AW: Reading Notes. Spiritual Electricity & The Basic Tools

This is from my initial run at going through this book in 2019. I mainly did the morning pages and failed to do the analysis of the chapters because I was severely distracted.

On its surface the book is unapologetic about its approach and encourages one to consider themselves as a conduit for divine influence into the world through their art. The language is not explicitly Christo-centric but it is clear that the concepts are based in the idea that there is a singular deity, though Ms. Cameron is careful to avoid gendering deity(for the most part). This rankled me as I was working through this book because I'm a polytheist and have more gods than fingers on both hands. It gave me moments of pure exasperation to sit there and mentally run through the catalog of deities that I am involved with to figure out who I should be invoking to help me. If I were an atheist, I'd probably be ready to throw the book at a wall because of how often deity is mentioned.

The first two major sections of the book (which are not the introductions) talk about two things. The first is this concept that all creativity flows from the divine and that we are clearing out blockages to open ourselves up to this higher source. It's a romantic notion that annoys me. It disregards the blood, sweat, and tears that we put into our work. It says that our work is not fully ours. Perhaps this means that I am holding on too much of my ego in Ms. Cameron's opinion, but I can't sit here and argue that being in a state of flow equates to being a direct conduit of the divine's plan for your creative work.

As a person who practices a spirituality that includes things like possession and being godridden, I find it somewhat dangerous for Ms. Cameron to assume that any spiritual being that takes an interest in your work and chooses to help you is benevolent. (The timing of my posting this on the eve of Samhain/Tamala/Halloween and one of the traditionally recognized days where the veil between the worlds is thinnest and spirits interact easier with us amuses me.) As one of my teachers in witchcraft taught me, "Not all spirits are helpful or kind. And they're usually dead for a reason. Take what they share with a grain of salt."

Ms. Cameron encourages opening oneself up to a indiscriminate number of spiritual beings as they work. This is a dangerous practice because it can lead to chaos in a greater degree in one's creative life (and life at large) if they have the misfortune of having something malevolent decide to masquerade as something pleasant. This is a persistent theme through these two chapters and through the book at large because the book doesn't tell you to focus your invitation on someone who will help you and have your best interests at heart. It just tells you to open up and the sense of flow will come and your block will magically go away.

Take this argument away and remove the spiritual exercises from the book, I suspect that it would shorten by at least two chapters if not three on the basis of verbage alone. Ms. Cameron does combine the spiritual elements of this process with a number of legitimate psycho-therapeutic practices and basic artistic exercises. Daily free writing in the form of the Morning Pages (or in my case now morning blogs) is a time honored exercise to help authors and other creatives to warm up and get distractions out of their way as they sit down to work.

The writing exercises confronting negative assumptions and biases are also well proven within the psychiatric community to help people through the healing process of doing so. Ms. Cameron focuses a good deal on confronting negative bias and helping the person working through her book to suss out what the source of these negative biases are and gives them tools to begin to effect a change in them. She is a bit cavalier in how she handles psychological trauma and reduces it down to almost a mockery in her examples. I would advise blocked creatives who are working with psychological trauma to handle her 'time traveling' exercises with care and be prepared to engage in self care after they unearth new trauma memories through these exercises.

Equally in need of caution is how persons with traumatic histories handle the confrontation with the parts of oneself that are hypercritical of one's artistic efforts. While, yes, there is going to be a portion of this that is self generated, there is going to be a large amount of it that is trauma response. Ms. Cameron fails to address the fact that there are people who have trauma response to their artistic work because of how they were traumatized for creating it. A blocked author, for example, who struggled to write in any deep detail because they were beaten for "writing lies" in their journal as a child is dealing with an entirely different monster than the blocked author who is struggling to write with any deep detail because an instructor told them their creative work was a hack job.