Will Mannon

 The War of Art (Steven Pressfied)

* (F) The source of creativity is found on the same plane of reality as Resistance

* It’s genetic. It’s called talent: the innate power to discover the hidden connections between two things (images, ideas, words) that no one else has seen before, link them, and create for the world a third, utterly unique world

* (I) It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is the sitting down to write

* What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance

* To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be

* (I) How many of us have become drunks/drug addicts…developed compulsive cell phone habits, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to?

* (I) Look in your own heart. Right now a still small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it.

* You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.

* (6) Which activities elicit Resistance?

* Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity

* Any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower

* (12) The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it

* (22) Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives.

* There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second, we can turn the tables on Resistance

* (23) The more empty you feel after sex, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was Resistance

* True for: drugs, shopping, masturbation, TV, gossip, alcohol, consuming fat, sugar, salt, chocolate

* (37) The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery

* Those who won’t govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them

* (38) When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own

* *Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others*

* (39) If you find yourself asking yourself “Am I really a writer?” Chances are you are

* (43) Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They’re the sign of an amateur

* (51) Any support we get from persons of flesh and blood is like Monopoly money; it’s not legal tender in that sphere where we have to do our work

* The more energy we spend stoking up on support from colleagues/loved ones, the weaker we become and the less capable of handling our business

* (54) Rationalization has its own sidekick (part of our psyche that actually believes what rationalization is telling us)

* It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it

* (64) “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” -W.S. Maugham

* (68) The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation

* The artist must be like a Marine: he has to know how to be miserable

* He has to love being miserable

* (74) How does the amateur pursue his calling?

* He doesn’t show up every day. He doesn’t show up no matter what. He doesn’t stay on the job all day

* He’s not committed over the long hall; the stakes for him are illusory and fake

* He over-identifies with his art; he doesn’t have a sense of humor about failure

* (74) The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time, and paid for in blood

* The Muse favors working stiffs

* Resistance loves pride and preciousness. Resistance says, “Show me a writer who’s too good to take Job X or Assignment Y and I’ll show you a guy I can crack like a walnut.”

* (75) Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: it uses his own enthusiasm against him

* *Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash.*

* The professional understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper; the tortoise, not the hare.

* The professional arms himself with patience

* *The professional steels himself at the start of a project, reminding himself it is the Iditarod, not the sixty-yard dash. He conserves his energy. He prepares his mind for the long haul. He sustains himself with the knowledge that if he can just keep those huskies mushing, sooner or later the sled will pull in to Nome*

* (77) The professional eliminates chaos from his world in order to banish it from his mind.

* He is on a mission. He will not tolerate disorder

* (80) The professional respects Resistance. He knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he’ll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow.

* (81) The professional understands the field is only level in heaven. He plays it as it lays.

* Adversity, rotten calls, good breaks, lucky bounces = ground over which the campaign must be waged

* (87) Thick skin = seated your professional consciousness in a place other than your personal ego

* It takes tremendous strength of character to do this (our deepest instincts run counter to it)

* Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts (biological)

* (93) The professional blows critics off

* They’re the unwiring mouthpiece of Resistance

* They can articulate the same venom that Resistance itself concocts inside our heads. That is their real evil.

* Not that we believe them, but that we believe the Resistance in our own minds, for which critics serve as unconscious spokespersons

* *Envy-driven criticism = the supreme compliment*

* *The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts*

* (108) The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying

* When we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set in motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose

* When we sit down each day to do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication

* We’re facing dragons…whom we must outfight/outwit to reach the treasure of our self-in-potential and to release the maiden who is God’s plan and destiny for ourselves and the answer to why we were put on this planet

* (114) The Greeks…sensed powerful primordial forces in the world. To make them approachable, they gave them human faces (Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite)

* (116) “Eternity is in love with creations of time.” -William Blake

* By Blake’s model…it’s as though the Fifth Symphony existed already in that higher sphere, before Beethoven sat down and played dah-dah-dah-DUM.

* The catch is this: the work existed only as potential

* It needed corporeal being, a human, an artist, to bring it into being on this material plane

* Beethoven “heard the whisper” and brought it forth

* When Eternity hears the sounds of Earthly music, it brings them joy

* (123) When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. A crack appears in the membrane. Like the first craze when a chick pecks at the inside of its shell. Angel midwives congregate around us; they assist as we give birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our /daimon/, our /genius/

* It makes God happy

* *Eternity has opened a portal into time. And we’re it.*

* (129) [Pressfield’s dream] He was Largo.

* “The power to change was in my hands; all I had to do was believe it.”

* We’ve all had dreams like that. That doesn’t make it any less a miracle

* (130) [Friend’s dream] Soaring as an eagle - air under his wings felt as solid as water that you row with an oar; felt like hand out a moving car window

* “You’re supposed to learn that things you think are nothing, as weightless as air, are actually powerful substantial forces, as solid as earth.”

* Dreams, visions, meditations = as real/solid as anything in his waking life

* (133) [Huge circle = self; dot = ego; outside dot, in circle = divine ground]

* The sphere of the soul

* When we learn we may die, the seat of our consciousness shifts

* The world is entirely new, viewed from the Self

* Superficial concerns fall away replaced by a deeper, more profoundly grounded perspective

* (136) Angels make their home in the Self, while Resistance has its seat in the Ego

* The fight is between the two

* (139) Have you ever wondered why the slang terms for intoxication are so demolition-oriented?

* Stoned, smashed, hammered

* It’s because they’re talking about the Ego. It’s the Ego that gets blamed, waxed, plastered. We demolish the Ego to get to the Self

* (139) When we deliberately alter our consciousness in any way, we’re trying to find the Self

The Self is our deepest being

* (140) The Ego hates the Self because when we seat our consciousness in the Self, we put the ego out of business

* The Ego doesn’t want us to evolve. It likes things just the way they are

* Ego hates growth. The more awake we become, the less we need ego

* *Ego hates it when the awakening writer sits down at the typewriter*

* Ego hates it because it knows that these souls are awakening to a call, and that that call comes from a plane nobler than the material one and from a source deeper and more powerful than the physical

* Ego hates artists because they are the pathfinders and bearers of the future, because each one dares to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” -James Joyce

* Such evolution is life-threatening to the Ego. It reacts accordingly

* The Ego produces Resistance and attacks the awakening artist

* (143) Resistance feeds on fear. We experience Resistance as fear. But fear of what?

* *Fear That We Will Succeed*

* That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess. That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we truly are

* This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty million years

* We fear discovering we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guys, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous.

* *We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us.*

* (145) Each kid comes into this world with a distinct and unique personality, an identity so set that you can fling stardust and great balls of fire at it and not morph it by one micro-dot. Each kid was who he was.

* We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become

* *Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it*

* (148) Most of us define ourselves hierarchically and don’t even know it

* It’s hard not to. School, advertising, the entire materialist culture drills us from birth to define ourselves by others’ opinions

* Problem with hierarchical orientation = when numbers get too big, things break down

* New York City is too big to function as a hierarchy. So is IBM, or Michigan State

* We humans have been wired evolutionarily to function in a tribe of 20-800 people. We can push it, but at some point it maxes out

* *We thrash around, flashing our badges of status (Hey, how do you like my Lincoln Navigator?) and wondering why nobody gives a shit*

* We’ve entered Mass Society. The hierarchy is too big. It doesn’t work anymore

* *For the artist to define himself hierarchically is fatal*

* The artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. *The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake*

* (152) Hack = doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for

* The hack condescends to his audience

* He writes what he thinks will play well in the eyes of others

* (154) Our territories:

* Provide sustenance

* Sustain us without any external input (re: autotelic self from /Flow/)

* Can only be claimed alone

* Can only be claimed by work

* Returns exactly what you put in

* *What you deposit, you get back dollar-for-dollar*

* (158) The territory vs. hierarchy test:

* “If I were the last person on Earth, would I still do it?”

* We have the right to our labor, but not the fruits of our labor

* We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause

* And/Or, view it as a service to God//Eternity

* We are put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us

* (162) Every breath we take, every heartbeat, every evolution of every fell comes from God and is sustained by God every second, just as every creation, invention, every bar of music or line of verse, every thought, vision, fantasy, every dumb-ass flop and stroke of genius comes from that infinite intelligence that created us and the universe in all its dimensions, out of the Void, the field of infinite potential, primal chaos, the Muse

* To acknowledge that reality, to efface all ego, to let the work come through us and give it back feely to its source, that, in my opinion, is as true to reality as it gets

* (165) Are you a born writer?

* In the end, the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it

* 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 being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.