The Inner Call to Absolute Inertia

Is there ever a valid call to abandon all your projects?

Welcome to The Living Dark. I’m Matt Cardin, and this is my blog/newsletter on waking up at the intersection of creativity, writing, religion, horror, nonduality, apocalypse, dystopia, consciousness, and culture. You can subscribe by clicking this button:

In addition to this newsletter, I keep a shorter-form blog over at my author website, and last week I published a post there that will probably be of interest to readers over here since it intersects with two recent Living Dark posts on the tension between creativity and spirituality.

Here’s an excerpt:

Are you ever tempted to abandon all of your creative projects? Let them collapse? Maybe even let your whole outer life crumble as you sit there silently and just watch it all burn down? Is there ever an inner spiritual call to do this? . . .

[At one point in my life] I was deep into editing my mummy encyclopedia and conceiving the proposal for my paranormal encyclopedia, while also carrying on a full-time job as a college writing center instructor and English faculty member, even as I was managing all the necessary responsibilities to my family. In the center of this swirl of competing calls and obligations, the desire just to let everything go was a constant whisper, a silently thrumming inner suggestion that hovered on the margins of my awareness and sometimes converged toward the center.

MORE: On feeling the call to absolute stillness

Coming up here at The Living Dark, I will be publishing a series of essays in which I explore the nature of Resistance, the awesomely useful concept advanced by Steven Pressfield in The War of Art and other books as a personification of the inner force that wages a perpetual war against the expression and fulfillment of our creative destinies. I will present a deep dive into the subject, using my own battles with Resistance as an inroad to understanding what it means, how it operates, and how it illuminates important aspects of the search for spiritual wholeness, especially as connected to nondual self-realization and the cultivation of a relationship with one’s demon muse.