Lateral Action, the very popular and influential (and excellent) creativity-and-productivity website run by writer and career/creativity coach Mark McGuinness, has published an article by me about the role of the muse in creative work. Yes, this complements the work I’m doing at my other blog, Demon Muse.
Here’s the upshot, from the article’s conclusion:
We’ve long recognized the epic problem-solving and idea-synthesizing powers of the unconscious mind. Adopting the muse model gives you a way to actively engage with these functions. Deliberately personifying your unconscious mind, whether as a matter of pure attitude or a more concrete matter of giving it a name and imagining its appearance or whatever, makes it all the easier and more manageable to hand over your creative problems to it, and then later to accept the breakthrough insights and rushes of inspiration when they emerge.
Your unconscious mind truly is your ‘genius.’ Befriending it as such in the classical manner puts you in a position to receive its gifts, and it in the position to give them to you.
— “5 Reasons Why You Need a Muse,” Lateral Action September 13, 2010
I invite you to click through and read the article in full, where you’ll find the five reasons listed and discussed, along with some excellent and instructive reader comments. The Twitter action has also been huge.
The implications of a a muse are deceptive,unless you consider the
cosmos as muse.Ones ability to utilize the cosmos as a muse is only limited by perception.
“ignorance is bliss”yet bliss is not ignorant….
Thanks for weighing in, Wolfe.
Julian Jaynes would find all of this very interesting.
I think you’re right, Noel.