Something I’ve realized over time is that my creative energy ebbs and flows.

Flow (might as well just say “flow state”) is a delight.

The ebb periods can be brutal. Ebb periods go by lots of names. Blocks. “Resistance.” Creativity at a low ebb is painful. It is a depressive and somewhat neurotic state. When I was younger, my response to ebb periods was “delete everything and start over.” This was counterproductive. The best response to ebb periods lies in discipline.

I admire people who will knock out 1,500 words per day and just sit in front of a notebook or computer for as long as it takes to get that done. On the good days that could be an hour or two. On a bad day it could be half a day or more. I am not one of these people. For me, it’s better to ride the waves.

When you’re playing bad golf, your #1 problem is mental. It’s a loss of confidence. Tentative swings produce bad shots. A big part of scoring better (no matter your handicap) is developing strategies for finding confidence when it runs away and hides on you. The key understanding here is that your confidence (and/or skill) hasn’t disappeared. It’s just hiding away. (here I have shamelessly stolen this concept from the book Every Shot Must Have a Purpose).

I suspect the self-destructive tendencies people associate with creatives are rooted in unhealthy responses to ebb periods. A creative person unable to create feels as though a piece of her soul has been amputated. It is a kind of a trauma. It is natural, if unhealthy, to try to numb this with sex, drugs and booze. For some people this is a matter of life and death.

For me, surfing the ebb and flow of creativity means trusting that these states are temporary. When I’m down, I must trust that the highs will come back. When I’m up, I must recognize that eventually whatever creative euphoria I am experiencing will eventually ebb. For me, these cycles tend to last a few months to a year at a time. Consistency of output is a coping strategy, but it’s not a cure.

There is a deeper issue at play here: what is the purpose of creativity? What role does it play in my life?

There was a time when I would have said I wanted to make a career out of it. That wasn’t the right path for me. Making a career out of creativity ended up feeling like a shit compromise between earning a living and being creative.

Lately I have been thinking about how creating makes me feel. It is more or less a brain wipe. A productive creative period empties out my head. This is the mental and emotional equivalent of how you feel physically after crushing a difficult workout. It is a feeling of wholeness. I have seen this described in fairly woo terms as a form of co-creating with the universe. I think there’s something to that, even if it’s just some weird, evolved physiological response.

(WARNING: Intense woo ahead)

The last post was about the nature of power.

This post is about moral and ethical considerations. To this end, I find the following table helpful.

Source: https://rpad.tv/2014/02/20/coffee-talk-615-whats-dungeons-and-dragons-alignment/

This one’s a little easier.

Source: https://rpad.tv/2014/02/20/coffee-talk-615-whats-dungeons-and-dragons-alignment/

If you are anything like me you will recognize these immediately as D&D alignments. Over time I have found this a surprisingly useful model for morality and ethics. For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to get into the ur-source for associating good with the the desire to uplift and protect the dignity of sentient beings and evil with the impulse to subjugate, oppress and destroy. Going to simply refer you to the discipline of moral philosophy on that one.

Now for the woo.

What I appreciate about this model is that it’s just a taxonomy. It isn’t normative. And likewise in the game of life, we are all just LARPing our own conceptions of self. There is something to the idea that people tend to embrace either the lighter or darker side of human nature. My personal cosmology is very much centered on the push and pull across a range of dualities. Altruism/selfishness. Creation/destruction. Order/chaos.

I’ve been tempted at times to believe a rich and meaningful existence is balanced on a knife’s edge between an infinite series of dualities. These days I’m more of the mind that the cosmos is a churning sea of chaotic forces (chaotic in the mathematical sense). These forces act on us externally in our physical reality and internally in our feelings about and models of that reality. You can flow with these forces or you can fight them. The output of this process is your character. Like, literally, in a deep sense, as well as in the superficial context of an elaborate D&D metaphor.

There is no objectively “correct” moral or ethical alignment. It’s all about which cosmological forces you choose to embrace and perpetuate with power.

“I don’t make choices about cosmological forces at all,” some might say.

In my view, whether we choose to think of the actions we take every day as choices is irrelevant. They are still choices.

From this point of view, the morality of power is simplicity itself. What do you want to manifest in the world? The answer is your moral and ethical code.

Now that’s not to say this is an easy or comfortable question to answer. Not if you’re being honest (as opposed to just vomiting up whatever you’ve been socially conditioned to adopt as moral values). If you’re anything like me, you will find honestly exploring the answer to that question often results in odd and irreconcilable contradictions. There is a difference between what you really want, on a “primal” level, and what you tell yourself you want on the basis of socially conditioned rationalization.

People tend to think of themselves as “good.” Yet there is an awful lot of “evil” in the world. I suspect this is simply because most people are just not very honest with themselves.

I am becoming more comfortable with accepting the contradictions and hypocrisy I find inherent in the human condition. Generally, I gravitate toward the light side of things (if you are curious my RPG characters lean toward the wizard archetype, usually with Neutral Good alignment). But I have some fascination with the dark bits as well (see: wargaming hobby). And in my own way I am pretty selfish and even a little greedy. I have to be mindful of overfeeding my selfish and greedy aspects. I do not always succeed. Such is the human condition.

I suppose you could call al this a moral compass.

Where exactly did it all come from? No idea.

And I’m not sure it matters, either.

Everything is turning into a loaded term these days. Power is no exception. I am not a fan of the current public discourse around power. To my eyes this has degenerated into a turgid morality play. (Though in fairness, public discourse around any topic has a tendency to do that)

I like to think of power in neutral terms, as a kind of force. Like gravity. What does that force do? It compels. Power operates on a spectrum of intensity, from subtle influence to physical coercion.

Different attributes and abilities strengthen and weaken any given individual or group’s power. Power has many different sources. Different types of power are fungible, to varying degrees. The most obvious example of this fungibility is with money. If you happen to have a lot of material wealth, say generational wealth, you have lucked into a major source of power. It is trivial to convert money to influence. Hell, mere proximity to wealth can be a source of power.

Another example is being super hot (extremely attractive). Being super hot is a kind of power. It is a form of sexual power. Sexual power, too, is fungible, though not to the same degree as money. For example, if I am super hot I can become a trophy husband and trade hotness for material comfort. (IRL this option is not available to me) Of course, the term “trophy spouse” implies another power relation. You can extend this kind of thing on and on and on.

To me, it is trivially obvious that human civilization is a web of power relations.

This is neither inherently good nor bad. It merely IS. Toss a rock out a window and it falls. Put humans together in groups and you get webs of power relations. This is a fractal pattern that runs from the nation state to the bedroom.

“I don’t have that kind of relationship with my husband/wife/partner,” some will insist.

To which I say: LOL. LMFAO.

As long as you sometimes have conflicting interests and desires, you have some level of conflict that needs resolving. And if you have some level of conflict that needs resolving, the balance of power in the relationship will influence that resolution. Again, that statement isn’t a value judgment. In good relationships, conflict is resolved through mutually empowered negotiation. In toxic relationships, conflict is resolved through emotional and physical coercion.

Here I’m touching on the ethics of power a bit, though the ethics of power are beyond the scope of this post. The ethics of power have no bearing on the nature, existence or pervasiveness of the web of power relations that shapes human interactions. The ethics of power are about the means and ends to which we exercise power. .

There is quite a bit of intention around the use of the term “web” here. A frustrating and pervasive mischaracterization of power is that it is some kind of weird binary–that you either have power or you don’t.

Power is not a binary concept. It varies in its precise nature and intensity. Read up on Nelson Mandela’s time in prison sometime. Mandela possessed extraordinary power, though not always in a conventional political sense. Mandela, and indeed all great leaders, understood the fungibility of power intuitively.

Another abuse of the concept of power that frustrates me is when it is used to pass moral judgments. “Having power = bad. Not having power = good.” That kind of thing. But weakness itself is not a virtue, and strength itself is not a moral failing.

Of course, if we want to get meta about it we can observe that occupation of the moral high ground (the perceived moral high ground, anyway) is a source of power. If we want to get extra meta (and I always do) we can further observe that the ability to define what constitutes moral high ground is an even more fundamental kind of power.

If you feel you are locked out of power, a decent strategy is to redefine the discourse. Not all wars are fought in meatspace. Insurgencies can be waged over ideas.

This is going to sound nuts (and it should) but I believe in magic.

Well, kind of. I should qualify this, lest you think I’ve finally gone completely off the deep end.

When I say “magic” I am talking specifically about the use of meditative states and ritual thinking as a means of programming the lizard brain. The lizard brain is the System 1 mode of thinking we are all familiar with from Kahneman’s work. It operates below the level of conscious thought, on the basis of heuristics and intuition. Kahneman’s System 2 is the mode we operate in when we are consciously reasoning.

Suppose we think of System 1 and System 2 as different types of computers. How would we program them?

System 2 uses a “higher level” language based on formal logical relationships (or should, anyway).

System 1 is another matter. System 1 does not speak in formal logical terms, by definition. It’s closer to the hardware. System 1 is crude. System 1 is primal. It speaks something like assembly language, whereas System 2 uses a more abstract, object-oriented schema.

I submit to you that magic is the language of the lizard brain.

The lizard brain responds to basic impulses such as hunger, fear and lust. The lizard brain responds to symbolic, emotionally charged language and imagery.

I submit to you that we can reprogram the lizard brain (or at least hack it) through the use of conditioning techniques via emotionally charged states.

I had been meaning to read up on magic, specifically chaos magick, for some time. I was intrigued by references to it by some otherwise quite rational and clever individuals I follow online. To my surprise, when I finally cracked open Peter Carroll’s Liber Null, I grokked the basics immediately.

I think there are two reasons for this intuitive response:

First, I have spent most of my life engaged in various forms of creative writing. Fundamentally, there is not much difference between chaos magick and creative writing. Or any creative process, for that matter. It all reduces down to the focused transmission of ideas and emotions through the manipulation of symbolic systems of representation.

Second, for the past couple of years I have engaged in a fairly regular meditation practice. Meditation changes the way you perceive the world. There are lots of books about how and why that works (I highly recommend The Mind Illuminated). I’m not going to rehash the mechanics of it here. The point relevant to this post is basic meditative practice helps you learn to view your thoughts and emotions as objects.

The changes are subtle at first. Personally, I would start to “catch myself” when my emotional state would change. Maybe I am in line at the grocery store and I start to get annoyed because some numbskull can’t use the self-checkout. Increasingly, I am able to consciously short-circuit that mild form of anger and its physiological symptoms. This is pretty mundane and uninteresting. I mention it because it’s probably something you can grok even if you think I’m completely off my rocker with most of this.

Here’s where things start to get magickal.

Once you begin to see your thoughts and emotions as objects it is not a huge leap to begin to manipulate them as objects. I am fortunate not to have intense psychological trauma in my past. But I definitely have unpleasant memories. Meditative states have a habit of bringing those unpleasant memories forward in a vivid way. It’s precisely the kind of thing that happens when you unleash the lizard brain. With some very basic, very mainstream guidance you can begin to work with these thoughts to lessen their intrusiveness and unpleasantness. This is simple, uncontroversial stuff like internalizing and projecting forgiveness of self and others.

We can call this meditation. We can call it magick. We can call it prayer. We can call it performance enhancing visualization. No matter what we choose to call it, it’s all the same thing.

Oh, by the way, we can invert some of these things if we want to get a little more woo and think about the nature of black magic. If you believe you can transmit positive energy, or create positive associations, using these techniques, there is nothing stopping you from doing the same with negative energy. My sense is that the dark side of things initially seems super cool to people who have not actually practiced these techniques “cuz power” and whatnot. This is a bit like a kid finding his dad’s gun.

There is a whole cosmological discussion to be had about the nature of darkness and evil and why they are inherent in existence. Waaaaay beyond the scope of this post. What IS relevant to this post is that if you start hacking around inside the lizard brain with a focus on the darker aspects of your human nature, and emphasize feeding and manipulating negative energy, you may not like the kinds of thoughts, feelings and “forces” that begin to manifest in your life as a result. It is not at all implausible to me that this could cause serious psychological damage. The degenerate form of meta systems thinking is psychosis. You should take that statement seriously.

So if you read this and decide to start experimenting with this stuff, I suggest first checking out this post on potential risks by my Twitter friend @liminal_warmth. Messing around with the plasticity of your brain is not something to be taken lightly. I do not want to be responsible for encouraging anyone to experiment with stuff that unintentionally leads to a destabilizing existential crisis or a psychotic break, and at this point I don’t feel I can improve upon Warmth’s summary of the relevant issues.