Creative Purpose in the Age of Apocalypse

A monastic option for a collapsing culture. The conclusion to my forthcoming book "Writing at the Wellspring."

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 conclusion to Writing at the Wellspring. 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 conclusion—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, finding its culmination in the conclusion.

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 conclusion I now share with you.

Warm regards,

Creative Purpose in the Age of Apocalypse

The conclusion to 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 conclusion, 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 in the conclusion. That moment has now arrived.