History of Automatic Writing

One of the most common forms of channeling information from the Soul Side is a personal “automatic writing” session. This concept will be new to many readers, while it is actually a common practice with a long history. Automatic writing derived over time from the concept of “free association writing” used in psychoanalysis as first developed by Sigmund Freud. Yet its roots date back to the early “stream of consciousness” concept found in early Buddhist scriptures (specifically, in the Digha Nikaya; reference Steven Collins,
Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism,
Cambridge University Press, 1982).

In 1890, the psychologist and philosopher William James published his Principles of Truth. James’ description of the mind-world connection described in terms of the “stream of consciousness” had a direct and significant impact on the development and expansion of “stream of consciousness writing.” This is commonly associated with the modernist movement in literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Stream of consciousness writing guides the reader to visualize or perceive a character’s point of view through the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Examples of stream of consciousness writing include Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981).  Read More…

The Process of Automatic Writing

For several decades, the famous author Ruth Montgomery was able to connect with an entity (soul or guide) on the Soul Side which identified itself as Lily. Although originally very skeptical, Ruth became quite comfortable over time with the information channeled from Lily as having a high degree of accuracy in terms of the information which was able to be verified in the physical world (e.g., people, places, dates, events, predictions, etc.). As a result, her automatic writing became the source of many successful books on spirituality. (On a personal level, my complete collection of Ruth Montgomery’s books are among my favorite reading and reference books.)

After reading one of Ruth Montgomery’s books on the subject of automatic writing, I was inspired to try it myself. As commonly happens with unfamiliar concepts, my early attempts at automatic writing failed. This was due in part to impatience, but it was primarily due to the frustration of learning to apply a centuries old technique in an era of advanced communication technology. While Ruth Montgomery relied on the pen and paper technique, I found it difficult while in meditation to keep track of a moving pencil on a page of limited dimensions and with limited space. I had no awareness of the edges of the paper and felt that the simple process of changing pages was unnecessarily disruptive to the meditation. Read More…