some time to get stuff out into the open. In other words, we need to lay our guts out on the table, not just for others but most importantly for ourselves. We are just as complex and multidimensional internally as we might imagine the cosmos to be externally. And—here is the beauty of free writing—once we write a statement, we begin to hear or see alternatives, complications, and extensions, which I mention now because I heard a voice in my head remind me as I was typing that even more complex than our inner and outer dimensions is the truth that there is no real distinction and clear boundary line between inner and outer. Oh yeah!—that’s the whole point of spilling your guts on the table!
Another core principle of this method is that we don’t always know what we want or need to say until we actually say it. Then we can go back and edit, change, alter, improve, degrade what we originally wrote or said as we interact with our own statements. We need to allow ourselves to stumble and fall down before we can run and fly.
These first principles lead to a third one: that TRUTH IS A NEVER-ENDING PROCESS. I remember that as a writing teacher in the 1980s I was very much informed by a movement or philosophy of composition called Process Writing. (I don’t remember if that was what it was actually called, but that was the point nonetheless.) As the German philosopher Georg Hegel wrote in The Phenomenology of Spirit, “The True is the Whole” (Das Wahre ist das Ganze). Or as the German thinker Martin Heidegger often wrote, “Truth happens.” In short, the idea is that truth is not a static principle or thing that we simply have to unearth. It is the result of the very process of searching for truth.
Finally (assuming that there really is an end or final word here), this Guts-on-the-Table approach to writing and thinking allows us to tap into everything we didn’t know that we already know. Maybe, of course, we didn’t “already” know these things and that our knowing comes from the writing process itself. Maybe the “knowing” is a result of the process of making visible and/or audible the thoughts, words, images that we have circulating in our inner consciousness already. Or—and these are not mutually exclusive notions—maybe what we find in this process was not INSIDE after all but always already hovering in the peripheries of our consciousness and we are now allowing ourselves to see them, feel them, taste them, grasp them as if for the first time.
And once these things are puked out onto the table before us, then we can begin sorting, sifting, ordering, and clarifying these things that appeared out of airy nothing because we freed ourselves from the imagined perfection we so often like to identify with. We are free to be imperfect. And if it is true that the True is the Whole—no single statement is ever true in and of itself but only as part of a chain or web of other complicating statements—then no consciousness is ever perfect in and of itself. Perfection is the Process and, like Truth, never completely at hand.
SO WHY I AM SAYING THIS HERE AND NOW?
Aha, good question! My reason for exploring this process of exploration is that I have recognized that a key stumbling block in my own mode of expression up to now has been the limits I have always placed on myself before I even begin to speak or to write. I have an insatiable urge to perfection, something that can never be satisfied, which would practically mean that I would never say or write anything if I didn’t allow myself the freedom to stumble and to be imperfect. We are all beautifully imperfect. And I believe that one of the intuitive goals I have for this Substack experience that I have invited you to share with me is that I need to create a space of creative imperfection endlessly burning into and out of brilliance like the stars above us.
So let this space be a space for burning brightly together as you join me on these inner-outer journeys that lie before us! Fellow travelers!