Reading Notes 2

Post-truth perils, the daemon in your psyche, and nostalgia for the infinite

Anonynmous, The Universal Favorite (Woman on the Moon), c. 1889 (Library of Congress, public domain)

Dear Living Dark reader,

This is the second entry in Reading Notes, the ongoing series of posts in which I track what I’m presently reading, researching, studying, and textually imbibing and enjoying—books, articles, essays, stories—by paraphrasing and labeling core points, quoting especially striking passages, and noting down my brief thoughts, reactions, and reflections. I have always taken notes on my reading. One of the most productively useful aspects of such an activity is the recording of fleeting notions and impressions that might otherwise be lost to the daily flux of mental activity. Another is the self-imposed challenge of processing texts by rearticulating them to myself. But the irreducibly performative nature of writing such notes in public for other people to read serves the added helpful function of keeping me motivated and accountable, especially since in a public post I feel the need to give an effective label or title to each note in order to indicate its content or import.

As always, I hope you find something enjoyable or otherwise worthwhile in these notes. If you feel like commenting on any of them, whether publicly or by emailing me at matt-at-livingdark-dot-net, please don’t hesitate. I will always be interested to hear your thoughts and impressions.

Warm regards,

NOTE 1: In a post-truth world, we’re all in Chapel Perilous

The English writer John Higgs has become one of the most important and enjoyable writers focusing on counterculture ideas and figures such as Robert Anton Wilson and Alan Moore. He has also become an important figure in that scene itself. For example, a few years ago he was instrumental in bringing to fruition the long-developing stage play version of Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger, which was finally performed in London and Liverpool in 2014.

On January 18, 2017—the day that RAW would have turned 85—Higgs published a blog post, “For Robert Anton Wilson's Birthday—Some Words on Operation Mindfix,” that not only offered a tribute to Wilson but tarticulated a critical point about modern culture in a particularly powerful way. It’s a point that has only become more salient in the seven years since. Reading it and reflecting on it can serve as a veritably spiritual exercise in clarifying your vision and understanding of what’s happening in—and to—the culture in which you’re embedded:

It’s stating the obvious, but the vast majority of us are not enjoying this “post-truth” world. It is not so much that the fake news is disturbing. The real gut-kick is when people confidently proclaim that we should return to the pre-post-truth world, and then think about how to do that, and slowly realise that not only is it impossible but that there was no pre-post-truth world in the first place....What has actually changed is that it is no longer possible to comfortably fall for our earlier illusions. As the saying goes, if you want to be certain, buy an encyclopaedia. If you want to be uncertain, buy two encyclopaedias. Our culture has bought a second encyclopaedia.

In his books, and most importantly in his autobiography Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson talks about the psychological state where you have no way of making sense of what is happening, where all your maps have run out, and where you have no fixed point with which to orient yourself by. He called this place Chapel Perilous. This is where we are now as a culture.

NOTE 2: Big Brother in your pocket

I appreciate lucid articulations of the dystopian head fake we’ve pulled on ourselves with the internet and digital tech and the way we’ve chosen to frame and use them. Like this one from Noah Smith’s essay “New Technologies, New Totalitarians,” February 27, 2024:

The internet’s inventors thought it would be a force for human freedom, enabling regular people to speak up from a position of relative privacy without getting government permission or paying large fixed costs. And for a while, in the 1990s and 2000s, that’s more or less how it turned out.

Then two things happened. First, internet users migrated from the Web (where attempts at tracking can be detected and blocked) to apps, which watch and record pretty much everything you do in the app. Second, internet use switched from PCs to smartphones, which are far easier to track in physical space, and far easier to link to a user. Together, these changes turned the internet into a technology for universal surveillance. A sufficiently powerful government can use your phone, and the apps on your phone, to track where you are and what you’re doing at all times.

Big Brother exists, and you put him in your pocket of your own free will.

NOTE 3: Real spiritual authority can’t be quoted

As sometimes (or frequently) happens, I was reading a book during my daily two-hour morning practice of meditation/coffee/reading/writing. The book was nondual teacher John Wheeler’s Full Stop! The Gateway to Present Perfection. I came to a passage that arrested me, and it sparked a chain of associations. And pretty soon, I had put down the book and was tracing my thought process as multiple connected stories and insights about, by, and from other books and writers came to mind. Here’s what it all added up to, beginning with the upshot, whose point is kind of paradoxical in light of the fact that it’s about the fatuousness of quoted authority:

The next time you find yourself confronted by someone who confuses quoting from supposed authorities or experts—or even from scriptures—with having a real spiritual conversation, you could do worse than to consider mentioning the following. Except, maybe, for the fourth one, which might bring down the ceiling.

1) According to Lives of the Saints, in 1273 on the Feast of St. Nicholas, the great Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas

was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.”

When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, ‘I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.’”

Aquinas died three months later.

2) In his classic 1954 book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley criticized “the confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning and the consciousness of having read all the books,” and said:

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when?

Huxley also directly referenced and commented on the Aquinas incident:

Near the end of his life Aquinas experience Infused Contemplation. Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his unfinished book. Compared with this, everything he had read and argued about and written—Aristotle and the Sentences, the Questions, the Propositions, the majestic Summas—was no better than chaff or straw. For most intellectuals such a sit-down strike would be inadvisable, even morally wrong. But the Angelic Doctor had done more systematic reasoning than any twelve ordinary Angels, and was already ripe for death. He had earned the right, in those last months of mortality, to turn away from merely symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of actual and substantial Fact. . . . [T]he man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

3) The apostle Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians—composed two millennia ago, probably in 55 or 56 CE—wrote of the distinction between “the letter and the spirit,” that is, the written words of scripture passed down reverently through time, as contrasted with the living present reality of truth itself. And he offered the following stark assessment:

The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.

4) A strikingly earthy instance of the same basic point about the inadequacy of words and concepts in comparison to the living reality of absolute truth can be found in an apocryphal line from the great twentieth century Indian nondual guru Nisargadatta Maharaj, as recorded in John Wheeler’s Full Stop (which, again, is where this thought train started). According to Wheeler—who was a student of “Sailor” Bob Adamson, who was himself a student of Nisargadatta—near the end of his life Nisargadatta reportedly said:

Forget me and my teachings. Piss on my corpse and throw it in the sea. Look into yourself and all the teachings will spontaneously sprout in your own words.

NOTE 4: On failing to live up to our science fictional future

Recently when I was in Chicago attending the annual meeting of the Higher Learning Commission, which is the institutional accreditor for most colleges and universities in nineteen U.S. states, I heard a speaker in one of the conference sessions quote Isaac Asimov. The words captured me and short-circuited my focus on the session itself, which was about the centrality of civic learning and democratic engagement to all higher ed endeavors. I spent the next few minutes buried in my phone, tracking down the source of this remarkable quote and then reading, rereading, and brooding over it while the session continued to unroll.

In the several weeks since then, I have continued to reflect on and brood over Asimov’s words, which were about the centrality of change in the modern world. I have also found myself considering our collective cultural trajectory during the intervening forty-six years since he wrote them. These years have been filled with and characterized by remarkable change of a type and scope that nobody could have fully predicted or anticipated. And I have found myself thinking that, instead of rising to the challenge of the times as Asimov prophetically prescribed, we are instead sinking under the combined psychological and sociocultural weight of Alvin Toffler’s future shock—a concept that was already culturally pervasive when Asimov said what he said.

And here is what he said, in the foreword to editor Robert Holdstock’s 1978 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be—and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not, or even whether he knows it or not.

When I posted this same quote on Twitter/X, my friend J. F. Martel, co-host of the Weird Studies podcast, astutely and correctly observed, “Brilliant. But recalling the conversation we had years ago on Weird Studies, I’d say that ‘science fictional’ isn’t enough; we need to think about the future fantastically.”

NOTE 5: Desire, aversion, and the death of the old self

When I reflect on the course of my life, including, crucially, its inner flavor, it’s honestly amazing to observe how much of it I spent trying to gain experiences that I deemed desirable while avoiding others that I deemed undesirable. Though this pattern has been self-evident on its own terms, as visible in both my drives and my behaviors, it’s not immaterial to observe that it has also illustrated and even instantiated traditional Eastern wisdom that says the life of suffering and bondage is rooted in our unacknowledged decision to use the paired principles of desire and aversion as our life compass. This pattern likewise illustrates Christian wisdom about the craven self-seekingness of what the apostle Paul called the “natural man” or the “old self.”

What a relief to finally recognize that the common denominator of “I” was the clue to what this sorry search was after all along. Not the egoic “I” of “I want this, I don’t want that,” but the encompassing and enduring substrate of awareness that is the necessary ground or space within which this projected dream experience of being a desiring and fearing self rises and sets, appears and then plays out.

As often happens, John Wheeler—the nondual writer/teacher, not the physicist—articulates the matter with helpful exquisiteness (in Full Stop, mentioned above in Note 3 on real spiritual authority). And he does it in a way that calls out a truth that I saw for myself many times over the years, and that I even wrote about in my journals, but that I failed to recognize for its world-stopping significance:

Once you see what awareness is, you see there is nothing else except awareness. It becomes all-inclusive....

In the end, you are what you are and nothing else. It is a perfectly tautological statement with no real content, but it is the clearest thing one can say. You are not a concept. Yet your presence is perfectly clear and obvious. You are present and aware, but nothing perceivable or conceivable....

The basic fact of experience is that all experience only occurs within awareness. The content is only appearing and disappearing in that....

The focus of attention may generate different experiences, but the being that you are remains constant. Reality is going nowhere and is unchanging. The changing element is the coming and going of interest in the content. This arises from the old perspective of identification with it. So, stay as you are and everything settles down quite easily and naturally. Let the content and experience play naturally. You are what you are, perfect being and clear awareness itself. Experiences are not authentic or inauthentic. They are displays in and on the natural state of your innate being. That is the only natural and authentic “experience.”

NOTE 6: On creative inspiration, the daemon, paranormal phenomena, religion, and the nature of genius

I have been slowly reading my way through The Personality of Man, the 1947 book by the British paranormal/psychical researcher and radio technology pioneer G. N. M. Tyrell. His ruminations on the layered nature of the human psyche and the relationship of the deep self or unconscious mind to such things as creative inspiration, the nature of genius, and paranormal phenomena are quite stimulating. It also helps that his thinking is deeply indebted to Frederic Myers, whom I have always found to be a deeply fascinating figure, and whose work is a cornerstone, though an undersung one, of later thinking about all such matters.

Here are some resonant excerpts from the second chapter of Tyrell’s book, which is titled “Inspiration and Genius.” The thematic titles for each excerpt are my own invention:

On the other-worldly uprush or inrush of inspiration:

It is a highly significant, though generally neglected, fact that those creations of the human mind, which have borne pre-eminently the stamp of originality and greatness, have not come from within the region of consciousness. They have come from beyond consciousness, knocking at its door for admittance: they have flowed into it, sometimes slowly, as if by seepage, but often with a burst of overwhelming power....

How comes it that the finest products of the mind are, in this sense, extra-mental? What is there outside consciousness which can produce them? They come, not only with power, but often with something exotic and other-worldly about them.

On the Daemon as a separate self in the psyche:

One after another, the great writers, poets, and artists confirm the fact that their work comes to them from beyond the threshold of consciousness. It is not as though this material came passively floating toward them. It is imperious, dynamic, willful....

The “Daemon” behaves more like a somebody than a something, indicating that there is an extension of our personality which normally we do not know.

On genius as the wedding of inspiration with conscious intelligence:

The task of consciousness is not to create but to seize this inrush and express it....

First the idea must well into consciousness from without; then consciousness must labor to express it....The technical ability must work on the inspiration....In genius, inspiration and intelligence are united.

And here is Tyrell on the parallels and resonances between mysticism, artistic inspiration, and the paranormal:

Religious mysticism bears a strong resemblance to artistic inspiration, but is carried, so to speak, to a higher plane. It is scarcely possible to draw a hard and fast line between artistic and religious experience. Both involve the personality beyond consciousness, though, perhaps, at different levels....

It is rarely that a mystic attempts to speak of his inspirational experience as it is in its essence. That calls forth merely negatives. Usually, as with artistic inspiration, it is the form of expression in which the experience has been clothed which receives utterance. And this form of expression is apt to be composed of ideas with which the conscious mind is already familiar. The experience has to be cashed, so to speak, in terms of current coin. Hence it comes about that, although the central experience of mysticism is the same in all places and throughout the ages, its forms of expression are various....

There is no doubt that some of the mystics went into trance and delivered experiences in the form of what we, today, should call “automatic writing”.... Undoubtedly in some ways the phenomena of mysticism are linked with those of psychical research....

It is clearly unreasonable to pretend [as in Freudian and other materialistic theories and systems of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy] that everything which is discovered in inspiration and mysticism originally entered the mind through the gates of the bodily senses during moments of inattention and is served up again as if it were something new. Wherever these things come from, they come from some original source which lies outside the world of familiar experience, though they may clothes themselves in the familiar in order to emerge.

NOTE 7: Nostalgia is your cosmic homing beacon

The Spring 2024 issue of Hedgehog Review features a review essay on the historian Tobias Becker’s recent book Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia. It’s written by the essayist and critic Charlie Tyson and titled “You Can’t Go Home Again.” A brief bit of online browsing turns up the fact that Becker’s book, published last December, is enjoying a moment of significant widespread attention. I can understand why, as it sounds fascinating. In discussing it, Tyson ably summarizes nostalgia’s long-standing status and reputation among the educated classes:

Nostalgia is a debased emotion. Intellectuals scorn it; corporations exploit it. Therapists instruct us to live in the present moment....[T]his sentimental yearning for an irrecoverable past is widely dismissed as regressive and reactionary. When we give in to nostalgia, we do not simply remember the past. We distort it, idealizing and whitewashing whatever lost era we wistfully recall.

Tyson devotes the rest of the essay to discussing Becker’s critique of this attitude, describing how Becker proposes that “our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed … because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time,” often standing as “a surreptitious way of defending a naive belief in progress.” But in fact, says Becker (as summarized by Tyson), contra this perhaps too-easy dismissal and scorn, nostalgia “can illuminate ideals for more humane living,” offering an emotional escape route—and maybe something more, maybe a core of true freedom, by preserving the memory of and the hope for better things—for “the multitudes of people who are victims, rather than agents, of historical change.” In this more positive view, Tyson says nostalgia “greets us when we are most desperate. A way of coping with a present that is no loner habitable, it provides, in the end, a last resort.”

This all resonates with me because of my long-standing fascination with the transcendent dimension of nostalgia. I mean nostalgia not as kitsch, or as escapism, or as a fun and fashionable pop cultural manifestation of the retro aesthetic, but as the deeply meaningful state of mind, soul, and emotion that is encapsulated in talismanic concepts—and what I enjoy thinking of as power words—like the German sehnsucht, the Portuguese saudade, the Welsh hiraeth, and the Japanese yugen, each of which gestures in its own way toward a mingled state of longing, sadness, sorrow, sensitivity, hopeful expectancy, and delicate, aching half-perception of an elusive beauty and truth that shines and trembles just beyond the horizon, just beyond the rim of the world and the edge of our ability to see, know, or grasp with full knowledge and finality.

This holy longing, this nostalgia for the infinite, points toward something real and can serve as a kind of existential homing beacon. Pertinent to my central concern with deep creativity as a life-orienting phenomenon, nostalgia is not separate from the creative daemon. In fact, I think it emanates from the same source. Though I haven’t yet worked this out to my satisfaction, I half-suspect nostalgia might ultimately be a different manifestation of the very same principle, with both it and the daemon resolving into same core impulse that has given rise to the experience of this being, this subjectivity, this projection of a separate individual viewpoint from and within the fundament of Being Itself.

The American Zen/spiritual teacher Richard Rose, whose writings and influence have become important to me in the past few years, was someone who made nostalgia a central part of his overall approach to spiritual enlightenment. See, for example, a 1978 lecture that he gave at Case Western University on nostalgia and dreams, where he discussed “hunger for eternality” that each person feels, and that shows up in wistful dreams of remembered people, places, scenes associated with a sense of serenity and security. Rose recommends taking note of the nostalgic mood in both dreaming and waking life, saying,

I think that this observation of nostalgia will bring you to a realization of the basic structure of the mind, and what the mind wants to do. It’s almost like a soul-voice. It’s almost a voice from inside that says, “This is the way things are, if you allow them to be that way.” Things aren’t that way now because your daily life has been one of furious fighting or endless ambition, something along those lines.

I think that it’s possible, too, that this is like a voice of what Paul Brunton would call the Overself, or the oversoul.

I have also found that the writings of some of Rose’s students contain clear and winsome extensions or continuations of this point. In particular, Art Ticknor—who, for my money, has produced some of the clearest contemporary writings on waking up—talks and writes about it in a uniquely winning way. See, for example, these passages from his book Beyond Relativity, where he paints a lovely picture of nostalgia as the voice of our own true Self calling us home:

The nostalgia voice or the longing for Home within us hints that we came from Perfection, and our deepest longing is to return to Perfection. Our mentality has to somehow pick up the conviction that such going within holds the best hope of finding true satisfaction.

And also:

How do I get there … “there” being the place of completion?
I know it has to be within, that I have to somehow go, sink, or dive within.

But what strategy makes the most sense?...

Is there an innate sensor that will find the path if it’s my top priority?
Can I feel “the call”—the voice of nostalgia, the call to come Home?

Since it must be coming from Home, could its music lead me there?...

Does the mind have a homing device?
If so, can the mind be trained to pay attention to it?

And from another of Ticknor’s books, Sense of Self:

Our intuition guides us, and intuition registers a downward current that comes into the mind from the source of awareness. The feeling-sense of the message coming from the light of awareness is that of nostalgia, calling us home.

I find this all to be deeply moving and quite resonant with my own experience—much of which I publicly mulled over years ago in a series of posts that I published at my former long-running blog, The Teeming Brain, on the subject of what I was then calling “the autumn longing.” I have also previously discussed it here at The Living Dark. See, for instance, “Start from Paradise.” And it is the central theme of my essay “Fantasy, Horror, and Infinite Longing,” included in my essay collection, What the Daemon Said. The numinous, transcendent importance of nostalgia has been impressing itself upon me for a very long time.