Unraveling the Illusion of Resistance and Tapping the Flow of Creation (Cosmic Creativity 2)

Resistance is a con. Seeing through it puts you in touch with the source of all creativity.

Dear Living Dark readers,

First, some publication news: I’m pleased to announce that Volume 2 of my Journals is now a reality. Available editions include Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. Booklife by Publishers Weekly praised the first volume as “epic and intimate, a portrait of a mind and a milieu, with deep dives into the creative mind, the nature of the weird, and how to find one’s way in a world that’s sick.” You can read the introduction to the combined two-volume set right here. If you want to know the private background behind my books and this newsletter, here’s your guide.

Second, a proviso about today’s post: The angle of the essay below is idiosyncratic (even more than usual, I mean). It approaches the subject of creative Resistance and how to understand it—and how to see through it to the deep source of all creativity—from a perspective that is highly personal and, I think, unconventional. Rather than focusing on practical aspects of dealing with Resistance and creative block in daily work, it addresses the matter at the foundational level of the psyche, where these hindrances are attached to the very drive to write itself. (Amusingly and/or ironically, it took me nearly a month to write this thing, during which time I sometimes felt defeated by it and considered giving up. Apparently my personal Angel of Resistance has a snarky sense of humor.)

I note this up front simply to alert you to the fact that the progression of thought in this essay follows its own internal logic. I fashioned it from things that came to me in private journal writing two years ago. On the paradoxical principle that what is most personal and private is also that which will connect most deeply with other people when shared, I trust my thoughts here will speak to some things that are meaningful to you. But if what I describe about Resistance indicating a potential falseness in one’s base creative motive sounds foreign, I hope you’ll at least remain open to the argument and follow it to the end, where maybe we’ll come together again.

Also be aware that what I say in this post interacts in various ways with several recent posts about writing versus not writing and the tension between the desire to create and the desire for spiritual awakening or liberation:

• The Inner Call to Absolute Inertia

• Creativity and Spirituality: It’s Complicated

• The Wisdom of Silence in the Age of Online Writing

• The Endgame of Creative Pursuits: Reaching the Flashpoint of Stillness

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NOTE: This is the second entry in a multi-part series. Read Part 1 first. To find all the entries in this series, search for “cosmic creativity” using the search box at the top of this page.

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The hollowing out of the creative drive

The concept of Resistance struck me so deeply when I first encountered it around 2009—seven years after the initial publication of Pressfield’s The War of Art—because I had already been grappling with the firsthand experience of it for many years. As reflected intermittently throughout my journals, in the early aughts I began to encounter a pointed, piercing sense of block on my creative output, both authorial and musical. It took an exceptionally insidious form, because it was not just a matter of feeling sterile, incapable, bereft of ideas, or otherwise prevented in any of the usual forms from starting or finishing a given piece of work that I really wanted to pursue. Rather, it was an attack on my very sense of wanting to pursue any given work at all. It felt like a draining of my core motivation, a hollowing out of my creative drive. Simply put, I was hit by wave after wave of felt uselessness, the powerful, spontaneous feeling and accompanying notion that writing a story or essay, or composing a song, or sometimes even writing in my journal, was flatly, absolutely, wearyingly, gallingly pointless.

Being attuned as I am to the wavelength of philosophical reflection, I both inhabited this experience (even as it also inhabited me) and studied it. I strove to understand it without rejecting it out of hand, even as I suffered from it. And it was the suffering that kept me from simply accepting it. I could easily see that there were no reasons to consider it flatly wrong, disordered, or suspect out of hand, because the question of whether creative output was a necessary and automatic good had some intrinsic validity. The thought that nothing really, ultimately mattered about my creative ideas and projects, either the completion or the abandoning of them, seemed to have real merit, theoretically speaking. And yet the living fact that I suffered from a sense of inner suffocation and mounting despair at my growing roster of creative misfires, stillbirths, and wholesale failures to launch took a toll. The pain of it kept me digging for answers, for clarity, for some position of stable, defensible affirmation, whether of my creative drive’s authentic uselessness (in which case I was off the hook) or its authentic value and meaningfulness (in which case I was off-course and careening into personal disaster).

I was hit by wave after wave of felt uselessness, the powerful, spontaneous feeling and accompanying notion that writing was pointless.

To put some flesh on these bones, here are three representative excerpts from my journal, spanning eighteen years and thus demonstrating that this has been a chronic issue. I share them on the chance and assumption that aspects of them will resonate with things you have encountered in your own creative journey.

From Wednesday, April 4, 2004, around 1:30 p.m.:

What is this that’s going on inside me? I might equally well ask what it is that’s not going on inside me. This feeling of emptiness, of numbness (sometimes), of deadness, of spiritual lethargy, is about as profound as I think it can be. There is absolutely nothing coming up from the depths inside me, no creative impulse like the ones that have always been with me since childhood. Or rather, whenever an idea does spontaneously occur, when some idea or train of thought takes off on its own regarding a movie, song, or story that might be created, or whenever that generalized, nonspecific desire to “create something” comes over me, something inside dismisses it—simply, effortlessly, instantaneously, as if the idea had never really occurred. I could say that “I” dismiss it, except that it doesn’t feel like that anymore. It feels as if the dismissing happens on its own with just the tiniest bit of willful help from me, which exists merely in the form of acknowledging the uselessness of the idea, or rather of acknowledging the uselessness of trying to follow it, work it out, or manifest it in some completed, tangible form.

Next, an entry from exactly nine years later, on Tuesday, April 9, 2013, 6:22 a.m.:

The effort of writing has come to seem an insurmountable barrier that defies and repels me even before I begin. I experience a desperate lack of conviction about the entire act, process, result, and value of writing itself.

The merest thought of writing my own stories, and the thought of the blind-foraging mountain range of epic suffering and discouragement that it inevitably demands, complete with near-fatal disruptions to the stability and peace of my inner state, daily life, and personal relationships—all the wild-swinging moods of elation and depression, and the half-passionate, half-desperate moods of withdrawal and self-absorption—this all leads to a kind of instantly blossoming experience of acedia and anhedonia toward the whole thing, just as soon as the notion arises.

And finally, an entry from seven years later, recorded in my journal on Monday, February 24, 2020:

For many years, most of my life, I felt driven to communicate to other people what I was thinking, through the form of the written word. This was partly a matter of intrinsic pleasure and partly a matter of ego gratification. . . . This egoic motivation was always right there, running equal with the sheer innate desire to articulate, to myself and to others, the thoughts and feelings that burned within me.

So what has happened to change that, to demotivate me on both counts? On the matter of writing fiction, is my lack of productivity these past many years an extended sophomore slump, an interminable round of self-consciousness in which the editor has strangled the creator?  Am I letting Resistance win? . . . Do I need to . . . keep writing, keep the flow going, let sheer quantity produce quality as Bradbury recommended, trusting that something good will come through eventually in its own way and on its own schedule? Do I need to trust the very act of writing? Just consider it endless, playful practice with no end result aimed at?

The thing that hamstrings this line of reasoning—which always sounds good whenever I reiterate it—is the sense that arises, after a few days or weeks of this practice, that it’s all pointless. Quite simply, I begin to wonder, “Why?” And this is devilishly persuasive, not just the question itself but the state of mind from which it arises. Because it doesn’t seem to be resistance as such. Or if it is, then it’s damned well camouflaged.

What comes over me is the sense, the thought, that even if I do end up producing a good story or whatever, so what? What would it even matter? I mean to me or to anyone else. How could it possibly have any significance? The finished product itself, the time and effort that went into creating it, my experience of writing it, the reactions of the people who would read it, my experience of knowing those responses, the impact the story might have on someone—is there anything really worthwhile in any of that? Isn’t there just as much reason not to do it as to do it?

This then bleeds out into the wider question of why to do anything at all.

As you can see, my personal experience of grappling with block, and thus with Resistance, has devolved down over time to the question of basic existential motivation—of why to do, or not do, literally anything. The entry above from 2020 is perhaps my quintessential expression of this phenomenon, stated only to myself until I agreed to publish my journals. I would be interested to hear whether the phenomenon I’m talking about speaks to any of your own experiences.

Seeing through Resistance

More recently, as my understanding of creativity has continued to deepen and evolve, I have begun to discover new levels of subtlety embedded in this negative/enemy pole of the inner creative battle. In a series of entries that I wrote in my journal over several days in the spring of 2021, when I was becalmed at home with my wife during the isolation of the COVID-19 lockdowns—having recently relocated from Texas to Arkansas during the societal shock waves of the pandemic, which left me feeling like I was ensconced in a liminal hyperspace—I rather suddenly realized that a deep understanding of Resistance, including not only how it works but what it actually is, down at the base level of the psyche, unravels the riddle of creativity at its ontological root. In the place where the apparently independent self emerges from and merges back into the One Self, the Ground of Being, the Absolute Consciousness, this is where Resistance takes form as an ultimately illusory enemy whose very unreality, when perceived, unlocks the door to creativity on a cosmic scale.

Let me unpack the above claim by describing my personal experience in more granular form. For me, the experience of being conquered in this deep way by Resistance, when I examine it closely, reveals itself as a two-stage or two-layer affair.

In the first stage or layer, as I set out to do some sort of creative work, to enact some nascent idea in tangible form—a story, a song, an essay—I encounter a glitch or barrier consisting of the feeling that either a lack of ideas, or a lack of skill, or the nature of outward circumstances (not enough time, too much stress from my day job, pressure from interpersonal relationships, etc.) is preventing me from carrying out the work. Or sometimes, if I’ve been in a blocked state for quite some time, I skip past these and run right into the sense of lethargy, futility, and demotivation described above. However it manifests, what happens is that I set out to do something, to do the work, and find that a challenge to my efforts arises immediately, as if by magic. It’s as if the challenge is one with the creative impulse itself, a corollary to it, an automatic accompaniment.

So that’s the first stage, the top layer: hitting the wall in whatever form. In the second stage, rather than fighting this challenge, I consent to it. This is where, no matter what form the barrier originally took, it morphs into that acquiescent apathy. I embrace an attitude of surrender toward the whole thing, a kind of capitulatory quietism. First I feel the Resistance, along with the suffering of it, the emotional stunting and the crushing sense of frustration and grief. Then I willingly embrace it. I accept the silence, the inability, the paralysis, the muteness. The fight seems hard and the reward of “winning” it seems meaningless, so I sink willingly into inertia.

And so, nothing happens. It has all been an inner drama with no outer result. Anybody watching with physical eyes alone would have seen nothing going on at all, no outward sign of an inner struggle or aborted project. But someone endowed with spiritual sight would have witnessed a slow death taking place.

My personal experience of grappling with Resistance has devolved down over time to the question of basic existential motivation—of why to do, or not do, literally anything.

As you may have noticed, though all of the above represents a detailed inner account, it actually begs a question. This fact comes into focus when I seek to fathom the mystery of what’s really happening, and I find myself returning to the apparently automatic, complementary nature of Resistance. As I said, it’s always right there, as if by magic. This is sufficient cause for suspicion.

The fact that Resistance arises simultaneously with the act, or even the intent, of starting to do the work is highly suggestive. On reflection it seems to imply that something about the way I have positioned myself to work, or maybe the attitude that I bring to it, involves a hidden contradiction. Because truly, why should the effort and intent to do creative work generate its own opposition? Am I missing something? Is something amiss? Could there be something wrong, on some level, with my intent itself?

Light comes from zeroing in on the act of surrender, the moment of giving in to the obstructing force. At that moment the energy from both directions, the creative impulse and the Resistance that opposes it, is discharged in a kind of culmination, however unhappy. The question is: What appears in the brief flash and its aftermath?

I said above that Resistance wins because I willingly embrace it and surrender to it. But now, as I closely observe the moment when this outcome manifests, I find the matter isn’t quite as settled as it first appeared. Do I really embrace defeat? How truly willing is my surrender? Do I fully assent to the state of being becalmed, silent, and totally “unproductive” as the impetus to create passes away unfulfilled? Or do I instead wallow and simmer on some level in grief and self-recrimination? Am I actually surrendering, which means giving up entirely and thus letting go of the stress, grief, and unhappiness? Or am I just capitulating, which means I give up the fight but still hold on to an inner morass of resentment and grief?

The answer, of course, is the latter. The very fact that my “surrender” results in a state of apathy and anhedonia shows that it isn’t really surrender at all. The apathy arises because the pain is too great. Apathy isn’t surrender, it’s passive aggressive scorn. It’s a defense mechanism. I wouldn’t feel it if I had really let go.

And now, with this surprising recognition of a self-deception at the core of my supposed surrender, the moment of clarity arrives: How much of my creative block has been subliminally entwined with this self-destructive cast of mind from the start? How much is the experience of silence and quietude as suffering just an unmasking of what was already there, a revealing of the programmed thought-emotion that gave rise to, or first emerged in the guise of, the block itself?

Answer: all of it.

Unmasking ego

Follow me here: Resistance, it turns out, is actually a cloaked form of an egoic and therefore artificial desire to create. In other words, an egoic counterfeit, as all things egoic always are. The ego thinks “I must create,” and, being ego, it wants to do this for narcissistic reasons, to shore up its fear-based sense of identity. It wants the self-gratifying and self-enclosed sense of regarding itself, and of having other egos regard it, as creative, brilliant, awesome. So it sets out to write something, to create something, under its own effortful power, for its own narcissistic ends.

But this necessarily engenders Resistance, which is also egoic. Even if we picture Resistance as a truly separate, autonomous force in the cosmos, a true Demonic Angel, it is really, functionally, just the figurehead or archetype of each individual’s personal, private experience of it. Resistance with the capital “R,” Resistance at large in the universe, is the spiritual nexus and absolute exemplar of the small “r” egoic resistance that we each know as our individual selves, the inflexibility of (seeming) separate, autonomous existence within a world of otherness. Ego is like a resistant screen in the river of consciousness, a net or filter through which pure consciousness flows and into which pure consciousness coalesces. It is, in a real sense, a kind of feedback loop. Identifying with it, as almost everyone does, means identifying with a dream of individual identity, a “me plus (or rather me against) the world” outlook.

This inherent, intrinsic, constitutional egoic resistance is inseparable from the Demonic Angel of creative Resistance. They are in fact the same.

The demonic angel archetype of big “R” Resistance is the Ur-ego, the supreme image of self-enclosed, self-seeking self-fulness.

So a momentous discovery has just announced itself regarding the nature of the block that we encounter in creative work: Resistance is the source of both the artificial desire to create and the accompanying sense of desperate inability to do so.

This leads to the jarring realization that my personal portion of it is really a sucker’s game. It’s a deception, a con. It shows me something with one hand and then hides it with the other. It misdirects as it plays multiple parts and dazzles me with a manipulation of my thoughts and attention. And it’s all in a circle, all for the purpose of feeding on my emotional suffering as it reproduces itself in me, in an attempt to alleviate or escape its own suffering by fulfilling its own unfulfillable—because ultimately false—being.

Short-circuiting resistance through authentic surrender

This is why, in addition to the various active responses to Resistance that focus on mounting a creative counterattack, and that Pressfield describes so helpfully in The War of Art, there is another approach we can take that will undercut the whole thing: authentic passivity. On this count, some penetrating words from Eckhart Tolle on the matter of stillness and inactivity apply fully as much here as they do to his focal subject of spiritual awakening:

[I]s there something you “should” be doing but are not doing it? Get up and do it now. Alternatively, completely accept your inactivity, laziness, or passivity at this moment, if that is your choice. Go into it fully. Enjoy it. Be as lazy of inactive as you can. If you go into it fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won’t. Either way, there is no inner conflict, no resistance, no negativity.¹

What Tolle describes here is real passivity and inactivity, fully embraced, in contrast to the false, frustrated inactivity of feeling blocked. In authentic surrender, you let go the notion that you should be doing something.

This short-circuits the Resistance loop, the Resistance con, wherein that Demonic Angel gives with one hand while taking away with the other. Now you’re confounding Resistance because you’re doing something it can never do and never understand: You’re being real. You have stepped off the Resistance ride, and thereby the egoic ride as well, and you’re freely and authentically Doing Nothing.

The outcome of such an act—or rather non-act—is fundamentally unpredictable, precisely because you’re being truly free instead of acting out a mental-emotional program. Before, you were a robot. Now, you’re a person. This distinction is crucial, because it highlights the importance of motivation in reaching this state. You can’t reach it if you seek it for the purpose of escaping Resistance and becoming productive. That merely smuggles the ego in through the back door. To enter this authentic rest, you must truly give up all notion of trying to bring about some predetermined and pre-desired result.

Think again of Tolle’s words, and especially the penultimate quoted sentence above: He says that if you go into inactivity “fully and consciously, you will soon come out of it. Or maybe you won’t.” This little four-word sentence has continued to resonate in my mind and revisit me frequently on long days and dark nights ever since I first read it in 1999. When you truly surrender to inactivity, activity might eventually return—or it might not. If you really want to see your way through Resistance, you have to find a place within yourself, an authentically open-minded and open-hearted position, from which you can honestly say that if activity never returns, you’re okay with it. It’s fine. You have given up trying to dictate the outcome and judge the results.

It is here that creativity, the real kind instead of the ego’s attempts to ape it, links most pointedly to the deep nature of not only personal but cosmic reality as a whole.

Consider: Why is there anything at all? Why does the experience of self and world, mind and cosmos, the whole play and panoply of Shakespeare’s “sound and fury” exist to begin with? What is the source and reason for the ten thousand things, the dream of the world, the created cosmic order? What gives rise to galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets, life, and the screen or page on which a nominally separate “you” is now reading these words? What is the original and present impetus for all things to exist and be as they are?

Embracing the total inactivity of full surrender reconnects you to this original motivation, whatever it is and however we may try to capture it in words: the matrix of creation, the source of all native motive power, God, the Tao. Surrender to stillness creates an “all bets are off” situation in which the question of if, when, and what you will create, of whether and how you will take action at all, is unanswerable, or rather only answerable in the actual moment of action (or inaction) and creation (or no creation). Action/creation becomes the pure expression of Being itself, seeking either no end at all or—to say functionally the same thing from the human viewpoint—an end that only It knows. If and when you act, you do so simply to act, for motives that are pure because they are not your own.

Or rather, these motives are more deeply your own than any you have ever known before, because they emanate from a level of primordial psychological and ontological intimacy that transcends anything you have previously thought of or even suspected as “yourself.”

In the next essay in this series, we will consider what this non-egoic action looks like and feels like in actual, practical manifestation.

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NOW AVAILABLE

Matt Cardin, Journals, Volume 1: 1993–2001

• From the publisher’s description: “Cardin wrestles with profound philosophical and religious issues, absorbing the work of thinkers ranging from Plato to Nietzsche to Alan Watts; at the same time, he speaks of his fascination with such writers as H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Thomas Ligotti, whom he has made a special subject of study.”

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Matt Cardin, Journals, Volume 2: 2002–2022

• From the publisher’s description: “In this second volume of his journals, Matt Cardin continues his ruminations on the subjects he has made his own—the theory and practice of weird fiction, the complexities of religious belief, and the relation between these two seemingly disparate realms. We find fascinating synopses of stories written and unwritten; reflections on films ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious to Chariots of Fire; accounts of bizarre dreams that have plagued the author; analyses of such writers as Thomas Ligotti (whose work Cardin has studied in great detail), Bruno Schulz, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and many others; and intimate glimpses into the fluctuations in Cardin’s personal life. Throughout, the author brings an incisive sensibility to the problems of life, thought, and feeling in the modern world.”

1. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999), 69 (my emphasis).