Brimstone Lark

On one hand there is Authentic Inspiration and on the other, Inauthentic Inspiration. These two types of motivations are easy to mistake for one another. When someone mistakenly follows inauthentic inspiration and expects creativity, the result is a painful frustration and confusion. I hope to clarify the difference between authentic and inauthentic inspiration so that more people can be creative instead of confused.

Authentic Inspiration

A helpful framing for Authentic Inspiration is Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian. If the Greeks channeled Apollo when they reasoned analytically, and Dionysus when they lost themselves in song and dance, they channeled a muse when they experienced Authentic Inspiration. Muses are a metaphor for the source of inspiration, just as Apollo is a metaphor for the source of rational thinking and Dionysus as the source of self-forgetting.

In the moments when we feel most in touch with the wisdom of reality it feels as if there is a force inside which does not originate from us. It feels like listening rather than producing. This feeling is Authentic Inspiration.

It is very hard to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic inspiration. Authentic Inspiration comes in moments when the mind is quiet and not distracted by the tasks and deficiencies of daily living. The muse speaks to us when we are still enough to listen. Although it may spark the desire to create, the feeling of wanting in these moments is not like the feeling of wanting when we see a bag of chips or fantasize about financial freedom. It is not a desire for something, rather it is a desire of something. It is a desire to capture something which already exists.

Inauthentic inspiration

In our efforts to build up a stylized identity which others value, we copy and paste thoughts, accessories, and preferences from other people. This can have the appearance of creativity when observed from the outside in because it’s really hard to tell where the source of inspiration comes from when there are so many references. However, the subjective experience of this process can be more accurately described as a hunger – certainly not motivated by the force of a muse. Much of the creativity we see each day in society is of this mimetic nature, not motivated by true inspiration (see “Taking the church more seriously than the prophets” )

The desire for creativity is a worship of the outcomes of inspiration rather than the actual state of inspiration – to have drawn the beautiful image, to have written the beautiful song, rather than to have felt the beauty which immediately precedes that act. I believe that a large cause of sadness in young people today is confusing this desire for having created with inspiration to create. The inability to distinguish between desire and Authentic Inspiration leaves us feeling empty when we realize that we were never inspired in the first place.

Whereas a sense of self is core to the mimetic hunger of desire, the muse’s inspiration causes us to forget ourselves. True artists channel that which compels them to create without questioning the impact on how people will see them. Acting on Authentic Inspiration has no “I” involved.

This fact makes mistaking desire for inspiration all the more painful to those who fall into the trap. Not only do we feel impotence owing to our lack of inspiration, but we also feel shame for our surplus sense of self. If others found out that beneath our false inspiration was self centeredness, we’d be doubly doomed.

When we feel motivated to pick up the pen, we must be very careful to consider the voice we are channeling. Is it the siren of desire or the muse of Authentic Inspiration? We may believe that we want to be a novelist, we may tell people in our lives that we want to be a novelist, but we may find that no deeper voice of inspiration causes us to put pen to paper.

The silver lining

However fallible we are to the siren of the desire, we are capable of hearing the muse. It is only a matter of learning how to tune in, of opening our state of consciousness enough to hear her sing. Learning to tune into Authentic Inspiration is very much akin to learning how to tune in to Maslow’s B-Knowledge. The information is always there, learnable and re-learnable, but also forgettable (see “Book review: Toward a Psychology of Being”).

Once we know what Authentic Inspiration feels like, we can distinguish between the muse and the siren of desire. Knowing that we are vulnerable to mistaking the two, we should pause when faced with an impulse to produce in order to determine if it is authentically inspired or rooted in mimetic desire (see: First Order Reactions)

Mimetic desire is not evil. It has its place – it’s just not in creative expression. If the desire is to be a successful creative, raw desire itself will never get you there, nor is the ability to tune into Authentic Inspiration enough to produce creative masterpieces.

Once we have identified what it feels like to hear the muse, we can begin the long journey of sharpening a newly discovered blade. Nobody can tell you how to write a poem or paint a picture, you can only be inspired to do so. However, once inspired to create, executing is no trivial task. If you have experienced Authentic Inspiration and you want to capture it, you should ask yourself two questions: a) How can I open my consciousness to hear Authentic Inspiration more clearly and frequently? And b) How can I build a practice to capture this inspiration to produce something beautiful?