The Origins, Present & Future of This Substack
Due to other commitments and responsibilities, I’ve barely written anything substantial over the last few months. I’ve come up with a few ideas, made some reading notes, and have at least a couple half-finished articles in drafts, but haven’t actually sat down to write something worth sharing for a while. I wish it wasn’t the case, but writing tends to be one of those things that falls to the bottom of the pile when life gets busier.
Still, it’s given me some time to reflect on what I want and don’t want this Substack to be. This post is an attempt to clarify my thoughts, and will recount the origins, present, and likely future of this newsletter.
Writing prior to Substack
The type of writing I do on Substack has its origin six or seven years ago. What started as an effort to improve my mental health through meditation led to a genuine interest and curiosity in the field. I practised different methods, familiarised myself with key Eastern teachings, got bemused and bedazzled by nondual philosophies, and spent countless hours reading and writing for a blog site that I eventually lost interest in.
It wasn’t the topic that I got fed up of, but the format and lack of engagement. To get anyone to actually find your site on Google (I didn’t want to publish anything in my own name or bother with other marketing efforts, so social channels were out of the question), you need to shape your articles around what people are searching for. For the topics I was writing about, this often meant dry ‘what is X’ and ‘how to Y’ pieces. You can only churn out so many of those before you get bored, trust me.
I was never going to outrank the big sites that had articles on these topics, so only a handful of people ever found my site. This didn’t bother me to begin with, because the whole point of the site was to learn. But the posts started to take longer and longer as I strived for more detail, and in the end I couldn’t be bothered putting the time in for little return.
Starting on Substack: Eastern spirituality and artistic practices
I was attracted to Substack because it lacked the constraints that search engines enforce on your writing. I didn’t, and still kind of don’t, have a clear direction for this newsletter. However, most of my initial writing explored crossovers and rhymes between Eastern wisdom traditions and artistic practices, with some more tangential topics punctuated throughout in my attempt to maintain a regular posting habit. I loved writing and learning about this kind of thing, and my articles on Duchamp, Cage, and Monod are still some of my favourite things I’ve done on here.
Exploring Jung and Joseph Campbell
Then came regular articles on Jung. These were a sort of happy accident inspired by something I’d read and wanted to learn more about. Just over a year ago, I knew little of Jung’s teachings beyond a few flashcard summaries of his key ideas. Up to this point, the spiritual teachings I was interested in rejected the self, which seemed to bypass, and therefore undermine the importance of, human psychology. If you think identifying with thoughts and emotions is the main obstacle to recognising that consciousness is already open and empty of self, then you learn not to take thoughts and emotions seriously.
I found Jung interesting because his teachings seem to advise the opposite. For Jung, psychic wholeness requires making the unconscious contents of the psyche known and integrating them into the conscious mind. Since thoughts and emotions emerge from the unconscious, they need to be taken seriously and explored. This isn’t an article on the differences between these two enormous topics, but an attempt to examine how and why the newsletter got to this point.
Going forward, I have neither the desire nor the expertise to be the Jung guy. I may decide to keep learning about and connecting Jung’s ideas with other interests, but I don’t want Jungian psychology to be the primary focus of this newsletter. The same goes for Joseph Campbell, whose teachings I wrote a few articles about too.
My recent posts
I’ve shifted the tone somewhat in three of my four most recent posts.
In Three Ways to Understand Meaning in Life, I began exploring the idea of a work-in-progress-and-open-to-revision personal philosophy. It’s based on the idea that there are three types of meaning:
Cognitive/intellectual meaning
Teleological meaning
Intrinsic meaning
The point is: the things that matter most or feel most significant in life rarely make sense intellectually, and trying to frame them intellectually often diminishes them. The vitality that makes life worth living isn’t to be found in intellectual accounts, but in direct and artistic experiences. Most of what I’ve written on here belongs to the first type of meaning. I love learning about them, but topics like Eastern philosophy and psychology can be dry as fuck, so I don’t want them to be the primary focus of this newsletter.
So what will I write about? In On Writing to Figure Stuff Out, I explored the idea of writing as revelation:
‘…writing is self-revelation and self-creation: it reveals unseen ideas, psychic contents, and perceptions, and shapes the conscious self through this revelation. But the self it reveals, like the self it creates, is unstable and impermanent.’
It flips the traditional idea of writing on its head. You don’t wait for ideas then write: you write to get ideas.
This is a key insight when faced with uncertainty, and something that will shape this newsletter going forward. Writing initiates a kind of psychic exploration and litheness that’s essential for landing on new ideas when you’re stuck. Looking back now, the article validates something I’ve been thinking about over the last few weeks: if you don’t know, write. You’ll land on something, even if it’s something completely unexpected.
The theme of On Curation and Connection: A Creative Manifesto for Life is similar. Authenticity and originality come from connecting disparate ‘things’ in a unique way, and writing is the perfect medium to do this. The best thing is, you can decide what you connect, so that you gradually build a vast and shimmering kaleidoscope of all the things you love.
While rambling, I’m practising the realisations I’ve come to (though writing) recently: writing through the uncertainty and connecting ideas without a clear goal in sight in the confidence that I’ll gradually develop clarity and land on something more complete. This is a skill for life, because uncertainty is always around the corner. The minute you feel like you know it all, something will come along that drags you back into the dark. In this way, we spend our lives hopping between ignorance and knowledge; knowledge breeds ignorance, ignorance breeds knowledge.
Going forward
The upshot is that I want to expand the borders of this newsletter. What this looks like remains to be seen, and could span a wide variety of topics. For instance, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading about things like:
Information and complexity theory
Cormac McCarthy
Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems
Football fandom
Ambient music
However, what I am clear about is that writing is the process of working things out, and that deliberate practice over a long enough period will lead me to land on something interesting and unique that I never would’ve conceived of if it weren’t for the practice itself. This is nice, because it takes away some of the pressure of having to meet self-imposed standards.
I believe that if you connect and curate the things that you love, your writing will become a sort of homage to what’s important. And since writing is as much revelation as it is creation, you’re guaranteed to come to some of the insights that many psychological and spiritual traditions promise as a result of the process.