As I've mentioned a couple of times, I've recently gotten to share cyberconversations with a group of former Rama students. It's interesting for many reasons, but one of them is that we all studied with a guy who was a former English professor.
One of his one-liners was that "Writers write to figure things out." Rama not only expected us to do this -- everyone was encouraged to keep a Journal in which you recorded your spiritual experiences and thoughts -- he required us to do it. We had writing assignments. We wrote stories about our experiences with him, or essays on some aspect of Buddhist thought. As an example, we were once asked to write a 20-page paper on the Four Noble Truths. I still have that one, because I had so much fun writing it. He read all of these stories and papers, but he never "graded" them or really much commented on them. The point was getting his students to experience the writing process itself, not what they wound up writing. At any rate, the point I'm trying to make is that we got used to figuring things out through our writing. Writing was just as fundamental a part of our spiritual path as meditation was. Not everyone on a spiritual path has that kind of relationship with the writing process, and is able to see it as a form of sadhana. On this forum, I think Curtis has come closest to explaining this idea, and the benefit that writing on Fairfield Life has for him. It's a way of working through ideas, pulling them out of the abstract and making them concrete, to see if they hold up in the relative world. I think Internet chat forums provide a very powerful sadhana for the spiritual seeker, if they just take advantage of it. The ability to write about one's spiritual experiences or beliefs is IMO a powerful way of *integrating* those experiences or beliefs into daily life. The experiences may be subjective, but writing about them is anything but; it's very objective. And in my experience the writing process is very occult -- it has the effect of drawing the power or the shakti or the transcendence or whatever you want to call it out of the world of subjectivity and integrating it into your objective life. Writing about one's spiritual experiences is very grounding. It's the opposite of spacing out. Anyway, that's why I'm enjoying this other forum. Everybody knows this, and puts some impeccability into what they write. Not because they're trying to impress anyone, or gain strokes from anyone, but because it's writing, and writing matters.
