Experiment: Writing from Clear Mind

Here was the experiment, offered by Jay at the Zaadz Creative Spirituality pod:

Let's all try this and see how we fair at it…

Sit down for five minutes or so and meditate. Do your best to clear your mind. If you have a Deity practice, establish a connection to that Deity beforehand with prayer. If not, you may use a technique like Genpo Roshi's Big Mind to invoke an awareness of your Higher Self. Let all ideas and images float past your mind for a while like trains in the station; you watch the trains, but never climb on board.

After five minutes, stop and WRITE.

Write what? Whatever the situation demands. A short essay. A poem. A short piece of fiction. A dialogue. It should be unstructured enough that you can write for several minutes without stopping, without correcting yourself. It should be un-premeditated. If you find yourself writing something you had started to script in your head, stop, resume meditation and try again.

What did you produce?

And here is the result that I posted in the pod:

I tried the experiment. It's a bit hard to still my mind when it's charged with caffiene, so that may have something to do with the jibberish that came out of it. Or it could be that my mind just doesn't work like other minds.

Anyway, here it is:

some days
the sand
on the page
tastes like candy

some days
the page
is sand
falling
through god

today
I am candy
covered
in sand
on a page
called god

So there ya go. Not sure if this is anything, maybe a poem. But it's what wanted to come out, so it did.

Good experiment. The product is fairly surreal, but I think that might be a result of the coffee I had been drinking. What I liked was that my mind was uncritical as to whether or not what came out made sense or followed the rules of language. I suspect I could go way into non-sensical language poetry using this method.

On the other hand, because it was unfiltered, it might reveal some symbolic aspect of my psyche, much the same way that dreams do. Feel free to psychoanalyze me -- it's cheaper this way.


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