“It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.”
~Joan Baez, American Singer/Songwriter
Automatic Writing Explained
Automatic writing is just that, writing automatically without thinking about what you will write. It is a technique that is used in various forms of therapy and in writer’s workshops around the world. Though, when employed as an extra-sensory practice, it involves opening oneself up to not only your own subconscious but also to spiritual beings and entities who might have some positive information and wisdoms to share with you.
Amongst superphysical, or psychic, abilities it is automatic writing that many people find the easiest to develop. And, I don’t say this just because it happens to be the first psychic communication that I myself deliberately attempted, but because the nature of this ability is one that can often get past the conscious defenses of our mind and allow us access to spiritual information.
This is true because, when we first become interested in spiritual abilities, we are often hampered in our over-confident attempts at psychic development by the protective ego, or conscious mind, which does not want us to experience anything that it cannot explain using reason. This is partly self-defense on the part of our mortal mind and partly self-defense on the part of our unique being. What if we come up against something that we cannot handle and suffer a breakdown or, worse, death? In other words, our fear of the unknown is often the very thing that keeps us from being able to experience the psychic unknown which we truly are trying to embrace.
How does automatic writing help overcome this problem? Well, simply put, the mind is a part of the physical body and as such will default to the physical senses if given the opportunity. Hence, putting a pen to paper. With a pen in your physical hand, the mind does not find it so ludicrous and fearfully unexplainable that information should be coming through you. After all, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do with a pen and paper?
So, pen in hand, you are more likely to be able to let spiritual beings speak to you and through you. And that is what you are aiming for, to allow non-physical information to permeate through you, as a physical being. This is the nature of psychic ability of any kind, the knowing and understanding of things not physically apparent.
With the development of automatic writing you may also find yourself hearing or knowing things in the split-second before they are written. These abilities, clairaudience and claircognizance (or clairsentience) are commonly developed in tandem with other types of extra-sensory gifts so they should not be alarming.
How To Do It
I myself began by putting pen to paper, on a mere whim, one summer afternoon many years ago. The process is simple and does not require any particularly difficult preparations.
You need a clean surface for writing, a very good-working pen, a stack of blank paper and a little peace and quiet in which you will not be disturbed. Then you need to have the clear intention of communicating with the spiritual realms, with a knowledgeable and positive being. When you are ready, think of your intention, close your eyes and enter a peaceful, slightly meditative, state of mind. Then hold the pen lightly, imagining the energy flowing down to you from the universe, from your mind and down to your hand. Allow it move if it wishes and see what comes through.
Though you may get interesting communication on your very first try, you are more likely to get a page of meaningless scribbles, if anything at all. This is quite normal. Keep trying and see how the scribbles develop. After a number of attempts you will know in your gut if this method is for you or not.
In the beginning, if you succeed in writing something automatically, you may find that your own belief in what you have written is wavering. This is a natural consequence of having successfully tricked or disengaged the conscious mind. Since your waking brain was not involved in the process of creating these words, which are before you now on the paper, it is disbelieving of what they are. So your mind will attempt to fill in the blanks of its own memory, to insert itself in a process of which it was not a part. So do not be fooled if you begin to doubt that you “did it right.”
Do not doubt the spiritual nature of the information obtained by assuming that you were exerting too much control on the process. It is common to wonder and worry that the information may have actually come from your own mental dribblings and not from a spiritual source. But the reality is that, when you have opened yourself up to the process, then any kind of amazing, and even mundane, information can be conveyed without the engaging of your conscious mind.
Spiritual development and the extra-sense are something rarely acknowledged or talked about in our modern western society, so it is not surprising that we find these things hard to understand or even believe in. But through trial and error you will know what is true for you and you will come to understand your own abilities. That is what being alive in this physical realm is all about.
