Conscious Writing

‘Conscious Writing is a truly wonderful book that will sit next toWriting Down the Bones and other classics on writing, and will be well-used by me!’ Robert Holden, author of Happiness NOW and Shift Happens! Conscious Writing is an original approach to creative awakening which leads you to discover your true self and express your true voice – on the page and in the world. It’s a journey of self-realization (conscious) and self-expression (creativity) which can be applied to any and all types of writing, and fluently blends soul with craft to reveal your richest insights and ideas. Whether you dream of writing but haven’t started yet or are an experienced author, Julia McCutchen will guide you through this tried and tested step-by-step process for releasing your fears and writing what you are truly here to write. Drawing on an inspiring mix of perennial wisdom, psychological research and modern neuroscience, she teaches how to: • Apply the 7 Core Principles for individual experience of transpersonal Truth, and emerge transformed and ready to write. • Align all aspects of yourself – body, emotions, mind and soul – to bring your whole self to the creative writing process. • Dive into deep creative flow and play with possibilities in the quantum realm of infinite potential. • Visit the Conscious Writing Sanctuary, a powerful inner space out of which timeless words flow freely. • Realize your full potential and effortlessly stand out from the crowd as you express yourself consciously and creatively as an author in the world.

"Conscious writing is an original approach to cretive awakening that leads you to discover your true self and express your true voice - on the page and in the world. It's a journey of selfrealization (conscious) and self-expression (creativity) that can be applied to any and all types of writing, and fluently blends soul with craft to reveal your richest insights and ideas"--Back cover.

A new edition of Wegner's classic and controversial work, arguing that conscious will simply reminds of us the authorship of our actions. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. With the publication of The Illusion of Conscious Will in 2002, Daniel Wegner proposed an innovative and provocative answer: the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain; it helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion (“the most compelling illusion”), it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Wegner was unable to undertake a second edition of the book before his death in 2013; this new edition adds a foreword by Wegner's friend, the prominent psychologist Daniel Gilbert, and an introduction by Wegner's colleague Thalia Wheatley. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines cases both when people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing and when they are not willing an act that they in fact are doing in such phenomena as hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, and dissociative identity disorder. Wegner's argument was immediately controversial (called “unwarranted impertinence” by one scholar) but also compelling. Engagingly written, with wit and clarity, The Illusion of Conscious Will was, as Daniel Gilbert writes in the foreword to this edition, Wegner's “magnum opus.”

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on analyses of conversational speech, written fiction and nonfiction, the North American Indian language Seneca, and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination. Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many topics of linguistic importance, such as anaphora, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages such as the historical present and free indirect style. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness for linguists, psychologists, literary scholars, computer scientists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

This critical study examines representations of philosophy in Modernist women's writing. Through the poetry of H.D., Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore, this book shows how feminist writers used seemingly small stylistic choices to make necessary contributions to predominantly male philosophical discourses, ultimately rendering these conversations more inclusive.

There are two huge gaps in scientific theory. One, the contradiction between classical and quantum mechanics, is discussed in many publications. The other, the total failure to explain why anything made of atoms (such as ourselves) can be conscious, has little acknowledgement. The main thesis of this book is that to be conscious at all, you need an unconscious mind. The author explores the idea that this mind sometimes makes contact with a whole unknown world, sporadically revealed by paranormal effects, but perhaps discoverable by hitherto uninvented scientific instruments. The book looks at the notion of the unconscious mind, one of the most important hypotheses of the twentieth century. Psychiatrists often deploy it rather informally, but there is no accepted theory of it. No region of the human brain seems to hold it. The author delves into the notion that the unknown world exists and is very weakly coupled to the physical world. He ponders the properties it may have to allow this coupling, looks at several paranormal effects scientifically and points out that many of them seem to imply brief but dramatic changes of the forces between atoms—a possible effect of the unknown world, unexamined by physical science. No existing publication seeks to talk both about paranormal mysteries and scientific theory. If scientists know about the gaps in existing knowledge, they might initiate research into such gaps, or notice experimental oddities they now gloss over. If the general public was aware of the gaps in physical theory, they would be less overwhelmed by the intellectual diktats of some scientists.

A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.