Your Daemon Is Your Dharma

On life purpose, God, and following your core longing toward self-realization

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:

To cut right to the chase without any introductory throat-clearing: Your daemon is your dharma. Both are karmic ripples or waves on the surface of Being. “You” (ego you) are the crest, your daemon/dharma is the rest. It is your true relationship to the ocean. It—and you—will eventually play out and subside, return.

(For more on the meanings of the word “daemon,” see here. For “dharma” as I’m using it in this post, see Stephen Cope’s book The Great Work of Your Life.)

Unpacking all this and examining it in finer detail:

What may be strictly, absolutely unnecessary from God’s perspective—from the fullness of absolute Being—may be necessary from the viewpoint of a given bodymind and its karmic momentum and outworking.

Specific ways of behaving, relating, knowing, seeing, being, may be truly necessary for a given bodymind to work out and fulfill its karma, the causal wave that gave rise to it and constitutes its space-time raison d’être, the chain of causal events that gave rise to it.

From the absolute perspective such things aren’t necessary at all, for nothing is necessary to God. But from the bodymind’s perspective, everything is necessary. Its very birth, its manifestation, is a function and expression of karmic necessity and inevitability.

Thus, specific actions and ways of living constitute the “right” path for a given finite self. Its daemonic dharma is experienced as an inborn character, drive, and set of ever-constellating life circumstances that express its destiny and fulfillment over (and in) time.