Dear Living Dark reader,

Here is Chapter Nine of Writing at the Wellspring. It deals with a state of mind and soul that comes to us all from time to time in our writing lives, and maybe even our wider lives as a whole. Or at least it has come to me repeatedly in my own creative journey.

I’m talking about the state where you just want to stop, where you feel a deep urge to drop everything, give up all effort, and rest in total silence. Is this an unhealthy state? Would your creative work wither if you gave in? Would your life implode? Or does this seemingly sinister call really represent a gift, a spontaneously given opportunity to discover something deeper about yourself and the world?

You can find the previous chapters of Writing at the Wellspring, plus the book’s introduction and conclusion, in the Living Dark web archive through a simple search for the title. For now, maybe you will see something of yourself reflected below in what I’m tempted to call—borrowing some language from Nietzsche—a chapter of untimely meditations or thoughts out of season. In our present age of wall-to-wall productivity advice and universal emphasis on getting things done, there is little place in the mainstream culture of writing and creativity for speculating, as I do near the end of this piece, that “maybe we are all writing . . . in search of the flashpoint of stillness, when we will realize that we don’t have to do it anymore, and that we don’t even want to do it anymore, because we have finally waked up from the dream and found the thing-in-itself.” But maybe, as with so many things, mainstream rejection doesn’t automatically mean something is false. Especially if it finds an echo in your own soul.

Warm regards,

Embrace the Unknown

Chapter Nine of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity as Refuge and Revelation in an Age of Upheaval

The Whisper of Inertia

Are you ever tempted to abandon all your creative projects? Let them collapse? Maybe even let your whole outer life crumble as you sit there silently and watch it all burn down? Is there ever an inner spiritual call to do this? If so, is it valid? Should we assent to it? Or is this desire instead your enemy: the energy of self-defeat, the siren song of your lower self, a function of negative self-image and defective mental/emotional programming? Could it even be the voice of some evil demon that we ought to recognize and resist, a spirit of destruction working to overturn and undermine us?

The call to sink into inertia and give everything up is a question and a temptation that has suggested itself to me many times over the course of my life. The peculiar nature of my mental-emotional makeup apparently renders me highly susceptible to such thinking. I have repeatedly experienced moments when it becomes apparent that what I am seeking through my creative efforts and actions is in fact a sense of final fulfillment in which I will not feel the need to do such things anymore, but will instead feel free simply to exist, to be, to sit in silence.

Being reasonably well read in the literature on creativity, I am self-aware enough to ask at such moments: Is this simply a manifestation of Resistance (a term and concept that we will examine in detail in Part Three)? Or is there something valid about that inner murmur that urges me to let go, sink down, and give blissful assent to the dream of entire rest?

Several times over the years, at moments when a sense of mutual resonance with a fellow writer or creator has led me to feel comfortable enough to share what can feel like my shameful secret, I have described this experience in words. And these moments of self-disclosure have pointed up an interesting fact: I’m not the only one. My sense of isolation in this experience is actually a function or manifestation of the writer’s paradox that I mentioned in Chapter Six, the ironic revelation that what we think is most private and peculiar about us is actually the most universal. Other people, other writers, have encountered this same inner sea change. They grok it with gusto, including not only the sudden—or sometimes lasting—desire to drop everything and go silent, but the same sense of combined dread and relief that accompanies it. Maybe you are one of them.

Naturally, a recurrent feeling this powerful and long-lived in my experience has made itself known in my journals. For thirty years I kept a private journal that served as one of the central external repositories of my inner life. It was there that I learned the sound of my own voice, the nature of my fascinations, and the style and mode of writing that was natural to my self-expression in words. I brought this centered knowledge of myself to my public writing as well. And then, unexpectedly, my private writings became grouped with my public ones when much of my journal was published in two volumes.

There are many entries in its pages dealing with this long-running, ever-returning, always attractive and seductive and convincing call to quit everything and retreat into a cocoon of blessed, blissful silence and stasis. The following example is a case in point that shows me grappling with the pull toward absolute inertia. Maybe you will find that something in it resonates with your own experience. Note that when the entry mentions “the mummy book,” this refers to Mummies around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture, which I edited for an academic publisher, and which ended up being published in 2014. When I wrote this journal entry, I was deep into the process of that book. And when the entry mentions “the paranormal encyclopedia” this refers to Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics: The Paranormal from Alchemy to Zombies, which I edited for the same publisher, and which was eventually published in 2015.

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Here is Chapter Eight of Writing at the Wellspring. Its subject is the heady and sometimes harrowing journey of writing and creating as a journey into the darkness of the unknown, where all you can see ahead is your next step on a dimly lit path. As it turns out, that single step is all you ever need to see. In fact, it’s all that you ever can see. Any belief to the contrary is self-delusion. Better get comfortable with writing and living into the dark.

The previous chapters that I’ve published here are of course still available to paid Living Dark subscribers. The book itself is still in manuscript. Forces are aligning to bring it to the world in more traditionally published form.

Warm regards,

Embrace the Unknown

Chapter Eight of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity as Refuge and Revelation for an Age of Upheaval

The Fantasy of Control

“What we hope for is to proceed from the known to the known. We are not enthused about abandoning the known and engaging the unknown.”1 These words on spiritual awakening from the late nondual writer/teacher Robert Wolfe apply equally to spiritual seekers and to writers. Our default comfort zone is to feel as if we know what we’re doing when we start putting words on the page. We commonly assume that the order of progression for producing a completed work is something like this:

1. Have an idea.

2. Start writing.

3. Develop the idea in the direction that you imagined and expected when you began.

4. Write “THE END.”

5. Experience a fulfilling sense of creative accomplishment. And maybe publish the thing and receive some money.

As anyone who has gone at this writing thing for any appreciable length of time can tell you, that assumed approach reveals itself as pure fantasy at a frequency of somewhere between ninety-nine and one hundred percent of the time. In fact, what it envisions is pretty much the obverse of how writing really works. We only maintain the fantasy because it provides a comforting illusion of knowledge and control—comforting, that is, to our separate self-sense, our ego self, whose sense of things is to be mistrusted automatically and on principle, since it represents the precise opposite of what is really the case in our lives and the universe.

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Every writer knows the longing for inspiration—that fleeting, electrifying moment when something larger than ourselves speaks through us. But how do we prepare for those moments of grace? In Chapter Seven of Writing at the Wellspring, I explore the paradox of creativity: the impossibility of controlling inspiration combined with the necessity of showing up, day after day, to invite it.

This chapter dives into the mysterious intersection of discipline and surrender, effort and grace, and the ways in which we can make ourselves more “accident-prone” to the daemon muse’s lightning strike. Along the way, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein emerges as a haunting metaphor for the profound risks and revelations of creative surrender.

Thank you for being here, and for joining me in holding up our lightning rods together.

Warm regards,

Invite the Lightning

Chapter Seven of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

The Accident of Inspiration

A well-worn bit of Zen wisdom has it that although enlightenment is a total accident, meditation practice can make you more accident-prone. Nobody is quite sure who first said this, but many members of the modern American Zen community have been suggested. It may have been Shunryu Suzuki. Or Robert Aitken. Or Richard Baker. Or it could have been someone from outside the Zen tradition, such as Rajneesh/Osho or J. Krishnamurti. Or it might have been two or more people in combination. I’m personally inclined to think the mystery of the saying’s origin adds to the charm of its insightful expression.

No matter where it came from, what concerns us at the moment is that the same principle holds true when it comes to creativity and the muse. The creative spirit alights on its own schedule. The muse or daemon is under nobody’s control, least of all yours. From your and my point of view, its arrival is an “accident,” a spontaneous, unplannable blessing that is unobtainable through direct effort. But—and here’s the thing, the Zen principle in action—through effort, by practicing, by sitting down to work, you can increase your odds of receiving a visit.

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Dear Living Dark reader,

“Your muse, daimon, genius possesses its own will and its own ways, and it visits and energizes you as and when it desires. Inspiration comes and goes. Your task is not to generate inspiration, and certainly not to control it, but to channel it, and to do so by whatever means necessary, so that when it shows up, you are there to listen, receive, and bring into being what it is intent on giving the world through you.”

Those words are from the fifth chapter of Writing at the Wellspring, which I share with you in full below. Like some other portions of the book, this chapter represents a revision of a post that I previously published here several months ago (and that I have now retired/removed to make way for this one). The subject is the subtle art of getting in touch and in tune with your inner creative genius by recognizing its unique needs and preferences, especially but not exclusively when it comes to the matter of rhythm, speed, and pace of production or expression.

I hope it speaks into your personal field of creativity—that is, to your own daemon muse—with a helpful voice. As noted in the chapter’s first footnote, you can find more guidance on the same theme in Chapter 6 of my A Course in Demonic Creativity.

Warm regards,

To Thine Own Muse Be True

Chapter Five of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

When the Daemon Speaks

I grew up in an Independent Christian Church, one of those evangelical Protestant congregations that represent the rightward-leaning doctrinal divergence of some conservative Restoration Movement churches from their liberal brethren during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century. One of the mottos of my childhood church, which I learned directly from my father’s lips, is this: “Where the scriptures speak, we speak; where the scriptures are silent, we are silent.”

Anybody who scents in this saying a close analog to the muse/daemon/genius-based approach to artistic creativity is surely onto something. You simply cannot know your innate creative rhythm—whether occasional, erratic, or prolific—until you actually do the work of finding out who you are by making friends with your daemonic genius, and then by approaching your work openly and experimentally in order to discover the pace and volume at which your creativity wants to emerge. There is a wide variation among different writers and artists in how their creative daemon consents to being accessed and how their muse consents to being courted. The crucial thing is to get in touch, and then stay in touch, with your own daemon muse, so that when it speaks, you speak, and when it is silent, you remain silent.1

An important implication of this truth is that you do not have to be actively writing all the time. Silence and inactivity are perfectly fine. On the other hand, making space for your muse to speak when it wants by committing to a regular practice can be valuable. This is not a contradiction but a simple fact of the situation, which is subtle and therefore calls for subtlety and sensitivity in one’s approach.

I have always found it greatly reassuring to read about the lives and creative habits of other writers, and especially the actual words of those who have generously talked about their idiosyncratic personal working relationship to their creative spirit. Here are six examples—from writers including Flannery O’Connor, Stephen King, and Katherine Anne Porter—illustrating the absolute viability of all positions on the matter of disciplined regular work versus the free acceptance of erratic silences. The first three line up on one side of the fence, the latter on the other. Every one of them is right, since “right” is a sliding scale calibrated to the precise nexus of karmic forces that has converged upon and manifested within (and as) the specific human being who is speaking, writing, and reflecting sensitively on the deep and singular nature of his or her experience of doing those things and being that person.

Magnetizing the Muse through Disciplined Labor

Flannery O’Connor: Three hours every morning

Flannery O’Connor was a firm believer in the value of discipline in a writer’s life. She famously suffered from lupus, which was both a help and a hindrance in her attempt to maintain the discipline of a strict writer’s routine. On the one hand, the severe pain of the condition took away her ability to perform many daily activities, thus leaving her free to sit and write. On the other hand, this was a sword with a distinct double edge, since, as anyone suffering from a rheumatic illness can tell you, sitting for long periods with such a condition can produce as much discomfort as moving.

This makes O’Connor’s now-famous recommendation that writers ought to sit for several hours and do nothing else but write all the more striking. When her friend Cecil Dawkins complained about a dry spell that she was experiencing, and said she sometimes used reading to distract herself from the tedium, O'Connor responded with this:

It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading.2

As seen in editor Rosemary Magee’s 1987 anthology Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, O’Connor returned repeatedly to this point, stating it in various contexts and ways that, taken together, leave no doubt about her position:

“People seem to surround being-a-writer with a kind of false mystique, as if what is required to be a writer is a writer’s temperament,” she says. “Most of the people I know with writer’s temperaments aren’t doing any writing.” Miss O’Connor is writing steadily three hours a day, regardless of her mood. “If I waited on inspiration, I’d still be waiting,” she says. . . . “I can’t seem to turn out more than two stories a year. I have to have a ‘story’ in mind—some incident or observation that excites me and in which I see fictional possibilities—before I can start a formal piece. But I do try to write at least three hours every morning, since discipline is so important. . . . I sit there before the typewriter three hours every day and if anything comes I am there waiting to receive it.”3

Dani Shapiro: Attract the muse with hard work

Novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro has described her experiences with inspiration and their relationship to conscious discipline in a way that resonates warmly with O’Connor’s account. Shapiro says that if she had assented to the notion that she ought to wait for inspiration before she started writing, she probably would not have written any books. “Don’t get me wrong,” she clarifies. “Inspiration has come. It has tiptoed into my writing room when I’ve least expected it. It has shown up mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-idea. But it generally doesn’t precede me to the desk.” She draws out the point in a direct statement of the principle:

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Here is a truth that I wish I had learned earlier in life: My life is not my own. My goals are not my own. My destiny is not my own. Whenever I have thought and acted as if I’m in complete control, meaning has vanished and things have gone awry. My one ultimately valid choice is to give up total control, to use what little control I do have to consciously accept that I was born with an inbuilt character and calling, and to work toward aligning with that instead of acting as if I’m a pure free agent in the world.

Of course, in the end this flips and transforms into the realization that I do have control. Absolute and total control, in fact. But this involves waking up to the truth that what I mean when I say “I” is so much more than this little ego with my name attached to it that the world has programmed me to mistake for my real self.

This post continues the serialization of my new book, Writing at the Wellspring. The words above come from its fourth chapter. As you know, I’m currently teaching a five-week online course bearing that same title as the book over at Weirdosphere, where seventy students have access to the full unpublished manuscript. Though the course is already underway—I delivered the second lecture earlier this week—you can join Weirdosphere to gain access to a permanent archive of it, including recorded lectures and all course materials (including that manuscript).

Chapter Four of Writing at the Wellspring takes the form of a dialogue that I constructed from multiple interactions with real readers who have asked questions about my model and philosophy of creativity as a process that feels like an inner collaboration with a separate presence or intelligence—in other words, as an interaction with what we may fruitfully and evocatively frame, conceive, feel, and understand as the daemon muse. I first laid out this perspective at a blog titled Demon Muse back in 2009 to 2011, which itself culminated in my 2011 book A Course in Demonic Creativity. The new Wellspring book picks up where that one leaves off, further developing the model and perspective by combining it with a nondual view of self and world and a focus on living out this creative-spiritual truth within a circumstance of apocalyptic social and cultural transformation.

The specific focus of Chapter Four is on the art of sensing, understanding, and getting acquainted with your personal inner genius and its ramifications, encompassing attitudes to adopt, practical methods to use, and some recommendations for further reading.

I hope it speaks to you. You can let me know below in the comments, where I will be happy to answer your questions, and also to hear your own insights and perspectives on this subject and approach.

Note that this post is long enough that some email services may clip the text near the end. If you’re reading it in email, you might have to click through and bring up the web version to see the full text.

Warm regards,

A Dialogue on Divining Your Daemon

Chapter Four of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

by Matt Cardin

Practically speaking, the most basic statement of truth about writing and creativity in relation to the inner genius is this: You are not ultimately responsible for it. You are responsible for befriending your creativity. You are responsible for practicing the craft side of it so that you can forge yourself into a channel, an instrument, a conduit for its clear and truthful expression. You are responsible for actively waiting on it to court its presence and ensure you’re ready when it chooses to alight. As Picasso famously said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

But as for generating it, or controlling it, or determining its nature, content, or deep direction—these are beyond you. Their responsibility belongs to the creative spirit itself. Your job as a writer is not to “be creative” but to shepherd your unique creative spirit into the world through a rich discipline of inner collaboration. In such work, the operative principle is: Give your daemon its due.

This all sounds interesting. But are we talking about something real or imaginary? Is this a metaphor, or are you saying the daemon is a literal reality?

The question of creativity’s ultimate source is an old one. And a fascinating one. Historically, attempts to answer it have often led into the realms of the spiritual, the esoteric, and the occult, where muses and daimons and daemons and genii hover all around us in imaginal hyperspace, whispering ideas and inspiration into the ears of poets, artists, historians, philosophers, and madmen.

More recently, in the past couple of centuries, creativity has become a popular topic in the realms of psychology and neurology. The id, the collective unconscious, the right cerebral hemisphere, the temporal lobe, the cerebellum, the pineal gland, and various other psychological and neurobiological structures and interrelationships have been named and championed as the real “muse.” The shift has been away from belief in an objectively real spiritual source to the belief that inspiration is a purely subjective experience with biological and psychological causes. Which direction a given person tends to lean—toward a forthrightly spiritual(ish) interpretation or a reductive scientific/materialist one—depends on his or her philosophical sensibility and cast of mind.

Some intrepid souls with fertile imaginations and the gift or curse of divergent thinking, plus a constitutional tendency to embrace a Robert Anton Wilsonian attitude of “maybe logic,” have embraced both views. Such people (and I’m one of them) say creativity is equally well explained on the one hand by biology + psychology + culture, and on the other hand as the workings of a real daemon muse or inspiring spirit.

Such people (and I’m still one of them) also tend to view the rest of life and the universe at large through the same imaginally tinted pair of philosophical eyeglasses.

Having said all that, let me say it all again differently, and maybe better:

I hold the whole matter of the daimon muse or inner genius in a permanent liminal hyperspace, and I suggest you join me in this. Our epistemic position makes it flatly impossible for us to know the literal truth or untruth of the daimon muse hypothesis. Wilson’s famous stance of “model agnosticism”—the skeptical refusal to select or adopt any one worldview or philosophical model as privileged or absolutely true—pointedly applies to this matter. (For his winsomely riveting presentation of this position, see the opening pages of his book Cosmic Trigger.)

What we can know for sure is that there is incontrovertibly the feeling of another intelligence accompanying our ego self and rational mind “from behind,” within our own subjectivity. In other words, the sense of it, at least, is definitely real and not in question. Any interpretations that we apply to this sense, however, whether in terms of the unconscious, the daemon, or anything else, are only that: interpretations. The datum of the experience itself remains primary.

Not tangentially, this same impossibility of final certitude applies to any and all totalizing interpretations that we place on ourselves, the world, and reality as a whole. As a matter of self-evident truth, we can never stand apart from our subjectivity, our first-personhood, to comment with objective finality on any of this.

Or rather, and to say the same thing differently and more deeply: The only final stance is one of truly absolute objectivity, from which position the entirety of the cosmic drama, including both its subjective and objective realms, components, or aspects, is all a collective wave pulse of mere appearances. Our own creativity, consisting of the dream of being a separate self that exists in perpetual relationship with a personal creative daemon, occurs within and as a component of that.

So, as a writer, how do you encounter your daemon in actual experience? How can you be sure it’s really there?

Encountering your daemon and verifying its reality and presence is like the fish becoming aware of water. It’s a moment of self-awareness in which you notice something that has always been present, but that was so all-pervasive in your total experience that you were unable to see it.

On a more ominous note, instead of asking how you can encounter it and verify its reality, you could just as well ask how you can get away from it. To which the answer—which elucidates the answer to the flipside question as well—is that you can’t.

There are multiple ways to divine your daemon that are readily available to you, right at this moment. They aren’t as esoteric as the name “daemon” and the connotations sometimes attached to it might lead you to think. For example, you can look to the following:

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Dear Living Dark reader,

“What is the ultimate and final benefit of embracing your genius, meeting your muse, aligning with your daemon? It is simply that you heal this epic rift by owning up to what is really true of your personal experience, what is really true in a deeply human sense. You account for a missing part of yourself that, if you are at all a typical member of the culture in which and to which I am speaking, you have not been given an adequate set of concepts and attitudes for recognizing. The polar opposite of the demon-haunted life we have been living together for over a century can be seen in the case of those writers and artists who have learned to commune and collaborate with the nightside of their psyche, and whose lives have been blessed because of it.”

Today we continue with the serialization of my new (and presently unpublished) book, Writing at the Wellspring. The paragraph above is from Chapter Three, whose topic is the historical trajectory, fate, and fortunes of the daemon or daimon in modern Western culture, where the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment occasioned a wholesale ejection of humanity’s visionary nightside from the mainstream intelligentsia, thus unintentionally unleashing a collective demonic fury and generating a global hellscape of physical and psychic violence. In the course of arguing, explaining, and illustrating this point in the chapter, I refer to a variety of historical and cultural matters and figures, including twentieth-century warfare, the Freudian psyche, the message of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for an age of material science, and Ray Bradbury’s relationship with his daemon muse.

In the total environment of the book, this chapter provides historical and cultural context for the other chapters, which are more focused on articulating practical guidance and philosophical perspectives for enriching your writing (or any other creative art) and linking it to the unfolding of your life’s purpose through a focus on your daemon muse and nonduality.

Before handing you off to the chapter, I’ll remind you that I’m teaching a course this fall at Weirdosphere, the online learning platform/community from the creators of the Weird Studies podcast—and that Living Dark subscibers will receive a discount on the price. Like my new book, the course is titled “Writing at the Wellspring,” and its content represents a fusion of this new book with my earlier one, A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius. It starts in a couple of weeks. I hope you’ll join me.

Warm regards,

The Daemon in Exile: A Cultural History

Chapter Three of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

by Matt Cardin

I begin this chapter with a word of advice: You can skip it, if you prefer, as it is not strictly necessary. Your understanding of the book’s overall flow of thought and argument will not be negatively impacted if you just move on to the next chapter. However, the subject that I explore in this one does add background and context to our consideration of the muse and the daemon by looking at their current status in the collective consciousness of modern culture and society, especially in the West. The chapter briefly traces the ejection and exile of the daemon muse from what came to be considered respectable intellectual discourse in the age of science, rationality, and technology, and it suggests some truly awful consequences, both personal and civilizational, that have flowed from this unintelligent act. So, if such things interest you, please read on.

Also please bear in mind that my perspective and approach here is forthrightly personal and idiosyncratic. Even when I adopt a tone of ostensible objectivity, and even when I talk about matters of factual history spanning the past few centuries, I am still speaking subjectively and offering my deeply personal and impressionistic take on things. This means my account freely foregrounds and magnifies some things while reducing or even ignoring many others that would validly form a part of the picture someone else might paint. I am aware that this may seem a dubious approach for talking about matters of objective history and collective import, and I tell you this in the spirit of full disclosure and forewarning, to help you receive these thoughts in the right way. But then, the approach I’m describing is not really different from the one I have adopted throughout the whole book. It’s just that the specific subject matter here gives my subjective statements the sound of objective pronouncements. This is a mere artifact of language.

Consider what follows a kind of visionary history of the past several hundred years, viewed from a highly and specifically inflected angle. For me, this angle sheds light (and also creates shadows) in a way that truly illuminates. Maybe it will for you, too.

The Enlightenment’s Shadow

The daemonic muse model of creativity holds that it is eminently reasonable and helpful to regard creativity as an independent force that emerges through you, as opposed to a quality or power that you possess or a feat that you are able to perform. Importantly, this ancient model of creativity is also a model of consciousness in general. It is a model of the nature and status of the self within the wider context of psychological life as a whole, human life in general, and the world at large.

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Dear Living Dark reader,

“What are you reaching for and aiming at in your reading and writing? What are you aching to find, understand, achieve, accomplish, or realize? How are they both, in the end—your daimon of the pen and daimon of the page—one and the same?”

That’s a snippet from Chapter Two of Writing at the Wellspring. I have previously shared the book’s introduction, conclusion, and first chapter. Today we continue with the second chapter.

In connection with this serialization of the book online for TLD subscribers, which I’m offering while scouting around for an agent or publisher, remember that subscribers will also receive a discount on the course that I’m teaching this fall at Weirdosphere, the online learning platform/community from the creators of the Weird Studies podcast. The course is likewise titled “Writing at the Wellspring,” and its content represents a fusion of this new book with my earlier book, A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius. I hope you’ll join me.

Meanwhile, here is Chapter Two, which follows on from the introduction’s meditation on living and writing into the dark and Chapter One’s dive into the hidden river of your writing.

Warm regards,

The Daemon of Pen and Page

Chapter Two of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

by Matt Cardin

The Coherence of Your Self

In the late autumn of 2023, I found myself taking stock of my writing that year. And I found that, in a development that I never would have predicted before it actually unfolded, my interaction with social media had become a source of significant authorial energy and productivity. Habitually an intermittent writer, I found that I had written a great deal that year, and that much of it had been specifically produced for sharing through a medium that I, like many people, have tended to criticize and use with more than a dash of irony.

This phenomenon was related to the fact that, beginning in the spring of that year, I adopted a new approach to social media in which I deliberately set out to ride the Thoreauvian railroad instead of letting it ride me. I sought out information, advice, and guidance on how to write for best effect in a short-form social media environment, with “best” judged by the metric of reader response and connection, that is, overall success or failure in communicating messages in such a way that people would actually see them and read them. This resulted not only in a noticeable increase in positive interactions with a growing crowd of readers, but in a new charge of energy infusing itself into my ongoing exploration of the intersection between the daemon muse model of writing and creativity and the theme of nondual self-realization.

This energizing effect was quite unexpected. Over a span of five months, I wrote and shared thousands of words through a medium that has generally favored pithy, short-form statements stripped of rhetorical subtlety and stylistic flourishes. And somehow this shift to a new register that felt so different from my usual mode of writing served to unlock a well of motivation. I found myself returning to my computer keyboard day after day as I sought to state the truth as it appeared to me in that moment. The words began to accumulate. Momentum began to build. As the weeks and months passed, I was genuinely surprised at the volume and variety of what wanted to express itself.

And then, of course, as the autumn season advanced and the shadows of its final twilight lengthened, that energy curve reached its peak and began its descent. This was predictable. For years my creative impulse has tracked the seasonal cycle. The fall and winter months usually represent a time of hibernation and incubation for my creative activity. So naturally, as that year’s seasonal shift away from advance and creation and toward retreat and reflection took place, I turned to contemplating the recent spring/summer surge to see what it added up to.

What I found was right in line with something William Stafford said in an essential essay on writing that I have returned to many times in my life: “I know that back of my activity there will be the coherence of my self, and that indulgence of my impulses will bring recurrent patterns and meanings again.”1 The scattered, separate statements and reflections that I had shared on social media that year added up to several quasi-essays, appearing in fragments, written incrementally in what felt like random order over an extended span of time, and falling later into discernible groups with spontaneously logical orderings that displayed a progression of thought and theme. This happened concomitantly with the writing of the more conventionally produced essays that I thought of as such when I was publishing them at The Living Dark. As with those, some of that other material now appears in this book.

I tell you this, including the story behind it, on the chance that it might be as valuable to you in your own creative life as it would have been to me if someone had said it years ago, early in my career, when I was mired in the unnecessary notion of a rational and linear progression of ideas and their articulation whenever I faced a blank page. Trust the coherence of your self. Indulge your impulses. See what patterns and meanings emerge.

And importantly, do this not only when you write, but when you read, as your mind and sensibility take in someone else’s words and seek to assimilate them. Seek to understand what is being said, but don’t fail to pay attention to your own reactions to it as well, to the thoughts and feelings arising naturally within the inner space of you as you interact with the textually transmitted inner space of another person.

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Dear Living Dark reader,

“As the world grows weirder and more disturbed, leading toward a potential collective cataclysm, the discipline of the daemon muse may enable us to heal the fateful rupture that has led us to deny and exclude the visionary aspect of our being from our mainstream map of reality....Authentic life purpose that is aligned with reality and embodied in one’s authentic great work can serve as what we may call a monastic option.”

Those words are from the concluding chapter to my book Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius. After having shared the book’s introduction and first chapter, I’ve decided to interrupt the sequential flow by jumping briefly ahead to this final portion. I’ll return to the other chapters in coming weeks, but recently I came across something that intersects so perfectly with the book’s ending—something I felt like sharing with you right away—that I decided to make this modification.

What I came across was a video talk by the mythologist Michael Meade that was published last week. Meade’s lucid insights into the mythic imagination and its intersection with the modern world have intrigued me for several years. When I found him focusing in this recent talk on the confluence of the daemon and life purpose in connection with our current age of collective crisis, I felt a real surge of affirmation, because this is one of the core themes of Writing at the Wellspring.

Meade’s talk is titled “Finding a Calling in Life.” Its description says, in part:

At this critical time on earth we are called to undertake an expansion of identity and growth of soul in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the radical changes surging through both nature and culture....In times of change, as in periods of personal crisis, there can be an acceleration of calling that opens the pathways of genius and imagination that can satisfy our souls, but also be our best way of serving the world.

And in the first few minutes of the video itself, he says the following:

[Calling] is more important at this time than at other times because the outside world is in such disarray, and will continue to be that way, that there’s a greater need for people to respond to their calling. Because in the long run, the things that call to us tend to be beneficial not just for us, but for everyone. And so calling becomes a more important thing on the inside when the outside world is falling apart....

Everyone that comes into the world is gifted, and the gifts are intended to be given, and the beneficiaries are intended to be the other people. So being alive at this time means being called to become conscious of more realities of daily life. It means to be challenged, to undertake an expansion of identity in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the flood of changes that are surging through both nature and culture. And it’s in times of change that there can be an intensification of longing to find something meaningful, to find a true purpose and a genuine aim in life. And just as in periods of personal crisis, there can be an acceleration of calling in the midst of the confusion of the world. And so, in a sense—at least my sense—the more people who respond to their calling, the more ways that people will find to bring healing, to bring meaning, to bring purpose to the world.

All of these ideas—the importance of inborn calling and purpose, the fact of its heightened significance in times of collective crisis like the present, the recognition that we help the world by fulfilling our gift—resonate deeply with key aspects of Writing at the Wellspring, whose last chapter I now share with you.

Warm regards,

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Creative Purpose in the Age of Apocalypse

Chapter 16 of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

by Matt Cardin

The Path Unveiled: A Retrospective

In many ways, this has been a book of perspectives and metaphors. Though I have offered practical advice here and there, especially in Chapter Four on divining your daemon muse, I have devoted far more space to laying out different angles on and symbolic representations of reality, spiritual awakening, human selfhood, and the creative drive that is embodied in both our specific acts of artistic creation and our whole lives. Are these helpful? Are they usable or actionable? That is for you to judge. I just know that in my own experience, it has often been not so much the practical advice but the new thought, the fresh perspective, the transformative insight shared by another person, that has been most valuable, sometimes to the point of sparking a wholesale paradigm shift with cascading effects extending throughout my understanding of myself and my world. Thoreau’s famous words in Walden about the power of books leaped off the page the first time I read them at age 20, articulating a truth that still arrests me today:

There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones.

A number of books have come to me in the course of my life that have had the effect Thoreau describes. Each has opened a new era for me by catalyzing a paradigm shift. I suppose the importance of this effect in my life has lurked behind my intuitive approach to writing this book, resulting in something that is as much or more about suggesting a shift in your own paradigm as it is about offering applied techniques for enhancing your writing or other creative work.

One of the first metaphors I introduced was that of darkness, and of writing and living into the dark. As I said in the introduction, the writing of this book has been an implementation and illustration of that very approach. We then began in Part One with multiple meditations on writing and collaborating with the daemon muse. In Part Two we moved on to consider various angles on the rich and sometimes subjectively fraught and tense interplay between spirituality, silence, and the drive to write and create. In Part Three we examined and exposed Resistance, uncovering a revelation about its devious nature, and discovering the alignment with the creative energy of the cosmos that is ours when we see through the lies of that ultimately illusory enemy.

Here in the book’s concluding chapter, as I continue to follow the same thread into the darkness of the unplanned and the unknown, I want to offer yet another perspective by saying something about locating our creative work within what is commonly referred to as “the real world,” meaning the world of human society and culture.

One of my core fascinations, which I know you share, centers on the idea of finding and fulfilling our individual “great work,” whether in the esoteric/occult sense that I mentioned in Chapter Four or the sense that Stephen Cope, the author, psychologist, and Kripalu Yoga teacher, employs in his excellent book, The Great Work of Your Life. Cope describes a person’s great work as an individual dharma or calling that is lived out on the ground, so to speak, within and through the vicissitudes and circumstances of a real human life. “People actually feel happiest and most fulfilled,” says Cope,

when meeting the challenge of their dharma in the world, when bringing highly concentrated effort to some compelling activity for which they have a true calling. . . . At the end of life, most of us will find that we have felt most filled up by the challenges and successful struggles for mastery, creativity, and full expression of our dharma in the world. Fulfillment happens not in retreat from the world but in advance—and profound engagement.1

Cope links this point to the famous saying in the Gospel of Thomas that if you bring forth what is inside you, it will save you, but if you don’t, it will destroy you. Anyone who has had the experience of living for years in a state of creative block, paralyzed by the spell and swindle of Resistance, compensating for not doing his real work by doing other things that may be nominally worthy, but that ultimately represent a deflection and retreat from what he knows he is really here to do—in other words, anyone like me—can personally attest to the truth of this ancient warning.

With all that, what I’m winding my way toward saying is this: Authentic life purpose that is aligned with reality and embodied in one’s authentic great work can serve as what we may call a monastic option. By this, I don’t mean solely the choice, which I mentioned in Chapter One, to make your life a portable monastery of the muse, though that is included. What I mean in a broader sense is what the cultural historian and social critic Morris Berman meant when, inspired in a contemporary American context by the actions of the famous fourth-century Catholic Irish monks who “saved civilization,” he coined or reappropriated the term “monastic option” to refer to opting out of the frantic world view and lifestyle of American and Americanized consumer-capitalist culture so that you can devote yourself to preserving some precious and humane form of knowledge and/or way of living in response to a rising dark age.

This is something I alluded to obliquely in the introduction when I mentioned the value of learning to commune and collaborate with one’s daemon muse in an apocalyptic world situation. To repeat what I said there, and to combine it with Chapter Three’s exploration of the “daemon in exile”: As the world grows weirder and more disturbed, leading toward a potential collective cataclysm, the discipline of the daemon muse may enable us to heal the fateful historical-cultural-psychic rupture that has led us to deny and exclude the visionary aspect of our being from our mainstream map of reality. This heedless act of dissociation rendered our daemon self destructive in the mold and mode of the Frankenstein myth, where Victor’s monster is actually the embodiment of his own rejected daemon, now helplessly transformed into a demonic fury seeking to reconnect with its creator through violence. Reconnecting with this inner force through healthier and more intelligent means may enable us both to resolve this inner-outer crisis and to find a life of meaning and purpose by fulfilling our unique callings right in the midst of a new dark age. It may also enable us to help others not only now but in the world ahead by planting cultural seeds that will come to fruition on the other side of the apocalypse, in a future renaissance.

I mentioned that I would say more about this at the end. That moment has now arrived.

Creativity in a Collapsing Culture

Sociocultural issues, as you know, have not been our main concern in this book. But they are certainly not divorced from it, either. All creative work, along with all living and spiritual seeking, occurs within some concrete context. Understanding how this context shapes us, and how we reciprocally shape it, is a matter of no small importance. For me, Berman’s concept of the monastic option has provided a meaningful model to understand and act on this within the world circumstance of unfolding apocalypse in our current age.

Berman introduced the monastic option in his 2000 book The Twilight of American Culture. The book lays out a fundamental diagnosis and critique, both academic and polemical, of America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Berman characterizes the United States as a country and culture that is past its peak and on the downhill slope of collapse, having fallen into the same sorts of degenerative troubles—social, cultural, economic, political—that have afflicted late-stage empires throughout history. Importantly, he says his point is not to solve the problem. Rather, it is to argue, using a combination of scholarly analysis and personal impressions, that America as a culture, a nation, and a world power has entered its twilight phase and is inevitably headed nowhere but down. He also argues, again referencing the witness of history, that this is a situation where most efforts to address the decline are actually symptoms and functions of it, and thus only serve unwittingly to advance it.

As an American and a human, I find Berman’s book to be deeply bracing and stirring. Perhaps the most stirring part, to me, is his concept of the monastic option.

Berman suggests that, in the face of this irreversible cultural breakdown, which is likely to spool out into the indefinite future, one of the most spiritually and practically beneficial things an individual can do is to follow the example of those Irish monks by finding some worthwhile area of endeavor—a field of knowledge, a set of skills, a plan for a humane way of living, whatever calls deeply to you—and deliberately seeking a way to preserve and transmit it to whatever new culture will arise in the future, after the present one has burned itself to the ground. To illustrate the point, Berman explicitly points not just to history, and not just to what he takes to be new monastic efforts (his specific examples being those that were underway in America at the turn of the millennium), but to various manifestations of this theme in apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction. He considers, for example, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—still one of the most prescient among the classic dystopian novels—and its “book people” (as they were called in director François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation), who memorize and effectively become books in an age when reading is banned. They thus preserve books in a line of oral transmission so that one day, when societal conditions have changed, their knowledge can be written down again.

It is Berman’s specific characterization of the necessarily private and individualistic nature of the monastic option, and of the need for all such efforts to retain their countercultural status in order to avoid being corrupted by the very world they are seeking to overcome, that resonates most intensely with me. Every time I revisit his words, I feel the same surge of electric energy, the same rising current of affirmation, that I felt when I first read them two decades ago. I will quote from them at some length because I think they play right into our presiding concern with creativity and life purpose. I am of course writing these words, and you are reading them, within a surrounding societal and cultural circumstance. Things being what they are, I would wager that no matter when it is that we have come together like this in these pages, no matter what year it is or where you specifically happen to be in the world, the global situation, and probably your more immediately local one as well, is both troubled and troubling in some pertinent way. Which means Berman’s words, too, remain pertinent:

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Dear Living Dark reader,

“Creativity is a hidden river running through your life. It created you, the dream character living out this narrative of a self in a world. It also uniquely gifted you for creating things within the dream.”

Those are lines from Chapter One of my next book. Two weeks ago I shared the book’s introduction with you. Today I present the first chapter. As with the introduction, and as with most (but not all) of the other chapters that I’ll be publishing here for paid subscribers, much of the chapter’s content previously appeared in this newsletter. But for Writing at the Wellspring, I have significantly reworked it and combined it with other material to produce something new.

Chapter One is located within Section One of the book, titled “Writing with the Daemon Muse.” You can see the complete table of contents and read detailed summaries of each chapter here.

I can also report that I have finished writing the book proposal and have begun querying literary agents. I’ll publish another update on that process soon, along with another section of the proposal (a description of the target audience for this book, among whom I know you number).

Warm regards,

The Hidden River of Your Writing

Introduction to Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

by Matt Cardin

We begin with a chapter of multiple metaphors and perspectives. I present several different ways of framing, picturing, and understanding creativity, like a series of shifting lenses, each one tinted a different shade and therefore highlighting, revealing, and calling out a different aspect of the subject. This is to give us a running start.

It also establishes an approach that I will return to throughout the book.

Navigating the Dreamscape

This is the ultimate secret of creativity: Your whole life is a story that you are telling. This thing you call “my life” is a dream narrative. You are both its author and its main character. As Nietzsche noted, “We are all greater artists than we realize.” Your challenge and calling, as both a writer and a person, is to wake up and own this.

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Dear Living Dark readers,

“Living into the dark means living with no plan, no rigid goals, no outline. It means forgoing the impossible attempt to plot a path to a preconceived end. It means accepting, even embracing, the fact that the future is unknowable, that all your thoughts about it are pure projection and abstraction. Beyond even this, it means accepting that you will never actually live your way into the future, since the future only ever arrives as a kind of cloud formation in the eternal and evanescent present: always new, always unexpected, always categorically eluding and transcending your mental images of it.”

Those words are from the introduction to the book I’m now writing. With this post, I begin serializing that book for paid subscribers, starting with the complete text of the introduction. As you know, I have previously shared the overview, table of contents, and chapter summaries, as written for the book proposal that I’m developing (and that’s now all but finished) for submitting to literary agents. You can read those to get a sense of the whole book’s scope and message for writers, artists, and spiritual seekers.

Those of you who have read my earliest posts from the fall of 2022 when I launched this newsletter will recognize much of this introduction. However, I have also combined TLD content with other writings from elsewhere, and have rewritten the text in various places. This has been my practice throughout the manuscript, which, as I have said, represents a massive reorganization, rewriting, and recasting of my essays, combined with newly written and previously unpublished material, to produce a coherent book. With these posts, including the ones where I share portions of the book proposal, I’m letting you look behind the curtain before this book has found a home with a publisher.

Writing at the Wellspring has developed quite a creative-energetic charge as I’ve gone to work on it in earnest over the past three months, and especially over the past three or four weeks. Believe it or not, my first-ever case of COVID-19, which knocked me off my feet for more than a week in July, somehow catalyzed my daemon and led to an eruption of motivation and an upwelling of creative energy that has not abated since then. As I said, the manuscript is now more than ninety percent complete, and ninety percent of the work to get it there, including the writing of new things to accompany the creative rewriting and high-level organizing of existing things, has occurred within the past month. So has the writing of the book proposal, which, at 7,500 words of major density (plus another several thousand words of text from sample chapters), represents a significant effort in its own right.

Never let yourself assume that your past experiences with your daemon muse have given you a clear and comfortable knowledge of how it’s going to want to work with you in the future. Thomas Ligotti once told an interviewer that his muse is sickness of the mind and the body. For the first time in my life, in association with this particular project, I share his experience of the latter.

Warm regards,

P.S. I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which helps local, independent bookstores thrive in the age of ecommerce. This means I’ll earn a commission if you click through one of the book links in this post and make a purchase.

On Living and Writing into the Dark

Introduction to Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

by Matt Cardin

[NOTE: I’m still experimenting with the subtitle. The one above is the latest of several shifting iterations. There will be more to come.]

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Dear Living Dark reader,

In a world increasingly dominated by digital technology, how do we navigate the delicate balance between online engagement and personal well-being without losing our authentic selves?

If our lives are an intricate dance between inevitability and free will, how much of our creativity and spiritual growth is truly our own, and how much is predetermined by forces beyond our control?

Can the act of exploring psychological and metaphysical darkness—through horror fiction, childhood fairy tales, and confronting our own traumas—paradoxically lead us to greater enlightenment and self-understanding?

In our quest for spiritual authenticity, how do we discern between genuine enlightenment and its imitations, especially when the very language we use to describe such experiences may be inadequate?

These are all questions and themes that arose in a recent conversation that I had with the writer Jasun Horsley for his podcast Jobcast: Fathoming God. You may already be familiar with Jasun and his work, which has been a visible part of the cultural-conversational landscape for many years. Jasun is a British author and cultural commentator known for his unique and critical perspectives on contemporary issues. His creations include the website and project Auticulture—an ongoing exploration of liminality and the interface between the human psyche, society, and culture—as well as books like Seen and Unseen: Confessions of a Movie Autist. Currently he writes the newsletter Children of Job, “a space for cognitive dissidents to gather,” with Jobcast as its associated podcast. Our interaction came about when he invited me on as a guest.

The episode is titled “Body of Horror” and is available to Jasun’s paid subscribers. With his permission, I’m also publishing it here for paid TLD subscribers. You’ll find the audio player at the bottom of this post.

Our conversation was long, relaxed, and meandering in the best of ways, spanning two days and two Zoom sessions as we followed a spontaneous thread. Here are some key themes and topics that we ended up exploring:

• The ambivalence of online writing and technology: The pros and cons of social media. Quitting Twitter and Facebook for Substack. The pressure to produce content. The importance of disconnecting for well-being.

• The writing process: The challenges and rewards of maintaining a writing practice. The tension between public and private writing. The value of knowing when to step back, stop writing, and embrace silence. The wisdom of Ecclesiastes regarding the weariness of constant writing and study.

• Spontaneity and creativity: The unpredictable nature of inspiration. Challenging the notion that fiction is inherently more creative than nonfiction. The role of interpersonal dialogue and external stimuli in sparking creative energy.

• Light and darkness in writing: The intersection of fiction and nonfiction. My journey from writing dark horror fiction to nondual, spiritually inclined nonfiction.

• Horror, trauma, and reality: The philosophical and psychological complementarity of light and darkness in writing. The impact of trauma on perception. How personal experiences and existential questions shape writing styles. The allure of supernatural horror. Dream life and sleep paralysis.

• Childhood and horror: The influence of early experiences on writing and perception. The psychological roots of childhood fascination with supernatural horror. The role of fairy tales and frightening stories in childhood development.

• Authenticity in art and spirituality: Authentic vs. superficial creativity. The challenges of discerning genuine creativity and spirituality. The impact of spiritual teachers and experiences.

• Physical activity and mental well-being: Connection between physical work and mental clarity. Counteracting an overactive mind and intellectual malaise through action.

• Enlightenment and horror: The intersection of religion, spirituality, and cosmic horror in life and literature. Steven Norquist and his book Haunted Universe. Connections to Thomas Ligotti and the Ligottian perspective. The paradoxical nature of conveying enlightenment through language. Potential healing and addictive aspects of engaging with horror.

• Questioning spiritual authority: The relative authenticity of enlightenment claims. The potential influence of nonhuman entities on consciousness and spiritual experiences.

• The interplay of inevitability and agency: The core tension in our lives between determinism and free will. Navigating the living balance between karmic inevitability and individual choice.

• Universal awakening and spiritual reconciliation: The idea of apocatastasis, the ultimate restoration of all things to their divine origin. The potential reconciliation of all opposites and redemption of all beings.

If you like dialogues that run deep while remaining relaxed and unhurried (Jasun’s and mine went two and a half hours), this one’s for you:

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Today’s post is too long for some email services to show its full text. If you’re reading it in email, you may need to click through to the web version for the whole essay.

*

Though this essay can be read on its own, it starts in medias res, leading in directly from the first post in the series, so it may be more meaningful if you start with that one.

As I stated in the introduction to that post, the focal question here is: What are the physical aspects, and more specifically the neurological ones, of the experience of the daemon muse? And how does looking into this contribute to answering, or at least informing, the question of creativity’s ontological status and point of origin in our lives?

But beyond that—and I probably should have said this at the outset—my purpose in these essays is simply to elevate, illuminate, and clarify the subjective experience of creative inspiration itself. What’s really going on, phenomenologically speaking, when the sense of daemonic flow and communication from the muse is active? How does it feel to hear that inner voice, to feel that creative compulsion, to sense that spark of inspiration? What is it like to do our work in service to and in collaboration with this intelligence, force, or source? Those are the real buttressing points, the thing I’m getting at. We’re not looking for “the answer” to “where” the muse experience is physically “located” in our anatomy or physiology. Note the overabundance of scare quotes. This whole matter inhabits and calls attention to the boundary line, or rather the liminal zone, between fact and myth, literal and metaphorical. Throughout these essays, the former shades and bleeds into the latter, and vice versa.

If perchance you come away with a sense of having been pleasantly engaged by interesting speculations about the biology of creativity and some of the people involved in studying and thinking about it, and/but in such a way that concrete answers really don’t matter compared to the mere and sheer focus on the subject itself and the way this information and these speculations heighten both attention to the experience of inspiration and appreciation of its inherent mystery, then I will have succeeded at my self-appointed task.

Warm regards,

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HAUNTED BY OURSELVES: Stan Gooch and the Cerebellar Muse

1. You and your two brains

In addition to serving as a possible muse location in its own right, the pineal gland, which was our focus in the previous installment, helps us transition to our next speculative/interpretive “lens” via its relationship to the cerebellum. Let’s allow the late psychologist and paranormal theorist Stan Gooch (1932–2010) to launch the discussion:

[W]e have two brains: the cerebrum (the front brain) and the cerebellum (the back brain). The ancestor of all mammals had two pairs of eyes—one pair on top of the head and connected to the cerebellum. The second pair was in the front of the head and connected to the cerebrum. Originally, the cerebellum was the main brain. But in the course of time the pair of eyes on top of the head fused together and sank down into the skull to form what is today called the pineal gland, which is still actually light sensitive (of course the pineal gland is the “third eye” of ancient Hindu mysticism). Now the cerebrum and its pair of front eyes became the main brain. But when did you ever hear these astonishing evolutionary facts discussed? The pineal is located directly above the cerebellum, whose name is Latin for “little brain.” This is a structure beneath the forebrain.1

But although this passage does serve a transitional function by touching on matters that we looked at last time, it effectively slams us into the new subject of the cerebellum instead of easing us into it. We need to do some backtracking to set the stage for explaining the cerebellar muse hypothesis, which is simply the idea that the muse is located in, or perhaps simply is, the cerebellum. This was the proprietary theoretical creation of Gooch himself.

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Today I pose a question in the hope that attempting to answer it will prove both fruitful and fascinating. Or rather, it has already proved to be both of these in my own experience. Now I’m hoping it will appeal to you as well. The project draws on and updates some of my previous writing and research from years past—though this material has not been publicly available anywhere for more than a decade—and it pushes my, or rather our, ongoing consideration of creativity and the daemon muse in a bit of a different direction. In terms of form, it takes a more heavily researched and footnoted approach than what I have typically published here. In terms of length, it will spill across more than one post—certainly two, and maybe three.

The question to be pursued is this: When we feel as if we are being guided and inspired in our creative work by an independent, external force or presence, what’s going on in our bodies, and more specifically, in our brains? What are the physical, neurological aspects of the experience of the daemon muse? And how does looking into this contribute to answering, or at least informing, the question of creativity’s ontological status and point of origin in our lives?

It was some fifteen years ago, around 2009 and 2010, while I was researching and writing the essays that I published at my now retired blog Demon Muse, that I first became interested in this subject. Most of those essays ended up in my book A Course in Demonic Creativity. One that did not was titled “In Search of Higher Intelligence.” It examined the interlinked experiences of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson, whose collective lives spanned nearly 140 years, and who each in his own way experienced what felt like psychic contact with a separate, non-ordinary intelligence.1

Though that essay didn’t focus on the neurological aspect of non-ordinary communication or creativity as such, it’s a fact that Crowley, Leary, and Wilson were all deeply interested in the workings of the human brain. In fact, the veritable explosion of new interest over the past couple of decades in what are now commonly called the “neural correlates of consciousness”—the brain states corresponding to subjective experiences—directly fulfills Wilson’s oft-expressed wish for a widespread cultural recognition of our real epistemological predicament vis-à-vis the neural basis of all our knowledge, which, he maintained, is an aggregation of impressionistic takes on a wildly rich and diverse primary reality by a multiplicity of nervous systems that experience fundamentally different worlds because they are “tuned” to different experiential wavelengths. For Wilson, as well as for Leary and Crowley, the matter of creative inspiration and the question of its neurological component were inseparable. So I think it was writing about these three men and their experiences of perceived supernatural or preternatural guidance and communication that originally ignited my interest in this topic.

Consider the whole inquiry a sustained thought experiment, if you like, an attempt to pursue a line of thought in search of an answer to a question that—note well—may ultimately be unanswerable. It may even be inaptly posed. The real value may lie not in any hard and fast answer to be gained, but in the mere fact of the investigation itself, in the sparks of interesting ideas that fly up from this flame to singe our faces with provocative intimations of new angles on the mysterious other to whom we are subjectively joined in our inner lives and creative pursuits.

To restate, what I am basically asking here is 1) whether and where the muse experience might be located in the brain, and 2) how researching and thinking about this might contribute to our understanding of what this experience of muse-like inspiration “really is.” There is also 3) the question of how, if at all, such perspective might provide us with practical and/or philosophical enhancements to our creative lives.

Several possibilities for a biological seat of the muse in the brain commend themselves immediately to our attention. Some of them involve the new knowledge made available to us by the two technologies propelling today’s functional neuroimaging wave, positron emission tomography (PET) scans and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Others hail from different lines of inquiry. Collectively, they provide multiple “lenses” through which to focus our question and gain a multipoint perspective on it.

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THIRD EYES AND ALIEN ENTITIES: The Mystery of DMT and the Pineal Gland

1. The mind’s eye

The first biological/neurological lens we will employ is the pineal gland, a pea-sized structure located deep within the brain that was determined in the mid-twentieth century to help regulate our circadian sleep/wake cycle by secreting melatonin. Prior to that, nobody knew what it really did, but speculation ran rampant for more than two millennia. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek physician Herophilus examined the pineal while dissecting corpses and speculated that it was involved in the functioning of the soul. Two thousand years later, the 17th-century philosopher Descartes famously declared it “the seat of the soul,” the physical point where mind and matter are joined together, and from whence the former exercises control over the latter.2

Two centuries after that, the first real scientific findings about the pineal gland’s nature and function had the ironic effect of providing fuel for further mystical and metaphysical speculation. Based on the observation that we share this organ with other animals, including not just mammals but creatures of an older evolutionary age, such as amphibians and lizards, whose pineal gland is linked to a functional third eye called the dorsal or parietal eye (located on top of the head between the two main eyes), several scientists in the late nineteenth century began to conjecture that the human pineal gland is a vestigial dorsal eye or third eye of its own, a relic of our phylogenetic history. This was immediately pounced upon by esoteric philosophers, including, most notably, Madame Blavatsky, the formidable head of the Theosophical movement, who declared that it provided scientific evidence of the reality of the mystical third eye or “Eye of Shiva.”

Today the idea of the pineal gland as a vestigial eye is an accepted part of evolutionary biology, even as it has also become almost universally embraced among occult and esoteric thinkers for its spiritual third-eye resonance. Witness this typical passage from a 2003 publication by the Theosophical Society:

The mind and senses are paths for occult energies that work through various psychophysical centers or chakras, among the highest of which is the pineal gland. These centers continue to develop as we evolve towards spirit. So while the third eye or pineal gland has certain physiological activities in conjunction with the pituitary gland—together they regulate the rhythms of metabolism and growth—it is also the physical organ of intuition, inspiration, spiritual vision, and divine thought.3

On a less mystical but no less philosophically and emotionally evocative note, the renowned twentieth-century French writer George Batailles famously thought that, in the words of the American philosopher David Farrell Krell,

the cardinal phylogenetic fact in the development of the human species…is its vestigial unpaired eye....Both sense organ and gland, both harbinger of light and remnant of inner darkness, the pineal eye is for Bataille the birthmark of human futility and fatality. It is the fleshy symbol of a hapless, hopeless struggle against animality and the earth, of a vain attempt to reach the heights of the open sky.4

So what is it about this ostensibly unassuming component of the human endocrine system that has inspired such interest and speculation? The clinical research psychiatrist Rick Strassman explains the matter concisely in his groundbreaking book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. As it turns out, one thing that draws attention to the pineal gland is the simple fact of its anatomical singularity in the human brain, the unpaired quality that Bataille referred to:

The pineal gland is unique in its solitary status within the brain. All other brain sites are paired, meaning they have left and right counterparts; for example, there are left and right frontal lobes and left and right temporal lobes. As the only unpaired organ deep within the brain, the pineal gland remained an anatomical curiosity for nearly two thousand years. No one in the West had any idea what its function was.5

Endocrinologist and chronobiologist Josephine Arendt gets at the same thing when she begins her Melatonin and the Mammalian Pineal Gland by referring rather lyrically to “the pineal gland, the mysterious unpaired organ of the brain, the ‘third eye’, the seat of the soul, a ‘calcified vestigial organ with no function’, subject of medical jokes.”6 The New World Encyclopedia likewise conveys much the same point: “The pineal gland was the last endocrine gland to have its function discovered. This combination led to its being a ‘mystery’ gland with myth, superstition, and even metaphysical theories surrounding its perceived function.”7

2. The spirit molecule

Most pointedly for our own specific interests, in the 1990s the pineal gland was implicated in fascinating research involving the psychedelic substance DMT and its tendency to produce experiences of being visited by angels, demons, aliens, and other paranormal presences with a distinct first-cousin relationship to the muse, daimon, and genius. This research was conducted by the aforementioned Rick Strassman. Beginning in 1990, Strassman conducted the first DEA-approved research into the effects of psychedelics on test subjects in over two decades. He then wrote DMT: The Spirit Molecule, published in 2001, from his findings and reflections.

In the book he describes how the deep origins of the project involved both the pineal gland and the question of creativity. He was an undergraduate at Stanford when he was alerted to the possible spiritual significance of the pineal by the pioneering transpersonal psychologist James Fadiman, who explained to Strassman that one of his jobs was to help engineers learn to think creatively. “Little did I know,” writes Strassman,

that Jim had worked with Willis Harman, who was administering psychedelic drugs in an attempt to enhance creativity, at a nearby research institute. The published results of this work, over thirty years old, remains [sic] the only such data in the literature and showed great potential for stimulating the creative process.8

For Strassman, this all ignited an enduring interest in the pineal gland, and he approached his later DMT research under the guiding hypothesis, based on highly suggestive but inconclusive biochemical evidence, that DMT, which is produced endogenously—that is, naturally, internally—by the human body, and which can also be found throughout nature in plants and animals of all kinds, occurs with a particularly psychoactive relevance in the pineal gland, from whence it is responsible for spiritual and mystical experiences like those seen in religious visions, enlightenment experiences, and near-death experiences. In other words, he hypothesized that the pineal gland is the “spirit gland,” the biological locus of spiritual experience. The resonance of this idea with the long-enduring “third eye” notion is obvious.

Strassman’s research consisted of injecting sixty volunteers with DMT and carefully documenting the results. One of the most common reports to emerge from these sessions was the experience of being subjectively propelled into what felt like other-dimensional encounters with independent, objectively existing “others,” entities that appeared variously as clowns, elves, aliens, angels, demons, robots, and insectoid creatures. These beings wanted to interact, communicate, and sometimes even assault the experiencer.

Both Strassman’s descriptions of these phenomena and those of his research subjects, who not only conversed with him during and after their DMT sessions but composed written accounts of their experiences, are replete with tantalizing hints of muse-like elements. “[M]ost curiously,” Strassman writes,

there was a feeling of “the other” somewhere within the hallucinatory world to which this remarkable psychedelic allowed them entrance....Beyond their own loss of control, some volunteers felt another “intelligence” or “force” directing their minds in an interactive manner. This was especially common in cases of contact with “beings”....Also surprising were the common themes of what these beings were doing with so many of our volunteers: manipulating, communicating, showing, helping, questioning. It was definitely a two-way street.9

In a follow-up conversation with Strassman about the long-term effect of the sessions, a volunteer named Aaron said, “I’ve found that the DMT experience intensified verbal, visual, and musical abilities.” A volunteer named Rex said, “I’ve had more creative urges, and I’ve been writing more....I have written some poems of the Other. Many were written before, but some after getting started in the study.” Perhaps most pointedly, a volunteer named Nils said his first experience with DMT, which occurred a year before he got involved with Strassman’s research, produced a remarkably muse-like effect: “I became very excited as an inner voice spoke to me. This was my intuition directly relating to me. It was the most intense experience of my life.”10

It is obviously only a short step, if indeed it’s a step at all, from the experiences described here to the related experience of communication with an inspiring and motivating daimon, muse, or genius, which similarly arrives from an invisible “hyperspace” and feels like an autonomous, ego-alien force or presence that pushes, pulls, or otherwise influences a person’s actions and affect.

3. The divine channel

Back when I was first learning about all of these things in the aughts and 2010’s, I read Strassman’s book and came away hungry for more information about his thoughts on the relationship between the DMT experience and creative inspiration. So I wrote to him. This was in June of 2011, and I was pleased to find him quite accessible and willing to answer my questions.

When I asked him about any experiences with a specifically muse-like presence that emerged from his research, he told me that none of his test subjects encountered “a specific entity that said ‘do this’ or ‘do that,’ although people felt inspired, either over the short or long term, to effect changes in their creative lives.” He said that when he performed some informal follow-up interviews with a few test subjects for the 2010 documentary film that was made from his book, some of them did describe “changes of interest” that indicated a kind of creative leading:

For example, someone began writing fiction based upon her experiences, which had led her to Peru and an investigation of some of the ayahuasca culture there. Someone else, a physician, changed specialties from family practice to a more obstetrics based practice because of some of his visions on DMT.  Another volunteer was inspired to begin training as a body-therapist, but I don’t know if she followed-up in that regard.

He also described a creative impact on his own life and work: “Indirectly, my path changed course, as I’m less interested in the biology now than I used to be, and more interested in the spiritual meaning/message of the DMT effects.”

Of particular significance for our present consideration of the pineal gland in relation to the muse is a new focus that entered Strassman’s thought subsequent to his seminal DMT research project: the relationship between the DMT experience and the state of consciousness that produced the Hebrew Bible. Like the Christian New Testament, the Hebrew scriptural texts are commonly described as “inspired,” referring not only to their content but to their mode of origin. And whereas in DMT: The Spirit Molecule Strassman drew on ideas from theoretical physics, Buddhism, and shamanism to speculate about the nature and meaning of DMT realms and entities, when I spoke to him in 2011 he said he was inclined to think that “the Old Testament model of prophetic states seems like a good one to explicate the DMT effect,” since these states “resemble, to a certain degree, DMT effects, suggesting a common underlying biology.” He was at that time writing a book on this subject. As he described it to me, his focus was mainly on the possible value of this insight for gaining a better interpretive and even experiential grasp on the Hebrew scriptures: “Since the prophetic state inspired the Old Testament text, this overlapping biology may suggest that psychedelic states, to the extent they resemble prophetic ones, could facilitate a deeper resonance with the text.”

Strassman’s book was published in 2014 as DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible. Receiving praise from the likes of Jeffrey Kripal and James Fadiman, it presented, as Strassman announced in the introduction, “a new scientific model for spiritual experience that bridges the Hebrew Bible and contemporary psychiatry.”11 Cleverly inverting the trendy modern term “neurotheology,” Strassman called his model “theoneurology,” explaining that whereas “neurotheology proposes that the brain generates spiritual experience…the theoneurological approach asserts instead that the brain is the agent through which God communicates with humans.”12 Clearly, this notion has significant resonances with our purpose at hand—which, again, is to investigate the speculative idea that perhaps the pineal gland, by means of endogenous DMT, is a biological locus of the muse, the experience of inspired creativity.

4. The unresolved enigma

In the interest of factual accuracy, it’s important to remember that the pineal gland’s production of DMT is still awaiting experimental proof or disproof, although Strassman told me that recent evidence—recent as of my conversation with him in 2011, that is—continues to suggest the distinct possibility that it really does happen.13 Today, thirteen years after he said that, the situation remains essentially unchanged, with research continuing to produce provocatively suggestive but maddeningly inconclusive results.14 However, if Strassman’s pineal-DMT idea should prove to be true, this would strongly implicate the pineal gland in the muse experience.

This is especially so in the context of things like psychologist Benny Shanon’s description of the creativity-enhancing effects of DMT, which he witnessed and personally experienced in conjunction with ayahuasca. The visionary state brought about by ayahuasca is, he says, “a time of grace during which ordinary human beings can…be like dancers or musicians when the Muses descend upon them.”15 In his book Antipodes of the Mind, Shanon describes a state of muse-like empowerment that came upon him once when he drank ayahuasca and played the piano:

In an amateur fashion, I have been playing the piano since childhood. I have played only classical music, always from the score, never improvising. . . . Once during a private Ayahuasca session, I saw the piano in front of me. A score of a Bach prelude was there. I played the piece repeatedly and felt I was entering into a trance. Then, I left the score aside and began to improvise. I played for more than an hour, and the manner of my playing was different from anything I have ever experienced. It was executed in one unfaltering flow, constituting an ongoing narration that was composed as it was being executed. It appeared that my fingers just knew where to go. Throughout this act, my technical performance astounded me. At times, I felt that a force was upon me and that I was performing at its command.16

Shanon says a friend who witnessed this performance later said it truly seemed as if he had been infused with the power of the muses.

One may of course argue that this serves not as evidence of the pineal gland’s muse-like function, or of anything else, for that matter, other than the psychological and psychedelic effects of ingesting a DMT-laden substance. But again, if Strassman’s hypothesis is true, and the pineal gland does produce DMT that becomes psychoactive at certain life junctures, then the connection is drawn.

To summarize: The deep source of creativity truly feels to the ego like an independent and autonomous intelligence, force, or presence. Since the pineal gland may be centrally involved in the production of entity encounters, dreams, visions, and other experiences that display the same quality of intra-psychic autonomy as, and that stand as first cousins to, the muse experience, and since psychedelics in general, including DMT, are so deeply associated with the stimulation of creativity, the pineal gland is worth considering as a possible biological locus of the muse.17

NEXT TIME: In the next entry in this series, I will delve into the life and thought of the late British psychologist, author, and paranormal theorist Stan Gooch, who famously developed a theory that located the human visionary unconscious, which Gooch held to be responsible for such things as dreams, paranormal phenomena, and creativity, in the cerebellum, the “second brain” that we all carry in the back of our head.

Warm regards,

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Dear Living Dark reader,

1. Having a system in place—and more importantly, an abiding, disciplined intention—to capture fleeting ideas whenever they arrive can be immensely powerful and helpful, and even necessary. HOWEVER,

2. you can also trust that if an idea is meant to be realized, it will come back persistently over time.

This dual understanding has been a part of my philosophical and practical approach to creativity, encompassing both my writing and my music, for many years. I mention it today because it was brought to mind again by a recent Substack Note from containing a quotation from Naval Ravikant:

“Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.” This is a forthright statement of one end of a dual or dialectical truth. And it’s one with ample support in both our own individual experience and that of prominent writers and artists who have testified to its truth. At the same time, the complementary proposition—that inspiration is instead persistent— has equal support and deserves an equal hearing.

For illustration, I ask you to consider the respective and combined cases of William Burroughs, Tom Waits, Billy Joel, and Ray Bradbury, all jostling up against each other, and all leading toward a convergence and synthesis of ostensible opposites.

William Burroughs: A glimpse may never come again

In a key passage in The Retreat Diaries, Burroughs avers that whereas craftspeople such as carpenters are able to do their work anytime,

a writer has to take it when it comes and a glimpse once lost may never come again, like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Writers don’t write, they read and transcribe. They are only allowed access to the books at certain arbitrary times. They have to make the most of these occasions.1

Burroughs said this in connection with a disagreement that he had had with Chögyam Trungpa about the allowability of bringing a typewriter to a meditation retreat. His point resonates warmly and energetically with me, and maybe also with you. Yes, my sensibility says, I need to ensure that I am always ready and prepared to record the promptings of my daemon muse whenever it speaks.

Tom Waits: Ask your muse to come back later

But then, I am also equally charmed by and in agreement with the story of Tom Waits and his relationship to the muse, which makes the exact opposite point. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s well-known telling of the story, Waits

was driving down the freeway one day in Los Angeles, and he heard a little tiny trace of a beautiful melody, and he panicked because he didn’t have his waterproof paper, and he didn’t have his tape recorder, and he didn’t have a pen, he didn’t have a pencil. He had no way to get it. And he thought, “How am I going to catch this song?” And he started to have all that old panic and anxiety that artists have about feeling like you’re going to miss something. And then he just slowed down, and he looked up at the sky, and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist, come back and see me in the studio. I spend six hours a day there, you know where to find me, at my piano. Otherwise, go bother somebody else.”2

Again, my sensibility says, “Yes, exactly. That’s just how it is.” I have genuinely benefited in my own creative work from taking the very tack that Waits and Gilbert describe, from trusting that when a creative idea comes to me at an inconvenient moment, I can consciously place responsibility for preserving it on my daemon muse and then return with confidence at a later moment to find it still waiting and available. I would be willing to bet that you have noticed this in your own work as well, or at least that it strikes you with a resonant sense of encouraging rightness.

Billy Joel: Write it down now

But suddenly another story, a contradictory one that goes back to support the Burroughs approach, comes to mind:

Years ago I heard Billy Joel say in an interview that once when he was walking down a city street, he received an idea for a new melody, and he realized he was in danger of losing it because he had no way to play it, write it down, or otherwise actualize it and save it from oblivion. Looking around in a panic, he saw with surprised delight that he was right near a piano store. So he ran inside and rushed to a piano, where he picked out the melody on the keyboard.

I don’t remember the source of this story, the exact interview where Joel said it. But he said something similar in a 2023 radio interview when he was asked about where his songs come from:

A lot of it happens in dreams. You wake up in the morning [and think], “What was that thing I was dreaming? It was really powerful. It was really good.” And you try to recollect it. Sometimes you can’t, and it’ll drive you crazy. Like “Just the Way You Are.” I dreamed it, and then I forgot it. And it was driving me nuts for weeks. And then one day I was in the middle of a meeting, and it reoccurred to me, and I said, “I got to leave right now. I gotta write this down.” And I’m running home [saying to myself], “Don’t go crazy, don’t forget this.” You know, any kind of words I could think of to just keep the melody in my head.3

Ray Bradbury: The muse, though neglected, persists

But now here comes Ray Bradbury, playing for Team Waits (or did Waits play for Team Bradbury?) as he describes the origin of The Martian Chronicles and explains how it taught him to trust the sometimes long and subtle arc-across-time of the muse’s transmission. In fact, his experience with this seminal book—seminal both for him as a writer and for science fiction and literary culture at large—taught him the very reality of the muse:

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Alan Watts ends the first chapter of his classic The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are—which is about seeing through the illusion of being an isolated ego that’s separate from the universe—by beautifully addressing what some might see as a contradiction in his act of writing such a book at all.

On the one hand, he says, the book contains “no sermons, no shoulds and oughts.” This is because

on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated Self....[I]t is not impossible that the play of the Self will be to remain unawakened in most of its human disguises.1

But on the other hand, he is indeed writing a book about seeing through the illusion of the ego. So why, then, is he even writing on this topic if it’s not in the spirit of an “ought”? Watts addresses this question head-on, and he does so in a way that has wider implications than just the matter of his book, for his words lift the veil on why any of us are doing anything at all.

The motive he describes for his activity of writing and teaching is actually the real motive behind all the respective appearances of motion and activity in these wave formations that we call “our lives” and “ourselves”:

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Consider this a micro-post. It’s something that surfaced today during the very early hours when, as sometimes happens, my regular morning act of sitting in meditation for half an hour or so was replaced by the spontaneous decision to extend my private reading and writing time. I was reading and annotating a book—The Awareness of Self-Discovery, by the late American spiritual teacher/writer William Samuels—and was focused on this passage from a personal letter that Samuels wrote to a friend and inquirer on the subject of not being disturbed by appearances and the shapes they assume, since you and I are the absolute Being and Awareness in which they all arise:

We do not do away with the images we do not like: we do not alter them to fit a prescribed picture....We see them as they are—just sights being sights.

Every form is Isness being form, Isness is the value—not the image-form out there! So we learn to stand before every picture nmoved, our equanimity undisturbe…

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Dear Living Dark reader,

My focus here has always been double, encompassing both creativity and the daemon muse on the one hand and nonduality and self-realization on the other, with a theme of cosmic dread or horror winding its way through. Today’s post is, on the surface, located wholly within the spiritual wing. But I think it also includes the others, even if only implicitly. I say this simply to set the tone.

I was reading a recent essay by the spiritual/nondual writer and teacher in her wonderful newsletter Right Now, Just As It Is, and it was about the question of why bad things happen, and she was saying typically insightful things like:

We lack the sensitivity, awareness, insight or ability to do any better than we are doing in any given moment. As we become more sensitive and aware, and as we learn more about ourselves and the world at large, more possibilities open up. The person who is running a factory farm and who cannot yet see that the animals being tortured there are sentient beings, or the person who is compulsively driven to commit serial rape or murder, or to get drunk every night and fly into violent rages and beat their wife or their dog, such a person is not yet able to do otherwise. But at some point, perhaps this will change. That possibility is there in humans. Whether the conditions will arise in which such a change might happen, we don’t know. But the potential is there.

And she was also saying things like:

In recognizing that everything is a movement of an indivisible and seamless whole that cannot in this moment be otherwise than it is, perhaps we can get beyond blame and guilt and see the whole picture with greater understanding and compassion. Otherwise we just perpetuate the cycle of violence, conflict, blame and retribution.

The awakened perspective doesn’t mean doing nothing about the serial killer, the child abuser or the genocidal dictator, but the response will be very different if the choiceless nature of their actions is understood. We will still do everything we can to stop them from harming people, but it won’t come from the mistaken idea that they acted out of free will or that they are evil.

She concluded with three quotations, one from the meditation/Zen teacher Toni Packer, another from Leonard Cohen, and another from Zen teacher Norman Fischer. And the latter two, in combination with Tollifson’s astute and sensitive handling of her topic, blew some doors open in my mind and elicited some vivid memories from my youth, when the secret of suffering and its self-generated nature—the way we ourselves create it, and also abolish it—was seeded in me through some serendipitous encounters with books at an age of heightened susceptibility.

This trip down memory lane was abetted by my urge to track down the source of these quotes. I investigated the one from Cohen and found it’s from a 1994 interview in Shambhala Sun—the Buddhist magazine later renamed Lion’s Roar—titled “Leonard Cohen: The Other Side of Waiting.” Here is the portion Tollifson quoted, in which Cohen described what he called “the wisdom of no exit,” a perspective of critical importance at times when life’s pain, complications, and difficulties seem amplified to the point of being intolerable:

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you're stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

“The consolation of no exit.” That really rang my bell.

The Fischer quote, for its part, emphasized that pain and difficulty really are pain and difficulty, and that meditative or spiritual practice is not about escaping them through some kind of transcendence, but about acknowledging them, accepting them, and even embracing them:

Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent.  It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is—even the suffering, even the difficulty.  So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its pain. We don’t say, “That’s not pain.”  It is pain.  You don’t say, “It’s not difficulty.”  It is difficult. But when we embrace the difficulty … we see this is exactly the difficulty we need, and this difficulty is the most beautiful and poignant thing in this world.

I tracked this down and found that it represents words Fischer spoke in a 2006 dharma seminar on the Genjokoan, the famous essay on spiritual practice and realization by the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen. The transcript also shows Fischer saying evocative and beautiful things like this:

We return to the human world as it really is, with all of its strife and suffering, and our own human problems, as they really are. We don’t think that somehow our spiritual practice is going to make us immune and transcendent and above it all. We’re right down there with what we have to deal with, and we know that it's sad and tragic and difficult. Blossoms fall. They don't last forever. But when blossoms fall, it’s beautiful. And weeds grow. They get in the way. They choke off the other plants. But weeds are life; weeds are beautiful.

And it was really all of this together, Fischer’s words, plus Cohen’s, plus Tollifson’s, plus my browsing through the source texts of the first two, that blew open those inner doors and sent a flood of memories and associations cascading through my mind.

In one of them, I am sitting at one of the reading tables in the high school library in my rural hometown in the Missouri Ozarks. The year is 1988, and I am 17 years old, a high school senior who is looking directly ahead, life-wise, at the major transitional experience of graduating and leaving home for the first time. At the moment, on that particular school day, I am in between classes and stopping by the library—always my favorite part of the school (or of any building, neighborhood, town, or city)—to catch a moment’s peace amid the beloved shelves of books with their delicious atmosphere of whispered wisdom and pleasure, which they seem to all but emit from their covers and pages like an invisible mist of tantalizing promise and comforting presence. A month or so earlier, I had read Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull in my modern literature class, taught by Mrs. Ellis, who teaches all of the school’s college-prep English classes. That one quite exhilarated me with its fast-moving tale of a singularly motivated seagull and his quest for perfection of flight that unexpectedly edges over into a quest for enlightenment. Now, during this stolen moment in the library in the middle of my daily class schedule, I am reading the paperback edition of Bach’s follow-up book, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, and am finding it even more exhilarating than the other. Maybe it helps, maybe the effect is heightened, by the fact that I am reading this one at a doubly liminal moment, suspended not only between classes but between entire life eras, momentarily parked at the threshold between youth and adulthood, and filled with a mingled emotion of excitement and anxiety that infuses my experience of Bach’s book with a deeply personal quality and becomes effectively inseparable from it.

And right there on the page before my eyes, in the middle of the book’s lovely, absorbing, semi-autobiographical, highly fictionalized and fantasized story of Bach’s encounter in the American Midwest of the 1970s with an authentic spiritual master, someone who knows how reality works and can therefore perform miracles, the following words leap out and grab me, as Bach’s messiah, a charismatic loner named Don Shimoda, explains how the lives we think we lead are essentially illusions, like movies, and that our suffering is ultimately unreal:

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Dear Living Dark reader,

Two of the most deeply felt fascinations that have gripped me over the years—and they’re honestly not just fascinations but full-blown obsessions, the chief orienting points of my life—are the matters of spiritual awakening and purpose or calling. You could also call them nonduality (finding out who I really am and what the world really is) and the daimon (understanding the specific energy that moves me, my reason for being, what I am supposed to be doing with the life experience that I have been handed). Obviously, these two are not unrelated. In fact, as I have cultivated a deepened understanding of them over time, it has become apparent that they are not two, but one. They are different aspects of the same thing.

Last week as I was doing some meditative early morning reading, I came across a line in a book that illuminates this matter as well as anything I have ever read. The book was Full Stop! The Gateway to Present Perfection by the nondual writer and teacher John Wheeler. The chapter was titled “Non-Duality and Social Reform.” It presented a dialogue between Wheeler and one of his readers/students. The latter expressed a fear of losing interest in the world and arriving at a state of total demotivation if the nondual understanding were really to sink in. On the one hand, the person said he/she felt a desire to work for increased personal and societal spiritual awareness, saying, “I want to write and create art that pushes the envelope, ruffles feathers or even simply offers simple truth in the service of cultural evolution.” On the other hand, this desire was accompanied by the fear that experiencing nondual awareness—the realization that the common notion of being a separate self in an objective world of multiplicity is just a kind of mirage or projection, and that your real identity is the awake spaciousness of absolute Being itself—would undercut the creative desire and produce a state of becalmed apathy and detachment.

This resonated deeply with me, as it echoed things that I myself have considered, mulled over, and written about. The question is compelling: What truly is the relationship between nonduality and the daimon? Is there an inherent antagonism between waking up and remaining active in the world, if waking up reveals the non-existence of the self that one has cherished and identified with? Does spiritual insight entail worldly quietism and relinquishment of creative drive, an automatic dampening of the daimon muse?

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“What we hope for is to proceed from the known to the known. We are not enthused about abandoning the known and engaging the unknown.”

These words from the late nondual writer Robert Wolfe about spiritual awakening (in Living Nonduality, Ojai: Karina Library, 2009, 325) apply equally to writers. Our default comfort zone is to feel as if we know what we’re doing when we start putting words on the page. We commonly assume that the order of progression for producing a completed work is something like this:

1. Have an idea.

2. Start writing.

3. Develop the idea in the direction that you imagined and expected when you began.

4. Write “THE END.”

5. Experience a fulfilling sense of creative accomplishment. And maybe receive some money.

As anyone who has gone at this writing thing for any appreciable length of time can tell you, that assumed approach reveals itself as pure fantasy at a frequency of somewhere between ninety-nine and one hundred percent of the time. In fact, what it envisions is pretty much the obverse of how writing really works. We only maintain the fantasy because it provides a comforting illusion of knowledge and control. The actual creative process is much more convoluted, obscure, and mysterious.

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Dear Living Dark reader,

For years I have been witness to extended philosophical and spiritual dialogues unfolding in my thoughts. These are mostly or, on occasion, wholly spontaneous. That is, they drive themselves. I don’t so much compose or articulate them as observe them, like an eavesdropper listening in on someone else’s conversation. Sometimes there is an external stimulus that sparks one of these conversations, something that I have seen, heard, or read that kick-starts my internal dialogic engine. At other times the reasons are more obscure. A mental voice starts speaking, another answers, and almost before I know it, they have taken positions and are debating vigorously.

And sometimes—perhaps the most interesting times—one of these private mental dialogues emerges into the outer world of my interpersonal relationships to manifest as a conversation with someone else. This happened recently in connection with the subject of demonic possession and the question of the competing accounts of it that have been offered by psychiatry and psychology as versus religion and spirituality. I share the following account of the matter here, with you, for whatever interest it may carry, both the sheer fact of it and its actual content.

Madhouses and possessed souls

To begin with, here is the proximate cause of the whole thing: a passage from Huston Smith’s Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions that I shared last month on social media, both Substack Notes and X/Twitter. I prefaced it with the following descriptive note:

“Huston Smith—arguably the most widely respected English-language scholar of religion in the latter 20th and early 21st centuries—on demonic possession, including the possibility that modernity’s mass madness has camouflaged it.”

The passage runs as follows:

Mindful of the psychic plane and the way the human is lodged within it, traditional societies tend to regard the insane with a species of awe and respect, seeing them as caught in psychic vortices that work at cross-purposes to ours while possessing something of the autonomy and coherence that ours exhibit. Our madhouses, too, may contain souls that are ravaged by principalities and powers on the psychic plane; in a word, possessed. The phenomenal response to a recent film, The Exorcist, shows that our unconscious minds remain open to this notion, but current psychiatric theory is . . . opposed to it. . . .

[C]lear cases [of possession] appear to be less common today than in the past. This may be due in part to the fact that persons tend to be receptive to what they believe—Freudians have a disproportionate number of Freudian dreams—and possession does not square with the modern scientific outlook, but there is a supplementing possibility. With genocides and the use of nuclear weapons to mash entire countrysides, the demonic may now be so diffused on the terrestrial plane that it has no need, one almost says no time, to put in many “personal appearances” in single individuals.

(Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, New York: HarperCollins: 1992, 43, 43n11).

I’ll pause here to say a bit more about this book and its author. As I already said, Smith, who died in 2016 at the age of 97, was one of the most widely respected religion scholars of the past century. Though he is probably most known for his book The World’s Religions (originally published in 1958 as The Religions of Man), which was for decades the most widely used college introductory textbook on comparative religion, I first came to him when I stumbled across a used copy of his 1982 book Beyond the Post-Modern Mind at a discount bookstore in Branson, Missouri. The year was 1993, I was fresh out of college, and the book set off an internal explosion that unlocked many mental doors and thoroughly transformed my perspective.

After that I progressed to The World’s Religions and Forgotten Truth. Smith described the latter book as a companion to the former: Whereas in The World’s Religions he undertook a detailed examination of multiple world religious traditions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and primal or indigenous religions—and tried to convey to the reader the view and feeling of each one’s perspective “from the inside,” in Forgotten Truth he set out to articulate what he, as an exponent of perennialism, saw as the underlying unity within all such traditions.

My purpose in sharing this biographical, autobiographical, and bibliographical information is simply to deepen the scene. When I publicly posted that passage from Smith, I was sharing the words of someone whose ideas and outlook have profoundly shaped my own intellectual and philosophical furniture.

Paradigms of possession

A number of people who read the post found Smith’s words interesting. Some of them left comments. One commenter in particular took issue with Smith’s point. I replied. A conversation started. It quickly became apparent that this was one of those situations where an outer conversation was manifesting an inner one.

Here is the dialogue that unfolded. Instead of simply pasting the actual words of my external interlocutor, I have massaged and edited them to reflect the tone of his counterpart, my internal dialogue partner. Note that the disagreement arose from a starkly literal reading of Smith’s words, which elicited instant disagreement from this Other Me:

Other Me:

Wait, are you kidding me? Today we know much more about supposed “demonic possession” than pre-scientific people did. We have modern medicine and psychiatry, so we’re able to recognize and understand mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Throughout history, people who suffered from what we today recognize as mental illness were horribly mistreated in the name of religion. They were locked away, punished, and made to suffer through nightmarish “exorcism” rituals. Many were killed. Huston Smith may have been a brilliant religion scholar, but his fatuous comments about exorcism are an example of what happens when otherwise intelligent and educated people stray from their lanes and try to talk about matters where they’re ignorant.

Me:

Actually, present-day psychiatry and its conceptual world with its formal diagnostic categories represents just another interpretive lens to apply to the total field of phenomena as given, no less than religion and its associated field of scholarly reflection and inquiry.

Other Me:

What? That’s just an evasion. What we’re talking about is more than a simple matter of considering different viewpoints. The crucial factor is evidence. When we talk about mental health disorders like schizophrenia, there’s a wealth of scientific, concrete proof out there. A mental illness is really real, regardless of whether some people choose to “believe” in it or not. Remember Occam’s razor. Simplicity is usually the key to understanding complex things.

Me:

Okay, let’s talk about evidence. What are the assumptions or philosophical axioms that determine what counts as “evidence” for a given claim or belief? What is the ultimate warrant for a self-contained system of seeing and interpreting that both adduces evidence from the total field of phenomena and provides rules for how to interpret and understand it?

In the case of what have traditionally been regarded as possession phenomena, at what point in history was it “discovered” that these phenomena have an entirely different and, as it happens, mutually exclusive explanation from the religious one? What is the basis on which to argue for the truth of the naturalistic/materialistic paradigm of modern psychiatry over the supernatural (for lack of a better word) outlook of religion?

Regarding Occam’s razor, what underlying principles determine what counts as simplicity in a given situation? The principle of parsimony rests on prior assumptions about reality that determine what seems simple and what seems complex. The direction that will result from applying it to a given question or situation depends on those starting assumptions.

Other Me:

You’re just complicating things and putting up a smoke screen. This isn’t rocket science. As I said, it’s all about evidence. We’ve got concrete scientific evidence supporting the reality of disorders like schizophrenia, whose symptoms might strike some people as a bit like “possession.” Shift the frame and think of it this way: If you came down with COVID-19, would you go to an exorcist? Or would you choose a medical doctor? The answer is clear. This all boils down to real, practical choices in the world.

Me:

It’s critically important to understand that “evidence,” and what counts as it, is the very thing that’s called into question when we really start to grok how this all works. Scientific evidence, for instance, doesn’t exist outside a philosophical scheme called “science.” Nothing in science or any other philosophical scheme was ever “discovered” outside the framework of that scheme itself. When modern science arose in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the same observed phenomena that had always been around in human experience, and that had usually been labeled and interpreted in terms of “possession,” were subjected to a different interpretation, that’s all. Nobody “discovered” that spirits are false and that the outward behaviors and subjective experiences that had traditionally been ascribed to them are due instead to other—to purely material/biological—causes. Instead, a different frame of reference subsumed the interpretation and understanding of these things—and not just of possession, but of everything else—for the newly dominant intellectual culture.

No phenomenon, no fact, no unit or collection of observed data, ever compelled anyone to understand this or anything else in medical, spiritual, natural, supernatural, or any other terms. Rather, the universe of observed phenomena presents itself neutrally, so to speak, without any assigned labels, and we through our sense-making efforts divide it into discrete chunks and assign interpretive and interpreted understandings to it. Our very words and concepts thus “create” our world. Schizophrenia didn’t exist until it was named. Nor did possession. Prior to the names, there was just a set of uninterpreted phenomena. It still exists today, outside the conceptual cages.

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