Cosmic Horror as Spiritual Practice
The unsettling doorway of nonduality
Dear Living Dark reader,
Here’s the briefest of thoughts for today, which I feel moved for some reason to share with you on this cold, dark, rainy, and very early November morning in rural Arkansas. It arose as I was pursuing a line of interest into the works of Nisargadatta Maharaj, the great twentieth-century Indian guru of nondualism whose recorded words have been keenly importance to me ever since I was fortunate enough to have stumbled across them in the 1990s during my mid-twenties.
In Nisargadatta’s last book of recorded talks, 1994’s Consciousness and the Absolute, the very first page contains a statement by him to a questioner that demonstrates, illustrates, and conveys, to a tremendous degree, the resonance that I have always felt between nondual utterances of the purest variety and the core outlook, mood, and worldview of the purest kind of weird fiction as exemplified in the works of Ligotti and others:
“You are an illusion, Maya, an imagination. It is only because I know that I’m unreal that I know you also are unreal. It is not like this: Because I am real you are unreal. It is like this: Because I am unreal, everything is unreal.”
For context, this is part of a wider response from Nisargadatta to a questioner who has asked him how a jnani (a Sanskrit word meaning someone who has attained higher knowledge or enlightenment) sees the world. The statement above comes after Nisargadatta has drawn the questioner’s attention to the unreality of the sense of “I” and the way the recognition of this unreality automatically points to an identity beyond the transient, role-playing ego: “The moment the ‘I’ is proven as unreal, who is it who knows that the ‘I’ is unreal? This knowledge within you that knows the ‘I’ is unreal, that knowledge which knows change, must itself be changeless, permanent.”
The exchange as recorded ends with Nisargadatta telling the questioner, who appears to be struggling to reconcile the notion of enlightenment with a desire to act and work in the world, “A doubt has arisen and you are trying to find the solution, but who is it that has this doubt? Find out for yourself.”1
Those who have spent time dwelling deeply in worlds and visions of the weird fictional and philosophical variety will, perhaps, catch resonances of such statements that might be lost on those who approach them with a sensibility that’s tuned to the more traditional wavelength of the “spiritual seeker.” This isn’t a truer or deeper way of receiving or apprehending them. It’s just one that enters by a different door. Or maybe it allows them to enter you by a different door: the doorway of existential unsettlement, numinous dread, and ontological fear. It’s the spiritual path for those who have felt their sense of self and world to be haunted, undermined, and imminently punctured or overturned by a force, a presence, that shines darkly through surface appearances and calls with the voice of their worst nightmare. It’s the path for those who have glimpsed the unreality of things—the universe, other people, themselves—and found it not hopeful but horrifying.
“Because I am unreal, everything is unreal.” That’s exactly what members of this involuntary sect of unwilling seekers are most afraid of. Never mind that the same recognition dissolves the chains of the heavy separate self and the world with its endless pains and complications, the whole interlocking tangle of competing entities and interests that elaborates itself into an impenetrable prison for those who take it to be the final word. This dream of difference, the tangled realm of the ten thousand things, is preferable, for members of this sect, to the awful abyss of the haunting presence beyond it, which infuses everything with the feeling of a nightmare about to reveal itself.
The fact that, in the end, this presence cannot be escaped because it’s what you, yourself, really are is not lost on these people. They know they are haunted by themselves. They just don’t know what to do about it.
And of course by “they” I mean “we.”
Warm regards,
P.S. If any of this resonates, you’d probably find something of interest in my essay “Initiation by Nightmare: Cosmic Horror and Chapel Perilous.”
P.P.S. The Kindle edition of Writing at the Wellspring is still available for preorder. Publication date, both print and electronic, is December 15.
“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden
Consciousness and the Absolute: The Final Talks of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, ed. Jean Dunn (The Acorn Press, 1994), 1–2.