How insights, creative sparks, and spiritual epiphanies happen
Or... How to piss off both Christians and atheists in a single post
Here I am, working on one of my Sharpie drawings back in 2019, in the back of a Carl’s Jr. in Orange County. Since I’ve been getting harassed by some of the powers that be on the Far Right, for over 20 years, my art “studios” are anywhere I can sit and write or draw for a couple of hours. Life as a homeless writer/artist comes with some additional challenges.
How to piss off Christians and Atheists both in a few paragraphs
Creative sparks of ideas, personal insights, new scientific ideas, and spiritual epiphanies happen in a very similar way. Religions and New Age books often mention people getting flashes of ideas or information in dreams, visions, or some other way. They can be called revelations, epiphanies, insights, signs, the light bulb going on, or satori in Japan. These little bits of amazing information may come to you in a flash of inspiration, like a lightning bolt, an intuitive hunch, in a dream or a vision (waking dream), or quietly drift into your brain through “the still small voice,” as Napoleon Hill called it 100 years ago.
These insights are available to everyone. They may be about some small personal habit of yours, or they may be something that could affect the whole world, and any level in between. If you’re a human, you can, and you will, have insights in your life. Whether you listen to them, that’s a whole different thing. Most of us, most of the time, ignore our own intuitive insights. At least until we take the time to start listening to them on purpose.
Here’s the basic process. First, you think intellectually about something for a while. Some annoying problem or thing in your world grabs your attention. You try to think through the problem, to intellectually solve the problem. But you can’t find the solution.
Then you forget about it. If you’re religious, you may pray about the issue. If you lean towards the New Age or Eastern way of thinking, you may meditate on the subject for a while. But in most cases, you just forget about it. You go back to thinking and getting busy with everyday life.
During that time, I think your subconscious still wrestles with the problem you were trying to figure out. Nobody is sure what happens then. Maybe your subconscious mind searches the whole Universe, and everybody else’s mind, looking for the answer. Maybe some kind of mental magnetism draws the answer to you. I don’t know. But something happens, if it’s something you really care about, and something you need to know.
Sometimes, not all the time, an answer comes, later on. It might be a few days later. It may be a month or a year later, the answer you were looking for just pops into your head, seemingly out of nowhere. It may come when you wake up in the middle of the night. Or when you’re in the shower. Or when you’re driving. Or in the middle of a party, when you don’t want to deal with it. Or may come while you’re taking a walk. Insights have a tendency to come when you’re body is busy, and you mind is wandering.
Then you have it. You have the answer you were looking for, at some earlier date. You may stop and think about it. You may write it down. You may try to memorize it. But, if you’re like most of us, you’ll let it slip away, completely forget about it. The majority of the time, you don’t act on it. That’s what most of us seem to do, most of the time.
I learned this basic process in 1987 and 1988, when I was dating a singer in a local rock band. I decided I would try and write her a hit song. I started writing “song lyrics.” Really bad lyrics. After a few months, the lyrics started getting a bit better, and I started having little insights, where a cool line would pop in my head every once in a while. I didn’t write down the first several lines, I just forgot them as the day went on. Then I was mad at myself because I couldn’t remember them later. I’ve been carrying a black, ballpoint pen in my front pocket since 1988, to collect these insights when they pop up. Losing several cool lines or poems taught me to be ready to “catch” them.
That girlfriend, back in 1988, wound up dumping me. I wrote my first really good poem the night she dumped me. Even she liked it. That poem got me a couple weeks of post break-up sex. Then we went our separate ways. I wound up writing over 400 or 500 poems since. And a lot of other things, like zines, a few more magazine articles, and a couple of thousand blog posts in more recent years. That black pen is in my pocket as I write this.
There is a higher force in the Universe. I’m not saying that I think there is, or there might be, a higher force in the Universe. I’m telling you, flat out, there is some higher force, or maybe a set of many forces, at work in this Universe.
You can call this force, or these forces, God, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, the Creator, Sophia, or you can call it Roy. Or you can believe that force doesn’t exist. I don’t think it really cares. You just have to be open to receiving insights, and start paying attention to them.
You don’t have to belong to a certain religion to access insights from this higher force. You don’t have to belong to any religion to receive insights from this force. Scientific discoveries come from the same place that religious epiphanies come from, which is the same place sparks of creative ideas come from to artists of all kinds. Different people ask different questions in life, and so they get different kinds of insights for different reasons. That’s pretty cool, when you think about it.
Personally, I think the Universe itself might be made up of consciousness, in some way we could never fully understand. A person from any religion, or no religion can ask for, and receive, insights this way. An atheist who believes in no higher power, but is open to insights, can use this force to find insights needed in their life and work. This Force is where your intuitive insights come from, whether you believe in it or not.
You become more intuitive by starting to intentionally listen to (or sense, or feel, or envision) your intuition. There are things that can help you become more intuitive. Meditation, prayer, doing most any kind of art or creative work (visual arts, music, writing, etc), playing sports, either individual action sports or team oriented sports, they can all enhance your intuition. Journaling, writing down your thoughts, ideas, and day to day crap that bugs you, that can help. All of these things use your intuition in some way. The best one for you will be one, or several, that you find most interesting, and take the time to develop.
Your conscious mind often second guesses insights, and tries to get you to ignore the insight, by coming up with a negative or opposing thought right after the insight. This is probably a coping mechanism from childhood, in most of us, developed when we had lots of ideas that seemed cool when we were three or six or nine, but that didn’t make sense to our parents or other adults. So they shot our ideas down. Eventually, we begin to shoot our own good ideas down. Then we have to relearn how to listen to intuition again, at a later time.
In any case, you can seek out the questions that really bother you in life, things you really want to understand, and eventually get answers. That’s how the Universe works, and it can work for everyone. If you try to hard to have an insight, you work against yourself. You have to do the thinking part, and then just let it go, and forget about it. The Universe seems to have a sense of humor, too. Often the most unlikely person or circumstance will lead you to the insight you are seeking. Just to keep you on your toes.
These are my basic thoughts on insights, something I learned by accident, and turned myself into a poet in the process. There’s a lot more to this, there are books and workshops on creativity that dive deeper into this basic idea. But coming up with insights, solutions to problems, is part of being human, and the Universe will help, if you learn to work with it.
