The Free Radical

With our intrepid leader, Cedar Branches, stalking wisdom in Peru, the rest of the Mystical Masters have been granted the freedom to post on any topic of our choosing these couple of weeks. When Rhea posted on Validation, I opted to follow suit, as the topic of validation had lately been much on my mind… for very positive reasons.

(Tempus Fugit by Yes from their 1980 album Drama)

Validation: A Personal Journey

Even if my readership was exactly zero, I’d still be writing what I write. I can’t not write it. But somehow, with each step of validation– either from my inner knowing exclaiming “Yes!” when I know I’ve gotten it ‘right,’ or from others lending their attention and care in their own agreement– there seems to be some inertial mass to the whole validation process. With each new validation, the process itself seems to gain confidence as I am required to do less and less. Mostly I just duck out of the way… Look out! Here comes an avalanche of words!

When I began to write in earnest, following mostly my curiosity as guide and mentor, I was just sifting through my own tangled thoughts… working shit out on paper. In the beginning, I didn’t really know if any of it was good in any respect. I suspected that others could perhaps derive some benefit from the sharing, so I confronted my chief fear: vulnerability. I started putting myself out there.

In practice, validation appeared to proceed in a ping-pong fashion. It oscillated between my own internal approval for what I was doing and the external feedback from others. If they got excited by what I’d written, then naturally I got excited about what I had written… and that naturally inspired better writing. (I use ‘better’ assuming that the greater the ease of the creative flow, the higher the quality of the creation– a direct correlation.)

Once the lumbering pace of validation-momentum was set into motion, it didn’t stop or pause easily. Only self-doubt can significantly slow it down… and I had long bouts of self-doubt. My second book took 10 years to write! And it squatted upon my shoulders the whole time, breathing down my neck. Those first two books of the Muse Trilogy I still consider to be my best work, but they’re certainly not very widely read. The feedback however from my cozy audience was enough to take a stab at writing full-time, starting in 2011.

In my third book, Humanity Incorporated, I set my overarching goal thusly:

“Among nearly seven billion human imaginations, drawing from their countless and diverse experiences, there is currently no problem which cannot be solved. All the answers are out there, right now. What is needed is a productive unfettered dialogue to mete out solutions and the practical means to implementing them. We require a global discussion.”

As it turns out, I have always really wanted to have that global discussion. It’s happening now… on the internet. It’s clumsy, inefficient and disjointed, but it IS occurring in pockets, cells and networks. The collective brain is still organizing itself.

I know we are driven by narratives. Everyone lives according to their own story, woven from the strands of what others say and their own internal dialogue. I want us all to experience validating stories.

With approximately a quarter million monthly readers at my blog, I feel that I am indeed in the thick of the global discussion now. It’s mostly the free monthly Newsletter that brings them in. It’s very validating to be able to shape and tweak the collective discussion that will one day soon define the next yoga pose of this contorted world’s future. I take this seriously… it’s the only thing I ever have…

Thank you for reading these words.
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