Writing & New Age

Lesson 1: Techniques, Imagery, and Beginning Exercises.

Writing performance enhancement piques the interest of every writer at some point in their career. We are all anxious to learn and apply new techniques to pique our level of expertise. The utilization of:

• Goal selection,
• Guided Imagery,
• Journaling and design book creations,
• Self-hypnosis,
• Meditative life applications, and
• Qi energy exercises,

will help to improve our literary skills.


This e-course is presented from this collection of application and resource formats:

• Design | idea booklet.
• Interactive applications. tests, materials presentation.
• Journals.
• Materials presentations.
• Meditation practices.
• On-line presentations.
• Qi energy power exercises.
• Section tests.

Footnote:

You may wonder why a patron saint is situated here and begins our first lesson overview. He is here to introduce this course.

"We will have visitors to these lesson plans (they will be explained in footnotes at the close of lessons where they are posted using italics). They have been teachers in the art of performance enhancement, so welcome them when you can."

St. Peter: Out of the whole world one man, Peter, is chosen to preside at the head of all nations and to be set over all the apostles and all the fathers of the church, therefore St. Peter is a good saint to preside over a compilation of study-so he leads the way into our lesson series.

Section 1-1: Multi-layer Techniques.

I. Mechanics of Message and Goal Selection:

To achieve the mechanics of message you have to select a goal. There are two camps of thought regarding the selection of a message to develop in either fiction or non-fiction format (no matter your genre). One is to have a well-defined outline. The other is to go with your flow and leave the outline to the four winds. The idea in this course is to combine both frames of thought.

This combination will define your purpose in writing and achieve results you determine to share with your reader. Oftentimes this appears initially as a "concept" more than a tangible reality. This is where mechanization (as uninventive as that may sound) assists in the process of building upon your goal selection and asserts your creative endeavor.

The environment of writing can be much more complex than that of a board of chess. As in real life, goals are not always clearly defined within a piece of writing. There can be more than one goal. The relationship between those goals can be, at times, fuzzy.

The fundamental problem with multiple goals is to achieve specific goal selection. The key to this in solution seems to be a motivation arising naturally from your emotional states. Emotions reflect basic needs and serve as origins of behavioral patterns. The selection is mediated via emotions.

II. Emotions, Motivations, and Goal Selections:

There are many ways where emotion-based motivation can be used. Most importantly emotions form the basis of characterization in writing. Even without any learning taking place characters can appear realistic if they display and satisfy emotional needs. Of more interest, are interactions that occur when many characters compete for the same resource of emotional satisfaction.

Through the incorporation of guided imagery, self-hypnosis, and the mechanics of message you will be able to incorporate an enhanced writing state.

III. Defining Goals:

Continuing in reinforcement of a learning framework the pure existence of a goal does not constitute planning. A good example to explain this can be derived from the chess masters. They do some planning, albeit they do not foresee all possible combination of their moves. Rather, they predict the value of a particular board position based on their experience, foresight, and intuition.

A particular kind of planning that chess players do is to select a sub-goal. In order to achieve sub-goals, they select a strategy. The selection of sub-goals and strategies are linked to their correct evaluation based on personal experience. These intertwining relationships between different kinds of experience (at the individual move, sub-goal, and strategy levels) make it possible for them to play chess without accounting for every future move.

Writing is, of course, a creative energy and through resourceful planning, sub-goal selection, intuitive strategies, and determination you will develop your ability to navigate the map of your manuscript from start to completion.

I. Brainstorming As A Tool:

The term brainstorming has become a commonly used word generically termed for creative thinking. The basis of brainstorming is to generate ideas within group situations based on the principle of suspending judgment. This is a canon that scientific research has proved to be highly productive in individual efforts as well as group efforts. The generation phase of brainstorming is separate from the judgment phase of thinking over the results.

Brainstorming is a traditional approach to deliberate creative thinking. The idea of brainstorming is that other people's remarks act as stimulation to supplement your own ideas in a sort of chain reaction of arguments. In a group setting you have to listen to others and may spend time repeating your own points until they receive sufficient attention. Thinking as a group using brainstorming techniques certainly produces ideas. Individual analysis using these techniques should be employed as you work on your projects independently.

II. Understanding the Inner Voice:

Getting in touch with the Inner Self and hearing the 'Inner Voice' is tantamount in your writing enhancement. The voice of the spirit residing deep inside each of us delivers a unique approach to the fulfillment of writing goals. Bookshelves are jammed with information on meditative techniques, transcendent spiritual experiences, and ways to build self-identity in addition to inner confidence. A number of these texts are referred to with this lesson series. We aren't going to draw uniformly from these texts, but rather treat them as supplemental research texts to aid your further discovery of the lesson material. I urge you to purchase them when you may, read them, and utilize the material found in each of them.

It is worthwhile to hear and listen to your Inner Voice. It is where the whispers of your psyche and the universal consciousness are to be found. It is where thoughts ramble without stumbling over the words, where ideas spring from, where images dance, and where the imagination soars. The Inner Voice is where emotions find root and spiritual longings arise. It is also where we find the stuff that makes us human, the stuff all humans have, and where the home of differences that define us as individuals resides.

III. Making The Inward Journey:

As we journey to hear and align with our Inner Voice there are some things we need to keep in mind no matter how overpowering our discoveries are, no matter what anyone claims, or how much it seems otherwise. They are the following:

1. You won't become so deeply unified with your Inner Voice that you are beyond yourself. You will always be the same individual you are now no matter how much you examine your Inner Voice and/or inner consciousness. Many people fear inner visioning and self-hypnosis, but both of these ideas are incorporated by the worlds' top athletes, corporate masters, political leaders, and etc. High achievers have been known to utilize a range of methodologies such as these as working tools in the development of their talents. You will benefit from their knowledge. Concepts you should remember are the following:
   
   
   • You will not become so deeply attuned that you surpass your spiritual capabilities.
     
   • You will not become so deeply attuned that you surpass your own foolishness. Harnessing the lightheartedness that remains hidden in your inner being is a good thing to embrace and works toward the achievement of writing enhancement.
     
   • You will always bear the 'outer world' while you journey toward and acknowledgment and understanding of your Inner Voice. You have not grown up in a vacuum. The stamp of the world you have perceived and the loved ones involved in your life have left their imprints on the deep recesses of your soul in one way or other. These imprints may be part of what drives you to do creative work and they may provide paths of discovery toward justice in your society.
     
   • You will not totally understand your Inner Voice initially. You will have to live and act with less than a full understanding, as the process of understanding will be an ongoing one, overtime the understanding will be intrinsic, and you will grow, plateau, grow, and plateau.

As you listen more carefully to your Inner Voice and integrate it throughout your life let it become stronger than the sharp cries of your ego. This is when your innate wisdom begins to flourish.

Increasingly, you will be able to distinguish between the Inner Voice and the ego they may, at times, act in opposition to one another (i.e.: you may identify most with love and affection not with pain and suffering). Understanding the Inner Voice is like awakening to a memory that is very, very superb-it is as though life has been restored to you from subconscious memory to active re-enactment.

Keeping with the practice, you will realize that it is your own inner guide, your own light, your own deep knowing, that guides you, therefore there truly is nothing to fear. This is the infinite abundance you house to draw upon and there is no separation from it.

Your Inner Voice is there inside of you. It has been since you were brought into the world. When you could not open your mouth, until your first two years on the planet, your Inner Voice has been the voice and knowledge base you have interpreted and understood life from.

Your Inner Voice is the voice of your subconscious. The subconscious acts as a secondary reflector of thoughts and ideas in the body. It justifies and rationalizes what is right and what is wrong. When we go against what the Inner Voice has declared to us we can develop a guilty conscious and become bothered by it throughout our lifetime. Re-visiting those areas of our subconsciousness may allow us to forgive ourselves, to place those guilt emotions on paper in character form, to remove them from their storage capacities, and relinquish them to a life of their own away from our mindset.



When we feel low or experience unforgettable moments we seem to need some kind of emotional or mental support. We may speak to close friends or family members to ease our burdens. We then recover from the initial emotional anxiety and mental restlessness, because of our empathic listeners, and their assistance. We feel rejuvenated. Our Inner Voice alerts us to get on with things. It helps us leave things that are past on the memory books housed within our brains. We can tap into emotional reserves such as those that are shelved in our memories and then re-deliver these as effective voices in our writing.

The Inner Voice is typically correct. It knows us better than others do. It is the intuitive daredevil that we have experienced since childhood. It is good to trust our intuitions because they respond to a synchronization between the mental and physical self.

Whenever you tried your first cigarette (if you did ever try one) or whenever you were asked to take sides in an argument, you were in a state of dilemma. Your Inner Voice gave a verdict that (if overwritten) left you either happy or unhappy with your decision and in your future decisions relative to the initial one. That voice is not a stranger, but it is generally not recognized until a dilemma arises. We are going to bring that voice into active recognition at will.

The wise writer is one who resides in the cave of the soul always speaking to the world from their Inner Voice while utilizing the mechanics of goal selection to deliver that voice in a balanced final form. The Inner Voice is soft, gentle...often a whisper. It is full of common sense, love, and kindness...best of all, it provides true wisdom in the ways and knowledge that is best suited for us.

We need to listen to our Inner Voice or life and our experiences will give us exactly what the Inner Voice has warned us about or informed us of.

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30 Scripts for Relaxation, Imagery and Inner Healing, Vol. 2 offers a variety of exercises to perform Guided Imagery.

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