[ This post is pure opinion, too. Same caveat as before.
I'm not looking for argument, because in matters of opinion
no one can "win" an argument. Discussion and taking the
subject further, on the other hand, are way cool. :-) ]
I've been thinking lately about the art of spiritual writing,
and what makes it an art.
For me (and please remember the caveat above, and that this
really is personal opinion, not a declaration of "fact"),
great spiritual writing is not about the sharing of ideas.
It's about the sharing of experience.
A writer can pontificate about ideas all day. A reader can
ponder them, and believe that he or she has understood
these ideas. But what if the ideas are about a different
state of attention? Can the reader ever really claim to have
"understood" them if he or she has not shared the writer's
state of attention?
My favorite spiritual writers shift the reader's state of
attention. And they have different ways of doing this.
Some shift their readers' states of attention by using
metaphor to hint at ("a finger pointing to the moon") an
experience that isn't *really* the thing they're talking
about, but "points at it" in the sense that if the reader
can "get" the metaphor experience, they can begin to intuit
the real experience.
If, as a writer, you can come up with a metaphorical "pointer
to" an experience that you can't adequately describe, and
the reader "gets" the metaphorical experience, then perhaps
you have pointed them in the right direction of "getting" or,
even better, *having* that other experience, the one you
can't describe. I tend to believe that spiritual writing
that does this is of a somewhat higher order than writing
that presents only ideas.
Other writers shift their readers' state of attention in a
kind of Zen or Tantric way, by presenting a situation or a
story that is fraught with contradiction, as if its elements
just don't "go together." In other words, they create a sense
of cognitive dissonance in the reader, some contradiction
that seems to need resolving. And whether the contradiction
ever can be resolved or not, there seems to be something
about the process of *trying* to resolve it that shifts
the reader's state of attention.
Another technique that seems to work to shift the reader's
state of attention is telling tales of power. This is not
the same thing as telling stories. This is a higher order
storytelling, bardic or shamanic storytelling, in which
the storyteller attempts to tell the story of how something
that happened to him *personally* shifted *his* state of
attention, and tell it well enough that someone else can
get a feeling for that experience, or possibly even exper-
ience it themselves. It's pure magic when this happens,
and I wish there were more instances of it.
Anyway, those are my Sunday morning cafe-by-the-sea musings
on the art of spiritual writing. I understand that there are
many who really, truly enjoy spiritual writing that is a
presentation of ideas, and trying to "understand" those ideas.
But it seems to me that the only thing that can think it
"understands" something is a self. So this type of writing
doesn't really appeal to me all that much these days.
I tend to prefer stuff that points me in the direction of
selflessness, by taking me out of my self, or at the very
least shifting the current one's point of view radically
enough that I notice the shift. My assessment of a spiritual
book is based on how much it shifts my perception of and
appreciation of Here And Now, not on how eloquently it can
discuss ideas about Here And Now.
