Ranting quick and slow

monkey mind

Everyone has bursts of mental proliferation (Papancha). Various metaphors are used to describe it. Monkey mind and cascade (waterfall) are two common ones. There is even the image of a demented monkey on amphetamines and with fleas.

The proliferations consist of thoughts with associated feelings, moods and emotions. Most of them emerge from the unconscious and they are beyond conscious control. It is as if the mind has a mind of its own and is prone to constructing stories based on more or less random causes and effects.

Many creative writers speak of a flow or stream of consciousness although it might be better to think of it as a flow or stream of unconsciousness. The mental stuff arises out of nowhere and it can be spoken about and written down.

Raging Torrent

We can extend the image of a flowing stream. Sometimes it is a watercourse or river in spate. It is a rushing, gushing, surging, flooding torrent. At other times it is a stagnant rivulet barely managing to ooze a trickle of dribbles.

The extremes are readily noticed by meditators. In terms of the five hindrances to mindfulness the gushing torrent links to ‘restlessness and anxiety’ and the stagnant rivulet to ‘sloth and torpor’.  

The extremes are also noticed by most creative writers. At times they experience flow where their ‘muses’ are an indefatigable source of ideas and at other times experience writer’s block due to their inspiration having dried up.

Writer's Block

I have no urge to write novels  but I have kept a journal for many years and more recently have published one-pagers on an assortment of self managed web sites and blogs. Productivity has varied enormously through time. 

Hard copies of my journal entries between 1965 and 1998 (33 years) take up 1.7m of shelf space. The rate of production nose dived when I was a workaholic contractor and soared while engaged in several long retreats between jobs. I stopped printing hard copies in 1998 and retired permanently from paid, worldly work in about 2010.

Since late 2002 my “Existential Soft Rock” blog http://dodclark.blogspot.co.uk/ , has received 504 posts and 27377 page views. This works out at about 50 posts per year (one per week) on average, with a range from 32 to 75 per year. 

These last few years have been fairly quiet in terms of one-pagers but this is changing. The more recent products are longer, and I think of them as midway rants - somewhere between gushing torrents and docile rivulets. And I am now more comfortable with letting the vital churn that is the unconscious do its thing. No gods, demons or magic muses – just a steady reworking of stardust spinning consciousness of unconsciousness at the edge of the milky way.