Disclaimer: I'm not a stream-enterer or above.

I don't think you will "lose" the ability to appreciate literature, but
Personally, I no longer find "existential angst" texts to be entertaining, to me they usually seem silly and tend to lose the point. But on another note, I still find japanese animation to be really entertaining, and like to see a few from the latest season.
I also don't think meditation opposes entertaining the mind with these kind of things, except when you are meditating ;-)
The way I see it is: the way of the buddha is the middle way.

About stopping the thought process I don't think this is something that would happen without you desiring and striving towards it. But I believe the end result is more pleasant than the possible entertainment the thoughts can give, even more so after you start consistently seeing them and how most of the time they have completely useless content.

Why is entertainment the only possible purpose? When I was first beginning to learn about Buddhism, I couldn't really wrap my head around ideas like emptiness and no-self. When I read Beckett's The Unnamable, it seemed to illustrate the emptiness of the self with terrifying immediacy. I can think of dozens of works that affected me as much, all in different ways.

In fact, I think intensively reading poetry lead to my engaging with the world, getting into concentrated states, and questioning my basic assumptions in a way that directly lead to my A+P initiations.

It may be that meditation will help clarify your ideas about writing. If you think of it in terms of "text production," and as essentially useless.... Man, what a bummer.

Philip Whalen was the abbot of the San Francisco Zen center. His poetry is dense and deft and very playful. Of course, there's Gary Snyder, and several other Buddhist poets in that circle. Their attainments in meditation and writing may vary, but I would guess Whalen was advanced in both.

I'm not a big Allen Ginsberg fan, but he was pretty creative anyway, and a devotee of Trungpa.

I'm convinced that John Cage, the composer and writer, was at least a stream-enterer. His work is pretty far-out and enlightening.

And there are endless histories of Zen poets and mystic writers and artists from every tradition. Rilke was terrific and beatific. Leonard Cohen (who lived in a zen monastery for 2 years) is actually a good poet, imho. Every see John Daido Loori's photography? Really great. He taught that art practice was intrinsic to awakening.

There are some interesting videos on the web of Alan Moore discussing the connection between writing and magic. In that vein, there's also Harry Smith - definitely a crazy wisdom practitioner (he even has his name on a building at Naropa!)

Personally, I pretty much gave up writing because I felt like it was making me crazy. Now, no more crazy. Hmmm... time to write?

Last thought: A theory - maybe spiritual practice is the key to creative power without having to become a drug-addict or insane?

Not only does creativity not decrease, I might argue that it increases it. You become much more connected to the direct source of creativity.

Do these people seem like they've lost their creativity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cdshiy7CrwA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqOwPteS_Xg (I love this one, the man dips right on the spot)

Hear the metta in their voices, see it in their eyes



Your thought process will not stop. If you need to think you will. I still day dream all the time, in fact it seems as if day dreaming plays some sort of important function in the mind.

Anyway there are so many fears people have about enlightenment.... will I turn into a vegetable, will I still be able to do my job, will I still fulfill family member functions, will I still like sex.... they all turn out to be unfounded. There is nothing to worry about ;) But if you wanna worry that's ok too.

As someone who does quite a lot of artwork, video post-production and music production within various genres, as well as operating a microlabel, a design label and working with about three or four different comedy-based projects, I can say with complete certainty that it doesn't interfere with creativity at all.

In my personal life, meditation has only ever had the complete opposite effect, that of strengthening my connection with creativity, sometimes very (relatively) powerfully so. Being able to concentrate on what one is doing (Shamatha) and not get pulled away by distractions is an essential tool in any creative endeavour, as well as being able to open up and flow with whatever you are aware of (a la Vipassana), so one could argue that meditation is the perfect creativity training tool!



I've seen it argued that shamatha or other "thought-decreasing" techniques could interfere with creativity but I don't think that idae has been (ironically?) thought through, or at least looked at closely enough. That could be the case if one's idea of enlightenment is shutting off their brain through repressing their thinking and becoming a vegetable but in that case one isn't doing meditation at all of course.

All the creative and amazing artists I admire seem to be quite in touch with reality very deeply and far along the Path(s), it seems somewhat obvious or clear to me that the closer one is to understanding and synching with higher-levels of reality and truth, the more creative one will be and vice versa, so nothing to worry about!


The one thing that is true, however, is that if you limit your definition of what creativity is to you, then indeed, anything that makes you grow or develop or change in some way will likely change also your relationship to those aspects of your creativity. If you are quite attached (go buddhism!) to existentialist angst type writing/art, but personally develop in such a way as to no longer feel any existential angst yourself, then unless you let your creative energies flow out of wherever they find themselves right now, and instead expect them to keep on doing what you used to like, then sure, one could say your creativity has been interfered with.

But that's like saying that taking art lessons interferes with your creativity because now that you can draw properly you're no longer interested in the primitive form of just copying characters from comics (ignoring the fact that you are now at a higher level where you can make your own characters woo!)

also: how do you know for sure that the only purpose of literature is to entertain the mind?
surely literature can have the purpose of developing the mind, paying attention to it and learning from it, and also of developing it? surely all the arts are forms through which people can exercise and gain insight into the different aspects of consciousness and humanity that they effect;
and given that there are seemingly various levels of mind, literature could also possibly be a tool through which to develop many of the Morality aspects of buddhist training (which must be why literature always plays such a big part in all the religious traditions) and perhaps even a way to develop along the Progress of Insight, if one is paying extremely close attention to one's experience while writing (as I imagine many of the chronic dark night literature yogis you mentioned must have been doing).

Another perspective on creativity: Creativity 'closely entwined with mental illness'