The Atheist's Way by Eric Maisel

If you've been interested in improving your creativity at all in the last twenty years, two names are probably familiar to you: Julia Cameron and Eric Maisel.

Julia, who wrote The Artist's Way, approaches creative recovery using the tools of addiction recovery, including the dimension of a higher power or Great Creator. Hers is an unabashedly spiritual program. Eric has written Fearless Creating and countless other books, and is the world's leading creativity coach. His background is as a writer and a behavioral psychologist, and his hands-on approach includes cultivating the empowerment that comes from assigning meaning to one's creative practice.

Both are humane, gentle approaches and complement each other. I have just about every book by each of them on my shelf. But I didn't realize until recently that Eric is an atheist.

I expected his new book the Atheist's Way to be a stretch for me. I grew up Catholic but left the church because of its dogma. One could say of any organization started with the best intentions that hierarchy and middle management eventually will subvert its members' experience. :)

So I'm not a fan of organized religion, but I'm an astrologer and the granddaughter of a Christian mystic. Eric's premise is that reliance on any supernatural experience is false and damaging. I'm not entirely sure. I think there might be a place for individual mystical experience.

He is right that the our country has a fundamentalist shadow that is problematic. We project it on our enemies, but express it ourselves. Blind faith, fed by (to put it nicely) major distortions and intolerance are considered justification for damaging policy.

Any system of belief needs to withstand critical testing. Any belief that makes you sign over control of your life to something outside you (even the Flying Spaghetti Monster) is not necessarily benevolent.

So this is a very useful little book about making individual meaning, and in some ways is the clearest and most direct of his meaning books. Making meaning means examining your values, and then choosing to live them full-time, reassessing your values constantly, and changing them when you need to. To really make meaning, says Eric, you have to go deep, making moral and ethical choices thoughtfully. The work is difficult but the rewards are great: “The painter creates a world, the writer creates a world; and you create a world, your own force field of ethical action. This is at least as beautiful a creation as any symphony or poem—more beautiful, really, because without it, civilization would soon collapse.”

We are the heroes of our own stories. Eric shows that atheism is not merely a dogmatic negation of gods, but a positive, active moral choice.

I consider it brave of Eric to write this book. Those who fly in the face of the status quo, who choose to make their own ethical choices, need validation. His book is necessary, encouraging, and eminently readable.

This is only one stop on the Atheist's Way blog tour. To see more, visit here.
Eric's blog on the Atheist's Way is here.
Purchase The Atheist's Way here.

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Here's an excerpted interview with Eric Maisel on The Atheist's Way:

You’ve written many books on creativity—more than
fifteen. Why a book on atheism from you now?

Like many lifelong atheists who want to communicate the
beauty and wisdom of the atheist worldview and lifestyle,
I’d wanted to write a book like The Atheist’s Way for a
long time. But the publishing industry had shied away from
books of that sort. Then, when several atheism books
became bestsellers, a few publishers took a second look at
their reluctance and stretched in the direction of providing
atheist authors with a platform. This is a book that I’ve
wanted to write for a long and now the times allow for it to
appear.

What is the central message of The Atheist’s Way?

There are three central messages. The first message is that
there are no gods and that the use of god-talk is a betrayal
of our common humanity. Anyone who plays the god card
is playing a dirty trick on his fellow human beings. The
second message is that a paradigm shift is needed from
seeking meaning to making meaning. Until people realize
that human-sized meaning does not exist until they make it,
they remain stuck embracing supernatural enthusiasms or
else pining for meaning. The third message is to describe a
beautiful and attractive atheist lifestyle, full of effort and
ethics—a complete way of life—that I hope people will
decide is exactly right for them.

What’s the real harm in believing in gods?

The harm is that it makes a person more stupid than he or
she would otherwise be, more authoritarian, and more
antagonistic to solving our shared human problems. It
amounts to a complete betrayal of our common humanity.
The instant a person gives in to the urge to answer difficult
questions about the facts of existence with false, slogansized
supernatural answers, he makes himself a smaller,
more frightened, less democratic person, lowers the critical
thinking bar, and endangers our freedom. Just imagine that
I started mouthing the made-up belief, “God says that blue
is bad.” Wouldn’t you immediately begin to fear that your
blue rug puts you in some undeserved danger? People
should not do that to other people.

Why should it matter to the rest of us whether or not a
person believes in gods?

A belief in gods is not an innocent thing. It is a position visà-
vis the world and vis-à-vis one’s neighbors. It is a refuge
for scoundrels who want their views to count more than the
next person’s, it is way to enslave the minds and hearts of
children, it provides cover for bigotry and prejudice, it
causes sharp divisions among people, and it makes the
world a less rational and a more dangerous place. Therefore
it should be the hope of every thoughtful person that beliefs
in gods wither way and the practice of every thoughtful
person to indict god-talk as a betrayal of our common
humanity.

Your book is also being billed as an “atheist lifestyle”
book. What does that mean?

When you’re an atheist, you’re obliged to figure out how to
live as an atheist. It isn’t just that you’re convinced that
god-talk is a human contrivance and a human weakness.
That’s only a small part of it. It’s a complete vision about
the finiteness of your time on earth, your intimate
relationship to nature, the sources of your values, and all
things human. If you’re addicted and intend to recover, you
recover as an atheist. That’s how an atheist recovers—
without god-talk. If you’re an artist and intend to create,
you sit down and create—you don’t wait for divine
inspiration. That’s how an atheist creates—by doing it.
Atheism supports and demands a completely atheistic
lifestyle, a way of life free of supernatural enthusiasms, full
of personal effort and responsibility, and beautiful in its
clarity and honesty.

Where do atheists get their values and morality?

How does a believer decide whether to stay at home with
his sick child or go off to war? He thinks about it, brings
forth his cherished principles and his ideas about right and
wrong, and makes an agonizing decision. That’s how every
human being who is not brainwashed into accepting the
slogans of god-talkers decides what is right for him to do.
He thinks about it, using his brain and his natural sense of
ethics. Every moral person is moral by virtue of the fact
that he is trying to be moral, that he is making the effort to
think through what is right and wrong. An atheist who is
thinking through what is right to do is more moral than a
believer who is mouthing some authoritarian slogan.

Isn’t atheism something of a fad?

Atheism is as old a tradition as the world’s religions. 2500
years ago Heraclitus wrote, “Religion is a disease.” At the
same time, Aristotle explained, “Men create gods in their
own image.” 2000 years ago Cicero wondered, “What old
woman is so stupid now as to tremble at those tales of hell
which were once so firmly believed in?” When the
disciples of Confucius wanted to debate the spirit world he
reprimanded them, “Why talk of spirits when you do not
understand men?” For thousands of years intelligent men
and women have been identifying god-talk as man-made
and religions as scourges. Atheism is not a fad: it is a
vibrant tradition and our best hope for the future.

Eric Maisel on The Van Gogh Blues

Today I catapult myself, as someone once said, from local to worldwide obscurity :) As promised, my guest is Dr. Eric Maisel, internationally-known creativity expert. Not only is he a prolific author and a major mover in the field of creativity coaching, but very generous to fellow artists. I am delighted to be part of his blog tour. I very much enjoyed reading his new book, The Van Gogh Blues, and have noticed that I have been questioning my negative self-talk in terms of meaning lately. It's a very interesting shift, and takes a lot of power out of the judgments I make about whether an action is worthwhile or not….

Eric’s website, with information on his books and trainings, can be found at http://www.ericmaisel.com/.


Q: Eric, can you tell us what The Van Gogh Blues is about?

E: For more than 25 years I’ve been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others. A certain theme or idea began to emerge: that creative people are people who stand in relation to life in a certain way—they see themselves as active meaning-makers rather than as passive folks with no stake in the world and no inner potential to realize. This orientation makes meaning a certain kind of problem for them—if, in their own estimation, they aren’t making sufficient meaning, they get down. I began to see that this “simple” dynamic helped explain why so many creative people—I would say all of us at one time or another time—get the blues.

To say this more crisply, it seemed to me that the depression that we see in creative people was best conceptualized as existential depression, rather than as biological, psychological, or social depression. This meant that the treatment had to be existential in nature. You could medicate a depressed artist but you probably weren’t really getting at what was bothering him, namely that the meaning had leaked out of his life and that, as a result, he was just going through the motions, paralyzed by his meaning crisis.

Q: Are you saying that whenever a creative person is depressed, we are looking at existential depression? Or might that person be depressed in “some other way”?

E: When you’re depressed, especially if you are severely depressed, if the depression won’t go away, or if it comes back regularly, you owe it to yourself to get a medical work-up, because the cause might be biological and antidepressants might prove valuable. You also owe it to yourself to do some psychological work (hopefully with a sensible, talented, and effective therapist), as there may be psychological issues at play. But you ALSO owe it to yourself to explore whether the depression might be existential in nature and to see if your “treatment plan” should revolve around some key existential actions like reaffirming that your efforts matter and reinvesting meaning in your art and your life.

Q: So you’re saying that a person who decides, for whatever reason, that she is going to be a “meaning maker,” is more likely to get depressed by virtue of that very decision. In addition to telling herself that she matters and that her creative work matters, what else should she do to “keep meaning afloat” in her life? What else helps?

E: I think it is a great help just to have a “vocabulary of meaning” and to have language to use so that you know what is going on in your life. If you can’t accurately name a thing, it is very hard to think about that thing. That’s why I present a whole vocabulary of meaning in The Van Gogh Blues and introduce ideas and phrases like “meaning effort,” “meaning drain,” “meaning container,” and many others. When we get a rejection letter, we want to be able to say, “Oh, this is a meaning threat to my life as a novelist” and instantly reinvest meaning in our decision to write novels, because if we don’t think that way and speak that way, it is terribly easy to let that rejection letter precipitate a meaning crisis and get us seriously blue. By reminding ourselves that is our job not only to make meaning but also to maintain meaning when it is threatened, we get in the habit of remembering that we and we alone are in charge of keeping meaning afloat—no one else will do that for us. Having a vocabulary of meaning available to talk about these matters is a crucial part of the process.

Q: A depressive since adolescence, I suffer from mild manic episodes as well and find it difficult to concentrate on creating in the middle of one. Can bipolar disorder be considered a meaning crisis? How might the context of meaning be used to make sense of mood swings?

E: The manic side of the bipolar swing has to do with the hope that meaning can be made—it is not so much an optimism as a pressure to try again, to throw oneself into life and to make some meaning by any means possible, often without any concern for the bite of reality or how reality might prevent you from succeeding. The person flings herself into some enthusiasm—and soon enough reality strikes: perhaps the work isn’t as good as she hoped it would be, perhaps it can’t be marketed, perhaps it was only meaningful in the contemplation and not in the execution. So depression follows—the meaning crisis that was always lurking there, waiting to be activated. The best way to avoid this dynamic of pressurized hope followed by sad retreat is to step back and recognize that making meaning is not a sprint but a marathon, that it is the lifelong pursuit of activities worth investing in and requires the discipline and patience of any lifelong practice. You don’t rush out and make some kind of super meaning this week—you make meaning day in and day, month in and month out, decade in and decade out, in a steady, heroic way.

Q: The chapter on Braving Anxiety is very compelling, in particular procrastination and its relation to anxiety. Can you explain how anxiety and procrastination can be debilitating to a creative person?

E: Because creating tends to make us anxious—and it does, by virtue of the fact that it is more anxiety-provoking to go into the unknown than to stay in the known and more anxiety-provoking to demand excellence from ourselves than to do things which are more ordinary—we react as people react when they get anxious: they avoid the anxiety-inducing situation. If you fear flying, you stay far away from the airport; if painting makes you anxious, you stay away from the studio. You may not know that this is why you haven’t gotten to the studio for three months—but it likely is. The anxiety produces the avoidance and we fail to get our work done. The answer is to recognize the place of anxiety in the process and not let a little anxiety keep us from working. We bravely work anyway; and we use our anxiety management tools, like a little deep breathing, to help us dispel any anxiety that wants to well up.

Q: How does The Van Gogh Blues tie in with other books that you’ve written?

E: I’m interested in everything that makes a creative person creative and I’m also interested in every challenge that we creative people face. I believe that we have special anxiety issues and I spelled those out in Fearless Creating. I believe that we have a special relationship to addiction (and addictive tendencies) and with Dr. Susan Raeburn, an addiction professional, I’ve just finished a book called Creative Recovery, which spells out the first complete recovery program for creative people. That’ll appear from Shambhala late in 2008. I’m fascinated by our special relationship to obsessions and compulsions and am currently working on a book about that. Everything that we are and do interests me—that’s my “meaning agenda”!

Q: What might a person interested in these issues do to keep abreast of your work?

E: They might subscribe to my two podcast shows, The Joy of Living Creatively and Your Purpose-Centered Life, both on the Personal Life Media Network. You can find a show list for The Joy of Living Creatively here and one for Your Purpose-Centered Life here. They might also follow this tour, since each host on the tour will be asking his or her own special questions. Here is the complete tour schedule. If they are writers, they might be interested in my new book, A Writer’s Space, which appears this spring and in which I look at many existential issues in the lives of writers. They might also want to subscribe to my free newsletter, in which I preview a lot of the material that ends up in my books (and also keep folks abreast of my workshops and trainings). But of the course the most important thing is that they get their hands on The Van Gogh Blues!—since it is really likely to help them.

(Thanks to Megan Warren for her excellent question about anxiety and procrastination…)

Writer Apprentice 2008 Edition

Here I am again. This month I am at the knee of the redoubtable Margie Lawson, learning all about Defeating Self-Defeating Behaviors (e-mail and excessive surfing, anyone?) It's a very good course filled with tools to attack and defeat all the negative things we tell ourselves and the negative behaviors we tend to have around writing.

Goals for 2008...well, they seem formidable. But I think another pass through my WIP's couldn't exactly hurt. And this is the year I tackle Donald Maass's Breakout Novel books and continue to master short fiction.

And I would like to blog just a little bit more. :D

I do have a new short story. Finishing it made me feel like I'd accomplished a marathon. If I do this once a month, I could have an anthology by the end of the year. (!!)

Maybe I'm just a teeny weeny bit depressed with all that's going on...which makes The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person's Path through Depression a timely addition to my library. Nationally known creativity coach Eric Maisel will be my guest right here on Feb 21st, as part of his virtual blog tour for VGB. The tour has already started--the schedule is here and I encourage you to surf around. I'm small potatoes :) but he is visiting many neat people in different artistic disciplines with unique perspectives on creativity and depression.