A Collection of My Prompts for Deep and Spiritual Writing
I share some of my weekly prompts from Promptly Written with the spiritually minded KTHT writers and readers in the hopes that you will rise to the challenges and share your wisdom
As an editor in Ravyne Hawke’s publication Promptly Written, I issue weekly spiritual prompts. Based on the engagement my posts receive, they are deep and thought-provoking. However, I see fewer responsive creations than I would hope for. Are the prompts too deep? I don’t think so. Perhaps they just need a different audience. So I decided to compile some of them for the readers of KTHT both to inspire your creations and hopefully to re-engage with my spiritual homegroup.
Several of my prompts have challenged readers to write a poem, essay, or fiction that comes to their minds from reading the following quotes:
- “The correct prayer is therefore never a prayer of supplication, but a prayer of gratitude. When you thank God in advance for that which you choose to experience in your reality, you, in effect, acknowledge that it is there…in effect. Thankfulness is thus the most powerful statement to God; an affirmation that even before you ask, I have answered. Therefore never supplicate. Appreciate.”― Neale Donald Walsch, The Complete Conversations with God
- “When someone searches for something, it can easily be that they see only the thing they have in mind: they are unable to take in anything else, unable to accept anything else, because they are fixated on that one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Pursuing the truth means having an objective in mind. Finding, on the other hand, is about freedom, about being open to discovery, about knowing one’s ultimate destination.” — Hermann Hesse, from Siddhartha. (In April 2021, in response to Day 5 of Diana C.’s 30-in-30 poetry challenge, I wrote this tanka inspired by the Hesse quote)
- “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning (When I read that quote, I think of the concepts of emotional intelligence and the poem that I wrote in response to #’s 12 and 13 of Diana C.’s 50 prompts for self-reflection and the related philosophies of stoicism and the serenity prayer)
This week I selected a few quotes regarding spirituality, not from well-known authors but rather from Medium writers (including one of my own), and challenged people to create an essay or fiction or poem inspired by any or all or a combination of them:
- “We just can’t stay in the kingdom of ideas, knowledge has to be incarnated to exist. We need to be involved in the affairs of the world otherwise the vacancy is dangerous and may be used by malevolents. This is why I don’t like the word Spirituality, this word is a way to park us in the domain of the spiritual only and leave the space for beings with hidden agendas. Those who don’t live their values are liars, cheaters and demagogues, they don’t represent us, we need to incarnate our values and give power to real representatives.” — Jean Carfantan (sorry Jean I don’t have a record of which piece of yours it’s from)
- “Being religious involves having faith in God (however named and defined) and signing up to a basic set of beliefs — technically a credo — that define what a worshipper needs to accept to become a member of that religious community. In contrast, being spiritual is experientially focused, with seekers and worshippers preferring to ground their spiritual outlook in personal experience, and to express using a range of sacred world texts, rather than by referring to a credo drawn from a single holy scripture…” — Keith Hill in his story
- “When I use the term spiritual, I use it in a manner that transcends the binary of theism versus atheism. One can act entirely spiritual with or without a belief in ‘god’ however one understands that term. Spirituality only requires love, empathy, compassion, humility, honesty and courage. As I define spirituality, there is a flip side to the coin and all those positive feelings — accountability, both personally and holding others accountable for their words and deeds.” — That one’s mine from my essays 1) Marriage of Philosophy and Spirituality and 2) Spirituality Redefined
- “No, I do not believe my spirit is my soul. I believe they are separate yet necessary aspects. Allow me to clarify. For me, spirit is more closely connected to the heart rather than the soul.” — Arthur G. Hernandez in his story
My own reactions to the quotes are here.
A couple of months ago I prompted readers, based upon their own life experiences, to reimagine, rewrite, reinterpret, or, so I don’t leave anyone out, defend, any story from any religious text. I provided my reinterpretation of the stories of Adam and Eve in that post.
Spiritual concepts often present themselves in run-of-the-mill occurrences. I issued prompts recently based on spirituality I perceived lately watching 1) an episode of Young Sheldon (video clip), 2) an episode of Peaky Blinders (video clip), and 3) Ari Melber’s engrossing interview with Scooter Braun (manages Justin Beiber, Arianna Grande and others).
I reacted to the Young Sheldon clip with my thoughts on the spirituality of non-conformity but the 4-minute clip also touches on at least these other topics:
- Sheldon refers to himself as an atheist baptist
- Using stereotypes humorously versus in a manner that could increase discrimination
- What it takes to get into heaven and what happens once we are there
In the Peaky Blinders clip, Tommy goes to visit his WW1 compatriot, Barney, in an insane asylum. Barney spends 24 hours a day in solitary, in the dark, constrained in a straitjacket. Tommy offers Barney a cyanide and opium capsule with which to commit suicide. Tommy refuses, saying, after some funny dialogue, “because one day, things might change.”
When I saw that scene, I immediately thought of essays I have written about the suicide of my friend Andrew, which I have geared towards suicide attempt prevention. My 17-minute version of those few essays includes this poem:
Suicide provides no relief at all On ledge imagining end to my pain Pavement streaming toward me will not end fall Just before break solution becomes plain My penance to help others to refrain Thought my loved ones better off without me Truth’s too likely they’ll header into sea Had I known that death cannot be cheated Baring deep secrets would cure malady Death would not have left loved ones defeated
The Braun interview is 40 minutes long, which I decided to watch in full after Melber included this brief exchange on his daily MSNBC broadcast:
Ari says, as a complete my sentence prompt: “failure means?”
Scooter: “failure means you’re on a pit stop to success.”
Ari: “reaching the summit means?”
Scooter: “I don’t think you ever reach the summit — I think we’re all on this journey until one day you’re not.”
That really caught my spiritual attention. It made me think of the concept of enlightenment. I have a very limited definition of enlightenment. My lead spirit guide (literally a spirit — not a human) has said to me:
“To attain nirvana, you would go on a completely different cycle, and that usually happens after a vast number of lifetimes lived. The lifetimes that you start to choose to live [at that point] are with great suffering. Think of the severely retarded, the severely mentally ill, POWs, people who have died violently at the hands of great evil and even stillborns who give up their life experience for the host.”
My soul has now incarnated 17,043 times and we have not lived anything close to a vast amount of lifetimes. So, anyone that preaches or sells a path to achieving enlightenment in this or any reasonably foreseeable future lifetime (as opposed to becoming more enlightened), in my spiritual opinion, with which you may disagree, is full of shit.
Watching the full interview, I noticed these other thoughts to prompt spiritual writing and you might notice others:
- “In 100 years, no one will remember me so they sure as hell won’t remember you so don’t have an ego…don’t go through life hoping someone will remember your name, just hope you will have made a difference.”
- “You’ll have plans and then life will show up.” As summarized in the prompt post, that evoked thoughts of mine in my essay about reincarnation, Life Is School for the Soul.
- “Stop making excuses about why you can’t start the journey.”
If you create any pieces from these prompts anywhere on Medium, please tag me and Ravyne so we can enjoy them.
In Rama I create, with soul-energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
