Dear Living Dark readers,

Today, I want to commend to your attention a short story by Thomas Ligotti titled “Ghost Stories for the Dead.” Whether you’re already familiar with Ligotti or have never read his work, this is a powerful piece of fiction that, I predict, you may find deeply arresting.

You won’t find it in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, the combined 2015 Penguin Classics edition of Tom’s first two books, which were originally published separately in 1986 and 1991 and which were collections of stories that had previously appeared in the horror small press. Nor will you find it in any of his other collections—not Teatro Grottesco, and not even 1996’s The Nightmare Factory, which represented a nearly comprehensive omnibus of his fiction up to that time.

“Ghost Stories for the Dead” first appeared in 1982 in the second issue of author/editor Thomas Wiloch’s small press horror magazine Grimoire. It opens with an epigraph drawn from E. M. Cioran, a confirmed influence on Ligotti’s work and worldview: “That faint light in each of us which dates back before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated.” It then proceeds to tell a dark and reflective story, partly mournful and partly horrific, about the bliss of nonexistence as contrasted with the nightmarish agony of existence. Rather than unfolding as a conventional narrative, it is structured as a sequence of four short, thematically linked movements, each approaching the same central vision from a different angle:

The New Blackness
The New Silence
The Old Nonsense and the New
Tales of the New Dream

Across these sections, Ligotti contrasts the torments and absurdities of embodied existence with a strange, almost beatific condition of post-existence, where identity, memory, and suffering fall away into a state of absolute negation. But the story does not leave things there. In its final movement, it introduces a quiet but devastating reversal, one that suggests even this annihilating escape may not be secure.

In 1989, seven years after its initial appearance, the story showed up again in the special all-Ligotti 68th issue of Crypt of Cthulhu. Then it was posted at Thomas Ligotti Online from 1998 to 2002.

And after that, it basically disappeared. As I mentioned, it has never been collected in any of Ligotti’s books, though it was included in a “collected short fiction” project—not carried out or authorized by Tom himself—that attempted to bring together all of his stories in chronological order.

I find this omission to be unfortunate and somewhat mystifying, as “Ghost Stories for the Dead” is simply brilliant, and also quite affecting in its signature combination of philosophical perspective, supernatural horror, and depressive gloom. If I were to assemble a list of my eight or ten favorite Ligotti stories, this would be among them. I don’t know why Tom has chosen not to include it in any of his fiction collections. I mentioned the story to him in 2006 when I interviewed him for my Teeming Brain blog (see “Interview with Thomas Ligotti: It’s All a Matter of Personal Pathology”), noting that it falls among the subset of his works that take a highly experimental approach and that convey plot only obliquely, opting instead to foreground his signature variety of horrific philosophical speculation. But I didn’t ask why he had chosen to leave it uncollected.

If you find anything enticing in this paean to a Ligottian literary rarity, be advised that you can read the story online, along with that entire issue of Crypt of Cthulhu, thanks to the Internet Archive.

As an accompanying note, and to expand on what I said at the start, I know many of you are interested in Ligotti’s writings, while I also know that some of you probably aren’t. Some of you may not even be familiar with his name, which is of course fine. Wherever you fall on that continuum of possibilities, I think this story will appeal if you appreciate short fiction that arrests and transports through a combination of philosophical vision and literary skill.

Thinking about the varying degrees of reader awareness toward Ligotti and his work leads me into a double-pronged digression, one having to do with the arc of his career and the other with my own history as a writer. As for the first, I still find Tom’s ascension or evolution from cult horror writer to mainstream literary figure to be somewhat hard to believe, even though it’s now a decade since that combined edition of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe from Penguin, followed by their publication of his nonfiction opus The Conspiracy against the Human Race three years later (in 2018), unofficially promoted him to the rank of canonical American author. And of course the famous (notorious) connection between his work and the pessimist/antinatalist worldview of the character of Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, in the first season of HBO’s True Detective thrust him into the general public spotlight before either of the Penguin books appeared. Then there’s the fact that he had, in the 1990s, gone through a brief period of mass-market exposure and mainstream critical attention before returning to the world of small press horror that had been his original domain. It’s a striking trajectory.

As for my own writing, much of it has been integrally bound up with my love for Ligotti, whose work has always felt deeply personal to me, as in, personal in a way that’s specific to my own person. Those of us who had been transfixed for years by his writing, feeling it to be a priceless and somewhat private possession with its combination of cult status and life-changing power—it felt as if his stories, books, and interviews were speaking to each of us individually in the depths of our soul—found his transition to mainstream status to be a strange one indeed, something to be simultaneously celebrated and half-regretted, as if a precious secret were in danger of being denatured.

I came to Ligotti’s work myself at the very start of what I didn’t know would be something of an authorial career, and, as I’ve said, those two things were thoroughly enmeshed. My first published story was “Teeth,” which I had written two or three years before I first read Ligotti, and which readers later told me was suffused with a distinctly Ligottian vibe. Moreover, its first publication was at the brand-new website Thomas Ligotti Online in 1998, where I was an original member. I went on to write and publish more in the field of weird, cosmic, and supernatural horror, as my innate creative drive led me to produce stories that explored the dark depths where horror, religion, and art are different facets of the same spiritual jewel.

Then my daemon muse began leading me to branch out into writing about creativity itself in connection with the weird and spiritual, and eventually in connection with nonduality. But that didn’t mean I left horror completely behind. As the classic 1980s horror anthology television series Tales from the Darkside (which I have invoked here before) observed each week in its closing narration, “The darkside is always there, waiting for us to enter, waiting to enter us.” The dark is just as real as anything having to do with the light, of which it is the obverse face or facet, the inseparable alternate aspect. It will always be part of my writing. And, to return to the point, there continues to be no more profound or important body of work dealing with the darkness than that of Thomas Ligotti, for whom the darkness has been all-consuming, though not unleavened by a distinct dose of sharp wit and humor from time to time.

Early in my engagement with his work, right after I had read Grimscribe and Songs of a Dead Dreamer, I read “Ghost Stories for the Dead” and found it so very powerful, so very resonant with the deep fears, feelings, and fascinations that defined my sensibility. For me it occupies a special place. And that’s why I’m bringing it to your attention now.

In parting, here’s a taste of its actual text to further whet your appetite. This comes from its closing words, which may haunt you, not like a specter that threatens from the outside, but like one that lives inside your own self:

For in the new dream such beings—wrenched from eternity and returned to earth—are capable of anything from indiscretion to atrocity. Those who have suffered most know how to inflict it best—it’s a law of the universe. The suicides, the murdered . . . the unfulfilled, the broken hearted: veterans of extraordinary suffering and mercenaries of its perpetuation.

These are my mind’s eyes, I who have no eyes. These are my mind’s mind, I who am not mind. I am bereft of traits, bankrupt of qualities. The riches of the dead are extravagant next to my destitute estate. I have nothing but my immortality; and now, desiring or not, they will have it too.

And I am glad I cannot know them.

But I am even gladder they cannot know me.

Warm regards,

The Living Dark is free to all readers. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work. Paid subscribers receive access to the full archive plus the quarterly Living Dark Reader, a PDF journal for slow reading and reflection.

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Some of the book links here are affiliate links to Amazon or Bookshop.org, which means I’ll earn a commission if you click through them and buy anything.

The inner work of the creative life:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

Dear Living Dark readers,

I was recently interviewed by Joanna Penn, the bestselling author and creative entrepreneur, for her podcast The Creative Penn. The episode dropped today under the title “Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius, with Matt Cardin.” You may recall that Jo kindly provided a blurb for my book, calling it “a guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning. Part craft, part devotion, Writing at the Wellspring is a call to surrender control, listen beneath the noise, and create from the place where awe and fear meet. If the page is a threshold, this book will show you how to cross.” It was a real pleasure to talk with her about the book’s themes. We talked about creativity as a collaboration with something deeper—and sometimes darker—than the conscious mind.

The only drag was some persistent noise on my end that you can hear during my portion of the conversation. I don’t know what caused it, but I hope the content of our interaction is interesting enough to make up for it.

Listen Here

You can also find the episode on the official site:

• The Creative Penn, episode 856 (with show notes and transcript)

About the Episode

Here’s the official description:

What if the source of your best writing isn't something you control — but something you learn to collaborate with? How can ancient ideas about the muse, the daimon, and creative genius transform the way you approach your work? And what might happen if you stopped fighting the silence and let it become your greatest creative ally? With Matt Cardin, author of Writing at the Wellspring.

What we talk about:

• How I balance a full-time academic career with my creative writing life

• The ancient idea of the genius, muse, and daimon

• Why creative silence (including writer’s block) may be a gift

• The stages of the creative process

• Living into the dark and embracing uncertainty

• How blogging and Substack can organically grow into books

From the Conversation

Here’s a short excerpt from the transcript (with Jo’s British spellings intact):

When you talk about the ancient Greek daimon, there was a whole well-developed tradition of that in ancient Greek philosophy and religion. A daimon was, in one famous sense, a spirit that you were born with, that the gods had given you. It was like your double, your higher self. It was the thing that represented your character, your interests, the blueprint and the outline that your life was supposed to follow.

[…]

For writers, my recommendation is to say, whether you believe it or not, whether you take it as a metaphor—which is fine—or whether you want to get somewhat mystical and delve into the idea that maybe there’s really a spirit or something, it doesn’t matter. Productively, with practical, measurable results, you can learn to relate to your creative impulse as if you are collaborating internally with someone else.

It’s the centre of why you’re interested in writing what you want to write, why you want to write the way you want to write, and even the types of things that unfold in the course of your career—both your creative career and the rest of your life, in the mould of the ancient daimon.

I have found that to be a vein of great power and meaning in my own life. I do it exactly the way I’m describing. I don’t actually believe it, but I don’t disbelieve it. I find that in experience, it really doesn’t matter. It works and it may as well be true.

If you’ve found my writings on creativity, spirituality, and cosmic dread here at The Living Dark—or in Writing at the Wellspring or A Course in Demonic Creativity—to resonate with your own creative and spiritual journey, you’ll likely find something here for you as well.

Warm regards,

The Living Dark is freely published. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work. Paid subscribers receive access to the full archive plus the quarterly Living Dark Reader, a PDF journal for slow reading and reflection.

Subscribe now

Make a Donation

The inner work of the creative life:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark Reader,

There are many different ways of being a writer. The comprehensive field of possibilities encompasses a vast array of forms and styles. And you, as the unique individual that you are (or that you appear to be), are free to be the writer you’re meant to be instead of chaining yourself to someone else’s rule.

Having led with the point, let me unpack and illustrate it. Our focus here is the specific matter of style, and of how there is no uniform or absolute standard to which you are obligated to conform.

Mark Twain once gave some advice to a young student, a 12-year-old boy from Texas named David Watt Bowser, on the value of plainness in writing. This came in a letter whose origin is quite charming: In 1880 Bowser was the star pupil of one Laura M. Dake, who, twenty years earlier under her maiden name of Wright, had shared a three-day platonic romance with Sam Clemens during his youthful days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Both parties had always remembered the relationship with fondness. Two decades later, Dake, now principal of Dallas’s Commerce Street School, encouraged her precocious student Bowser to send one of his English compositions to Clemens, who was now famous as Mark Twain. Twain was delighted to receive the letter, which included an account of its origin, and this led to a two-year correspondence between the man and the boy. Their letters remained private until 1959, a quarter century after Bowser’s death, when they were discovered in an old lockbox. The find was announced in The New York Times, and the letters were published the next year in The Southwest Review.

It is the postscript to Twain’s original letter to Bowser, dated March 20, 1880, that I want to focus on here. In the letter’s main body, Twain reflects on Bowser’s inquiry about whether he would like to be a boy again. He also lets the boy know that he has not yet read his composition. Then comes the postscript, which he added a little later:

Now I have read your composition, and think it is a very creditable performance. I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way, and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean that, utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together, they give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, or flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

It was a very large-hearted letter for Twain to have written to such a young correspondent. It is also an important letter for those of us identified as writers, particularly because Twain’s advice in that postscript has gone on to assume the status, for many, of the type of universal rule that I am here calling out for rejection. It has been widely quoted and much celebrated as one of the classic statements, by an acknowledged literary master, on the fundamentals of effective prose style. But for all this, and as much as I love Twain, I simply have to respond to it, or at least to its universal application, with an emphatic no. When Twain advised killing most adjectives, he was speaking for himself, which was fine, and he was also speaking in and for the specific rhetorical moment of his correspondence with young Bowser, which was right and proper. But this in no way makes his words qualify as a general rule. There is a clear and definite place for prose that presents a rich stew of descriptive language. There’s even a place for all-out baroque writing that teems and bristles with a profusion of adjectives, adverbs, and long, densely looping chains of phraseology.

An obvious authorial example that comes to mind is that of H. P. Lovecraft. Critics have sometimes condemned Lovecraft’s prose style for the supposed sin of what some have called “adjectivitis.” The major precedent for this was set early on by Edmund Wilson, who, as the most prominent American literary critic in the first half of the twentieth century, both reflected and helped to set what counted as mainstream opinion. In a 1945 New Yorker article titled “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous,” Wilson famously lambasted Lovecraft by opining that the only horror to be found in his stories was “the horror of bad taste and bad art.” Wilson criticized both Lovecraft’s general sensibility and his specific writing style, saying of the latter:

Lovecraft’s worst fault is his incessant effort to work up the expectation of the reader by sprinkling his stories with such words as “horrible,” “terrible,” “frightful,” “awesome,” “fearsome,” “eldritch,” “eerie,” “weird,” “forbidden,” “unhallowed,” “unholy,” “blasphemous,” “hellish,” and “infernal.” Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words.

Despite Wilson’s celebrated status in the literary world, it has to be said that in this case he was simply wrong. The style that he found so repellent and risible in Lovecraft was actually Lovecraft’s right and natural métier, one of the primary literary characteristics of the type of work that he, as the person and writer he was uniquely born to be, was meant to bring into the world. As S. T. Joshi has persuasively pointed out, it was a highly effective style for conveying the psychology, outlook, and worldview of Lovecraft’s many first-person narrators in the specific imaginary universe that he created and shaped with his stories and poems. In other words, Lovecraft’s prose style, baroque and ornate through and through, was perfectly suited to his authorial self and worldview.

For just one example of this style in action, I direct your attention to the opening paragraph of Lovecraft’s short novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a work that is remarkable for many things, including the fact that the manuscript for it is a first draft that he never went back and revised:

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.

Personally, I wouldn’t change a thing. Everything about it is perfect, both as a stand-alone passage and as the opening paragraph of the tale that follows, which takes place in the world of dreams. Lovecraft begins the novel with a paragraph that contains nearly fifty adjectives and adverbs. Stating that number alone might make it seem excessive, like an assault by modifiers, a clear example of Wilson’s “bad art.” But in the actual reading of it, the effect is not excess but incantation. It reads like a dream, like a visionary spell being cast to draw the reader in—which in fact it is, and which is entirely appropriate to the story being told.

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In Ray Bradbury’s classic 1948 story “Pillar of Fire,” a man named Lantry who died in the twentieth century wakes up four hundred years later in a thoroughly sanitized and imaginatively flattened future world where death is hidden and anything that suggests darkness or fear is policed and suppressed. Discovering this, at one point he goes to a library to check on the fate of supernatural literature in such a society. He asks the librarian if they house any books by Poe, or Machen, or Bierce, or Derleth. He also asks about Lovecraft. The reply for each is the same: These were all part of the great burning a century earlier, and good riddance, too. Later, as Lantry reflects and fumes over this galling travesty, one of his infuriated thoughts is, “You destroyers of Edgar Allan Poe and fine big-worded Lovecraft, you burner of Hallowe'en masks and destroyer of pumpkin jack-o-lanterns!” I first read this story in junior high school, several years before I read Lovecraft, and I think Bradbury’s descriptive phrase, issuing from the mouth of the story’s protagonist, may have been the first time I ever heard of him: “fine big-worded Lovecraft.” For me, that set the tone through which my later expectations were both shaped and fulfilled. Lovecraft with his big words and ornate style is indeed fine. Very fine, indeed, with no remedial application of Procrustean principles needed for his prose.

Having laid out the illustrations at some length, I hasten to loop back to the point: What was true of Lovecraft is true of many other writers as well—including you and me. The work of many fine writers contains a full complement of adjectives and even, gasp, adverbs, despite prominent figures from Elmore Leonard to Stephen King to Kingsley Amis being lined up against them. “The adverb,” says King in On Writing, “is not your friend. . . . I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.” And yet we have a host of counter-examples that we can draw on without too much effort, from Dickens to Faulkner to J. K. Rowling, who have loved a good adverb and not hesitated to use it. We also have examples immediately available of writers both historical and modern who have loved, and in loving have elevated the use of, prose that is distinctly ornate and/or baroque, from Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov to Gabriel García Márquez and Angela Carter.

I will cede the floor momentarily to David Bentley Hart, who, in his 2022 essay “How to Write English Prose,” gave us one of the most pungent attacks on the culturally dominant advice regime of lean prose that you’re likely to come across:

I do not know exactly why, in the twentieth century, the dominant fashions in English prose moved relentlessly in the direction of ever greater simplification and aesthetic minimalism. I do not even entirely regret it. Tastes change, and some of the change has been a corrective of certain excesses of the past. But, on the whole, the result has been a kind of official dogma in favor of a prose so denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality as to be often little better than infantile, not only in vocabulary but also in artistry and expressive power—a formula, that is, for producing writers whose voices are utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness. . . .

All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions—urging you to write only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple—are expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity and its banausic values. They reflect an epoch in which the mysterious, the evocative, and the beautifully elliptical have been systematically suppressed and nearly extinguished in the name of the efficient, the practical, the mechanical, and the starkly unambiguous—in short, in the name of everything that makes existence uninviting and life boring. They are reflections of an age of bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense, the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences. Learn to detest all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done so.

The upshot of all this, from Twain to Lovecraft to Hart and all the other examples and ideas that I have invoked, is easy to identify: Good writing is not all one way. Sometimes, for some writers and occasions, good writing emerges as spare, sleek, and lean. At other times, for other writers and occasions, it emerges as dense, wordy, complex, and ornate. And the latter, no less than the former, when deployed rightly—meaning organically and skillfully, as the natural flowering and expression of the writer’s spirit of creative genius—is glorious just as it is, with no need for any change, which could only diminish it. “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences,” said Twain to Bowser. “That is the way to write English—it is the modern way, and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.” That was great and valid advice for Twain himself, and perhaps for Bowser. It was not great advice for Lovecraft, or for Wilde, or for anyone whose natural mode of expression goes in the opposite direction. The question now before us is: What kind of writer are you? What kind am I? Answer carefully and honestly, and only for yourself.

When it comes to writing, there is no such thing as a rule that is universal, absolute, and applicable to everybody. Or rather, the only universally valid advice is really a piece of anti-advice. I often like to paraphrase Bradbury on this point, as processed through my lifetime of reading his stories and essays, including his wonderful, necessary, life-giving advice on writing. One of the cornerstones of this advice might be rendered as follows:

Never listen to a damned thing anybody tells you. Find your own way. Do what you are uniquely supposed to do, and do it in the way that you are uniquely equipped, qualified, and inclined to do it. Be the writer you are called to be. And to hell with everyone else.

Warm regards,

The Living Dark is freely published. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work. Paid subscribers receive access to the full archive plus the quarterly Living Dark Reader, a PDF journal for slow reading and reflection.

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

The inner work of the creative life:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark readers,

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a new project to enhance this newsletter, or rather to serve as an adjunct or extension to it. The project is The Living Dark Reader, which, as you’ll notice, echoes the way I usually greet you.

The seed idea came from my ongoing love-hate relationship with the experience of reading online, which opens up so many new avenues for finding valuable things and making rich connections with people, but which constantly fights against its own deepest fulfillment because of the very nature of the online experience itself, which is not friendly to, and which is in fact antagonistic to, full absorption and deep reading. For reference, I direct you to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which is still hugely valuable sixteen years after its publication. So is the classic essay that preceded the book, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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Dear Living Dark readers,

I’ll break convention by starting this post right out of the gate with someone else’s words instead of my own:

Socrates was content to refute everyone else’s positions while affirming nothing concrete himself, meaning that his philosophical heirs do a lot of performative contradiction, which is not sufficient. Nor is what we like to call ‘the Socratic method’—teaching by asking questions until students produce the correct answers—what Socrates had in mind. Such attempts to mimic him miss the point, which is that true thinking should be dangerous to your intellectual equilibrium. It should strive for answers that overthrow the terms of the question being asked, not simply prove a point.

It’s impossible to convey the extent of my delight at this opening salvo from Laura Kipnis’s review, published last year in The New Republic, of Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. Though I don’t talk about Socrates all that often, he has been an iconic figure to me in a deeply personal way ever since I discovered him in my late teens. And this brief summation of Callard’s overall point about him goes a long way toward articulating what I have always felt is the beating heart of both his general importance and his deep appeal to me personally. It’s an appeal that has shaped my inner life, my understanding of how I interact with others, and the way I approached my teaching career for eighteen years in the classroom.

A bit more from Kipnis’s review:

We’re not born with the knowledge of how to live, yet we want to live lives that make sense—that’s what it is to be human, Callard and Socrates believe. But we spend most of our lives floundering around, improvising stopgap solutions. Philosophy is the answer to this need.

The method Callard proposes to achieve the requisite self-knowledge to lead a meaningful life is the “untimely question.” “There’s a question you are avoiding,” is the book’s opening line. “Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it.” The good news is that the resistances we organize our lives around are actually the paths to truth and wisdom. The bad news is that we assiduously evade taking them, feigning busyness and obligations as avoidance strategies. . . .

If we need to believe in the choices to which we’re committing at the very minute we’re committing to them, the impossibility of the untimely question is that, by definition, it comes too late: You’re already using the answer to lead your life. The only way to freely answer the untimely question is to saw off the branch on which you’re standing.

And on the value of philosophical conversation, of having someone else with whom to reflect on all these things:

[T]he operative question is: To what extent can we really see ourselves? Are we in some inbuilt way “self-blind”?—after all, the eye can’t see itself. Which is why thinking is a two-person job, in the Socrates-Callard view. . . .

[S]ince none of us can subject our “load-bearing” beliefs to sufficient evaluation on our own, we need the help of others to clarify our beliefs: “Refutation cures normative self-blindness.”

By the by, the whole concept of “the untimely question” brings up, for me, a resonant comparison with something David Carse returns to repeatedly in Perfect Brilliant Stillness regarding the single, profound, devastating question that we each carry deep within—a question that’s unique to each of us, the very asking of which will utterly undo the house of cards that we have built up and come to regard as “ourselves.” “If you’re going to ask questions,” says Carse, “ask . . . the hard questions, the questions that take you out of anything you have ever known, the questions that could end your life.”

Here are a couple of other passages where Carse elaborates:

The ego sense of self spends all its time trying to stay in control, and that means trying to keep you away from these moments of disorientation when the bottom drops out and it doesn’t know what to do. This is so beautiful. This is what I mean when I talk about asking the dangerous question, the question that may end your life. This idea that this “you” is not real, is only a thought, a projection, stop[s] you. That’s why I [say] to savor that feeling of disorientation. Get to know it, to not fear it, to welcome it. . . .

Be aware that what form this will take is not up to you, and that it may take “time.” It may take a lifetime, may take more than a lifetime. It doesn’t matter. Let yourself be brought to a place where it doesn’t matter. In stillness, find yourself asking the dangerous question, the question that the ego does not want you to think of, the question that will end your life.

What Carse is getting at in these passages is not, of course, precisely identical to what Callard talks about in relation to Socrates. Carse is speaking within the field of Eastern-oriented nondual spirituality, while Callard is speaking within the field of Western philosophy. But I’ll go out on a limb by asserting that both are aimed, ultimately, at the same thing, and that both manifestly carry the same general spirit. I would also wager that both approaches will wind up—again, ultimately—with the same result.

This also says something of profound and pointed importance about the very nature of the Socratic/Western and nondual/Eastern approaches to understanding your life and the world, and to uncovering the whole point by answering the question that has been given to you by the very fact of your birth and presence.

It seems I have a new book to read. I’m surprised that this is the first time I have heard of Callard, a philosopher, professor, and provocateur who, as I’m now learning, has been on the scene for quite some time, and for whom the adjective “colorful” sounds inadequately extravagant. In any case, maybe my spirit of energetic interest has passed itself along to you as well. Let me know if you, too, find this all intriguing. Especially let me know if you read Kipnis’s review and/or Callard’s book. I’d love to hear your impressions of both.

Warm regards,

PS. The book links in this post are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

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Published in December:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark readers,

If we take social media to represent, in essence, a big game, is it winnable? I am increasingly inclined to think the answer is no. And by winning I don’t mean getting more engagement in the form of things like outperforming others, gaming algorithms, or finding smarter ways to increase your reach. In fact, flipping the script on such “engagement” can wake us up to what’s really going on and what’s at stake in this mass experiment in behavior modification.

These thoughts are inspired by two things, one new and the other old. The new factor is my recent acquisition of Jaron Lanier’s 2017 book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. The second is my approximately two-decade personal relationship with social media, which has had both positive and negative aspects.

For the first factor, Lanier’s book is an entry in the same venerable genre represented by such books as Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. In fact, Lanier explains in his acknowledgments that he was directly inspired by Mander’s 1978 classic. Mander claimed television didn’t need to be reformed or improved, but rather completely gotten rid of, because it was essentially—that is, in its very essence—destructive on multiple levels (personal, environmental, and societal) and was therefore not reformable. Lanier takes the same approach with social media, declaring them rotten at their core.

On the off chance that you aren’t aware of Lanier’s rhetorical ethos for writing this book, he’s not a culture critic peering in from the sidelines. He’s a computer scientist, technologist, and one of the original pioneers of virtual reality. He has spent decades working at the highest levels of Silicon Valley research and development, including roles at companies like Microsoft and Google, and has been deeply involved in shaping the digital world from the inside. His critique of social media is thus not anti-technology as such, but the considered judgment of someone who helped build the very systems he’s now warning us about.

Currently, I have made it through his book’s introduction and first few chapters, and I’m finding it deeply riveting, as I knew I would. “Algorithms gorge on data about you every second,” he says in the first chapter, which argues that social media are causing us to lose our free will. He points out that these platforms are fundamentally underwritten by advertisers whose ultimate identities and motivations the social media companies themselves don’t even know, so our attention is sold in a titanic behavior modification experiment that’s specifically engineered to exploit certain features of human psychology for the purpose of what the industry euphemistically calls engagement, but which Lanier says can be more obviously and accurately understood as addiction. And as we all remember from the spate of books and journalism that appeared in the 2010s, many of the founders of the whole industry gained a conscience a few years ago and frankly admitted all this with many mea culpas, though this didn’t really do anything to stop or even slow the juggernaut.

Lanier has a knack for framing arguments and information in compelling ways, for coming up with figures of speech and turns of phrase that drive home with new and startling force the kinds of things we think we already know. For example:

What started as advertising morphed into what would better be called “empires of behavior modification for rent.”

And:

Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.

And:

So the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms. Hypnosis might be therapeutic so long as you trust your hypnotist, but who would trust a hypnotist who is working for unknown third parties? Who? Apparently billions of people.

I’m currently strapped in for reading the remainder of the book. It remains to be seen whether I will be persuaded to delete all my social media accounts. This wouldn’t be a major chore, as I only currently have three, or four if you count Goodreads, which I don’t.

That brings me to the second thing that inspired me to write these words: my aforementioned long relationship with social media. The story of me and Facebook, and me and Twitter, and me and LinkedIn, probably isn’t all that different from your own in its general outline. What may be somewhat different, or maybe not, is the level of skittishness and repeated reversals of course that I have pursued. I currently have a Facebook account where I’m minimally active. It has only existed for the past couple of years. And it’s my third incarnation over there. I created my first FB account in the late aughts. A few years later I deleted it and swore I’d never go back. Then in the mid/late teens I created another one in connection with my doctoral work and the simultaneous imminent publication of one of my books. I ended up destroying that one as well. My current third presence at Facebook is only a couple of years old, and its ultimate fate is likewise uncertain.

The same thing happened with Twitter. I created my first account circa 2009, used it for a few years, and then deleted it when I realized it had begun to colonize my mind, causing me to unconsciously evaluate my everyday experience through its own lens by filtering and framing everything in terms of potentially tweetable moments. The same realization lay behind my decision to delete that first Facebook account around the same time. But a few years later, as with Facebook, I returned to Twitter with a new account. This was a couple of years before Elon Musk bought it and transformed it into X. I “got serious” with that account and figured I might as well learn how to use it for the most effective communication I could possibly carry out. My thinking was: Why not see if I could use it as it “wanted” to be used, in the ways most suited for its particular form and function, with a knowledge of how best to connect with people through it, but keeping this all subsumed under my own purposes?

To effect this, I took an online course that laid out the inner workings of the whole thing. It covered everything from how to optimize your profile, create magnetic content, use third-party tools, and time your posts to how to collaborate with other users for maximizing engagement. And on the last count, oh, didn’t you know? All those mega-popular Twitter (now X) accounts, and also Instagram accounts and so on—the super-users with tens or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers, the ones who regularly garner thousands of likes and comments with their posts—vanishingly few of these achieve that level or status “organically.” Instead, they game the system. There is an entire back-end world of collaborative “engagement groups” made up of people who have agreed to cross-promote each other’s content. There’s also a widespread practice of buying followers, of paying people to follow you in order to jack up your numbers, look impressive, and game the algorithm.

If this is news to you, and if it hits you with a big feeling of “What the ever-loving hell?”, just know that it hit me that way, too. But in the end, it all makes total sense, as measured by the internal logic of the social media universe itself, where growth and engagement are the meta-principles underlying everything. Everyone, it seems, wants more engagement. “Success” and “failure” are measured in terms of clicks, likes, comments, and shares, cross-referenced with the size of one’s audience and the rate of its growth. This tends to be true whether you’re an individual or an organization. Consciously or unconsciously, success or failure in the social media realm for any given account is generally measured by those symbols of attention and approval.

But, as emphasized by Lanier (among others), on the back end the real engagement is what the social media companies get from you: the fact that you’re chasing these symbols of attention on their platforms. They have you totally engaged. It’s an all-encompassing wraparound, like water to a fish. It’s like the casino always winning, no matter how many little “wins” you may get on a given day. Our very act of seeking and responding to social media engagement is itself a meta-game of engagement via a behavior modification protocol that’s deployed by the social media companies. And it’s one that they, as the casino, are always winning. The sheer fact that we’re playing the game is their win. Sure, we can have truly meaningful conversations with other people through these media, and these can sidestep the addictive engagement effect to a degree. I have certainly had my share of such interactions, and I have appreciated them. But this positive benefit doesn’t alter the deeper manipulative and extractive structure of the system itself, which still benefits from our attention, participation, and emotional investment.

And as the social media companies are winning, we’re all losing, as evident in the central contributing role that this technology plays in our proliferating mass insanity. Such insanity is reciprocal to our proliferating individual unhappiness as dopamine addicts who get their fix from interactions with electronic screens. I’m sure I will be reading more about this as I make my way through Lanier’s book, but it is also something that I, like you, have known for a long time. And isn’t it strange that, even as we know this, we find it so very difficult to abandon our accounts?

I have often thought of digital technologies in terms of Thoreau’s famous metaphor of the railroad in Walden. “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us,” he wrote in the mid-1800s, expressing his view that modern technology and industrialization had become things that we serve instead of things that serve us. Inspired by his famous words, I have often thought the challenge of social media, and more widely of the internet itself, is to learn to “ride it,” to maximize our conscious use of it for positive purposes while learning to minimize or eliminate its clear potential to enslave us to its own logic and purposes. And yes, all technologies do have an inbuilt purpose or program for how they metaphorically “want” to be used, such as the reshaping of cities and how we inhabit the landscape that was brought about by the automobile. This is the chief insight of the field of media ecology.

But over time I am becoming more convinced that such positive use of social media may be impossible. This is even without the provocation of Lanier’s book. Social media may, I suspect, be irredeemable, even if companies were to redesign them to remove their deliberately addictive features. Some systems, some technologies, may simply be bound to these impulses too tightly and too fundamentally to ever be effectively disentangled from them. There may be a bug in our human makeup that will always find and exploit the egoic, destructive possibilities of technologies like this, ones that emerge out of our dual inbuilt desire for connection/communication and attention/esteem, and that inflame this desire at scale. If this is true, then the problem isn’t how we use them, but that we use them at all, because using them and being used by them are impossible to separate.

It may be that social media—and maybe elements of the internet as a whole?—were best characterized more than 40 years ago by a famous fictional artificial intelligence: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Warm regards,

PS. The book links in this post are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

The Living Dark is freely published. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work.

Make a Donation

Published in December:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark reader,

Last week, in response to Donald Trump’s recent call for the release of all U.S. federal materials related to UFOs, alien life, and unidentified aerial phenomena, Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on a video interview to reiterate a familiar position: Until someone produces actual photographic or other such evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial spacecraft for general inspection, we’re dealing with speculation and belief systems, not knowledge. In conversation with NBC News’s Tom Costello, he said the laws of physics are universal, and therefore aliens, if they exist, are subject to them, which means visitors to Earth from across the vast distances between stars and galaxies are highly unlikely.

Tyson is always an engaging speaker, and much of what he said in that interview is cogent and sensible. I’m sure it would be interesting to read the deeper exploration that he presents in his forthcoming book, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter. But his remarks also carry an embedded philosophical assumption of materialism or physicalism that goes unnamed, representing a continuation of something he has been doing for a long time. What he says reflects an unexamined view that many others likewise bring to this topic with their notions of mechanical spacecraft and fleshly, physical beings of extraterrestrial origin. More fundamentally, his remarks carry the assumption that the language and thought world of physical science is the first, last, primary, and even the only domain for thinking and talking about such matters.

Twelve years ago—a span of time that makes me dizzy with a kind of temporal vertigo when I consider it—I wrote an essay at my former blog, The Teeming Brain, in which I responded to Tyson’s wholesale dismissal of philosophy itself as a pointless distraction from scientific progress. Last week, watching his new interview on UFOs, I was struck by how directly my earlier critique, which many other people likewise made in their own way at the time, applies to the present moment. This has motivated me to republish that piece here, as a semi-response to present concerns.

You can still find the earlier version of what follows at The Teeming Brain under its original title, “To Reject Philosophy Is to Embrace the Matrix.” For this republished version, I have lightly refreshed the text, and have also integrated a later addendum from 2014 into the body of the piece. I haven’t changed the tone, though, which reflects the somewhat sharper and more polemical approach that I sometimes took back then.

If it’s not already clear from these framing comments, what we’re talking about here is not just UFOs per se (especially since I don’t mention them at all in this republished and refreshed piece). It’s something deeper: the impossibility of escaping philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular, even—perhaps especially—when one believes oneself to be speaking from “pure science.”

You Cannot Escape Metaphysics

or, To Reject Philosophy Is To Embrace the Matrix

In case you haven’t heard, Neil deGrasse Tyson has outed himself as a philistine. Or at least that’s how Damon Linker characterizes it in an op-ed for The Week titled, appropriately enough, “Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Is a Philistine.” In the words of the subheadline, “The popular television host says he has no time for deep, philosophical questions. That’s a horrible message to send to young scientists.”

What Linker is referring to is Tyson’s appearance in March 2014 as a guest on the popular Nerdist podcast.1 Beginning at about 20 minutes into the hour-long program, the conversation between Tyson and his multiple interviewers turns to the subject of philosophy, and Tyson speaks up to talk down the entire field. In fact, he takes pains to specify and clarify that he personally has no use for philosophy at all, which he views as a worthless distraction from other activities with real value.

Yes, it sounds as if I must be overstating it in the retelling, but in fact I’m not. Here is a portion of the episode’s transcript. The comments from Tyson and his interviewers, especially host Chris Hardwick, come right after they have been discussing the standardization of weights and measures. Note especially how Tyson not only dismisses philosophy but pointedly refuses to allow that there might be even a shred of value or validity to it.

Chris Hardwick: Philosophy was my major.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: That can really mess you up.

Hardwick: It really does mess you up. It’s when it starts crossing over with math and science, and you have to solve an argument using p’s and q’s and whatnot, and the philosophy of science and math says, “Why is a yard a yard?” and “What makes this, this?” I always felt like maybe there was a little too much question-asking in philosophy.

Tyson: I agree.

Hardwick: Because at a certain point it’s just futile, you know, like “Why is a table a table?” and so on.

Tyson: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. My concern here is that the philosophers believe they’re actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, “What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?”

Another interviewer: I think a healthy balance of both is good.

Tyson: Well, I’m still worried even about a healthy balance. Yeah, if you’re distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you’re not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our progress. . . . How do you define “clapping”? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about ideas. And when you do that, don’t derail yourself on questions that you think are important because philosophy class tells you this. The scientist says, “Look, I got all this world of unknown out there. I’m moving on. I’m leaving you behind. You can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve asked yourself. I don’t have the time for that.”

Hardwick: I also felt that it was a fat load of crap, as one could define what “crap” is and the essential qualities that make up crap: how you grade a philosophy paper?

Tyson: [Laughs.] Of course, I think we all agree you turned out okay.

Hardwick: Philosophy was a good major for comedy, I think, because it does get you to ask a lot of ridiculous questions about things.

Tyson: No, you need people to laugh at your ridiculous questions.

Hardwick: Ultimately, if you ask a lot of questions, it just becomes a bottomless pit.

Another interviewer: It just becomes nihilism.

Tyson: Nihilism is a kind of philosophy.

Linker’s comments express my own thoughts about all of this quite well, so I’ll borrow them:

Yes, he really did say that. . . . [B]ehold the spectacle of an otherwise intelligent man and gifted teacher sounding every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman. . . . With these words, Tyson shows he’s very much a 21st-century American, living in a perpetual state of irritated impatience and anxious agitation. Don’t waste your time with philosophy! (And, one presumes, literature, history, the arts, or religion.) Only science will get you where you want to go! It gets results! Go for it! Hurry up! Don’t be left behind! Progress awaits!

Tyson’s words have also drawn a response from his friend Massimo Pigliucci, who, speaking as someone who is both a biologist and a philosopher, seeks to remind Tyson that science actually arose out of philosophy, and that philosophy deals with real things and makes “progress” of a sort.

But the best response I have seen comes from someone who probably wasn’t thinking about Tyson at all when, a few months after the podcast episode aired, he wrote a beautiful defense of philosophy’s value in just a thousand words. In the essay “In Defense of Armchairs,” published at 3 Quarks Daily, philosopher Charlie Huenemann meditates on the longstanding metaphorical and adjectival use of the word “armchair” as a kind ideological shorthand for denigrating and dismissing someone’s expressed thoughts as stuffy, purely academic, and divorced from the real world. Think, for example, of the disparaging retroactive references to the so-called “armchair anthropology” practiced by the field’s nineteenth-century founders, such as Edward B. Tylor and James George Frazer. “Generally,” Huenemann writes,

in any conflict between long-held, seemingly obvious beliefs and new research challenging those beliefs, defenders of the old beliefs will find themselves charged with sitting in armchairs. . . . An armchair represents both laziness and privilege, a luxurious class of opinion-mongers who simply will not bother themselves with actual empirical research — the original La-Z-Boys, as they might be called.

As Huenemann rightly points out, the people who are most often associated with this type of condemnation are philosophers, since “those who argue from the armchairs are arguing from broad, philosophical perspectives.” I think here, for example, of Andrew Ferguson’s 2013 article for The Weekly Standard titled “The Heretic,” which focused on the ruckus in the intellectual establishment over the publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos with its materialism-challenging thesis. At one point Ferguson describes a moment from a 2012 meeting of scientists and philosophers titled “Moving Naturalism Forward” in which the armchair accusation was brought out by Daniel Dennett:

A video of the workshop shows Dennett complaining that a few—but only a few!—contemporary philosophers have stubbornly refused to incorporate the naturalistic conclusions of science into their philosophizing, continuing to play around with outmoded ideas like morality and sometimes even the soul. “I am just appalled to see how, in spite of what I think is the progress we’ve made in the last 25 years, there’s this sort of retrograde gang,” he said, dropping his hands on the table. “They’re going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness. It’s sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn’t worth anything—it’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.”

But back to Huenemann: Having noted the particular susceptibility of philosophy and philosophers to this charge, he goes on to offer an eloquent and pithy defense of pure speculation of the armchair variety. And I, for one, think his words lucidly call out the fundamental flaw in positions like Dennett’s and Tyson’s:

An armchair is a place of frictionless speculation. In an armchair we can ask What would I see if I rode upon a beam of light? and What if species aren’t fixed? We can also ask Why do people follow laws even when the cops aren’t around? and What is it about opera that makes it seem so much more meaningful than barbershop quartets? We can ask what it is that makes mathematics true, and whether there are any cases when providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number turns out not to be the right thing to do. Empirical information is required in all these cases, but what is even more important is our ability to speculate and conjecture, to imagine and project. If we don’t discover any new answers, we at least begin to see our old presuppositions for what they are.

Armchair speculation can also help us see what our theories entail. Is our mental life purely a matter of what the brain does? If so, then could I read your mind if I studied your brain? Are human actions as fully determined as any nonhuman event? If so, then on what basis would we call any of our actions “free”? If we list the physical causes leading up to an event, do we thereby explain the event? Or in some cases—think now of historical or cultural developments—does explanation require something more than a listing of causes? Again, it would be silly to think that all the information relevant to these questions can be reached from an armchair, but it is impossible to try to tackle them without some good old-fashioned armchair speculation. Answering questions is sometimes just as much about how we think about things as it is about those things themselves.

To further illuminate the rhetorical and ideological use of the word “armchair” as a tool of critique, consider the wonderful passage in the conclusion of Jeffrey Kripal’s necessary book, Authors of the Impossible, where, in an ironic act of inversion, he invokes the word while significantly repurposing its application. This comes in the midst of his discussion of why it’s important to reclaim and reacknowledge the reality of anomalous and paranormal experiences in the context of religious studies. He writes:

Why continue to tolerate a kind of armchair skepticism that has everything to do with scientistic propaganda and nothing at all to do with honest, rigorously open-minded collection, classification, and theory building, that is, with real science and real humanistic inquiry? True enough, anomalies may be just anomalies—meaningless glitches to the statistical field of possibility. But anomalies may also be the signals of the impossible, that is, signs of the end of one paradigm and the beginning of another.

Armchair skepticism—take that, Daniel Dennett. Genuine and important philosophical thinking that actually applies to reality, and that even questions what we mean by the word “reality” itself—take that, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

To draw the point from all this, and to hit at the primary aspect of Tyson’s obtuse dismissal of philosophy that strikes me as most glaring and short-sighted: There is simply no such thing as having no philosophy or refusing to philosophize. There is only philosophy that is consciously engaged, or philosophy that is unconsciously and implicitly followed. The former involves careful reflection, deep thought, and the artful interpretation of experience and data. The latter is equivalent to subconscious programming. Real philosophy, the consciously engaged kind, involves careful consideration of and reflection upon the very principles and assumptions by which we do all this considering, reflecting, thinking, and interpreting. If we don’t practice it, then we automatically fall into the second type, the unconscious, unacknowledged, implicit kind that makes us puppets of our own unacknowledged biases and predilections. And that leads nowhere but to business as usual and the unconsidered propagation of unrecognized assumptions.

Tyson can talk all he wants about being “a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world,” but if he refuses to pause, and if he discourages others from pausing, to inquire into what he means by terms like “the natural world,” “productive,” and “understanding,” and if he refuses to dig under the surface of language, thought, and culture to uncover the multitude of assumptions that precede and are embedded in these terms and their linkage to the assertions he’s making about who we are, what the world is, and what, if anything, we ought to be doing and not doing in and with this experience of life and consciousness—if he refuses to do this, and if he convinces others not to do it, and if this stands for something like mainstream educated opinion and public intellectual discourse, then something is terribly amiss and we’ve reached a singular type of cultural dead end.

In The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas wrote, “The fund of data available to the human mind is of such intrinsic complexity and diversity that it provides plausible support for many different conceptions of the ultimate nature of reality. . . . Evidence can be adduced and interpreted to corroborate a virtually limitless array of worldviews. . . . Because the human understanding is not unequivocally compelled by the evidence to adopt one metaphysical position over another, an irreducible element of human choice supervenes.” The worst thing we can do is refuse to recognize and acknowledge that we are always involved in this inescapable act of philosophical choosing. An entire way of seeing and being in the world hangs in the balance. To reject philosophy is to ignore this choice, to opt for the unexamined life, and to embrace our enslavement to a matrix of our own unrecognized creation.

Warm regards,

PS. The book links above are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through and buy something.

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Published in December:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark readers,

For the past while, I’ve kept this newsletter entirely free while more recently experimenting with external donation options through Stripe and PayPal for those who have asked for this option. Now I’ve realized that it’s cleaner and more coherent simply to use Substack’s built-in subscription system to help with some of this. So I’m reactivating paid subscriptions.

Nothing is being taken away. All new posts will remain free to read, along with the large majority of the archive. But paid subscribers will now:

• Gain access to the complete Living Dark archive, including posts in the “Selected Essays” section.

• Receive occasional “Living Dark Reader” PDFs, curated for slow, reflective offline reading. This is a brand new feature that I’m currently developing and will say more about soon.

• Support independent writing at the crossroads of creativity and awakening.

I also realized it was slightly absurd to leave a body of past paid writing (those Selected Essays) essentially sealed away in amber where only a group of former paid subscribers could see it. Making the archive whole again by offering a way for newly interested readers to access those essays simply makes sense.

If you’ve ever wanted to support this work in a sustained way, this is now the simplest way to do it. One-time support options will also remain available. And if you prefer to remain a free subscriber, nothing changes. The Living Dark remains open.

In whatever form feels natural to you, thank you for continuing to read, write, and live into the dark with me.

Warm regards,

Since 2025, all new writing at The Living Dark is free to read.

If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work.

Thank you for reading.

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Published in December:

READER REACTIONS:

“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”

“What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”

“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”

“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”

“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”

“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”

“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark reader,

Here’s a suggestion for readers of books and other writings on creativity, self-help, spirituality, and other such things, given to you by a person (me) who finds such things to be just as interesting and attractive as you do:

Read such books avidly, even recklessly. Let yourself get thoroughly drunk on whatever sense of enjoyment or illumination they may generate. But don’t do any of the recommended exercises. Later, after a few days, weeks, or years, you may find yourself doing something specific—maybe writing down a personal life inventory, or conducting a visualization or personal reflection, or engaging in a specific meditation, or pursuing a thought experiment, or doing some other form of inner/outer exercise—and you’re going at it with the sense that you thought of it yourself, that it just welled up as a moment of organic insight and action, propelled by an energy of rightness. And precisely because of that self-driven sense, it proves deeply effective in clarifying things for you. And then suddenly you’ll remember with a shock, “Wait—this is from that book I read a long time ago!”

In my engagement with such literature over the years (decades), I have found that following other people’s prescribed exercises can feel too stilted and artificial to let them be effective. A kind of residue or barrier of self-consciousness always accompanies such action. Even if I really grok and groove with a writer’s ideas and worldview, even if I’m excited about a book and the doors it’s unlocking in my self-understanding, I find that actually trying to do any prescribed exercises feels mechanical, awkward, and even counterproductive.

I first discovered this when reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology in my late teens and early twenties. Both books excited the hell out of me, and both were filled with practical exercises, which I dutifully tried to execute. The results were frustrating. It was as if the energy that I sensed in them, and that filled me with a sense of exhilaration, came from the fact that they embodied RAW’s personal, vivid, hard-won insight, which he had then expressed and shared in the form of recommended actions that were better taken as descriptive instead of prescriptive, as expressions of his insight that just happened to be dressed up as means of gaining the insight for myself. The veneer of “how to” was actually misdirecting, at least for me. I was better off enjoying Bob’s description of the exercises for their own sake. (This, despite his repeated assertions that it was vitally important to actually carry them out.)

I eventually realized this same phenomenon was at work across the entire field of consciousness change, spiritual awakening, self-development, and creative unfolding. I found that whenever I was excited by a book of this kind, the best approach was just to let my psyche absorb the writer’s perspective and then concoct and devise, however slowly, its own self-motivated version of any specific action to take based on it. This action might then emerge from the soil of my life organically, feeling like deeply aligned wisdom in motion. At this point I can’t tell you how many times I have gone to the page and written down some self-revelatory or self-clarifying thing, or conducted some kind of thought experiment, or done some kind of self-inquiry, or otherwise undertaken something that might reasonably be classified as an “exercise,” and have felt it come up with a powerful sense of rightness, as if it were arriving naturally in a moment of inner and outer alignment—and then recognized it as the flowering of a seed that was planted in me years earlier by a book whose prescriptive advice I had deliberately refrained from acting on.

If we want to enlarge the frame, we might relate this to things like David Steindl-Rast’s classic (in my opinion) essay “The Mystical Core of Organized Religion,” where Steindl-Rast asserts that “every religion has its mystical core,” its ancient origin and present living base in a vivid, firsthand experience of realizing reality, and that “the challenge is to find access to it and to live in its power.” This is specifically a challenge because the very means that each religion has devised for accessing that living core can become the primary obstacle. To quote Steindl-Rast’s incisive words:

As long as all goes well with a religion, then doctrine, ethics, and ritual work like an irrigation system, bringing ever fresh water from the source of mysticism into daily life. . . . Time has an influence on the system: the pipes tend to get rusty and start to leak, or they get clogged up. The flow from the source slows down to a trickle.

Fortunately, I have not yet come across a religion where the system didn’t work at all. Unfortunately, however, deterioration begins on the day the system is installed. At first, doctrine is simply the interpretation of mystical reality; it flows from it and leads back to it. But then the intellect begins to interpret that interpretation. Commentaries on commentaries are piled on top of the original doctrine. With every new interpretation of the previous one, we move farther away from the experiential source. Live doctrine fossilizes into dogmatism.1

Similarly, we could invoke Peter Brown’s criticism—a bit more spicily expressed—of Buddhism with its rigid, doctrinaire set of practices:

Watch out for those Buddhist teachers, expert at creating bondage out of the quest for what you already are. . . .

[Much of Buddhist teaching] is just more promulgation of deluding complications (as is 99.999999 etc.% of all human communication, teachings, books, etc.). That stuff pisses me off too if I bother to read it for any length of time, at this point I can tell immediately if it’s the rare communication of liberating clarity or the usual deluded bullshit and I close the book and move on.2

For both Brown and Steindl-Rast, the point about organized religion parallels the point I’m making here about exercises for enhancing your creativity, deepening spiritual insight, or otherwise trying to gain something for your life. The supposed means can obscure the end. They can become the cart interposing itself before the horse, the pointing finger that distracts from the beautiful moon, a quagmire of self-generated effort that locks you in an endless round of frustration that deludes you into thinking you’re “making progress.”

I hope it goes without saying that when I recommend ignoring and, in effect, sublimating any practical exercises that you come across in books on spirituality or self-help, I mean this to encompass my own books, too, as well as anything that I write in this newsletter. Both A Course in Demonic Creativity and Writing at the Wellspring contain suggested exercises (the former more than the latter) for discovering and working with your creative energy and destiny—with your muse, daemon, or inner genius. Don’t rush to execute these. Instead, let them compost. Let them sink into the soil of your life. They will be far more helpful if you simply let their outlook settle into you and then pay attention to how, if at all, this moves you to respond later. After you’ve forgotten all about them, what actions may arise within you and from you that are natural, flowing, and deeply your own?

Warm regards,

P.S. A couple of the links here are affiliate links for Amazon or Bookshop.org, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through them and make a purchase.

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Support This Work

If you want to materially support The Living Dark, you can make a one-time donation or choose a recurring monthly donation. I spend a lot of time tending this project, so I sincerely thank you for even considering it. All posts will always remain free.

Make a Donation

Published in December:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Here’s a thank you to , , , , , and many others—about 180 in all—for tuning into my live video today with .

Writing at the Wellspring served as our focus and jumping-off point. This meant our overall topic was creativity, spiritual depth, and the importance of listening for what wants to come through us, especially in an era of acute and accelerating cultural collapse. Matthew describes Writing at the Wellspring like this:

Part Stephen King, part Eckhart Tolle, the book also speaks very directly to why it’s more important than ever for us to unblock our creative channels in this age of metacrisis—and reveals how the Daemon Muse can help, if we learn the right way to ask.”

In our one-hour interaction, we delved into things such as:

• how to meet your muse

• creativity and nonduality

• the uncanniness of the unconscious mind

• giving yourself permission to stop and fall silent

• finding the master theme of your creative work and your whole life

• the meaning of “daemon muse” and the experience of creativity as a relationship with it

• the “monastic option” as a valid creative and spiritual response to cultural decline and the engulfing metacrisis

It was a deep and fulfilling conversation, thanks largely to Matthew’s skillful direction. I hope you enjoy it. And I’d love to hear your own thoughtful contributions in the comments.

Warm regards,

If you enjoyed this video, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Share

Leave a comment

Support This Work

If you want to materially support The Living Dark, you can make a one-time donation or choose a recurring monthly donation. I spend a lot of time tending this project, so I sincerely thank you for even considering it. All posts will always remain free.

Make a Donation

Published in December:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark reader,

This is the second installment in a series of posts that I’m classifying under the rubric of “thoughts, quotations, and fragments.” As I explained in the first installment last month, each post represents a batch of assorted excerpts, perspectives, and commentary, some of it in response to things I’ve been reading, and other parts serving as stand-alone reflections. Think of these posts, if you wish, as curated collections of thoughts that have crossed my mind, cross-fertilized by interactions that I’ve had with books, articles, essays, and other material—including conversations with people. At times they may also serve as informal menus of suggested reading.

Here are two preliminary items ahead of the main substance of this edition:

FIRST, I’m semi-surprised to see that Amazon’s AI-generated description of Writing at the Wellspring, which accompanies the book in the search listings, is actually quite good:

A spiritual guide exploring creativity as a path to awakening, teaching writers and artists how to tap into their inner genius through silence, presence, and nondual awareness.

Beyond Amazon, the book’s distribution has now been fully enacted, so it’s available not just at the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble but at Bookshop.org, Books-a-Million, and pretty much everywhere.

SECOND, I recently sat down with on his Method and Madness podcast to talk about the core premise behind Writing at the Wellspring: that the creative life isn’t primarily a matter of “technique,” but of an inner relationship with the daimon/muse, the inner force that feels like you and not-you at the same time, the thing you can either cooperate with or fight against until it burns you up.

We got into Jung’s line about the creative person being “captive and driven,” the Gospel of Thomas’s warning about what happens when we don’t bring forth what’s within us, and the flow state as something like full alignment with the daemon muse. We also talked about the danger of letting the left-brain “emissary” seize the throne, especially in the modern era, when it’s so easy to measure creative “success” by numbers (money, engagement, impressions) instead of by what the work itself asks of us.

Along the way we wandered into bibliomancy, tarot-adjacent meaning-making, synchronicity, cosmic horror as spiritual territory, and the deeper question hiding behind every “random” sign: what does anything mean? And we also touched on silence, creative droughts, the desire to stop entirely, and why “breaking the spell” may sometimes mean giving yourself permission to sit perfectly still and wait.

At the end, I shared a few under-discussed books that have shaped me: Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block, Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (and also his wonderful novel Flicker), and Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer.

You can listen to the episode here:

LISTEN: Matt Cardin on Writing at the Wellspring

And now, having said all that, it’s on to today’s gallery of assorted items.

The mysticism of Christmas morning

I know we’re now several weeks past Christmas, but for what it’s worth, here’s an important Christmas message that is actually meant for other times, as indicated by the words themselves:

We really should awake each day as if it were Christmas morning, as if the dawn were bringing us—in G.K. Chesterton’s phrase—“absurd good news.”

That’s a summary of the core message or outlook of Colin Wilson, the late British philosopher and author, from Michael Dirda’s review in The Washington Post of a biography of Wilson by Gary Lachman. (See “UFOs, Alien Abductions, and the Occult: To One Man, the Building Blocks of Scholarship,” August 31, 2016).

Wilson famously pointed to Christmas with its magical mood, which we feel most strongly in childhood, as an opportunity for recognizing something about the frankly amazing, mind-blowing nature of reality itself. In his novel The Philosopher’s Stone, he wrote:

Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach.

In his introduction to The Ultimate Colin Wilson: Writings on Mysticism, Consciousness, and Existentialism, Wilson pointed out that Chesterton’s sense of “absurd good news” is frequently supplanted in our experience by something darker:

The feeling of absurd good news is often contradicted by its opposite—what might be called “absurd bad news”—a feeling that we are helpless victims of forces far stronger than we are. In these moods, it seems that all our “values” are illusions created by the body.

And again, he drew a connection to Christmas, observing that this holiday actually serves as a focal point for both outlooks, the one of a heavy emptiness and despair and the other of a buoyant, magical enchantment, with each outlook seeming plausible whenever it has a hold of us:

For me, the problem first presented itself at Christmas-time as a child. That marvellous feeling of richness and excitement made it obvious that life is not difficult and boring and repetitive. Then came the new year and return to school, and it was like waking up from a pleasant dream in an icy bedroom. The glow of Christmas seemed an illusion. Yet the moment the moods of happiness and freedom came back—on a day-trip to the seaside or picking blackberries on an autumn afternoon—it was quite plain they were not some kind of delusion or wishful thinking. It was again self-evident that the world was a far bigger and more exciting place than we normally give it credit for.

Elsewhere, in his book Beyond the Occult, he wrote that, for a child on Christmas Day, “everything combines to make life seem wonderful.’‘ He said he remembered from his own childhood that, at Christmastime, he had the sense

that the world is self-evidently wonderful and exciting, and that no problem is too great for human will and persistence. There was a feeling that if only I could maintain this vision, I would never experience any serious problems for the rest of my life.

However, as noted, we generally don’t maintain that consciousness. Instead, most of us go through life wearing a set of philosophical blinders that lead us to mistake the world as a fundamentally dreary place. But that, said Wilson, is a problem with us, not with reality at large. If we saw things as they truly are, we would always feel the magical Christmas glow we remember from childhood, not finding it limited to a single time of year.

Right now, with Christmas nearly two months in the rear view mirror—and with the world continuing to weird out in early 2026 to a degree that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago—this is all worth remembering.

The cosmic horror of Christmas

Christmas, of course, isn’t always entirely cozy. Case in point: If you’ve not encountered ’s writing on the cultural traditions that we’ve collectively built around mythic-dreaming consciousness, his essay from last December titled “The Chimney Portal” is a great entryway into it. Its theme, as named in its subtitle, is “supernatural agents and cosmic coziness on Christmas Eve.” And as if that weren’t enough to endear it to your (let alone my) attention, any piece of writing that contains the phrase ‘‘a nondual Santa, transcending awe and horror” automatically receives my endorsement.

Here’s a key passage to whet your appetite:

Isn’t that pretty much the deal with coziness and the winter vibe in general? It’s an apotropaic effect where we indulge in the contrast of being warm, safe and secure against a backdrop of the cold and unprotected. Coziness itself dabbles in cosmic horror, with warm tea and cookies in hand.

MORE: Ryan D. Hurd, “The Chimney Portal,” Archaeology of Consciousness, December 19, 2025

The ontology of Santa Claus

And speaking of Christmas horror, an essay by from late December lays out an ontology of Santa Claus that applies point-for-point to that avatar of high-quality mythic-cinematic horror, Candyman. I mean this without irony or any intent to sully the piece’s excellent insight.

See for yourself:

[W]e all fully participate in Santa’s yearly flight, buying toys and setting up the tree and stockings, and everything else I don’t need to list. In this, we embody the spirit of his elves, sometimes even against our will or own best interest. Collectively, we’re all totally possessed by his animating spirit, and we couldn’t stop it if we tried.

It’s not wrong to participate in that spirit for the delight of our children. What is wrong is sitting them down to tell them it’s all a conspiratorial lie. That is itself a vicious lie. He’s real—the magic is just subtler than we can get at in ordinary speech.

Here I feel like I run into a brick wall, because we are all at least somewhat materialist in our outlook. There is just a tic in the modern mind that wants to be like, “But if I literally went to the North Pole. . .” as if that’s the most important level of truth or revelation.

If you approach Foreman’s argument with Candyman in mind, it reads like a sharp analysis of and commentary on that movie’s cultural-ontological argument about the potent and actual reality of mythic figures and their for-real presence among us and within us:

Importantly, Santa requires our participation—he needs us to believe in order for his existence to substantiate. We are his body and his elves. Not everything depends on your belief to exist, of course, but more than you might think. Seeing is not always believing, because believing sometimes literally changes what you are able to see.

The essay is well worth your time as a brief primer on daimonic reality.

MORE: James Taylor Foreman, “It’s Wrong to Lie to Kids about Santa (He’s Real),” The Metaphor, December 27, 2025

When art breaks reality open

In deep resonance with the above, recently published a striking essay on “the real magic behind the metaphor” when it comes to making and experiencing art. “As I proposed in Reclaiming Art,” he says, “great works of literature, drama, and poetry contain ‘rifts,’ anomalous moments where an otherwise seamless narrative logic is interrupted, and something else shines through. . . . Such moments lay bare the open, contingent, and downright weird dimension of reality that art excels at exploring.” He elaborates his point by carefully examining the deeply weird, dreamy, and fantastic horse scene in writer/director Tony Gilroy’s transcendent film Michael Clayton.

JF’s whole meditation demands reading (including for the narrative context it provides for the horse scene), but here is its upshot:

We moderns pride ourselves on having swept the world clean of the miraculous, yet the possibility of miracles cannot be exorcised. Good art finds its objective value in revealing the possible as an irreducibly wondrous dimension of reality. Through its rifts, art itself becomes a rift in the smooth surface of our secular image of the world, affording us each time a glimpse of the unbanishable beyond.

MORE: JF Martel, “It Bottoms Out in Fantasy,” The Imp of the Possible, December 24, 2025

( calls out one of the implications of this line of thinking in a Substack Note: “It’s time to take seriously the reality status of every single thought that pops into your head.”)

Nostalgia for the infinite

The only type of nostalgia that’s ultimately valid and true is nostalgia for the infinite. Sehnsucht. The holy longing. Intense yearning sparked by the shimmering memory trace of our true identity flickering in the shadows and interstices of this dream of separation. All other nostalgias are sentimental egoic projections of a time and circumstance that never really existed. But this one is genuine. It’s also the ultimate clue and the final path of return.

Root craving and root horror

For the past month and a half, I’ve been incubating some deep intuitions about the core matter of desire versus fear, longing versus dread, attraction versus aversion, fascination versus terror, and the fact that this yin/yang dialectic or dyad forms the deep core of both spiritual awakening and weird/supernatural horror.

At base we’re each propelled in our experience of separate, individual selfhood by a root craving and a root horror. This is part and parcel of the experience of identifying as a separate individual at all. Seizing on either pole can lead us back to the center and show us the common reality that precedes both. Seeing how our root craving and root horror serve as perfect mirrors of each other, projected from a common source, can triangulate the opening or the portal in the center of our subjectivity, the doorway of Being that we can back into and remember who we really are beyond this dream of separation.

Or at least this is the gist of these current intuitions, which, in coming months, may lay themselves out more fully in new Living Dark posts.

Ghost writers and daemons, or The autonomy of ideas

I appreciate ’s handling of a critically important matter in a post from last December in his Subtle Maneuvers newsletter that bears the clever title “Ghost Writers in the Sky.” That matter is the notion or sense that ideas are, or can be usefully framed and viewed as, existing ‘‘out there,’‘ not as things formulated but as things found, things received and engaged with. In considering this, he brings in references to and quotes from André 3000, R. Crumb, Elizabeth Gilbert, John Cage, David Lynch, and more.

If you’ve read my own writings about creativity, then you know that I promote the objectification of it—the framing of it as something external and autonomous, something with which we have a collaborative relationship—as a meaningful gambit for enhancing its flow and vibrancy, including in the notion’s most developed form in the model of the muse or daemon. I highly recommend this as a working hypothesis, to be held forever in an attitude of liminal indeterminacy. And I find Currey’s consideration of the potentially objective, autonomous nature of ideas to be a worthy and useful exploration of this territory. Rather than quoting any specific passage, I’ll just direct you to the full piece itself:

Mason Currey, “Ghost Writers in the Sky,” Subtle Maneuvers, December 16, 2025

The creative power of lowering the bar

If you want to write but struggle with it because you just can’t seem to produce anything good, I can tell you that the single best trick or strategy I’ve come across in 25 years of doing it professionally and a lifetime of doing it generally is this bit of wisdom from William Stafford:

Lower your standards.

Set a bar so low you literally can’t fail. Make your goal not to write a book but to write a paragraph. Not to finish a story or essay but to finish two sentences. Not to write for two hours but to write for two minutes. With literally no concern for quality or even content. Just write. Just succeed at a writerly goal that’s so easy it makes failure impossible and success inevitable.

Do this daily for a week, a month, or a year and see what happens.

No experiencer outside experience

I offer the following from with no commentary since it stands perfectly well and emanates meaningful—and actionable—wisdom without any help from me:

If we’re referencing “being awake” or “liberation” to a particular experience or state of mind—maybe a very expanded, open, peaceful feeling—that will inevitably prove disappointing because that state will disappear. The open aware presence it reveals is simply what remains when the me-system is quiet or when it is totally accepted as simply the weather of this moment. That open boundless aware presence is actually ever-present, even when apparently obscured by obsessive, me-centered thoughts. It is the common factor in every different experience. And those thoughts are nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as thoughts. Experience is ever-changing like the weather. It’s never personal. It’s a happening of the whole universe. But if we take the stormy, cloudy, foggy weather personally, then it seems like we have lost that expanded openness that we tasted before. If we imagine that there is a persisting, independent self (“me”) who is either awake or not awake, that is only an imagination. No such persisting, independent self can be found. There is no experiencer outside of experiencing. Clinging to or chasing after experiences of spaciousness is a great way to avoid them. And eventually, we see that every experience, whether contracted or expanded, clear or muddy, is always just this.

MORE: Joan Tollifson, “Silence,” Right Now, Just As It Is, December 10, 2025

The creative-spiritual path of boredom

Boredom feels like a trap, but if you really delve into it instead of trying to escape it, you find it’s actually the doorway out of the trap, right in the act of springing open.

Paradox of Boredom: With a phone always in arm’s reach, it’s almost impossible to get bored. This is a disaster, because boredom is the mud from which creativity blooms. To be bored is to be undistracted, and only then is one free to dream, just as it’s only when the world goes dark that we see the galaxy.

— Gurwinder, “26 Useful Concepts for 2026,” The Prism, December 28, 2025

The flavor of infinity never needs to be found because it’s never lost. It is the heavy-handedness of our interpretations that seems to dominate and obscure the background ubiquitous flavor of reality… Find something in your experiential field that you have no interest in whatsoever. Since there’s no heavy-handed interpretation going on, the inherent flavor of the Radiant Presence may be more obvious and accessible.

— Peter Brown, This That Is (The Open Doorway, 2022).

The courage of being enough

“To ‘know thyself’ is hard work. Harder still to believe that you, with all your flaws, are enough—without checking in, tweeting an update, or sharing a photo as proof of your existence for the approval of your 719 followers.”

—James Victore, “Reclaiming Our Self-Respect,” in Manage Your Day to Day, ed. Jocelyn K. Glei (Amazon Publishing, 2013).

UFOs and ontological shock

Here’s a fascinating take on the UFO/UAP disclosure theme by , focusing on its specific ramifications for healthcare. The message or thesis is that the ontological shock that will accompany disclosure will overwhelm both the human body and psyche, along with the societal structures, systems, and institutions we’ve created for managing them, creating an unprecedented crisis with no map for navigating it. It’s a unique take or angle that’s well worth absorbing, regardless of whether you view the whole disclosure meme as referring to something fictional or something literal:

But the real disclosure, if it comes, won’t give us time to process in a comfortable theater seat. It’ll hit bodies and psyches that have no preparation for reality operating in ways we were told were impossible. It’ll manifest in emergency rooms as people try to articulate experiences that language wasn’t built for. It’ll show up as physical symptoms that don’t match our diagnostic criteria because those criteria assume a materialist universe where consciousness stays inside skulls and reality has clear boundaries.

And unless we start building frameworks now (medical, psychological, and ontological frameworks that can hold paradox) we’re going to medicalize and pathologize people who are having the most important experiences of their lives.

MORE: Meredith, “Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Trailer Just Dropped. We’re Not Ready,” Maze to Metanoia, December 16, 2025

The world as dreamscape

On the real-time, self-generating environment of the world in your dreams:

It seems like, rather than starting with a predetermined map, the dreamworld is continually created wherever the dreamer ventures, unlocking new spaces along the way and encouraging further exploration.

—Michelle Carr, Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind (Henry Holt and Co., 2025).

On the same phenomenon as evident in the waking world:

We’ve been taught to believe…that we are born into a vast pre-existing universe of separate solid objects that have evolved to their present state over billions of years…

Our direct, first-person experience is that the universe operates as creation-on-demand, just like a video game. But we reject our direct experience in favor of an unprovable belief in an infinitely old, infinitely vast universe of solid separate objects that exists whether anyone’s looking or not…

Seeing the world as a pre-existing solid “reality” that exists whether I look at it or not, is not seeing the world as a little child sees it, and thus, according to Jesus at least, is not perceiving the kingdom of God.

My experience is that Creation expands in the direction of looking, and when I’m not looking it disappears. Is your raw experience—absent all beliefs—different from this? My experience is that where my “head” supposedly exists, is actually a wide circumference of emptiness roughly defined by my “peripheral vision,” and that this emptiness is filled by the world. Is your actual experience—absent all beliefs—different than this?

—Bart Marshall, Becoming Vulnerable to Grace: Strategies for Self-Realization (Realface Press, 2021).

Magic is the way everything happens

In the wake of the item directly above, I’ll end this installment of thoughts, quotations, and fragments with the following words from Peter Brown in one of his several brilliant books. His endlessly effusive way of verbally pointing to the truth is as vibrant and effective as any I’ve come across, and these passages in particular call out the magical, mind-blowing nature of that truth, which is utterly swamping you and me even now, as I type these words and as you read them:

Magic is the way everything happens, the way anything happens. Happening is magic. . . . So anything and everything that seems to happen—how does it happen? Simply by the inherent intelligent of the Radiant Presence. . . .

I’m sitting here, I’m talking, you’re hearing these words, there’s communication happening to some degree—it’s like, what is that, how is that, how does it happen? Magic! . . .

Your body is working, you’re just digesting your dinner, and you had some wine, and all of that’s going on, how’s that happen? Magic.

Anything, everything is magic. How do all these colors and shapes appear in your consciousness, in your field of vision, how does that happen? Magic!

Magic is just a word for the functioning of the inherent intelligence [of reality itself]. Magic is a word for the functionality of Radiant Presence. . . .

There’s nothing but Radiant Presence being itself in the way that it does. This inconceivable functionality, this inconceivable self-harmony, the inherent intelligence. . . .

There’s nothing else. This is being itself. This is doing itself. And everything, all the intricacies that we may think of as happening are simply this doing, this doing of what this is, of what you are. The doing of Radiant Presence being itself.

Magic is the perfect word to refer to this hyper-functionality, this hyper-perfection of the way that it is what it is. What that looks like is your field of experience.

—Peter Brown, This That Is (The Open Doorway, 2022), 79–80.

Warm regards,

P.S. Many of the book links in this post are affiliate links for Amazon or Bookshop, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through them and make a purchase.

Support This Work

If you want to materially support The Living Dark, you can make a one-time donation or choose a recurring monthly donation. I spend a lot of time tending this project, so I sincerely thank you for even considering it. All posts will always remain free.

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Now available:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

If this post was forwarded to you, and you like what you read—or if you’re just interested in creativity, the daemon muse, weird and horror fiction, religion and spirituality, and/or the examined writing life—I invite you to subscribe.

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Dear Living Dark readers,

Here are two recent podcast interviews that I’ve given in connection with the publication of Writing at the Wellspring. The conversations did not, however, remain exclusively centered on that topic, as reflected in the episode description for the first interview below. My interactions with the hosts—and, in the case of the Lovecraft eZine episode, with the other guests—simply sprawled wherever they wanted to go, encompassing a wide range of topics and themes. These included the deep nature of weird fiction, the uncanny insights of nonduality, my personal history with organized religion, and my adolescent obsession with role-playing games.

In the wake of such conversations, the voice of my rational, editorial mind always speaks up to say, “You really need to stay more focused. Approach these conversations as marketing opportunities. Have your talking points pre-planned. Make sure you get the message out about the book.” But this is invariably trumped by another voice that replies, “Nah. Just keep following your natural interest and energy wherever it wants to go.” The latter, of course, represents the living into the dark outlook and ethos, here applied to the notional business of book promotion and media appearances. Which I’m more than happy to embrace.

In all such conversations and interactions—of which there are more to come, including one already completed that I’ll share with you next week—I’ve sincerely appreciated the skillful guidance of the hosts and interviewers.

If anything in the conversations below ignites a spark of interest in Writing at the Wellspring, and if you haven’t already picked up a copy, you’ll find ordering information at the bottom of this post.

In a recently published reader review, novelist and English professor Brian Hauser characterizes Writing at the Wellspring as being centered on “the examined writing life,” stating: “It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life. . . . For many readers, it may be an introduction to an entirely different way of thinking about their lives.”

Interview for The Gospel of Direct Experience

Living into the Dark: Matt Cardin on Creativity, Horror, and the Daemonic
The Gospel of Direct Experience, February 5, 2026 (1 hour, 7 minutes)

In this episode of The Gospel of Direct Experience, we’re joined by Matt Cardin, acclaimed writer of cosmic horror and author of the new book Writing at the Wellspring. What unfolds isn’t just a discussion of creativity; it’s also an initiation into darkness—darkness as terror and generative source and spiritual/cultural necessity.

Matt reframes the “demon muse” or “genius” not as a benevolent guide from beyond but as an abducting, inner organizing force that destabilizes our egoic certainty and is the true wellspring of art, vocation, and transformation. Our conversation ranges from the chapel perilous and cosmic horror, to non-dual philosophy and role-playing games to Frankenstein and the collapse of modern culture.

Get ready to descend into the living dark—not to transcend it, but to be transformed by it.

Interview for Lovecraft eZine

Matt Cardin: Writing at the Wellspring
Lovecraft eZine, December 7, 2025 (1 hour, 48 minutes; my portion is about 1 hour, 17 minutes of the total episode)

(Note that I don’t actually arrive on the scene until the 8:30 mark; I somehow had the time wrong.)

Writers, artists, and creatives won’t want to miss today’s episode! Matt Cardin will talk about his new book Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius.

Later, Doug Murano of Bad Hand Books will join the conversation. Plus: John Taff!

Warm regards,

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend. I’d also love to hear your thoughts and comments.

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Support This Work

If you want to materially support The Living Dark, you can make a one-time donation or choose a recurring monthly donation. I spend a lot of time tending this project, so I sincerely thank you for even considering it. All posts will always remain free.

Donate

Published in December:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today I’m sharing an essay with you about metaphysical horror, cosmic pessimism, and the strange proximity between religious revelation and existential dread. Or more accurately, I’m sharing a portion of something longer. Though it can be read as a stand-alone piece, what follows is excerpted from my essay “A Formless Shade of Divinity,” whose subtitle identifies its wider context: “Chasing Down the Demiurge in Thomas Ligotti’s ‘The Red Tower,’ I Have a Special Plan for This World, and This Degenerate Little Town.”

My involvement in horror fiction and publishing, though it often takes a side seat here at The Living Dark, remains one of the foundations of my writing, my outlook, and my personal and professional history. So does my long involvement in the critical and creative scene surrounding Thomas Ligotti, where I have somehow come to be recognized as one of the major interpretive writers on his work over the past quarter century or so. Long-time TLD readers will remember that Ligotti has come up here several times before.

“A Formless Shade of Divinity” first went out into the world in 2020 as a booklet accompanying the vinyl audio recording The Red Tower, produced and published by Cadabra Records. The album presents dramatic readings of the three Ligotti works named in the subtitle—one short story and two poem cycles—featuring my dear friend Jon Padgett as reader, accompanied by a musical score by Chris Bozzone. It marked my second collaboration with Cadabra Records on a Ligotti project; the first was a reading of Ligotti’s “The Bungalow House,” released in 2018 and featuring the same team.

It was a pleasure and honor to be invited to write the essay portions of these releases. The projects were also formative for me in a more inward sense, giving me a formal occasion/provocation to articulate, for myself as much as for anyone else, why certain works by Ligotti had haunted me for years.

The section of “A Formless Shade of Divinity” that I’m sharing with you here is titled “Laughing and Screaming in an Endless Dream.” It’s devoted to exploring and explaining Ligotti’s poem cycle I Have a Special Plan for This World. The excerpt makes up roughly 1700 words of the essay’s total 6,300-word length.

It may help to situate this section within the essay’s wider thesis. My argument is that the three works under consideration present themselves as more than literary horror. In both form and function, they operate as revelatory texts—texts that seek to work a transformation upon the reader, in a manner analogous to religious scriptures. I’ll quote from my own introduction to explain what I mean before proceeding to the excerpt itself:

[U]pon starting to read them, one notices immediately that they present themselves and function as more than, and other than, mere works of horror literature. Much like religious texts, these key entries in Ligotti’s total body of work convey the sense that they are attempting (as it were) to channel directly to the reader the transcendent reality whose existence they posit. Put differently, they attempt to act as windows, and also, in some sense, as textual instantiations or incarnations of the nightmarish reality toward which they gesture. In this, they are transformative texts—again, more like religious scriptures than mere stories that change the reader’s perception of reality. They are texts that work, or try to work, an alteration upon and within the reader’s mind, brain, and perception, and in so doing work a veritable ontological change upon the reader him- or herself. . . .

These texts seek to work a change upon the reader, to open the reader’s mind to a new way of seeing, knowing, and feeling about his or her existence, the cosmic environment in which it plays out, and the foundational ontological reality upon which both of these phenomena, self and cosmos, rest, and from which they derive.

More succinctly, one could say, if one were so inclined, that “The Red Tower,” I Have a Special Plan for This World, and This Degenerate Little Town are not so much literary texts that one reads as revelatory experiences that one risks. They are scriptures of a sort, ostensible carriers of a metaphysical truth that seek to transform those who are “sympathetic organisms” (to quote the monstrous eponymous guru in Ligotti’s short story “Severini”). They speak of a truth—they reveal a truth—the very grasping of which can change the one who grasps.

I trust that my long-standing fascination with the confluence of religion and weird, cosmic, and supernatural horror is evident in this framing. Many of you who make up the Living Dark readership may know my writing more through its engagements with creativity, the daemon muse, nonduality, spiritual awakening, and cultural critique than through my work in the horror field. What follows is one example of how these strands have always occupied the same interior space for me, how metaphysical dread, awakening, and creativity have long stood in a complementary relationship rather than an oppositional one. I hope this speaks to something within you, whether it’s familiar or unfamiliar territory.

As a final introductory note, the complete essay is collected in my book What the Daemon Said, which is available pretty much everywhere.

Warm regards,

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Laughing and Screaming in an Endless Dream

On Thomas Ligotti’s I Have a Special Plan for This World

I Have a Special Plan for This World was first published in 2000 in a limited edition of 125 copies by David Tibet’s Durtro Press. Tibet, the founder and long-time beating heart of the British experimental music group Current93, was then and remains now a confirmed fan of Ligotti’s work—Ligotti even chose him to deliver his (Ligotti’s) acceptance speech for the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2020—and Special Plan first emerged when Ligotti, who had already written the text, described it to Tibet, who decided he wanted to turn it into a collaborative project. Tibet published the limited-edition book in connection with a compact disc that featured him narrating Ligotti’s text, accompanied by an ominous paramusical landscape and interspersed with deeply distorted vocal effusions. The production also featured audio content from a series of mysterious cassette tapes that Ligotti and his colleagues at Gale Research, the educational publisher where he worked as an associate editor for two decades, used to find lying on a park bench outside the Penobscot Building in Detroit.1

Ligotti’s text takes the form of a series of thirteen surreal poems or “discorporeal prose poems,” all representing, like the text of “The Red Tower,” the darkly unsettling reflections of an unidentified narrator. Dominant themes include the intrinsic and inescapable suffering and despair of mortal, fleshly, embodied life; the dreadfulness of existence itself; the idea of humans as puppets or automatons being controlled by an occult force; the vision of the cosmos as a crummy, creaking, rundown façade that barely conceals a nightmarish horror; and the “special plan” of the title, which seems to have something to do with desiring the unmaking of creation and returning everything to a state of utter non-existence. The exact nature of the plan is never specified, but the narrator hints at it in various ways.

For instance, at the start of the second section, the narrator relates a chance meeting with a shadowy figure—one of many that are encountered in the total dreamscape of the poem cycle—who speaks of having his own special plan. What this figure says indicates that this plan is focused on the idea of annihilating the savage bloody suffering of physical existence and the monstrous drives and appetites that accompany it:

	One needs to have a plan, someone said who was
		turned away into the shadows
		and who I had believed was sleeping or dead
	Imagine, he said, all the flesh that is eaten
		the teeth tearing into it
		the tongue tasting its savor
		and the hunger for that taste
	Now take away that flesh, he said
		take away the teeth and the tongue
		take away the taste and the hunger
	Take away everything as it is—
	That was my plan, my own special plan for this world

The narrator, however, will have none of that, for his plan, he says, extends far beyond a mere removal of things as they are, reaching all the way backward and inward toward the luminous primal darkness that preceded and precedes all things:

	I had heard of such plans, such visions
	And I knew they did not see far enough—
	That what was demanded—in the way of a plan—
	Needed to go beyond tongue and teeth
		and hunger and flesh
	Beyond the bones and the very dust of bones
		and the wind that would come
		to blow the dust away
	And so I began to envision a darkness
	That was long before the dark of night
	And a strangely shining light
	That owed nothing to the light of day 

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that at one point the narrator characterizes his very own plan as the most horrific thing in the entire horror-filled multiverse, calling it “the worst of all / of this world’s dreams— / My special plan for the laughter and the screams.” And yet, the text is bookended by lines, phrased in incantatory language and repeated verbatim in the first and final sections, that obliquely anticipate a kind of dark bliss that will accompany the plan’s eventual accomplishment:

	When everyone you have ever loved is finally gone
	When everything you have ever wanted is finally done with
	When all of your nightmares are for a time obscured
		as by a shining brainless beacon
		or a blinding eclipse
	Of the many terrible shapes of this world
	When you are calm and joyful and, finally, entirely alone
	Then, in a great new darkness,
	You will finally execute your special plan

The Hungarian philosopher and social theorist Adam Lovasz observes that I Have a Special Plan for This World is “ironically titled,” in that the text, in its totality, “seeks to express the very absence of such a plan. Ligotti rejects the notion of a cosmic teleology, a divine blueprint that would integrate atomized, separated moments into itself.”

Interestingly, and perhaps contrastingly, Ligotti derived the title of the piece from the Golberg Mania Questionnaire, a widely used psychological test, developed by the American psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg, that is intended to help diagnose bipolar disorder. One of its questions asks, “Do you have special plans for this world?” Ligotti was apparently so struck by this that he created not just one but two works titled “I Have a Special Plan for This World.” The second, unrelated to the one under consideration here by anything except its title, is a corporate horror story that was first published in My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002).

In any event, buried in the latter half of I Have a Special Plan for This World (the poetic text, not the short story), in section nine, is a set of lines that might validly be thought of as expressing the pure essence of the nightmare ontology that informs and underlies all of Ligotti’s work:

	I first learned the facts from a lunatic
	In a dark and quiet room that smelled of
		stale time and space
	There are no people—nothing at all like that—
	The human phenomenon is but the sum
	Of densely coiled layers of illusion
	Each of which winds itself upon the supreme insanity
	That there are persons of any kind

	When all there can be is mindless mirrors
	Laughing and screaming as they parade about
		in an endless dream

When asked by the narrator, “what it was / That saw itself within those mirrors,” the lunatic “only rocked and smiled / Then he laughed and screamed,” and the narrator reports seeing in his “black and empty eyes . . . as in a mirror,”

	A formless shade of divinity
	In flight from its stale infinity
	Of time and space and the worst of all
		of this world’s dreams—
	My special plan for the laughter and the screams. 

In his 2003 book Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality, later released in a new edition with the altered subtitle Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment, the American science writer John Horgan related his personally transformative experience of taking ayahuasca, as well as the subsequent philosophical quest it put him on. He reported that during his psychedelic episode, after experiencing a number of the conventionally predictable DMT-fueled visual phenomena, he found himself “coming face to face with the ultimate origin and destiny of life.” He said he “felt overwhelming, blissful certainty that there is one entity, one consciousness, playing all the parts of this pageant, and there is no end to this creative consciousness, only infinite transformations.”

Then, without warning, the bliss toppled over and inverted itself into an experience of nightmarish terror. Horgan’s description of the nature and source of that terror, and of his vision of the central core of personal and cosmic reality, may shed light on Ligotti’s amorphous divinity and its horrified flight from its own infinitude:

Why? I kept asking. Why creation? Why something rather than nothing? Finally I found myself alone, a disembodied voice in the darkness, asking, Why? And I realized that there would be, could be, no answer, because only I existed; there was nothing, no one, to answer me. I felt overwhelmed by loneliness, and my ecstatic recognition of the improbability—no, impossibility—of existence mutated into horror. I knew there was no reason for me to be. At any moment I might be swallowed up forever by this infinite darkness enveloping me. I might even bring about my own annihilation simply by imagining it. I created this world, and I could end it, forever. Recoiling from this confrontation with my own awful solitude and omnipotence, I felt myself dissolving, fracturing, fleeing back toward otherness, duality, multiplicity.

Horgan went on to say that in the aftermath of this “nightmarish vision,” which he eventually “shaped into a theodicy with gnostic overtones—call it gnosticism light,” he realized that he had come to suspect that “God creates not just for companionship or ‘fun’ but because of His terrified recognition of His own solitude and improbability and even His potential death; God ‘forgets’ Himself and flees into multiplicity because He cannot bear to confront His plight.”

One recalls that Ligotti has told of how he himself experienced a mental-emotional breakdown at the age of seventeen while under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that this put him in a state of mind that rendered him profoundly receptive to the vision of a bleak, menacing, and monstrous cosmos portrayed in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, which he discovered soon afterward. Ligotti’s particular experience of horror, though, as he would begin to express it decades later in his own stories, might be characterized as the horror of the “deep inside,” the horror to be found at the ontological heart of psyche and reality, whereas Lovecraft’s might be characterized as the horror of the “deep outside,” of the monsters and forces of outer darkness that scratch at the rim of the ordered universe and the walls of conventional human sanity.2

In I Have a Special Plan for This World, in the image of those “mindless mirrors / Laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream,” and of that “formless shade of divinity” fleeing its own infinite isolation—just like Horgan’s deity, which lives in terror of its own solitude and flees into multiplicity to escape it—Ligotti has provided perhaps the most potent key to articulating his particular vision of the horror at the center of existence.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend. I’d also love to hear your thoughts and comments.

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Support This Work

If you want to materially support The Living Dark, you can make a one-time donation or choose a recurring monthly donation. I spend a lot of time tending this project, so I sincerely thank you for even considering it. All posts will always remain free.

Donate

Published in December:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark readers,

I know many of you are writers. And also artists, musicians, and various other species belonging to the socio-spiritual genus that we sometimes call “creator.” Regardless of where or even whether you fall in that group, it’s clear we’re all interested in the question of creativity, including what it is, what it means, how it works, where it comes from, and how it relates to the rest of our lives. Otherwise, why would you be reading a post like this in a publication like The Living Dark? We’re also probably all interested in the subject of artificial intelligence, since, well, who isn’t these days? And since, as you may recall, I have already written about it several times in the past, effectively chronicling my own evolving understanding of it.

This is all why I figured you might find the following two perspectives, and the contrast and tension between them, to be as interesting and provocative as I do. Each lays out in miniature a complete weltanschauung of the relationship between writers, their work, and artificial intelligence. Each does a fine job of making its case. And each fundamentally disagrees with the other, almost on a point-for-point basis. This means it’s worthwhile to reflect, even to meditate, not only on each separately but on the dialectical tension between them.

The first perspective, which I’ll label View A, comes from a recently published piece by Nick Ripatrazone, the culture-oriented author and editor whose interesting and subtle views on religion, literature, and other topics I have found consistently engaging for years.

VIEW A:

Artistic ego is the best chance we have of battling against the rise of AI in creative spaces. When we write something and decide to share it with others, we are affirming the worth of our own words, which is an action of the ego. . . . Great art isn’t supposed to be easy. While it’s easy to fetishize the trope of the struggling artist, art results from failure overcome by determination. The artistic ego, in asserting itself, is a human action. When we cede creation to the machine, we are not making art. Reddit posts abound in which people turn to AI to ease their writer’s block, as if it is a temporary inconvenience. The struggle, in fact, feeds the art.

— Nick Ripatrazone, “Against Generative AI: Is Art the Last Refuge of Our Humanity?” Literary Hub, January 15, 2026

The second perspective, which I’ll label View B, comes from the book The Art of Unwriting by Youri Hermes, which hasn’t been published yet, and for which I will be writing the introduction.

VIEW B:

The identity that manages, controls, and worries about being good enough. The voice that asks “Am I qualified to say this?” and “Will anyone care?” The self that turns writing into performance. When the writer falls away, so do the problems it creates. Writer’s block, perfectionism, procrastination. These only exist when we believe we’re the one who has to write the book. When there’s no writer, what’s left to be blocked? No writer, no problem. Remove the writer, and the obstacles dissolve with it. . . . We stop carrying the entire burden of making our writing clear. We see that clarity often emerges through the relationship between our words and other minds, both human and artificial. . . . The effort, the struggle, the inspiration, it was never really yours. AI just makes that obvious. It reflects back what’s always been happening: creativity appearing from nowhere. With or without you.

— Youri Hermes, The Art of Unwriting: Freeing the Book from the One Who Writes It (forthcoming)

Since I’m the one who has brought this all up, it probably behooves me to state where I myself stand on these dual outlooks. So here goes:

The plain fact is that I can’t champion either view exclusively and remain honest, as aspects of both describe my personal experience, deeply known and intensely engaged over decades.

The recognition-in-action that the pause and suffering of creative block can actually be the thing that infuses writing with the quality and soul it needs? Check.

The contrasting recognition that creativity is literally always happening, that my writing isn’t actually, ultimately mine, that it doesn’t belong to me, that it appears from nowhere, and that therefore struggling with block can represent self-deception and even a kind of needless sidetrack? Check.

Profound misgivings about AI’s ability to short-circuit the slowness, effort, and suffering of that soul-productive block, combined with a growing fascination with the way the instantaneous muse-like flow of words (or other things) from generative AI seems like a concrete illustration of potential creative meaning being profligately produced from essentially nowhere, just like whispers from the daemon muse itself? Check.

A sense of being poised in a kind of fertile liminality as I contemplate this tension and watch for the synthesis that might eventually emanate from it? Check.

And now: How about you? Is creative struggle essential, or is it an illusion we’ve mistaken for virtue? And how does artificial intelligence play into it, if at all?

Warm regards,

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Published in December:

BUY THE BOOK

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self

Available from all the major stores, including Amazon, Bookshop.org, and Barnes & Noble.

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Dear Living Dark readers,

Ahead of the specific meat of today’s post, which is about a book I finished reading this week, there’s this:

A couple of months ago, before Writing at the Wellspring was published, I entered it in the annual nonfiction book contest held by BookLife, a service of Publishers Weekly. The final outcome remains to be announced, but each entry receives a report from a professional BookLife critic. The one for Wellspring arrived a couple of days ago. The critic’s response was highly positive toward both the content and the prose:

Plot/Idea: Writing at the Wellspring takes a refreshing approach to the craft of writing by recentering on the ancient concepts of the muse (or demon) as a force of inspiration, perseverance, and passion. Less a work of practical advice for writers, Cardin’s book is a philosophical treatise on creativity, its purposes, and its mysteries.

Prose: Cardin’s prose is at once academic in tone and richly lyrical; the subject matter and the wealth of references and allusions make for invigorating reading.

Originality: In a sea of titles offering tips for outlining and scaffolding a piece of writing, Cardin gives readers permission to embrace the beauty and uncertainty of the creative process, while pulling from a primal source, and arriving at a place of personal and/or spiritual renewal.

Character/Execution: Cardin balances autobiographical material with literary history, philosophy, and mythology. Writers who may feel they have lost touch with ‘the muses,’ but are discouraged by more conventional writerly advice, will be emboldened to ‘write into the dark.’

I especially appreciate the correct identification of Wellspring as “a philosophical treatise on creativity, its purposes, and its mysteries.” If a book like this sounds appealing, scroll to the bottom of this post for ordering information.

And now for some positive comments on another book.

Be the Gateway by Dan Blank

A heartful guide to sharing creative work for creatives who are allergic to marketing

Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience by (WeGrowMedia, 2017) is framed as a book for writers, artists, and creatives who may feel uncomfortable, ignorant, or inept when it comes to marketing and sharing their work. Blank is an author consultant and digital strategist who has worked with many prominent names and brands in the publishing industry, including Publishers Weekly and Writer’s Digest. And for my money, his book nicely delivers on the promise of its subtitle. I’m currently in my third decade of writing and publishing, and I found Blank’s approach to be uncommonly insightful, not least because I have always felt the discomfort and aversion to marketing and self-promotion that he describes.

In many ways, Be the Gateway lives in the same general space as Austin Kleon’s bestselling Show Your Work! Both books outline useful strategies for attracting an audience by letting them in on your creative process. But whereas Kleon’s book is focused entirely on this theme, Blank incorporates it into a wider framework. In the words of the Amazon description, “If you want to share your voice and inspire people with your writing, art, craft, or creative idea, you must unlock new experiences for them—not just through what you create, but through the unique way in which you share it with the world. That is the gateway, the one you lead people through to introduce them to your world.” You do this, he says, by keeping an eye on the core fact of narratives and their importance in our lives. This includes the narratives that both you and your readers are living and the narrative and vision that you seek to advance and embody in your work. Get this right, he says, and you and your readers will naturally gravitate to each other with the help of a little practical execution.

It’s a fascinating approach, and one that feels like it has real value, at least to this reader. As I said, I’m someone who has never—ever, at all, for the least infinitesimal fraction of an emotional second—found anything attractive or enjoyable about the prospect of marketing and promoting my writing. This has put me at odds with the way things are supposed to be these days. By now it’s passé to state that the publishing world’s playing field has shifted from what it used to be, and that today’s writers are required to serve as their own marketers, publicists, and promoters in ways they previously ignored because back then it was all the responsibility of the publisher. Those halcyon days, which have been a bit misremembered—most writers always had to do some of their own signal-boosting—went away with the birth of the internet, the rise of blogs and social media, major shifts in general economic conditions, accompanying major shifts in the publishing world’s ecosystem, and so on. Publishers now reserve the majority of their marketing budgets for the fraction of a percentage of writers who constitute their biggest sellers, with everyone else being required to bring their own audience and foot their own bill.

But then, as Blank cogently notes, this all means the work of making people aware of your art is really just the cultivation of relationships. And, as it so happens, this is nothing new. “Again and again,” he says,

I hear creative professionals bemoan “the good old days” when authors and artists didn’t have to worry about marketing.

This is a lie. It is an excuse to try to avoid the same challenges that creative professionals have always had to face.

When you read about the publishing world of the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, you realize that letters and lunches were a significant part of making connections to get one’s work published or noticed. . . .

What you find is that if you dig into the story of someone’s success “back in the day,” you find a web of relationships, of persistent effort on the business/marketing side, and, of course, a lot of luck. (65)

He goes on to say it’s actually easier to connect with your ideal audience today because of the greater number of communication channels that are available. And the really important thing when using those channels—email, social media, blogs, and so forth—is to take the right attitude, the one that not only preserves the integrity of you and your work, but that arises right out of it: “Instead of launching a ‘brand,’ you are simply seeking out small conversations, tiny ways of helping, and having meaningful conversations with people who will care about your vision” (66).

Blank’s interesting innovation here, which I welcome, is to redeem our marketing efforts by framing them as part and parcel of our creativity itself, and to tie this to an approach based not on massive general marketing campaigns but on building human relationships one at a time. Don’t separate your creative work from the work of helping it find and connect with its audience, he says. Recognize these as aspects of the same drive and purpose. The latter is the extension and fulfillment of the former. And it functions best in the context of connecting with individual people in meaningful ways.

In other hands this might come off as sophistry, just a clever move to anesthetize our justified sense of resistance to selling out and exploiting our muse, just another co-opting of primary creative truth and motivation in the service of the “creator economy” (a term that I will never be able to use or hear without ironic scare quotes around it). But in Blank’s hands, it really works. Over the years he has developed and shared an approach that he calls “human-centered marketing,” a way of identifying and connecting with one’s audience that’s natural and genuine, serving as an organic part of the creative process itself. I only learned of this two or three years ago when I discovered his newsletter, The Creative Shift. And I have truly enjoyed and, I think, benefited from paying attention to it, even though I’m someone whose writing career is fairly advanced. For more than 25 years, I have been figuring out who my audience is, who will resonate with my writing and the unfolding vision that drives it, and how to connect what I write with those individuals. And I still find fresh and valuable insights in Blank’s book and newsletter.

Lest you think this is a book primarily made up of philosophy and theory, I’ll add that Be the Gateway is chock-full of concrete, practical guidance. Blank gives advice on studying other people’s work, and also reader responses to it, to clarify what people may find valuable in your own work. He explains how to write your bio and how to link this to your primary creative purpose and vision. He outlines an approach to identifying and articulating your vision so that you can more insightfully and accurately identify your ideal reader and how your work will appeal to them. He talks about befriending and learning from other writers and creators who share your orientation and embody the level of successful audience connection you’re seeking. He offers advice on building a platform. Throughout, he uses the metaphor of building a “gate” for people that will bring them into the world of your creative vision. As indicated by the title, the core insight at the foundation of his system, its secret magic, is that you are the gateway. In fact, this is the title of Section I, which is followed by two more sections on opening the gate and walking people through it.

I finished reading this book at a particularly apt time, when my own experience is mirroring its message. As you know, I published Writing at the Wellspring only a month ago. And I’m presently involved in multiple conversations with readers who have contacted me to express their heartfelt gratitude at the sense of confirmation, clarification, and identification they’ve been receiving from it. I’ve been told the book is having a catalyzing effect, that it’s helpfully articulating people’s own deep sense of creativity and the self, that it’s helping writers to understand blocks and barriers or to finally intuit the meaning of themes that have been threaded through their work for years. This kind of feedback is invigorating and humbling. It’s exactly the kind of organic response that I would have hoped for, and it’s in line with things that other readers have told me with increasing frequency over the past 15 years or so. Naturally, this has shaped the way I think, feel, and act when it comes to sharing my writing. Be the Gateway thus serves as a welcome confirmation and extension of these things.

Here are my top short passages from the book, including page numbers for my own reference. Bold emphases are mine.

1. “Instead of framing the value of your work by how it performs in the market, you define it by how other people experience the world through your creative work—the stories and experiences you share, the topics you talk about. This simple idea radically shifts the value of what you create. Instead of selling a product in a marketplace, you become the gateway for how your work can shape the world for others, and inspire them.” (7)

2. “It is about understanding the connection between what you create, why you create it, and how it will engage others. This is the ‘secret’ to engaging others, which is not really a secret at all. It is as old as human culture and how we are wired.” (12)

3. “Let’s face it, this is why someone crafts creative work—they become a gateway for others. . . . You are a gateway to the identity that someone wants for themselves, or that highlights an aspect of themselves they want to be more clear, more in the forefront, more real.” (20)

4. “Your audience lives by narratives. This is how they express their identity. They want a narrative that makes sense of the world. It is not just a reflection on the world, but their place within it. It justifies their decisions. It allays their fears. It motivates their hopes. . . . You are not creating a “fan,” or a customer [with your creative work]. You are providing someone something much deeper, which is a sense of themselves and the world around them. When you understand the narratives your ideal audience seeks, you know how to engage those people. You know how to grab their attention, you know how to get them to lean in, and to become so enamored that they can’t help but tell their friends.” (25, 30)

5. “When you follow your dreams, it can disrupt the world of those around you. You force them to confront their own barriers. They may have a creative dream that they haven’t pursued. They may feel that they have good excuses as to why they haven’t, and when you go ahead and pursue your dreams, it breaks their excuses.” (52)

6. “Creative work fails to find an audience when the creator assumes a specific intrinsic value within it that their ideal audience is never able to see or experience because the creator didn’t make it clear to them. Walking someone through the gate is a process of helping others experience your work, by having empathy with how they see the world.” (151)

I know many Living Dark dark readers are writers and artists themselves, so if you’re interested in exploring both a new perspective and new practical methods of connecting with the people who will organically gravitate to your work—the people your work is naturally suited to inspire, entertain, and/or help—I think you’d probably find something of value in Be the Gateway. The book is available at both Amazon and Bookshop.org.

Warm regards,

P.S. The Amazon and Bookshop references above are both affiliate links, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through either and make a purchase. I have an affiliate status with both stores but haven’t made much use of them. I figured I’d start doing more of that in 2026.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend. I’d also love to hear your thoughts and comments.

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Support This Work

If you want to materially support The Living Dark, you can make a donation, whether one-time or recurring. I spend a lot of time tending this project, so I sincerely thank you for even considering it. All posts will always remain free.

Make a Donation

Published in December:

BUY THE BOOK

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden

Available from all the major stores, including Amazon, Bookshop.org, and Barnes & Noble.

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark reader,

This year, alongside essays and book notes, I’ll be posting occasional batches of short thoughts and perspectives, some in response to things I’ve been reading, others as stand-alone reflections. Essentially, these will be curated collections of thoughts that have crossed my mind and interactions I’ve had with books, articles, essays, and other material. They’ll also function, at times, as informal menus of suggested reading, in case you’re interested.

These posts won’t have a single through line. I won’t be grouping material for thematic coherence, or else I’ll do it only lightly. Topics within each post will be all over the map, a kind of kaleidoscopic grab bag of ruminations.

This is the first such post. For no particular reason, I’ll gravitate toward publishing these posts on Tuesdays. All bolded text below represents my own emphases. I’m always interested to hear your thoughts, so comments are welcome. And please feel free to share this with anyone you think might find it interesting or valuable.

Warm regards,

Is poetry worth it?

Is poetry, and by extension other forms of art and creativity, “worth it” in a world of more practical concerns and troubles? It’s a question that comes up for many of us who are drawn to reading, writing, and the arts. The Irish poet Maurice Riordan provides a nuanced answer to it in an interesting interview for Literary Hub:

I suspect most people who write poetry, myself included, have squandered the chance to do something more worthwhile for the world. I do have faith in the creative imagination, overall, from the cave paintings to rap, as well as its role in mathematics and science, and including, too, the religious and moral imagination. Human history would be only diabolic without it. And with it? Perhaps not good enough—who knows yet.

—Peter Mishler, “Maurice Riordan on Writing Rituals, the Creative Imagination, and His Journey as a Poet,” Literary Hub, December 12, 2025

The weird fictional flavor of nonduality

In Nisargadatta Maharaj’s last book of recorded talks, 1994’s Consciousness and the Absolute, the very first page contains a statement by him to a questioner that illustrates and conveys the resonance I have always felt between nondual utterances of the purest sort and the core mood and worldview of weird fiction as exemplified by the likes of, say, Ligotti:

You are an illusion, Maya, an imagination. It is only because I know that I’m unreal that I know you also are unreal. It is not like this: Because I am real you are unreal. It is like this: Because I am unreal, everything is unreal.

—Nisargadatta, in Jean Dunn, ed., Consciousness and the Absolute: The Final Talks of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (The Acorn Press, 1994), 1–2.

You can find the book online.

Why miracles don’t matter

First: Miracles, as in phenomena that appear to break or go beyond the rules and possibilities of conventional reality, are real.

Second: When you recognize reality’s nondual nature, miracles are utterly beside the point.

Some elucidation:

NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ: There is no end to the miracles that can happen in the world, but they are still of the manifest. There have been many powerful minds and powerful beings, who, by their penance or strength of mind, have acquired powers and performed miracles. What has happened to them?

QUESTIONER: The same thing that happens to everyone. [That is, they died.]

N: If they have had the experience of their true Self, such people would not be striving to acquire powers…I am not concerned with any miracles except the three within myself. The first is that I am able to see the world; the second is that the world is contained in that tiny spot of consciousness which I am; the third is that from that no-being state this beingness has come. Give thought to these miracles.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj, Seeds of Consciousness, ed. Jean Dunn (The Acorn Press, 1982), 179, 192.

The mysterious source of ideas, poetic and otherwise

Here’s psychologist June Downey on the inner lives of poets and the rest of us. I love her easy emphasis on the fact that it isn’t just the workings of creative genius that are mysterious. Everything about our mental lives, and by extension our inner lives as a whole, is steeped in the unknown.

Do poets actually have a more lively Unconscious than ordinary mortals? The claim that they do has often been made. . . . As a matter of fact every idea that flits through anybody’s head is something of a mystery. Where do any of them come from?

—June Downey, Creative Imagination: Studies in the Psychology of Literature (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 160.

Art and mysticism

In An Anatomy of Inspiration—a great, classic, necessary book—Rosamund Harding offers the following insight on the resonance between art and mysticism:

[The artist] is he who catches and fixes those fleeting lights, those transient intuitions that we see for a moment out of the corner of the mind’s eye…

It is this submission to a higher power; the nature of things; that provides the analogy between creative art and mysticism. The artist is, so speak, given his themes and, once given, he must follow their unfolding. While he transcribes it is dictated to him: it is not the deliberate outcome of his will; and it is this that has given rise to the thought that creation is the result of inspiration—a breathing in by some exterior spirit.

Since the operations of life are continually flowing on there is always something new for the artist. Hence a great work of artistic genius is one which arrests attention. The intensity of the artist’s creative mood—its special character—is reflected and casts its spell on the beholder, reader or listener.

—Rosamond E. M. Harding, An Anatomy of Inspiration, and An Essay on the Creative Mood, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1948), 144.

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An early Wellspring review

An early (prepublication) review of Writing at the Wellspring at Goodreads features a closing line that, if I hadn’t written the book myself, would be enough to draw me to it:

“If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”

Yes, this helpfully clarifies my vibe.

AI marketing and the indignities of death

The onslaught of fake book marketing come-ons gets weirder: Some of you know that I wrote the introduction to Mark Samuels’s final book, the absolutely wonderful Charnel Glamour. (You can read the whole thing right here.) In December I received an email through my website contact form that began with this:

Hello Mark. My name is Ruth G. Bryant, Marketing Manager at Bestseller Bridge, and we’ve completed a seasonal visibility review of Charnel Glamour. With the holiday season bringing readers more time to explore immersive fiction, your collection is positioned strongly for fans of literary and weird horror seeking richly atmospheric, unsettling stories.

It went on to do a version of the usual tap dance with a concluding come-on for a conversation with “Ruth” about increasing the book’s visibility among readers. Of course I’ll just brush this one off like I’ve done with the dozens of previous versions of the same AI-written shtick that I’ve received over the past few months. However, all the other ones were addressed as if to me. The fact that this one confused me with Mark and tried to do its con job with the last book he ever wrote is pretty annoying. I know it’s just the result of an impersonal shotgun approach, plus the fact that my name appears with Mark’s on the Amazon listing and elsewhere. But it still pisses me off a bit. Maybe this reaction is abetted by the fact that the email arrived eight days after the second anniversary of Mark’s sudden death, which occurred less than 24 hours after I had sent him the completed introduction, which I later heard he had been delighted with.

I also wrote the introduction to the late Joseph S. Pulver’s Portraits of Ruin. I wonder if I’ll end up receiving book marketing spam addressed to Joe beyond the grave as well.

The sound of Claude

It’s apparent that many writers, at least at Substack, have begun using Claude to write pretty much everything they post online. The thing is, I can tell. So can anyone who reads closely and has learned to recognize Claude’s typical voice and style. It’s garishly apparent. And I’m seeing it absolutely everywhere. What’s especially annoying or icky about it is Claude’s signature rhetorical pose of pointed authenticity, consisting of short, punchy sentences and sentence fragments infused with a tone of “come on, let’s just be honest here”—an artifact of what I’m assuming is rhetorical training and tuning on a lot contemporary online writing. So, in other words, the overarching, unstated ethos is “Let’s just be frank, honest, plainspoken, and bravely to the point—while outsourcing our writing and our voice to an AI.” Irony, anyone?

The ordinary is extraordinary

I love this. A lot:

The extraordinary turns out to be nothing other than the ordinary seen without the assumption that something essential is missing.

—, “Let’s Flip the Script,” Naturally Being Nondual, December 9, 2025

Blowing up the house of you

This Substack Note from is dynamite. Almost literally. It might blow up the house of “you.” Or at least explain a demolition that could already be underway.

The world is within me

Who am “I”? And what is “the world”? Can we improve either of them? And does a true spiritual awakening hamstring our ability to carry out life’s normal duties? Further: Are the questions themselves perhaps misconceived? The following question/answer session goes deep and runs counter to how most of us understand things at the most basic level. That’s one reason why it’s worth taking in.

NISARGADATTA: The world is within me, I am not within the world…

QUESTIONER: Since this manifestation is myself can I bring about certain improvements in it?

M: When you cling to the body-mind you become separate from the manifest world and you see different entities. In that state you will have all kinds of desires to improve yourself or somebody else. The next state is “I Amness,” in which every action is myself, every manifest thing is myself. In that state there is no question of improving; you are just manifestation, “I am everything.” Next is the Unborn state, where there is no beingness to understand “I Am.” That is the highest state…

I am trying to speak of the most intimate secrets. Just as the dream world [in sleep], uncalled, has appeared and you observe it, similarly this world, uncalled for, has appeared and you are compelled to observe it. Just observe…

Q: Can I carry out normal household duties?

M: Carry them out with all enthusiasm, but understand what I have told you. If you really understand this, remember it and ponder it; no special meditation is needed…

Meditate on that principle by which you know you are and the world is. That is the very source of this manifest world.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj, Seeds of Consciousness, ed. Jean Dunn (The Acorn Press, 1982), 152–153.

On living in the world, and vice versa

A common question when someone hears or glimpses the nondual perspective is, “Then how should I live in the world?”

The answer, of course, is that the question is misconceived. You don’t live in the world. You never have. Rather, the world lives in you.

The ultimate awakening

Here’s Wei Wu Wei, one of the most direct and uncompromising nondual writers of the past century, using impeccable logic to annihilate—and then redeem—you and me and the entire universe. It requires us to slow down, read very closely, and appreciate the chain of reasoning very carefully. Those who have lived their way into a clear grasp of the subject/object divide may be find this especially impactful:

Objects . . . are only a surmise, for they have no demonstrable existence apart from the subject that cognises them.

Since that subject itself is not sensorially cognisable except as an object, subject also is only a surmise.

Since the factual existence of neither subject nor object can be demonstrated, existence is no more than a conceptual assumption, which, metaphysically, is inacceptable.

There is, therefore, no valid evidence for the existence of a world external to the consciousness of sentient beings, which external world is therefore seen to be nothing but the cognisers of it, that is—sentient being themselves.

But there can be no factual evidence for the existence of sentient beings, either as subject or as object, who therefore are merely a conceptual assumption on the part of the consciousness in which they are cognised.

It follows that “consciousness” also can only be a conceptual assumption without demonstrable existence. . . .

[C]onsciousness may be regarded as the manifested aspect of the unmanifested or non-manifestation, which is the nearest it seems possible to go towards expressing in a concept that which by definition is inconceivable. . . .

All that we can say about this which we are, which to us must be objectified as “it” in order that we may speak of it at all, is to regard “it” as the noumenon of phenomena, but, since neither of these exists objectively, phenomenally regarded it may be understood as the ultimate absence from which all presence comes to appear.

But consciousness or “Mind,” does not “project” the phenomenal universe: “it” IS the phenomenal universe which is manifested as itself. . . .

This-Which-Is, then, which cannot be subject or object, which cannot be named or thought, and the realisation of which is the ultimate awakening, can only be indicated in such a phrase as [this]: “I am not, but the apparent universe is my Self.”

—Wei Wu Wei, “‘I Am Not, but the Universe Is My Self’ (Shit-t’ou, 700-790): Logical Analysis of This Intuition,” The Mountain Path 1, no. 1 (1964): 44.

The core teaching

Here’s Jean Dunn, who spent years as a student of Nisargadatta Maharaj, explaining his core teaching in her introduction to Seeds of Consciousness, one of the books she created from transcripts of his talks:

The entire universe exists only in Consciousness. . . . In Consciousness the world appears and disappears. All there is, is Me; all there is, is Mine; before all beginnings, after all endings, I AM. Whatever happens, I must be there to witness it. Therefore, it is not that the world does not exist. The world is an appearance in consciousness which is the totality of the known in the immensity of the unknown. What begins and ends is mere appearance. The World can be said to APPEAR but not to BE.

Maharaj tells us that whenever every single individual dreams, he has the actual experience of the world being created in consciousness. When a person is not fully awake, and consciousness merely stirs, he dreams, and in his dream, in that tiny spot of consciousness, in a split second, is created an entire world exactly similar to the world outside. . . . But once he wakes up, the entire dream world merges in the consciousness in which it was created. In the waking state, says Maharaj, the world emerges because of ignorance (Maya) and takes you into a waking dream state. Both sleep and waking are misnomers because you are only dreaming; you dream that you are awake, you dream that you are asleep. . . . The main point to grasp is that you have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, desires, and fears, and that you have imprisoned yourself in it. Realize that, break the spell, and BE FREE.

—Jean Dunn, explaining the core teaching of Nisargadatta Maharaj in her introduction to Seeds of Consciousness, ed. Jean Dunn (The Acorn Press, 1982), 12–13.

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Published in December:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden

Available from all the major stores (Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, etc.) in both paperback and electronic editions:

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark reader,

Before I get to the meat of today’s post, a couple of housekeeping items:

FIRST, I have added two new links to the main menu at this newsletter’s website: “Start Here” and “Selected Essays.” These represent new sections of The Living Dark.

• “Start Here” is for new readers, and also for anyone who would enjoy an orientation to the core concerns around here. It gathers essays spanning the earliest days of TLD to the present, encompassing a range of themes: creativity and its hidden source, silence and resistance, the daemon muse, nonduality and the instability of reality, art as both calling and trap, and the uncanny undercurrents that surface in horror, dreams, science, and spiritual inquiry.

• “Selected Essays” is intended to simplify the experience for new readers while preserving the integrity of earlier work. It collects essays from TLD’s former paid period (September 2022–January 2025). These remain accessible to original supporters as a permanent thank-you. The essays have been removed from the main archive and are now visible only in this section.

SECOND, several readers have asked me for a way to support this work materially now that there’s no paid subscription option. So, starting today, I have added a donation option at the end of posts for anyone who feels inclined. There’s no expectation, and nothing here is paywalled. This is just an opening for anyone who feels drawn to donate.

And now, on to the main post.

On Speaking Openly in a Spiritually Thin Age

A couple of weeks ago, a reader questioned me on the advisability of publicly sharing statements of deep or esoteric spiritual knowledge. This was in response to a quote from a book of nondual teachings that I had posted to Substack Notes. It marked the second time in a couple of months that someone had raised such a concern. The first commenter expressed reservations or skepticism toward the practice of “pilling,” which was a characterization of my Notes activity that hadn’t crossed my mind before.

Forgive the pedantic aside, but on the off chance that you’re unfamiliar with the term pilling, more fully known as red pilling, it comes from The Matrix and refers to the “red pill” that Morpheus offers Neo to wake him up to the reality of the false world in which he is imprisoned. The term, including its modification into a verb, entered the cultural lexicon almost immediately upon the movie’s release in 1999 and came to mean the act of providing information in an attempt to shatter someone’s worldview. It has been most prominently associated with promoting far-right viewpoints, but my commenter was invoking the term’s broader, ideologically neutral meaning of seeking to wake people up.

When something like this comes up twice in a short span of time, it generally suggests there’s a question worth addressing.

On sharing what’s deep, and why this unsettles some readers

Is it, in fact, irresponsible or otherwise inadvisable to share fundamental spiritual knowledge or viewpoints openly and publicly? If so, then I’m very irresponsible in my online life, as a significant portion of my activity on Substack Notes consists of sharing ideas and quotations that run pretty deep. The same is true of my activity on Facebook and, previously, before I deleted my account, at the former Twitter. I’m particularly prone to posting quotations and excerpts from books of nondual teachings and philosophy, ones that I find potent, memorable, and useful as pointers and reminders.

Here’s an example, and it’s one that I haven’t chosen randomly, as it is the one that elicited the first of the reader comments mentioned above. It’s a passage from This That Is, a book of transcribed teachings by the late nondual teacher Peter Brown, whose unique expression of such things is exceptionally powerful and effective:

God does everything. God always gets exactly what it wants. God is doing exactly what is supposed to be done. And it is impossible to know what that is supposed to look like. So whatever is happening in your life is exactly what is supposed to be happening in your life—you’re exactly where you need to be. Yet you cannot know what “benevolent” or “meaningful” is supposed to look like.

Seeing the entirety of it as this one Radiant Presence of your being, your reality, your dream.

Getting caught up, getting swept up, getting distracted is IT too. It’s one of its major modes. It’s one of the flavors of radiance, of experiential qualities. So there’s no failure mode, there’s no such thing as “doing it wrong.” Doing it wrong is just another flavor of doing it “right.” Not seeing Radiant Presence is Radiant Presence. Seeing Radiant Presence is Radiant Presence. So how can you miss?

—Peter Brown, This That Is (The Open Doorway, 2022), 32.

Upon reading this at Substack Notes, my recent commenter felt moved to state a significant reservation about my act of posting such a thing for general consumption. For the sake of convenience, I’ll refer to the individual with masculine pronouns. He expressed concern and discomfort with what he experienced as a drift toward nihilism or resignation. The idea that “God does everything” felt to him like it erased moral agency and blurred the line between justice and injustice, encouraging people to accept suffering or oppression as simply their fate. He said Brown’s point in the quoted passage felt arbitrary and unsettling, like a cosmic dice game—he (my commenter) explicitly invoked the image of the Dungeon Master—whose rules and outcomes are hidden. And he worried that sharing ideas like this publicly, where people might encounter them without context or preparation, might lead to confusion or spiritual distress. He also pointed out that many wisdom traditions limit or carefully stage the transmission of deeper teachings for precisely this reason: not because the insights are false, but because they aren’t necessarily helpful or resonant for everyone.

The traditional logic of secrecy

It’s a concern that is not lost on me, and the commenter made it well. I understand it implicitly. At the same time—and here’s my whole point—I think current conditions constitute and result in a different calculus than what obtained during the time(s) in history when certain core knowledge required strict maintenance of an inner/outer, esoteric/exoteric distinction and hierarchy.

In fact, one could argue, as I am arguing here and now, that the traditional approach carries its own set of problems, both potential and actual, precisely because of its inner/outer conceptual structure. On the outer level, these problems can include misconstrual of key understandings, injurious literalizing of what is intended only metaphorically, fanatical fundamentalisms founded on such misconstruals, and a near severing of the exoteric shell from any meaningful, organic connection to its tender esoteric core. The trouble can even reach the point where those who cherish and promote the shell are unwittingly damaging the tender core that the outer layer is meant to carry and protect (though of course that core, or rather the eternal reality it represents, cannot actually be damaged). In other words, much mischief can be and has been propagated this way as well, not just via the more contemporary approach of airing for general view and consideration what was formerly held back as something exclusively appropriate for an inner circle or an elite understanding.

If you’ll forgive an extended illustration that draws on my personal religious history and upbringing:

In Christianity, the traditional approach is laid out explicitly in scripture. Consider, for example, the case of Jesus. The biblical gospels say he maintained both an outer teaching and an inner one, the latter being reserved for an inner circle of students. The clearest statement of this comes in Mark’s gospel, where, immediately after Jesus publicly tells the parable of the sower and the seeds, the narrator says, “With many such parables he spoke the word to them [that is, the general public] as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples” (Mark 4:33–34). Similar statements appear in Matthew and Luke. (But for an interesting contrast, compare John 18:20, where Jesus, while on trial before the Pharisees for supposedly teaching blasphemous doctrines, tells them, “I have spoken openly to the world. I always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together. I said nothing in secret. Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard me what I said to them. They know what I said.”)

Paul likewise spoke of an inner/outer distinction in Christian teaching, and in words that are much more verifiable as having actually come from him, in contrast to the unresolvable ambiguity surrounding the historical authenticity of the many sayings attributed to Jesus. This appears most prominently in the second chapter of 1 Corinthians, in one of my two favorite passages in the New Testament. The document itself represents a letter that Paul wrote to the fledgling Christian church at Corinth, which he himself had planted. After telling his readers that during his previous visit with them he had deliberately abstained from exercising any rhetorical subtlety or philosophical prowess in talking with them about Christ, instead limiting his discourse to the sole focus of “Jesus Christ and him crucified” so that their faith “might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God,” he goes on to emphasize that, despite the importance of that basic element, there is a deeper layer to the message. In fact, he says this deeper layer is the whole point, the core that the outer message is meant to lead to. As he puts it, “Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom.” This wisdom that is shared among “the mature” is not, he says, the wisdom of the world, but “God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.” Its specific content is that “we have the mind of Christ”—in other words, that Christians know God’s inner mind through God’s own Spirit, just as each individual human directly knows the interiority of his or her own thoughts.

Paul emphasizes that the discourse about these things among mature believers transcends the forms of human wisdom and philosophy that were widely known throughout the first-century Roman imperial culture in which he and his readers were living. “We speak of these things,” Paul says, referring to the inner Christian truth, “in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.” In other words, Paul says the inner core of Christian wisdom is a transcendent mystery that goes beyond not only the forms and philosophies of the Greco-Roman world, but beyond even the outer form of the Christian way itself with its foregrounding of “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He compares the latter to milk for infants—that is, baby food—and contrasts it with the “solid food” that is the more appropriate nourishment for spiritually mature persons.

There are other New Testament invocations of the same point. Consider, for instance, Jesus’s famous instruction not to “cast your pearls before swine,” generally interpreted as a warning against sharing spiritual wisdom with people who aren’t prepared to appreciate or understand it. Or consider his statement to the Pharisees in Chapter 17 of Luke’s Gospel, in two verses that constitute my other favorite passage in the New Testament. The Pharisees ask Jesus when God’s kingdom will arrive. In its context, they’re asking when God will overthrow Rome and reinstall Israel’s power in an earthly, visible, political kingdom. Jesus gives them a forthrightly spiritual and mystical answer to this worldly question: “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within [or among] you” (Luke 17:20–21). In other words, he calls out and contradicts the very premise of their question by asserting that the rule and realm of God is something internal, not something to be looked and longed for in an objective arrival of physical and political conditions.

The relationship of this saying to the issue at hand becomes even clearer when we compare it to its near-parallel in the Thomas Gospel, where it’s not the Pharisees but Jesus’s disciples who ask him when the kingdom will come. His answer recalls but alters the canonical version: “It will not come while people watch for it; they will not say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘Look, there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, and men do not see it” (Thomas 113). In other words, the kingdom, rule, or realm of God is already present for those who have eyes to see it. And this of course means it’s far different from what people commonly conceive. The secret-ish tone of this saying, its status as something intended only for an inner circle of advanced students, is made even clearer when we consider that the Gospel of Thomas opens on page one by announcing, “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.”

An autobiographical illustration

To explain why I land where I do on the question of sharing deep spiritual teachings with a general audience instead of keeping them secret, I need to step back and say something personal. Every time I revisit these matters, I think of how amazed my teenage self would have been to hear the “secret things” openly taught, preached, exposited, and emphasized. Certainly, the whole Bible was the official text of my childhood church, which was a mainstream Protestant evangelical organization. And I’m sure that at some point, some of the passages discussed above made their way into one or more sermons, teachings, lessons, or sets of Sunday School or youth group material (except for the Thomas material). But whenever and however they did, their revolutionary import certainly wasn’t emphasized. As I understood things, after you had privately believed and publicly proclaimed before the assembled local congregation that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” followed by water baptism via full immersion, the Christian life consisted of continuing to attend church services, participate in church social life, live morally, read your Bible, and pray. I understood things this way because that’s how they were taught to me in both explicit instruction and cultural atmosphere. The idea that there was something deeper, something mystical, something more like the revolutionary secret wisdom that Paul and Jesus talked about, simply wasn’t there.

For someone possessed of an innately philosophical temperament like I was, someone for whom this temperament would bloom into a raging desire for answers in his late teen years and afterward, this all laid the groundwork for an immense receptivity to the kinds of things presented by the likes of Alan Watts and others who brought Eastern philosophical and spiritual teachings—and not just that, but high-level philosophical and psychological concepts and insights from across the East-West divide—to popular awareness in American culture during the heady period of the middle and late twentieth century. It also engendered a desire to dispense with small talk and cut right to the chase, right to the quick, whenever dealing with spiritual matters. Long youthful years filled with a yearning for something deeper, even as I lacked a sufficient vocabulary for understanding or articulating the yearning, instilled in me an enduring predilection for bringing those deeper things out into the public arena and making them central.

Spiritual malnutrition and why the calculus has changed

Because, after all, what might happen if nobody emerged as spiritually mature? What would it be like if the exoteric form of a religion began to propagate itself in the absence of its inner core? What would it look like for a church, or a movement, or a philosophical school, to blunder on through sheer force of inertia, continually propping up its outer forms, now become the only forms, and self-proclaiming them as being the thing itself, the whole package? What might that look like in, say, a Protestant evangelical context in the Missouri Ozarks during the 1970s and 1980s? And what might that feel like for someone who hungered for something more, something deeper, without being able to say what exactly that might be, or even to name the desire itself because of the very deficiencies of the tradition that created and failed to fulfill it? Wouldn’t such a person have been overjoyed to hear deeper “secret” truths being offered?

In my own case, it’s also on-point to ask: Would such a person possibly find in the literary vehicle of weird and cosmic horror fiction an interrogation and articulation of these deep truths that could speak to that hunger and give it resonant new forms in which to express itself, albeit founded on emotions and intimations of transcendent terror and horror rather than cosmic comfort—which, come to think of it, are likewise to be found in the deeper understanding of Christianity?

What this autobiographical detour makes clear, at least to me, is that my inclination to speak and write openly about putatively esoteric, advanced, or secret spiritual truths isn’t motivated by a sheer desire to provoke people, to “wake them up.” Instead, it’s driven by a long familiarity with what happens when depth is withheld altogether, when little to nothing is provided to speak to the deeper hunger that exists within us. The value in using contemporary channels to share things like Peter Brown’s words on God, quoted above, is that this addresses what may be the primary spiritual issue of the age, at least here in the culture where I live and in which/to which I’m speaking. The issue isn’t confusion, though there is indeed a great deal of that. Rather, it’s spiritual malnutrition, a culture saturated with religious, spiritual, and philosophical language but often starved of real, lived insight.

So, returning to the initial concern from my commenters: Certainly, the same key factors and principles that have led people throughout history to create a division between the esoteric and exoteric, and to carefully shield the former from general public consumption, are still in place and always will be. Upon hearing or reading “deep” teachings, some people will understand, while others won’t. And the risks of misunderstanding in both directions are still fully present. There’s no getting away from that. But, as I said, I’m of the opinion that present conditions, not only unique to me and my personal history and formation, but characteristic of the culture at large, have shifted the calculus and made the public sharing of those formerly reserved formulations of truth potentially more valid and helpful than harmful. And even, to an extent, needful.

In fact, I think that’s one of the most interesting characteristics of the present age with its influx of formerly secret teachings into mainstream discourse, reaching at least as far back as the late nineteenth-century birth of Theosophy and extending forward to the current era of spiritual writing, teaching, and publishing with its Jiddu Krishnamurtis, Eckhart Tolles, and other prominent figures who speak nondual and other high-level wisdom to a mass audience.

It’s like Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit priest and theologian, famously said in the 1960s, in a statement whose import still holds today: “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’—someone who has ‘experienced something’—or will cease to be anything at all.” In other words, a purely doctrinal, and thus exoteric, Christianity isn’t something that can even survive anymore. It has played itself out and found all its own dead ends, in tandem with the shifting and evolving of its various cultural and civilizational conditions. The time has come when the “mysticism” that was formerly reserved for a few must now become the dominant approach of the many.

This holds true not just for Christianity. Rahner’s point expands beyond the frame in which he advanced it, becoming a point of general importance. At least that’s how I see it.

Warm regards,

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend. I’d also love to hear your thoughts and comments.

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Support This Work

If you want to materially support The Living Dark, you can make a one-time donation or become a paid subscriber. I spend a lot of time tending this project, so I sincerely thank you for even considering it. All posts will always remain free.

Make a Donation

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Published in December:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden

Available from all the major stores (Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, etc.) in both paperback and electronic editions:

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark reader,

I finished reading this book today. Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir by Lisa Dale Norton (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008) is a lovely, short book. The term in the title, coined by Norton, refers to those persistent memories that have returned and haunted you all your life, “a memory that rises in your consciousness like a photograph pulsing with meaning. . . . Over and over they come back, knocking at the door of your creative soul, waiting to shed light on your life, waiting to share the wisdom that resides inside them” (28, 29).

Norton presents an entire strategy in this book, a step-by-step guide to surfacing and focusing on these core images and then taking them as both the practical and spiritual heart of a memoir. Impressively, she manages to do this in a way that doesn’t foreclose on possibilities by reducing the work to a cookie-cutter approach. Instead, my sense is that her method expands possibilities by empowering the reader, exactly as she intends.

Along with the specific advice and guidance, and undergirding it all with a real energetic fascination, Norton shares many resonant insights about the mythic power of writing to shape self and world. The book is ultimately as much about that as it is about the act of writing. Or rather, it’s about both of these together.

Here are my top short passages, including page numbers for my own reference. Bold emphases are mine.

1. “Story, the essence of narrative, is art. Writing life stories borders on the mystical because you, the writer, become the master of reality. You make sense of chaos. You bring order to life events through narrative; you attach meaning to events. That act is more than reporting facts; it is an act of creation. Art is creation. Memoir is art.” (10)

2. “You must voice your stories to get beyond them.” (15)

3. “The most audacious story waits behind the one trying to hide. That is the place where you’ll find the most emotion, the most passion, and the most resistance. Resistance in the writing of personal stories is a catchword for story-that-needs-to-be-told. Whatever is behind the resistance has so much energy that you yourself, its author, are scared of it.” (39)

4. “This is all about teasing the Muse to come out of the trees and dance with you around the fire of creation. And I can’t tell you exactly how it works, because we are talking now about forces beyond the ken of ordinary folk.” (69-70)

5. “Go back to all the Shimmering Images [that you have gathered for your current memoir] and ask yourself, ‘What are these about? What is it that is backing up my throat that I want to spit onto the page? What unspoken meaning has come over me?’ And then you write about that.” (73)

6. “Stories order chaos and make sense of our lives. In the process, the story has a magical way of answering old questions and transforming random events into meaning you can carry into the future with grace.” (98)

7. “[W]hatever myth you sculpt from your past will influence your future. That’s what matters to me, because you are creating for yourself a new paradigm, a new way of being in the world, and that can shake things up. That audacious act has within it the seeds of change.” (110)

On a personal note, this book came into my life three or four months ago when I stumbled across it in a thrift store. It was at a moment when my thoughts had been returning pretty regularly for several weeks to the subject of memoir. After so many years of seeing this synchronistic dynamic play out with all sorts of things, I probably shouldn’t feel as surprised or delighted as I do when it keeps happening. But each time, the pleasure is the same.

Shimmering Images is available at both Amazon and Bookshop.org.

Warm regards,

P.S. The Amazon and Bookshop references above are both affiliate links, so I’ll earn a commission if you click through either and make a purchase. I have an affiliate status with both stores but hardly ever use them. I figured I’d start doing more of that in 2026.

Speaking of books:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden

Available from all the major stores (Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and so on) in both paperback and electronic editions:

BUY THE BOOK

Dear Living Dark readers,

Well, the calendar has rolled ‘round once again to that time of year when we all reflect on what has transpired during the previous twelve months. For me, this always involves taking stock of what I read and wrote. As I did last year, I’m sharing the result of this stock-taking exercise with you since I enjoy perusing other people’s year-end reading lists. I’m also copying most of the format that I used last time, since it feels comfortable and natural.

What I Wrote in 2025

A new book

The obvious headliner here is my new book, Writing at the Wellspring, published just two weeks ago.

I developed it largely from essays that I originally published here, all the way back to the launch of this newsletter in 2022. Early last year I asked my readers (you) for help in coming up with a title for it, even before the book’s actual shape had revealed itself to me. That shape came out in a month-long rush late last year, in July through August 2024, when I was severely ill and incapacitated by my first-ever case of COVID-19. Then in October through December I taught a course at from the unpublished manuscript. Creativity’s currents and machinations are unfailingly strange and unpredictable.

Sincere thanks to all of you for joining me on the journey to this book’s publication. It was my first venture into self-publishing after 25 years of working through the traditional route. I’m pleased with the result, and I should mention that I had excellent help in this from D. Patrick Miller of Fearless Books through his “assisted publishing” service.

The reaction to Writing at the Wellspring has been gratifyingly positive. It briefly became an Amazon bestseller in one of its subject categories during the preorder period. BookLife from Publishers Weekly has praised it as “an intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit.” Joanna Penn calls it “a guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.” JF Martel calls it “a guide for writers unlike any other.” Kat (Katrijn) Van Oudheusden says it’s “important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.” Clintavo finds it “the most illuminating book on creativity I’ve read in a long time.” Amanda Saint says, “If you’re seeking permission to trust the dark unknown that guides your work, and your way of being in the world, this book offers profound companionship on that journey.” Some of the readers who encountered the book in its earliest form in the course that I taught from it—an audience of writers, artists, educators, and more—found it “revolutionary,” “the perfect book for this moment in my life,” and “a gift to anyone with a core creative longing.”

It’s available from all the major stores (Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and so on) in both paperback and electronic editions:

BUY THE BOOK

Most popular posts and essays

My most popular pieces published here at The Living Dark in 2025 are as follows, as measured by a combination of likes, comments, and behind-the-scenes engagement from readers like private messages and emails. Often the posts that generate reactions from readers who say they’ve been deeply moved are not the ones with the most visible public response. I find this oddly appropriate.

• The Imaginal Doorway: When Creativity Meets the Shadow Realm

• Going Silent: A Hiatus for The Living Dark (my February 16 post announcing a hiatus)

• The Path Ahead (my August 5 post upon resuming the newsletter)

• Humans Are the Dreaming Animal

• Reverse-Engineering the Dream of Your Life

• Disinvesting from the World Nightmare

• Frankenstein’s Warning: Don’t Deny Your Daemon

• We Are All Artificial Intelligences

• On UFOs and the Death of Astonishment

• Ray Bradbury’s Method for Discovering What You’re Meant to Write

• A Winter’s Benediction: Joy to the World on Piano

• Reclaim Your Reading: On Curating a Personal Digital Digest

• What Good Is Art in a World on the Brink?

• Writing at the Wellspring: Cover Reveal + Early Praise

• The Hidden Force That Shapes Your Art

• Reflections on Bibliomancy, Storytelling, and Emerging Patterns

• On What The Living Dark Has Quietly Become

What I Read in 2025

Below are two book lists plus a shorter list of essays and articles. The book lists are divided into 1) books that I finished this year, whether by reading them in their entirety or finishing them after having started them in 2024, and 2) books that I started or continued in 2025 and will continue in the new year. The list of essays and articles represents, naturally, a fraction of the total number that I read.

For no particular reason, I have arranged the books alphabetically by author but the essays and articles alphabetically by title.

As always, this list reflects curiosity rather than completionism.

Books I read in full (or finished from the previous year):

As with last year—as with every year when I’m not following an externally imposed course of reading (like for a college degree)—I set my course as a reader this year by pure blind interest. I followed whatever directions and substreams revealed themselves by sheer magnetic attraction. This led me to and through books and authors I wouldn’t have anticipated in advance, including some that don’t “feel” like my mental image of “me” when I survey this list. But all of them contained something of interest that drew me to them.

• Notes on Nothing: The Joy of Being Nobody (2024) by Anonymous

• In Each Wave, the Entirety of the Sea (2024) by

• The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in life (2008) by Leo Babauta

• Illusions 2: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (2014) by Richard Bach

• Effortless Being (2023) by David Bingham

• Liberation Beyond Imagination: Discovering Spiritual Freedom through the Truth of Experience (2024) by Peter Brown

• The Yoga of Radiant Presence (2020) by Peter Brown

• The Yoga of Radiant Presence Revealed in the Gospel of Thomas (2020) by Peter Brown

• Dirty Enlightenment: The Inherent Perfection of Imperfection (2012) by Peter Brown

• Essence of Recognition: The Yoga of Radiant Presence Revealed within the Pratyabijna Hridayam for Modern Yogis (2020) by Peter Brown

• Hero (2013) by Rhonda Byrne

• How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995) by Thomas Cahill

• Wishes Fulfilled (2012) by Wayne Dyer

• The Essence of Ribhu Gita (1984), translated by N. R. Krishnamoorthi Aiyer

• Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (2015) by

• Already Awake: Dialogues with Nathan Gill (2004) by Nathan Gill

• Being: The Bottom Line (2006) by Nathan Gill

• The Art of Work: A Proven Path to Discovering What You Are Meant to Do (2015) by

• Real Artists Don’t Starve: Timeless Strategies for Striving in the New Creative Age (2017) by

• An Anatomy of Inspiration and An Essay on the Creative Mood (1940) by Rosamund E. M. Harding

• Awakening to the Dream (2003) by Leo Hartong

• From Self to Self (2005) by Leo Hartong

• Pouring Concrete: A Zen Path to the Kingdom of God (2023; original edition 1999) by Robert Harwood

• The Art of Unwriting (forthcoming) by

• The Secret of Think and Grow Rich (2019) by

• The Miracle of a Definite Chief Aim (2017) by

• Know Yourself (2011; English translation of thirteenth-century text) by Ibn ‘Arabi/Balyani

• Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (2011) by Joseph Jaworski

• The Book of Listening (2008) by Jean Klein

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness (2020) by Eric Jorgenson

• Watchers (1987) by Dean Koontz

• The Kybalion (1908)

• I Am That (1973) by Nisargadatta Maharaj

• Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization (1963) by Nisargadatta Maharaj

• Seeds of Consciousness: The Wisdom of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (1982), ed. Jean Dunn

• American Mystic: Memoirs of a Happy Man (2016) by A. Ramana

• One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir (2019) by Henry Shukman

• The Art of Peace and Happiness (2011) by

• The Personality of Man (1946) by G. N. M. Tyrell

• Selfless Leadership: A Complete Guide to Awakening the Servant Leader Within (2022) by

• Seeing No Self: Essential Inquiries That Reveal Our Nondual Nature (2024) by

• The Sovereign Artist (prepublication) by (Clint Watson)

• Open Secret (1965) by Wei Wu Wei

• Abiding in Nondual Awareness (2013) by Robert Wolfe

• Always Only One: A Dialogue on the Essence of Nondual India (2013) by Robert Wolfe

• Awakening to Infinite Presence (2015) by Robert Wolfe

• One Essence: The Nondual Clarity of an Ancient Poem (2011) by Robert Wolfe

• Foolsgold: Making Something from Nothing and Freeing Our Creative Process (2007) by Susan G. Wooldridge

• The Chrysalids (1955) by John Wyndham

Books I read in part (and will likely continue reading into the new year):

• The complete satsang transcripts of Robert Adams

• Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success (2023) by Scott Adams

• Be the Gateway: A Practical Guide to Sharing Your Creative Work and Engaging an Audience (2017) by

• The Art of Slow Writing (2014) by Louise DeSalvo

• Awake: It’s Your Turn (2021) by Angelo DiLullo

• Happiness is Free: And It’s Easier Than You Think (2020) by Lester Levenson and Hale Dwoskin

• Think and Grow Rich (1937) by Napoleon Hill

• Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity by Ken Ferlic (website essays). To repeat what I said in my year-end reading list from last year, this one isn’t a book but a website with a virtually infinite supply of articles on conscious creation, nonduality, awakening, ultimate freedom, and related matters. In 2025, just like in 2024, I read maybe two books’ worth of posts and essays here, finding the high level of bizarre textual errors in most pieces to be outweighed by the general insightfulness of the content.

• Real-World Nonduality: Reports from the Field (2018), edited by Greg Goode

• Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (1995) by Burton L. Mack

• Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (2008) by Lisa Dale Norton

• The Seven Laws of Money (1974) by Michael Phillips

• Sensemaking in Organizations (1995) by Karl E. Weick

Notable articles and essays

I didn’t do as thorough a job this year as I did last year in keeping track of the articles and essays that struck me as most memorable. But here are some that definitely stand out.

• “The AI We Could Have Had” by Evgeny Morozov, FT Magazine, June 27, 2024

• “The AI We Deserve” by Evgeny Morozov, Boston Review, December 2, 2024 (“Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?”)

• “As American as Apple Pie? An Insider’s View of Nichiren Shoshu” by Sandy McIntosh, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Winter 1992

• “Data Free Disney” by Janet Vertesi, Public Books, January 1, 2023 (“In this miniseries, Seeing Past the Tech, social scientist Janet Vertesi un-blackboxes the systems we call ‘artificial intelligence.’”)

• “‘Here I Gather All the Friends’: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study” by Andrew Hui, The Public Domain Review, November 13, 2024

• “Inside the $621 Million Legal Battle for the ‘Soul of the Internet’” by John Blistein, Rolling Stone, September 29, 2024 (“Major record labels have sued the online library Internet Archive over thousands of old recordings, raising the question: Who owns the past?”)

• “Kingdom of the Solitary Reader” by Ed Simon, 3 Quarks Daily, January 22, 2024

• “The Pathologies of Precision Medicine: The Runaway Logic of Risk Reduction” by Paul Scherz, The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2024

• “The Relations between Religion and Art” by Arthur Osborne, The Mountain Path 1, no. 1, January 1964

• “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience” by David J. Hufford, Transcultural Psychiatry 42, no. 1, 2005

• “Who Wants to Believe in UFOs?” by Clare Coffey, The New Atlantis, Summer 2024 (“Strange things in the skies of a clockwork universe”)

And what about you? What did you read this year? And next year do you need to consider reading less, or perhaps reading differently?

Looking ahead to 2026

It looks likely that I’ll begin writing a new book in the new year. In fact, a couple of months ago I found myself assembling existing materials, including uncollected posts and essays here at The Living Dark, and meditating on their interconnections and throughlines. The next book—if indeed there is a next book; it’s always good to leave that little door open, or maybe closed, to honor the daemon muse’s guidance—is likely to be more directly inclined in a spiritual direction. Certainly, Writing at the Wellspring is as much about waking up as writing and creativity. It’s actually about how they are, or can be, the same thing. But I’m getting the feeling that the next book may bring the waking-up aspect to the forefront. I may also act on the suggestion, given to me by a close relative a couple of years ago, to write some kind of map or memoir of my personal spiritual journey and outlook. Yes, I know such books are, as the saying goes, a dime a dozen. I also know that I have found great value in some of them. Time will tell. I’m also incubating an idea for a book on sleep paralysis—part memoir, part cultural/spiritual/scientific exploration.

I’m also going to continue publishing new posts here at The Living Dark, including a new intermittent series of posts consisting of thoughts, quotations, and fragments. This will be alongside the ongoing multipolar focus on creativity, the daemon, weird/supernatural horror, and the living novel or movie of the rapidly weirding world around us. In other words, the usual.

I also have a collaborative post in process with another Substack writer whose work on writing and creativity I greatly admire. And a couple of upcoming podcast appearances that I’ll tell you about.

Until then, and as always, it’s a pleasure and an honor to have you here. I wish you much goodness in the coming year.

Warm regards,

Dear Living Dark readers,

From time to time it feels worth pausing, not to announce a change in direction, but to articulate what has quietly taken shape. Note the plural in the greeting above: not “reader” but “readers.” I usually use the singular when sending out a new post, not least because it really helps me to imagine that I’m writing to a single, deeply receptive reader who is interested and attuned to my wavelength. (Hey, if it was good enough for Bruno Schulz—who found his writing energy finally, fully unlocked by channeling it into letters to Debora Vogel—it’s good enough for me.) But right now I’m speaking to all of you.

Over the past few years, and largely through writing here in public, certain threads have made themselves unmistakable, as much to me as to many of you. What started as an open-ended experiment in 2022, originally titled Living into the Dark and intended to serve as the next chapter in my regular public writing after I had maintained my previous blog, The Teeming Brain, for sixteen years, has gradually clarified its own center of gravity—not because I set out to define it in advance, but because the work itself has kept asking the same questions and circling the same themes.

What has become clearest is this: The Living Dark is written from a particular perspective or place of seeing. It’s a perspective where creativity, nonduality, dread, and meaning intersect; where the sense of being a separate self in a stable, objective world is called into question; and where art and awakening turn out to be less separate than we’re usually taught to believe (and certainly less separate than I myself unconsciously held them to be for many years).

Again and again, the writing here has found its way back to that threshold. Sometimes it does this through reflections on creativity and the daemon muse, the felt sense that authentic work arises from attunement to something deeper than the everyday mind. Sometimes it does it through explorations of nonduality as a first-person investigation into the self and the world, as distinct from a belief system or a philosophy. And sometimes it does it through horror, the uncanny, and the darkly or weirdly numinous, serving as a legitimate doorway into questions of identity, reality, and waking up.

Over time it has also become clear to me that this space works best when it remains simple. That’s why I eliminated the paid subscription tier last August, after pausing it back in February when I put the whole newsletter on hiatus. That’s why I stopped using the chat features after dipping into them a few times. This leaves no pressure to perform “community,” which is simply not in my personal makeup to be able to sustain—though I’m delighted when real community just happens, as it often has, thanks to you. What wants to happen here is just essays, reflections, intermittent interviews, and occasional works-in-progress, published on their own obscurely self-determined schedule, as they’re ready. This way, the focus stays on the writing itself, and on the shared act of attention it invites.

As many of you know—those of you who have been on board for a while—much of what eventually became my new book Writing at the Wellspring first took shape here, in conversation with readers (you) and through sustained reflection over time. I expect the same to remain true of whatever comes next, if anything ever does. (I am indeed quietly grouping and mulling over uncollected posts and essays right now.) This has never felt like a platform for output so much as a record of inquiry unfolding in real time.

I have recently revised TLD’s short description and About page to reflect this more clearly. In brief, The Living Dark is now described as:

A journal of creativity, nonduality, and the daemon muse, exploring what emerges when the separate self loosens its grip on identity and meaning.

Nothing essential has changed. If anything, this is simply a clearer articulation of what has been happening all along.

If you’ve been reading for a while, thank you for staying with the inquiry. If you’re newer here, please know that you’re welcome to begin anywhere. This isn’t organized as a curriculum or a system, but as a long-form exploration of what it’s like to live and create in full contact with the mystery underneath ordinary life.

That said, sometime next month I’ll be publishing and pinning a “Start Here” post to serve as a brief guide to essential Living Dark essays.

Speaking of next month, as we head into the new year, wherever you find yourself reading from, I’m glad you’re here.

Warm regards,

My new book:

“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden

Available from all the major bookstores—Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, more—in paperback and electronic editions

Purchase Writing at the Wellspring