"The Pain of Being Human" (from "Turning Pro")

     Today's bit of wisdom from Steven Pressfield's Turning Pro:

"The Gnostics believed that exile was the essential condition of man. Do you agree? I do.

The artist and the addict both wrestle with this experience of exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the state of separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, to transcend it, or at least to make the pain go away.

What is the pain of being human? It's the condition of being suspended between two worlds and being unable to fully enter into either.

 As mortal flesh, you and I cannot ascend to the upper realm. That sphere belongs to the gods. But we can't put it out of our minds either. We can't escape intimations and half-memories of... what? Some prior sojourn, before birth perhaps, among the immortals or the stars.

Our lot, instead, is to dwell here in the lower realm, the sphere of the temporal and the material — the time-bound dimension of instincts and animal passions, of hate and desire, aspiration and fear.

You and I are called to the upper realm (and it is calling to us), but we're having a pretty good time (sometimes ) down here in the sphere of the senses. Bottom line: we're marooned in the middle, stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again."

Pressfield, Steven (2012-05-30). Turning Pro (p. 45). Black Irish Books. Kindle Edition.

On Habits, Part 2 - from "Turning Pro"

     Steven Pressfield gives us a pretty clear vision of what it means when you fall into bad habits instead of building positive ones. When one gives in to Resistance, "addiction replaces aspiration" . . . and one's calling is lost:

     "The pre-addictive individual — i.e., you and I when we're young — experiences a calling. To art, to service, to honorable sacrifice. In other words, we experience positive aspiration. A vision of the higher, realized self we might become. The intimation of this calling is followed immediately by the apparition of Resistance.

Fear.

Self-doubt.

Self-sabotage.

     What makes this moment so soul-precarious is that most of us are unconscious, in the event, of both our aspirations and our Resistance. We're asleep. We know only that something is wrong and we don't know how to fix it. We're restless. We're bored. We're angry. We burn to accomplish something great, but we don't know where to begin and, even if we did, we 'd be so terrified that we still couldn't take a step. Enter: a drink, a lover, a habit. Addiction replaces aspiration. The quick fix wins out over the long, slow haul."

Pressfield, Steven (2012-05-30). Turning Pro (p. 25). Black Irish Books. Kindle Edition.

On Habits, Part 1, from "Turning Pro"

I am trying to get back to reading things that I find spiritually uplifting and blogging about what I am reading. It is a habit I had that I have let fall by the wayside. It is therefore somewhat ironic, I suppose, that my first such post in a long while is about habits, from Steven Pressfield's Turning Pro:

"We can never free ourselves from habits. The human being is a creature of habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones. We can trade in the habits of the amateur and the addict for the practice of the professional and the committed artist or entrepreneur."

Pressfield, Steven (2012-05-30). Turning Pro (Kindle Locations 301-303). Black Irish Books. Kindle Edition.

"The Artist's Life" (from Pressfield's "The War of Art")

"The Artist's Life" from Pressfield's The War of Art - 

"Are you a born writer? Were you put on this earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end, the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don't do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every human being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got."

"The Fruits of Our Labor" from "The War of Art"

The Fruits of Our Labor

"When Krishna instructed Arjuna that we have a right to our labor but not to the fruits of our labor, he was counseling the warrior to act territorially, not hierarchically. We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

But there's the third way offered by the Lord of Discipline, which is beyond both hierarchy and territory. That is to do the work and give it to Him. Do it as an offering to God.

Give the act to me.
Purged of hope and ego,
Fix your attention on the soul.
Act and do for me.

The work comes from heaven anyway. Why not give it back?

To labor in this way, the Bhagavad-Gita tells us, is a form of meditation and a supreme species of spiritual devotion. It also, I believe, conforms most closely to Higher Reality. In fact, we are servants of the Mystery. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but will be, through us."

"We all become what we pretend to be."

From Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle, Day One:

     "It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story." ~ Bast

"The Supreme Virtue" (from "The War of Art")

From Steven Pressfield's The War of Art:

"Someone once asked the Spartan king Leonidas to identify the supreme warrior virtue from which all others flowed. He replied: 'Contempt for death.'

For us as artists, read 'failure.' Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue. By confining our attention territorially to our own thoughts and actions - in other words, to the work and its demands - we cut the earth from beneath the blue-painted, shield-banging, spear-brandishing foe."