Through the Magic Eye: Writing, Nonduality, and the Lurking Presence Beyond Form

An interview with me on creativity and spiritual sight in a fractured world

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today I give you a special version of the transcript from an interview that I recently gave for the Leafbox podcast. The podcast’s creator and host, Robert, was a student in the online course that I taught last fall on writing, creativity, and spiritual purpose, as based on my new book Writing at the Wellspring. He enjoyed both the course and the book, which I provided to students in manuscript form. After the course ended, he invited me onto his podcast to extend the exploration.

Our conversation ended up being both wide-ranging and thematically focused, as seen in the section headings that I have created for this enhanced textual presentation of it:

INTERVIEW CONTENTS:

• Private Journals, Creativity, and the Daemon Muse

• The Modern Mood: A Desperate Search for a Pattern

• Nonduality and the Magic Eye

• The Marriage of Stillness and Action

• Discovering Nonduality and Its Teachers

• Meditation and the Dark Night of the Soul

• The Monastic Option in a Collapsing Civilization

• Effortless Action and Creative Quietude

• The Godhead and the Magic Eye of Belief

• Religion and Horror: The Peril and Potential of Sacred Canopies

• Final Reflections on Creativity and Purpose

A word about this transcript and the reason I created it:

Though Robert has helpfully provided a rough transcription over at the podcast page, I wanted to give you something different here, something intended specifically for reading instead of listening. This is for those of you who 1) like to complement live recording with a written version and/or 2) like me, prefer reading to listening. You’re surely familiar with the way literal transcriptions of live conversations can make for rough and choppy reading because of the distinct differences between verbal and written communication. In producing the transcript below, I have freely and substantially revised the language, smoothed and amplified the wording, untangled confusions, corrected some factual errors (such as when I misnamed one author during the heat of dialogue), and done other things to produce something that can be enjoyed in its own right, as a text specifically intended for reading. If you’ve ever watched the classic PBS television series The Power of Myth and then read its companion book, and if you’ve noticed the substantial differences between the two versions of those brilliant conversations between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, then you’ll understand the general nature and tenor of the changes I have made.

You will also understand why, if you were perhaps thinking of playing the audio interview of Robert’s and my conversation while reading the words below, you might reconsider. The wording and phrasing of the two versions frequently differs, so listening to the one while reading the other might prove to be a distracting experience. I suggest approaching them as related but distinct entities, each intended to be enjoyed in its own right and on its own terms.

A final note: Robert started the interview by mentioning my private journals, which longtime Living Dark readers will remember that I published in two volumes a couple of years ago. You can read the full introduction to those journals here at The Living Dark, and you can read more about the journals themselves, and find links for ordering them, on the books page at my author website.

For now, I hope the following conversation contains at least some things that resonate with your interests and concerns.

Warm regards,

Through the Magic Eye: Writing, Nonduality, and the Lurking Presence Beyond Form

An interview with me on creativity and spiritual sight in a fractured world

Interview by Robert for the Leafbox Podcast

Original podcast version: Interview with Matt Cardin

Private Journals, Creativity, and the Daemon Muse

LEAFBOX: I was recently reading your journals, and one of the lines in your early entries is all about your desire to dial one’s nervous system like a radio tuner. And as I read all those journal entries, I thought, man, everything you said in the class on the Wellspring book is true in your case. In your journals from thirty years ago, all the same matter is in there. And I was actually surprised how relevant it is to the work that you’re doing now.

I think when I first read your Wellspring book and signed up for your class, I thought it was going to be like a writer’s workshop. But now as I reread the end of the book and have started reading your journals, I realize the whole book is really about your awareness of nonduality and coming to clarity on your core interests. You’ve had two paths: your spiritual journey and then what I guess we could call your pursuit of purpose and life calling.

So, what is your life mission? How does it all come together in this excellent new book? And what are your reflections on your course now that it’s over?

MATT: Thank you for the good words. I appreciate it, Robert. When it comes to my mission in life, well, I don’t know if that’s articulable. Personal mission or calling is something that I have just been interested in for years. And as for your taking my class and reading the new book, and then going on to read my journals, which I didn’t know that you were doing—well, this brings me back to the fact that I still wonder if it was advisable to publish those private writings. This question has been on my mind ever since they came out.

But yes, I have read a great deal of the literature on calling and life purpose, including one very interesting book titled Is Your Genius at Work, written by Dick Richards, an American psychotherapist. It’s a career manual built around the idea of the genius and the daemon and their place in understanding one’s life work, and it attaches some very specific meanings to the word “genius.” It’s largely about trying to come up with a verbal articulation of one’s purpose and mission using a specific approach that the author created. I have gone through that book and done Smith’s exercise, and I have also read other writings and done other exercises on articulating life purpose or calling. And I have always failed. I simply don’t know how to state my calling or mission in simple words.

I do have some thoughts about it, though. My mission seems to be something about surfacing depth, something about seeing macro patterns in things and relating these to my own fundamental, primary experience. And it’s not just about articulating these things in a way that’s helpful and clarifying for me privately. It’s about drawing others into this same reflective process.

I think I hit upon something a while back, a potentially good articulation of my particular calling, using Richards’s approach. It actually relates to the title of my first book, Divinations of the Deep: My personal life calling might be framed as divining the deep, or maybe surfacing depth, or illumating depth—something like that. More fully, it involves determining the deep patterns that are at work in my life, and somehow relating that to other people. In fact, since you’ve read Writing at the Wellspring, I’ll mention another writer whom I refer to in there. Or actually, this is silly—I can’t remember if I actually mentioned her in that book. I write so much that my memory can get kind of scattered. Did I mention Rebecca West in Writing at the Wellspring? The great British author and journalist, Rebecca West.

LEAFBOX: Yes, you did mention Rebecca West in the book. One of the things that’s great about Wellspring, and that was also great about your course, is that you supplement your own words with so many other books, authors, and texts. And they’re excellent, encompassing everyone from Ray Bradbury to Thomas Ligotti and others.

But before you say more about Rebecca West, why don’t we pause and better introduce this conversation for those who are new to you and your work. Who are you? What do you do? Let’s step back for a moment and give people a framework for understanding your ideas.

MATT: Well, speaking on the relative level—because it’s difficult to speak about oneself on the absolute level, right?—I’m Matt Cardin. Let’s see, what public roles do I play? Writer. Author. Editor. Currently a college vice president.

I’ve been in higher education for some seventeen years, originally as English faculty, teaching developmental reading and writing, English composition, American and British literature, and sometimes a course in world religions. I also worked for several years as a writing center instructor.

Beyond academia, I’m a writer about creativity, consciousness, horror, and religion. Since the turn of the millennium I have written and published eight books, including those two volumes of private journals. And I have edited another four books, three of them academic encyclopedias—one on the history of horror literature, another on the scientific and cultural study of the paranormal, and another on mummies in history, religion, and popular culture

“Creativity itself is something that just happens. It occurs spontaneously, like the flow of thoughts or images in your mind.”

I’ll say a bit more about my journal since you started this conversation by referring to it. I obsessively wrote in a private journal beginning at about age 21 or 22. I filled up many handwritten notebooks over a span of thirty years, with a special intensity in the 1990s and the early 2000s. That’s where I learned my writer’s voice and discovered many things about myself in self-reflection, externalizing the teeming thoughts and ideas that were both coming out of me and being fed into me by a wild and undisciplined course of reading in supernatural horror fiction and other types of literature, including ancient Greek drama, the literature of pessimism, and all kinds of books on philosophy, spirituality, religion, history, culture, consciousness, and more.

And that has all played into the text we’re talking about, my newly written book Writing at the Wellspring, which is currently unpublished. Long before this one, beginning in the early 1990s, I wrote weird and supernatural horror stories. Five of those were collected in my first book, Divinations of the Deep, which was published in 2002. My second book after that was a collection of both supernatural weird horror fiction and essays on matters horrific, religious, and philosophical, titled Dark Awakenings, published in 2010.

I had another fiction collection titled To Rouse Leviathan that came out in 2019. It collects the entire fiction contents of Dark Awakenings, all of Divinations of the Deep, and additional uncollected stories that had appeared in various publications over the years. Then in 2022 I published an essay collection titled What the Daemon Said, containing most of my significant nonfiction from the previous two decades.

Throughout these books and their contents, I have been searching for a pattern in my life. And along the way, I’ve written a lot about creativity, and the muse, and the daemon or daimon, and the experience of relating to one’s creativity as a seemingly separate source, and about recognizing that ideas—and not only ideas, but one’s whole character and personality, and the flow of thoughts, and the flow of memories, and the things one is interested in, and the things that I am drawn to and that are drawn to me—are just spontaneous. Conventionally, I claim that my identity is this ego self. The very nature of ego is to feel like it’s an entity separate from the rest of the world, and that it’s a conscious agent in control of itself and its decisions. And yet, really, what is it? When you question it, all kinds of ambiguities and trap doors open up.

You know, this all plays into my interest in supernatural horror as well—the sense that there are forces at work that are very fundamental, and that you don’t control. So for me creativity, horror, and my other interests have all played into my journey as a writer and a thinker.

This even applies to my teaching. I taught a college course at one time titled Religion and the Supernatural in Literature. It addressed and drew on all the things I’m talking about here. So if you ask me who I am, and where I’m coming from, and what my mission is, I have to say it’s all bound up with these things somehow.

The Modern Mood: A Desperate Search for a Pattern

MATT: So, after all that, let’s return to Rebecca West, Dame Rebecca West. She was a great British author and journalist who, near the end of her career in the early 1980s, gave what I believe was her last interview to Bill Moyers.

West was famous, and in fact renowned, for a host of reasons, one of which was her reporting on the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals. Having witnessed so much change in the world over the decades—she was born in 1892—she had a unique perspective. And in the course of that wide-ranging interview, which touched on her life and career in general, and also on the condition of modern society at the time, Moyers asked her a simple but profound question: He wanted to know what she thought could be identified as the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century. More specifically, he asked her, “What is the mood of the day?”

She paused, then answered, “A desperate search for a pattern.”

That was some forty years ago. But if I had to name something about my own mission as it’s playing out here on the relative plane, with me as this seeming self, it would probably be that I’m involved in a desperate search for a pattern. And for whatever reason, I’m wired to be someone who writes about this and enjoys communicating about it with others.

Nonduality and the Magic Eye

LEAFBOX: Talking about patterns, I love the many metaphors you use in the Wellspring book. One that stood out to me was the Magic Eye puzzle. Maybe you can talk about that and how it plays into the spectrum of reality, the spectrum of the muse, and the spectrum of patterns.

MATT: This is my second book on creativity. My first one was self-published as a PDF back in 2011. It was titled A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius, and it was my first real foray into talking about inspired creativity. It actually came together from essays that I had published on a blog that no longer exists, titled Demon Muse.

This next book, Writing at the Wellspring, takes the subject of creativity much further. When I recently used it in the course you took, I had it subtitled Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse. We’ll see if that sticks. Currently I’m thinking about changing it. But even if I do, it’s still the case that this new book draws creativity into a much more direct relationship with nonduality, which, as you pointed out, is something I’m centered in as well.

I think the Magic Eye metaphor comes up in a middle or late chapter of the book. It refers to those popular novelty images we all became familiar with back in the 1990s. You’d see them in shopping malls or elsewhere, those dot patterns that just looked like some sort of psychedelic or kaleidoscopic design.

I was fascinated when I figured out what they were and how they worked—and especially when I learned how to see the picture hidden in them. You stare at one of these pictures for a while, thinking it’s just a random pattern. But then you figure out how to let your eyes relax, and you learn how to defocus. Even now, it still blows my mind that this can be done. But suddenly, you see a 3D picture emerge from what seemed like random dots or shapes.

What’s especially fascinating is that it doesn’t feel like the picture is coming out at you. It feels more like it drops inward, like it has depth. It’s as if you’re looking through a window and seeing shapes and patterns that were always there, but you just couldn’t see before. I’ve seen Magic Eye pictures that look like cars in a parking lot, a forest, dinosaurs, just about anything.

The metaphor is that our primary experience—the one that began immediately in an all-enveloping sense the moment we each opened our eyes on this life—is similar. We all know our own sensory experience, the surfaces of the things we perceive. The collective totality of our five senses—or six if you count the mind—has been called the sensorium. It’s the sum of everything we perceive as this point of consciousness, this center of subjectivity or selfhood as it is confronted by what seems to be an outer world, including our very bodies.

“The pattern of our primary experience is the ultimate Magic Eye picture. If you learn to unfocus your gaze, something shifts and you drop into an unseen dimension.”

Douglas Harding pointed out something profound: When you really pay attention to your field of vision, your body just seems to sprout out of nothing. You can’t see the edges of your sight, right? And it’s the same with your other senses—touch, hearing, all the rest. Your sense perceptions all seem to arise out of nowhere, and yet your perception picks up this entire field of experience.

It’s like this whole pattern of what we’re seeing and experiencing, our inner and outer sensorium, is the ultimate Magic Eye picture. There is another depth to it. If you learn how to “unfocus” your gaze, or how to hold your mind in a certain way, something shifts. It’s as if you drop into an unseen dimension, and this opens up possibilities far beyond what would otherwise seem to be afforded by the limited view we call consensus reality.

That consensus view says you’re an independent self, extending to the limits of your skin, existing in a world of objects that are completely other, completely separate from you. From earliest childhood, we’re told that’s just the way reality is. In this consensus world, your primary task is to figure out how to navigate that separate, confronting world as a separate body and ego self, using a combination of cultural training, formal education, your own wits, and whatever natural abilities you have on hand.

But what if there’s another way to see this? Where is the actual boundary between what you’re calling “yourself” and what you’re calling “everything else”? When you start to investigate this very openly, honestly, and intimately in a first-person sense, that’s when the Magic Eye picture of you-and-world gains its hidden depth. And that’s when your mind is blown.

LEAFBOX: Yes, the nondual aspects of this are just so profound. Fitting them into a writer’s book is fascinating—such a unique combination.

What I really enjoyed about the book is how you keep coming back to your journals. These paths are running side by side: how to be a writer, how to find your path, how to be creative. But then there’s also your awareness, the spiritual awareness you’re coming to, and this nondual perspective.

The Marriage of Stillness and Action

MATT: Right. In the book—and in the class, too—I talk at length about negotiating what can seem to be the tension between those two drives.

On the one hand, there’s the potential drive for silence and stillness that can come with a perceived spiritual yearning or quest. On the other hand, there’s the creative drive, which seems separate—this impulse that leads you to engage, to speak, to write words, to make music, or to do whatever it is you do in your creative art.

That fusion—or maybe it’s a contrast, but still fused in your own experience—combines with what also seems undeniable, at least for those who want to notice it: Creativity itself is something that just happens. It just occurs spontaneously, even if it’s as simple as the unplanned flow of your thoughts or the images in your mind. And when you relate that to ancient ideas of the muse and the daemon, it all weaves together. This understanding and perspective is the heart of the new book. In one or two key chapters, I try to finally articulate this. As I said earlier, that’s what I’m doing in all my writing and teaching: trying to understand these things for myself, and by extension for others, by writing about them.

Where it all comes together for me seems to be in a desire for stillness that’s related to the spiritual quest, the search for spiritual awakening and fulfillment. The question that I broach and grapple with in a core section of Writing at the Wellspring is whether spiritual awakening and the inner stillness that accompanies or characterizes it is potentially a danger to creativity. Such stillness, the desire to sink into delicious peace and inertia, the desire just to be, can appear to conflict with the desire for creative action.

But maybe it’s not really a conflict at all. You can be still while continuing to move, like how a tree grows. The Taoist idea of wu wei comes to mind. As I’m looking at you on my laptop screen right now, and as you’re looking at me while we’re having this conversation, the whole experience is just arising. I’m talking right now with no sense of effort—this is just happening. It’s all stillness in motion.

That’s the level I think one can arrive at, where nonduality and creative expression emerge as two different ways of saying the same thing.

Discovering Nonduality and Its Teachers

LEAFBOX: Just going back in time a little bit in your journals, would you talk about when you first discovered nonduality? You had a teacher. What was his tradition? And it doesn’t seem like you’re coming into this from a strictly Buddhist tradition. I’m not sure what to call it. Tell me about that experience of finding this.

MATT: I’ve never really been involved in any formal religious or spiritual path, except for the evangelical Protestantism of my youth. That’s the only one where I had any kind of organizational connection or formal training.

One of the first things that really opened me up was the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, followed by his book Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. I read them both during my senior year of high school, the former in a modern literature class and the second on my own, sitting in the school library. This would have been in 1987 or 1988. Illusions really swept me away, and I’ve revisited it several times as an adult and found that it’s one of those books that remains amazingly fertile with additional depth every time you open it again. Just a few days ago, by accident, I found a first-edition hardcover copy of it at a Goodwill store. That was fun.

From Bach, I graduated to authors like Alan Watts. He was one of my first real contacts with someone widely recognized as a spiritual writer or teacher in the modern milieu. I don’t even remember when I first heard the term “nonduality” or “nondualism,” but as you’ve seen in my journals—which begin in 1992 with the first of the two published volumes—I was already using these words as early as the 1990s. My understanding of what they actually mean has clarified over time. What’s drawn me to nonduality, or what strikes me as important about it, is the idea that there really is an answer to what I didn’t even recognize as the “problem of my existence” or the “riddle of my existence” until I encountered writers who articulated it for me.

I think the first book by Watts that I read was the same one that served as so many other people’s introduction to him: The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. Do you know that one? I got some of my basic terminology for speaking and thinking about these things from it. Watts talks in there about what he called the normal, customary consensus view that each of us is a mind housed in a bag of skin, where the borders of who we are end at the skin’s surface. That idea really spoke to me as a very young person, as it has for many others, and it lit me up

Watts opened my eyes to the interesting fact that you can start paying attention in a more subtle way to the fact of your experience, the fact of the world, your positioning in relation to the world, and your own subjectivity. You start to see that things aren’t as you thought. In fact, the way you have been thinking about them is like a hypnotic trance. You’ve been taking a kind of mental model as real. You’ve been identifying with what is, in a very real way, a hallucinatory view. I thought that was fascinating.

You see me writing about such things in my early journals, grappling with book after book. Along with the spiritual and philosophical focus, I was also really engrossed in supernatural horror while simultaneously trying to deepen my understanding of Christianity, the tradition in which I was raised.

After Watts, very early on I discovered Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj and several other major figures. And when Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now came out in the late 1990s, I stumbled across an early edition of it in a bookstore. I think it was Renaissance Books and Gifts in Springfield, Missouri. And I read it and thought, “This is one of the best articulations of this stuff I’ve yet encountered.”

Now, you asked about me having a teacher. There were two, in a way. The first was one of my college professors when I was studying communication at the University of Missouri, around 1989–1991. He was a Tibetan Buddhist. Not that he taught me anything specifically about Buddhism, but he became an informal philosophical mentor. For example, he was the first person I ever met other than myself who had read Robert Anton Wilson. I thought that was fascinating. It turned out that he had read essentially everything I wanted to read, so we had some great conversations. He gave me my first real-life advice on meditation, which was invaluable since everything else up to that point had come from books. He also introduced me to many of the movies that have been perennially meaningful to me, like Network, My Dinner with Andre, Harold and Maude, and Zardoz.

The second teacher came later, in the mid-to-late 1990s. There was an online teacher named Scott Morrison. He ran a website called Open Mind, Open Heart. This was first-gen internet, back when everyone thought the web was going to dismantle top-down bureaucratic power and create this wonderful free information field. Scott’s site was basically an ongoing public satsang. People would email him questions, and he’d post both the questions and his beautiful answers on the site. He also published a couple of books, which I still have. One of them even includes a question from me.

I became part of his online community, and it was very interesting as an insight mentoring experience at a time when I was filled with all these ideas but had no living teacher. It’s very difficult to be an autodidact and get a real purchase on these things, to really understand them. Scott addressed real people’s real questions about self, meditation, relationships—like, “If I’m espousing this nondual philosophy, what does that mean for my relationship with my wife, my kids, or my job?”

Unfortunately, I fell out of touch with him. A couple of years later, I tried to reconnect, only to learn he’d passed away. He’d gone in for gallbladder surgery and died on the operating table. Scott was suddenly just gone.

Since then—that would’ve been around 1998 or 1999—I haven’t had anyone who could be called a teacher. It’s all been me blundering my way through life. I’ve found a number of writers who’ve helped sharpen my reflections and deepen my understanding, but that’s it. I’ve been walking this path solo for a long time now.

Meditation and the Dark Night of the Soul

LEAFBOX: Do you still have a meditative practice? You mentioned insight. Was that his main technique, insight meditation?

MATT: When I say insight meditation, I know that’s a term associated with Vipassana and all these other formal traditions. But I’ve never done anything formal, and that’s not what Scott taught. He was more a teacher of self-inquiry and embodiment. My meditation has always been semi-informal—just sitting meditation.

I’ve never been able to achieve the lotus position. I tried for years, but it’s just not going to happen unless I break my ankles. So, I sit in a chair. I meditated off and on for years, starting from when I first discovered Alan Watts at maybe age 19. This lasted through my twenties and thirties and into my early forties. Then, from age 40 or 41 until this year, I meditated every single day, rain or shine, for thirty or forty minutes. At least once in the morning, and sometimes in the evening too, whether I was at home or staying somewhere else. So that’s a good twelve or thirteen years of daily meditation practice.

Sometimes, I’ve brought in specific techniques on my own. For example, I’ve used the Lord’s Prayer—or, if you’re Catholic, the Our Father—as an object of meditation. There are depths to that prayer that most people raised in a church don’t see because they’re used to reciting it as part of a rote communal liturgy. I’ve also practiced body observation—observing and feeling the inner body or the subtle body—breathwork, counting, self-inquiry, and what Zen practitioners might call shikantaza (just sitting). But again, I’ve never actually practiced, say, Zen, never had a Zen teacher, and never even meditated with another person. It’s always been a private practice for me.

LEAFBOX: I highly recommend trying a sangha or a 10-day retreat. I think your practice seems so sharp already. If you did a retreat, all the things you talk about—manifest awareness of the self, awareness of nonduality—I think they would deepen.

The only thing I’d ask is this: Without a teacher, sometimes there’s an alienation aspect that can come with awareness and depth. And since you write about horror so much, I wonder—often, people who do long retreats or intense meditation encounter what’s called the dark night of the soul. It can become quite destabilizing. You become so attuned to experience that it starts to feel formless, and that formlessness can feel meaningless. That can lead to nihilism, which can be a trap. But if you push through that, eventually bliss and other states can arise. Buddhist teachers can explain this much better than I can, of course.

Is this something you can speak to, something you have heard of or encountered in your own experience?

MATT: I’m aware—again, from a distance—of what you’re talking about. In recent years some interesting things have been published, articles and personal accounts that describe the dangers people have encountered in meditation. I don’t know if such occurrences are due to a too free-and-loose modern application or a universal prescription of some pretty deep meditation techniques. Or maybe it’s the recommendation to attend retreats when those retreats aren’t appropriately structured. I don’t know if it’s all ill-advised or not. But yes, I’ve read some of the accounts of what people have encountered who were not ensconced within a helpfully structuring situation, so that those who thought they were guiding them were actually misguided themselves. Or maybe just a lack of structure itself led them to encounter those dark nights, that horrifying loss of identity you mentioned, or even full-blown psychotic episodes.

I’m hip to that. And maybe, who knows, that’s all part of why I haven’t let go in a certain way or explored certain things more deeply on my own. Maybe there’s a fear of that.

The horror thing—it’s interesting. I don’t know why that has been given to me as a such a strong interest. You’ve seen me, if you’ve read my other writings, trying to understand and explain to myself the relationship between cosmic horror—specifically weird, supernatural, cosmic horror—and religion and spiritual awakening. That relationship seems to me like another Magic Eye picture. You can see the horror in religion, and you can see the religion in horror.

The Monastic Option in a Collapsing Civilization

LEAFBOX: Yeah, I think there’s a purpose to attune to all these things. Before we jump to horror, I want to talk about the end of Wellspring. You talk about something called the monastic option, which I thought was really interesting, especially since I keep coming at this from a Buddhist perspective.

I recently interviewed a long-term meditation teacher, and I asked him, “What happens after a year of sitting, a year of doing intense practice?” He described the same things you talk about: the breakdown of the self, nonduality, bliss, horror, absolute suffering—all these feelings. Like you said, the Magic Eye just starts flowing, and you’re in a stream of psychedelic awareness. The gates are fully open. But then, at the end, you realize: What is the purpose of all this?

In your book, you get to that so well, and you also touch on the monastic option, in that the creative purpose of all these things is, first, to cleanse yourself, and then to create and contribute to the stream. In your case, as a writer, you’re guiding the stream through your creative practice. Maybe you can expand on what the monastic option is in your book and what it means to you, especially in the context of a collapsing civilization and all these related issues.

MATT: The term “monastic option” as I use it in the book comes from Morris Berman, the cultural historian. He’s an American writer and academic who first rose to prominence in the 1990s with a trilogy of books on the history and evolution of consciousness, which are still well worth looking up. He gained more major attention with another trilogy, the America trilogy. The first book, The Twilight of American Culture, is the one most people know. It got reviewed in The New York Times and other prominent outlets.

In Twilight, Berman combines a scholarly approach with a deeply emotional, first-person, almost polemical response to what he saw as the decline of American culture and civilization. He argued that America had reached a peak and was now heading into a garish period of decline—economically, politically, intellectually, educationally, culturally, and socially. It’s a compelling book. It came out in 2000, and he made it clear that he wasn’t searching for solutions. He said, in essence, “I’m not trying to reverse this. I’m not writing one of those books where I lay out a devastating argument that’s just unanswerable, and then, in the concluding chapter, present a ten-step plan to fix everything.” He framed the book as a forensic examination of an inevitable unfolding reality, something that was valuable in its own right for its truthful perspective—whether you agree with him or not.

What particularly fascinated me, and I think many others, was his concept of the monastic option. He introduced this idea of the “new monastic individual,” or NMI. He even used the acronym somewhat playfully, pointing out the absurdity of labeling the matter. The idea is that if we’re facing the collapse of American civilization—not in some Hollywood-style sudden apocalypse where one day people wake up with the world ending and everybody is running around in the streets wailing, but in the slow, protracted way all civilizations have irreversibly declined throughout history—what can a person do? How can someone live a meaningful life in the face of this reality, if they truly recognize it, without just becoming a doomsayer?

Berman pointed to the example of the famous Irish monks who “saved civilization” during the so-called Dark Ages. Of course, the term “Dark Ages” has been critiqued and largely abandoned, but using Berman’s terminology, these monks saved civilization during a Dark Age by preserving cultural treasures—manuscripts, knowledge, and ideas. Much of what we know about the ancient world exists because of these monastics who made it their mission to do something of value by preserving things through a very difficult period so that they could become the seeds of some sort of renaissance for a future generation. Berman’s monastic option asks us to do something similar—not necessarily by joining a monastery, though we could do that, but by making our life a kind of monastery. Dedicate yourself to preservation, cultural transmission, as your mission here in the world, creating something of value that can be passed on.

“The monastic option asks: What seeds are you going to plant that a future civilization might find useful?”

Referring to technology that was current at the time he wrote his book, Berman emphasized that this isn’t about putting classics on CD-ROMs so future generations can access them. Technology changes—just think about how laptops today don’t even have CD drives anymore. Instead, he meant engaging in something more fundamental. It could be writing, making art, or creating social structures or relationships that embody a humane way of living on a small, local scale. These efforts might scale up someday or be passed forward into the future. He talked about people, each in their own way, identifying things that they think are valuable to produce or save. And he identified three different fronts on which it can happen, though I won’t go into those here. He just says we’re in a situation where we’re going to have an inevitable collapse, in the long term, of America and what we think of as American civilization. And since so much of the world is now Americanized, well, what can you do in this that’s valuable? How are you going to weather the storm? What seeds are you going to plant that a future civilization might find useful?

To flesh out his point, he uses examples from science fiction, like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. In that dystopian world, books are banned because they enable people to think and reflect, and therefore question the rightness of the dominant order. But there’s a society of “book people” living on the outskirts, who have memorized and internalized books. They’ve burned their physical copies to avoid breaking the law, but they become the books. They live in enclaves, reciting their books to each other, waiting for the day when the dystopian order collapses. Maybe they’ll pass their knowledge down to their kids. Maybe they themselves won’t see the fruition of their work. But someday when things have changed and this dystopian order has passed, the people who have inherited this knowledge will recite their books, the books will be written down again, and maybe they can then become the seed of a new and better order.

This is the essence of the monastic option. It’s what I lay out in the conclusion of Wellspring as perhaps one way to employ the idea of coming into contact with your creativity, recognizing your life’s mission, and aligning with what your daemon—or daemon muse—wants to do, and combining this with awakening to the spiritual reality of the world and yourself.

How can you employ this in a practical way? Well, what do you think is worth handing down to your kids? How can you relate to others right now in meaningful ways? What kinds of knowledge, structures, ideas, or ways of being do you want to survive the apocalypse? What could you contribute to some future phoenix rising from the ashes of the present order?

This concept really moved me when I read Berman, and it’s stayed with me for years. I’ve spent two decades thinking about how it connects with my interests in nonduality, spiritual awakening, horror, creativity, and literature. In Wellspring, I finally managed to draw these threads together, at least in a preliminary way. The first chapters focus on the fusion of nonduality with the muse and the daemon, and then the book suggests that this can be a way to identify your own “monastic” activity, if the idea appeals to you.

Effortless Action and Creative Quietude

LEAFBOX: To take it even further, I think what you said about this moment—how it’s always arising and ending—that’s the message, right? The self is always arising and ending, just like civilizations. What’s so beautiful about Wellspring is that it’s about relaxing into that cosmic stream. The muse speaks to you through those exercises, and tuning yourself in a relaxed way helps you tap into that monastic option.

MATT: Yes, thank you for noticing that. It’s important because if you try to send the wrong kind of energy out into the world—wrong in the sense of what a person interested in these things might want to create—it can backfire.

If you try to strong-arm it, if you force your way through these things, or if you take too much of a cerebral approach and say, “Ah, now I’m on a mission! I have to figure out my monastic activity, I have to do this, I want to do that, I need to see these specific results,”—well, that’s likely not going to work. The things that are most likely to endure are the ones that arise naturally on their own.

You know, for no good reason, I just reminded myself of a passage from the New Testament. There’s a passage where the Pharisees and Sadducees are meeting. It’s one of the many scenes in the gospels where these Jewish leaders are discussing how deeply disturbed they feel by this Jesus guy because of the challenge he has mounted to their order through his itinerant teaching and healing ministry. In the midst of this, one of them, Gamaliel, speaks up and tells the others something profoundly insightful. He says, “You’ll be wise to exercise extreme caution in how you approach this situation. If what Jesus of Nazareth is doing is from God, you won’t be able to oppose it. You’ll break yourself trying to fight it. But if it’s not from God, it will collapse on its own. You won’t need to do anything.”

I didn’t consciously think of that when I was writing about these things in Wellspring, but it’s exactly the point I’m making. If you can align yourself with the natural stream of creativity that’s already happening—simply because you’re awake, perceiving a world, and figuring out the relationship between those two facts—then what needs to happen will happen. And it will be unstoppable.

“How do you align your creativity with the creative action that’s causing the clouds to move or matter to exist?”

It’s just like you can’t stop this sensory experience from happening right now. Sure, I suppose you could do something drastic, maybe do violence to yourself by putting out your own eyes or ears. But as many of us who have been involved in long-term meditative practice recognize, even that wouldn’t end the flow of experience. There’s a givenness to it—it’s just happening.

So that’s what wu wei in Daoism is all about. What is effortless action? What is creative quietude—which is what Huston Smith called it in his classic book on the world’s religions, instead of the more common translation “effortless action.”

How do you move from efforting things into existence to having your creative activity be the same creative activity that’s causing you to breathe, or your hair to grow, or the metabolic functions of your body to be happening right now? How do you align your creative action with the same creative activity that’s causing the clouds to pass across the sky outside my window, or matter to exist, and so on?

At that point, if that alignment happens, it becomes kind of unstoppable. And you’re also not too attached to whatever form comes up. Whatever arises will come through you, not as something you take egoic credit for. And because of that, it will endure in a way that something you were just trying to effort into existence might not.

The Godhead and the Magic Eye of Belief

LEAFBOX: Coming back to your journals, there’s a line I read this morning that I liked. It said you were fighting with the Western and Eastern perspectives on consciousness. You say consciousness is something more than just a spectator. You keep talking about this nondual perspective, and then there’s your Christian upbringing.

So, what’s your relationship to the God figure now? It’s still unclear to me. I could never really tell when I was reading your journals. Are you still battling with it? Do you externalize God, or do you take a nondual perspective?

MATT: I’m not still fighting the same internal battle that you see me fighting in those pages. I think the God that—well, let me pause a minute. I used to speak in broad generalities and not even recognize that I might have been painting with too broad a brush. I was about to say, “The God that most Christians believe in.” But how am I supposed to know? So I’ll qualify it by saying it seems the God that most or many Christians believe in—or even theists in general, whether they follow one of the great Abrahamic traditions or something else—it seems to me that this is often a partial God, or a mental projection. There are many people who are worshiping their own image of God. They’re distracted by a mental idol and calling it God. But there are also others within those same traditions who might be more in tune with the reality, even if their understanding is mixed up with something more partial.

I’ll hasten to add that I don’t claim to have achieved perfection myself when it comes to this matter. But I don’t really struggle with the issue anymore—the conflict I used to feel between my attraction to nonduality and my lingering compulsion to “believe in God.” Today I’m fine with the word “God,” because there clearly is that—whatever “that” is. From the point of view of the rational mind, or the point of view of language and speech, there is “the thing,” the source of suchness, as we might say in Buddhist terms. And that’s what this all is. That’s God.

I’ve at least become astute and sensitive enough in observing these things, maybe with the help of some meditative practice, to recognize that if I’m here speaking as “I,” this unit of consciousness, looking out from a central subjectivity, then clearly, as an obvious matter—not as something I need to prove to myself or anyone else—this refers back to what we might call, using a faulty term, an “absolute subject.”

And that “absolute subject” is necessarily the same for you right now, and for anyone else. It’s necessarily the same source that is the far interior—if I can use an incorrect spatial metaphor—of the table my laptop is sitting on right now. It’s not something I can prove. But you know what I’m talking about. And those who have gone there know what I’m talking about. That would be God. Now, you can talk about that perfectly fruitfully, I think, in metaphorical terms as the personal God.

I got a lot of help with this early on when I found Huston Smith in the nineties. Rather than his book The World’s Religions—first published as The Religions of Man in the mid-twentieth century—being my introduction to him, as it has been for so many people, I first encountered him through his book of essays Beyond the Postmodern Mind, which I found in a bookstore in an outlet shopping mall in Branson, Missouri, in 1993.

Smith, who passed away just a few years ago, was deeply connected to the classic tradition of perennialism, the perennial philosophy. It’s fascinating to note how much he stood personally at the center of a huge nexus of major writers, thinkers, and cultural forces in the mid-twentieth century. He was hanging out with people like Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Aldous Huxley, and he knew many of the big movers and shakers in the worlds of religious studies, psychedelics, and even the physical sciences. At the same time, he was one of the major figures in the world of religion scholarship himself.

In Beyond the Postmodern Mind, and also in some of his other books, like Forgotten Truth: The Wisdom of the World’s Religions, he articulated ideas that were incredibly helpful. One example is the concept of the “great chain of being,” which is found in both classical Western Christianity and some Eastern religious traditions. The idea is that reality has discrete ontological levels: the physical level, the mental level, the astral level, and so on. Within that framework, the image of a creator God or the theistic God works just fine. It’s part of the primal pattern. I’s there. But it’s just not the final word.

So what’s beyond it? Answer: the One, the Godhead. This is deeply embedded in Christianity—Roman Catholicism, for instance, is steeped in it, and so are Eastern Orthodoxy and other forms of Eastern Christianity. Even Protestant mystics, rare as they may be, can take you there. That’s the kind of Christianity and God-belief that works for me.

At the same time I recognize that for most of my youth, and not just for me but for virtually everyone who was involved in my religious education, we were stuck worshiping a mental idol. You can use the term “God” in a way that’s completely wrong, becoming utterly distracted by it. And you can spend your whole life stuck there, wondering why things seem so screwed up and difficult.

Or, you can use the same term, the same concepts, but see through them. It’s like any idol, really. An idol can become a barrier—you get stuck on it. But you can also recognize that there’s nothing wrong with the idol itself. You can use it as a window, or a prism, to access the reality the idol represents.

LEAFBOX: Coming back to the puzzle—the Magic Eye puzzle or pattern—it’s the same relationship with the Godhead or the God figure.

MATT: That’s a very good point. Yes. You could view the God of theism as a kind of big Magic Eye figure. You look at it, and you’re dazzled by it. And then a previously unseen depth suddenly opens up within it. That’s a wonderful illustration. I’m glad you said that.

Religion and Horror: The Peril and Potential of Sacred Canopies

LEAFBOX: Let’s switch to horror for a minute. I’m curious, there was an interview you gave—I think it was for the Weird Studies podcast—and the host asked you about the difference between Lovecraftian and Ligottian horror. He said there’s Lovecraft, who thinks that horror comes from within ourselves, but then Ligotti says no, it’s from outside. Or actually I think what he said is that for one of them, horror is internal without meaning, and for the other—I think it’s Ligotti—horror is external, and malicious, and meaningful, and absolutely horrible in terms of wanting to destroy things.

What’s your take on how to fit what you just said about the Godhead together with these two takes on evil?

MATT: The way you described the distinction is perfectly accurate and helpful, but just flipped. It’s actually Lovecraft where the horror is one of outsideness, and Ligotti where it’s a horror of insideness.

Lovecraft, of course, is one of the exemplars of cosmic horror, one of the originators of the modern idea of it. In his stories, and in his classic essay Supernatural Horror in Literature from the late 1920s, he lays out his concept of cosmic horror, which he describes as the essence of supernatural horror in general, though he was really just talking about the kind of horror that he personally enjoyed reading and writing. Cosmic horror as he frames it is the sense of horror that comes from an awareness of external forces, of unseen figures, trying to overturn the natural order—what he described metaphorically as the sound of black, unseen wings beating and awful, monstrous shapes clawing at the universe’s utmost rim.

Now, did he mean the physical universe? Or was he talking about your psyche? That’s an interesting question, because in reading his work, you realize you can go in either direction. The idea with Lovecraft is that if you could see the big picture, the macro view of reality, you’d see that there is some kind of fundamental awfulness to it. He famously gets at this in the opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu,” where he writes, “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” He goes on to say that it’s an unacknowledged blessing we can’t piece together everything we’ve learned—from science, for instance. Because if we could, we would be absolutely horrified. We’d either go insane from the knowledge and be destroyed by it, or retreat into a new dark age. That’s the essence of Lovecraft’s horror. It’s the horror of outsideness.

Ligotti, on the other hand, represents the archetype of the horror of deep inwardness. For Ligotti, there’s something bizarre in the world that corresponds to something equally bizarre within oneself. Reality itself can tip over into nightmarish weirdness at any moment. He uses various metaphors to describe this, including “the great Chymists,” referring to powers and principles that seem to twist and mutate reality however they want. These forces make reality plastic in ways that disregard the sensibilities of self-aware creatures like us.

Ligotti also ties this into extreme cosmic pessimism—a sense of total meaninglessness. Sure, there’s a malevolence to these powers, but it’s more like everything is just recognized as a shrieking void, inside of which conscious existence is a nightmare.

So how do I connect those things, my interest in horror and my delineation of it, with my interest in spirituality? That’s an interesting question. Actually, right now, I’m in the process of writing an essay for an online magazine that explores the relationship between horror and religion.

How might religion, viewed in some ways, be intrinsically horrific? It seems to me that any religion posits a cosmology. I’ll pause instantly to point out that there’s some question when it comes to traditions like Buddhism, which are often discussed in books and courses on world religions, about whether they should be considered religions, philosophies, or psychologies. But Buddhism is usually considered a religion, so I’ll include it here. And, to repeat, it seems that any religion conveys a cosmology. And when you’re an adherent of a given religion, you’re trying to get inside it and see reality from its point of view: What is reality? Who am I? What does this scheme mean for everything, including me?

In a way, you could say that every religion therefore builds a cosmos. It constructs a world picture. And when you do that, you automatically invite the possibility of things that don’t fit with your picture. You creating what the sociologist Peter Berger famously called a “sacred canopy” in his book of the same title. A sacred canopy is a system of meaning. The so-called great religions of the world—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism—all posit a world system in some way, a way that reality is set up. The savviest among them try to remain flexible and self-aware about this, of course. But the point remains. All religions posit and proceed from a cosmology.

And in doing so, they risk being partial by offering an understanding of self and world that’s incomplete, that leave things out. That means things can come along in one’s experience that disrupt the sacred canopy. Berger’s metaphor of stretching a canopy over the unbounded sky shows how religion provides a way to view the world. But what happens—to return to Lovecraft’s metaphor of the “cosmic outside”—when something comes along from outside your canopy, some fact or experience, that the system can’t account for?

This can happen quite literally, like if you’re a native inhabitant of the North American continent several centuries ago on the day a European ship arrives. That encounter is not on your map of reality. It’s not even on the reality map held by the people on the ship. Your entire world is ripped open, and then the effects play out over time.

These traumatic intrusions can also happen subjectively, in consciousness, like when someone goes on a meditation retreat and encounters something they weren’t prepared for.

So maybe it’s something external that punctures your sacred canopy, or maybe, as in Ligotti’s model, it emerges from deep within. Either way, it’s something your conscious framework didn’t anticipate. Your cosmos is now breached.

So: Is that moment an occasion for joy and bliss? A revelation from beyond, like hearing angels sing the Hallelujah Chorus or experiencing moksha? Or is it like the Old Ones awakening from their slumber of eons in “The Call of Cthulhu” and sending horrific alien dreams into the minds of sensitive poets around the world? The human sensibility can receive it either way. The same event can be horror or bliss.

Spiritual enlightenment, for instance, might arrive as something wonderful. But even for those seeking it, it might arise in a form they didn’t expect, leading them to wonder, “Why did I ever court this nightmare?”

“Religion is a perturbation of consciousness. It disturbs the universe, including the universe of oneself”

So I think this begins to get at what we’re talking about. There are of course other ways to talk about it. But religion inherently constitutes a cosmic order. And since real religion, I think, inevitably goes beyond itself, this shows the perilous waters we’re treading. I don’t know if you’ve read my essay “Initiation by Nightmare,” which is included in my book What the Daemon Said and is a supplemental text in the Wellspring course. It talks about my sleep paralysis episodes in the 1990s. Those experiences overturned me. In that essay, I interrogate the darkness that was stalking me, the demonic figure that I saw in those horrifying nocturnal experiences. By the end of the essay, I link this shadow figure to my daemon muse. My creativity seems to arise from the same source. So, why does it appear as horrific? In the essay I mention Terence McKenna’s contention that all of us who perturb consciousness in search of enlightenment are putting ourselves in a perilous place because there’s no telling what might arise from that.

Religion itself is a perturbation of consciousness. It disturbs the universe, including the universe of oneself and the entire conception that goes with it—as provided by one’s religion in the first place! Religion creates a world, but it also invites the possibility of going beyond that world. And that’s why it can tip over into horror or bliss. It’s legitimate to say that religion is, in one sense, horror itself. It builds a world, but that world is always subject to being overturned.

Just look at religious traditions. In Christianity, miraculous events—whether in the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament—are rarely accompanied by joy. They’re often apocalyptic, terrifying events. Jesus walks on water, and his disciples see him from the boat and are terrified because they think he’s a ghost. When Jesus drives the legion of demons out of the Gadarenean demoniac, all the people in that region are overcome with dread and beg him to leave. When the angel rolls away the stone at Jesus’s tomb, the Roman centurions guarding it are so thunderstruck that they pass out.

You see the same thing in other traditions, like in the Bhagavad Gita. When Krishna reveals his cosmic form to Arjuna, Arjuna is overwhelmed, he can’t handle it. When you play with religion, you’re playing with fire, because religion creates a world, but it also lets in an infinitude that blows up that world. That can be received as horror or joy.

Lovecraft, by the way, had this same fascinating dichotomy or complementarity built into his own personal sensibility. In his letters, he wrote about a sense of yearning and adventurous expectancy, a longing and nostalgia, that he felt when looking at sunsets or architectural vistas in Providence, and he also talked about an intrinsic yearning, which he said we all share, to be set free from the galling limitations of time and space. But at the same time he wrote that the most horrible thing conceivable to a human being is the suspension of natural law, something that overturns what seems rational and orderly. Those longings and fears were right there in him, fused in contradictory or even paradoxical form in his own natural sensibility. And that’s at least one way that real religion and spirituality are always implicated in the possibility of the horrific.

Final Reflections on Creativity and Purpose

LEAFBOX: Matt, I know your time is limited, but I wanted to end with a quote from your journal. There are so many great passages that bring this full circle. Early on, you write, “I think this world is sick. The disease is everywhere and no one sees it.” But then, later, you write, “The easiest thing in the world should be to relax fully into the arms of the universe and trust whatever happens next. But…” That seems to lead into our next point. You’ve written about battling with this yourself. You accept that you should relax into the phenomenon, but there’s always the possibility of that horror arising, the horror that breaks the self. So maybe this is the purpose of horror: to be a mirror?

MATT: And part of the horror is one’s own inability to fully relax, at least at a given intermediate point. The continued arising of clutching, of effortfulness, of wanting to gain control. You want to relax into the arms of the universe and accept what comes next, but you just can’t.

If anyone listening has read Illusions by Richard Bach, which I mentioned earlier, they know it starts with a parable about creatures living at the bottom of a river. Their only way of life is to cling to the rocks and not be swept downstream. But one of them gets the idea, “What if I let go?” So he does, and he’s swept off by the river. As he’s carried along, he comes to other communities of these creatures, and they think he’s supernatural as they see him flying by. Some call him crazy and warn him he’ll die for letting go. But he says, “No, the stream loves to carry us.”

So, to those who haven’t done it, letting go is horrifying. It’s probably even horrifying for the one who does it, too. And though Bach doesn’t say this in his little parable, there’s no guarantee that the very one who lets go and sails along downstream, just flying with the universe, won’t have an attack of self-consciousness later and say “Oh, shit!” and start clinging again. That’s the dialectic so many of us live with. I certainly do.

LEAFBOX: Matt, I really appreciate the effort you’ve put into the book. I’ve taken so much from it, in everything from the nondual perspective to the exercises that help you connect with your creative practice. They’re so useful. Thank you. I think people should follow your work at The Living Dark. There’s so much more I’d like to ask, but I know your time is limited. Is there anything else you want to share today?

MATT: Just to say that I appreciate your vibe. I appreciated having you in the class, and when you asked if I’d be interested in this conversation, I listened to a podcast you sent. You have a very open, calm, and accepting way of approaching these conversations. It’s clear that you’re genuinely interested in these topics. I think that brings out the best conversations.