A Dialogue on Divining Your Daemon

Chapter Four of my currently unpublished book 'Writing at the Wellspring'

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online course bearing that same title as the book over at Weirdosphere, where seventy students have access to the full unpublished manuscript.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: