In this episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Cardin, an accomplished writer, editor, and higher education professional known for his profound exploration of creativity, spirituality, and the mysterious intersections of religion and horror.
Matt’s work delves deeply into non-duality, the paranormal, and dystopian cultural trends, offering unique perspectives on the connections between creativity, spirituality, and life purpose.
I first encountered his writing and teaching, particularly through his books A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius and the upcoming Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse. I had the privilege of participating in his Writing at the Wellspring course, which provided transformative perspectives on creative practice.
Matt Cardin is an author known for delving into the realms of horror and the metaphysical. His widely acclaimed fiction books, including To Rouse Leviathan and What the Daemon Said, focus on the convergence of horror with religion and creativity.
With a Ph.D. in leadership and an M.A. in religious studies, Matt brings a richly layered understanding to these topics. A native of the Missouri Ozarks, he has lived in Texas and now resides in North Arkansas with his wife, where he continues his work of thoughtful cultural and creative exploration.
Connect with Matt Cardin @
Time Stamps:
01:48 Introduction and Opening Remarks
01:52 Journals and Life Mission
02:48 Exploring Life Purpose and Creativity
03:34 Writing and Creativity
07:52 Rebecca West and Patterns
09:11 Understanding Non-Duality
13:21 Non-Duality and Creativity
15:42 Discovering Non-Duality
21:32 Meditative Practices and Teachers
25:26 The Monastic Option and Cultural Preservation
34:20 Tuning into the Muse
36:37 Effortless Action and Creative Quietude
37:35 Exploring Western and Eastern Perspectives on Consciousness
38:04 The Concept of God and Mental Projections
40:04 Houston Smith and the Perennial Philosophy
43:00 Horror in Religion and Spirituality
43:46 Lovecraft vs. Ligotti: External vs. Internal Horror
46:08 The Intersection of Horror and Spirituality
46:28 Religion as a Cosmic Order and Its Horrific Potential
55:50 The Wellspring Book and Future Plans
57:48 Final Thoughts
Excerpts from Interview:
On Non Dual
“ Where is the actual boundary between what I'm calling myself and what I'm calling everything else? When you really start to investigate that in a first person sense, that's when the magic eye picture suddenly gains that added depth. And your mind is blown.”
On Religion, Horror
You can see the horror in religion and you can see the religion in horror…
You're playing with fire when you're playing with religion because it creates a world. And then there's this infinitude that it also lets in that is going to blow up that world. You might receive that as horror. You might receive that as joy…
Religion is a perturbing or disturbing of the universe, including the universe that is oneself and the entire conception that goes with it that is provided by the religion to possibility to tip over from horror or to bliss or whatever is right there.”
On Life Mission, Creativity
Make a monastery out of your life, a monastic preservation and cultural transmission activity, the mission of your life here in the world. What seeds are you going to plant that a future civilization might find of use? What could you contribute to some future phoenix rising from the ashes of the present order?
Interview Transcript
Apologies for any transcription errors
Matt: Make a monastery out of your life, a monastic preservation and cultural transmission activity, the mission of your life here in the world. What seeds are you going to plant that a future civilization might find of use? What could you contribute to some future phoenix rising from the ashes of the present order? The things that are most likely to endure are the things that arise on their own. How do you get from just efforting things to having your, what you view as your creative activity be the same creative activity that's causing you to breathe and your hair to grow and the metabolic functions of your body to be happening right now and the clouds to be going past in the sky outside my window
It's about trying to come up with a verbal articulation of your purpose and your mission.
The very nature of ego is to feel like it's this conscious agent that is in control, and that is separate from the world and yet really what is it?
Where is the actual boundary between what I'm calling myself and what I'm calling everything else? You can be still while continuing to move, like how a tree grows or something like that. Wu Wei in Taoism is the idea that comes to mind.
You can start paying attention in a more subtle way to the fact of your experience and the fact of the world and the fact of your positioning in relation to the world and the fact of your own subjectivity and recognize way things are not as they, as I have been thinking about them. When you really start to investigate that in a first person sense, that's when the magic eye picture suddenly gains that added depth. You look at it, you're dazzled by it. And then that previously unseen depth suddenly opens up within it.
Your whole world is ripped open at that point and the effects are going to play out over time. And your mind is blown.
Introduction and Opening Remarks
Leafbox: Hey, Matt. Good morning. Thank you so much for meeting with me.
Matt: You bet. Thank you.
Journals and Life Mission
Leafbox: I just was reading your journals and, one of your lines in your first entries is all about your desire to dial one's nervous system into the, a radio tuner. And I was reading your journals and I thought, man, everything you said in the class of the Wellspring is it's true in your case.
Your journals from 30 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 book and I signed up for your class, I thought it was going to be like a writer's workshop but rereading the end of the book and getting to start your journals, this whole book is really about your awareness of non duality and coming to, you've had these two paths of spiritual, your spiritual journey, and then your, what you call I guess the purpose of life calling.
What's your life mission? How does it all come together in this I think excellent book and what are your reflections on your course now that it's over?
Exploring Life Purpose and Creativity
Matt: Thank you for the good words. I appreciate it, Robert. As far as what my mission in life is, I don't know that's articulable.
It's one of those things that I've been interested in. And as from reading the book and taking the class and then, reading my journals, which I didn't know that you were doing and which I still wonder if it was advisable, to publish that's been on my mind. And yes, I've read lots of the literature on a calling and life purpose and all that including one interesting book, which is titled, I think, Is Your Genius At Work.
I think it's by Dick Smith. It's a career manual built around the idea of the genius and the daemon and all that kind of thing. And it has some very specific meanings that it attaches to the word genius. It's about trying to come up with a verbal articulation of your purpose and your mission.
So I've gone through that and gone through some other things and it's always failed. I don't know how to state it.
On Writing and Creativity
Matt: Something about, surfacing depth, something about seeing macro patterns in things and helping to relate that to my own fundamental primary experience, but then also somehow articulating these things in a way that is not only helping me articulate them for myself, but drawing others in, that kind of thing.
I think I hit upon something a while back. Using Dick Smith's recommendations in his book, I think that's his name, Richard Smith, Dick Smith and it had something to do with had something to do with almost like the title of my first book, Divinations of the Deep. Divining the deep, surfacing depth, like I said, something like that.
And determining what patterns are at work in my own life, and somehow relating that to other people. In fact, since you've read Writing at the Wellspring, this is silly, I write so much, remind me, did I mention Rebecca West in there? And the great British journalist, Rebecca West.
Leafbox: And I believe so.
One of the things that was great about your coursework that you supplemented with so many texts that they were excellent texts, everyone from Ray Burberry to so many, Ligotti and maybe we can start for listeners. Why don't we give it a context? We're going so deep into the course.
Who are you? Where are you? Why don't we step back a second just to give people a framework of your projects and who you are.
Matt: As far as who I am speaking on the relative level, difficult to speak about that on the absolute, right? Matt Cardin, of course. And what? Let's see. What roles do I play? Writer, author, editor, currently a college vice president.
I've been in higher education for some years, first as English faculty, who also taught some world religions classes and also writing center instructor. And writer about creativity, consciousness, horror, religion. The aforementioned journal that you talk about was something that I obsessively wrote in the beginning in my about age 21, 22.
And filled up many handwritten notebooks with over a span of 30 years with a special intensity in the nineties and the early two thousands. That's where I learned my writer's voice and learned a lot about myself in self reflection, externalizing these 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 the supernatural horror fiction and other types of literature, ancient Greek drama, the literature of pessimism, the literature of all kinds of philosophy, spirituality, religion, that kind of thing.
And that all played into the book that you're talking about, my, my fiction book to begin with 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. I had another book come out that was a collection of both Supernatural Weird Horror Fiction and Essays on Matters Horrific and Religious and Philosophical titled Dark Awakenings in 2010.
I had another fiction collection titled To Rouse Leviathan that came out in 2019 and that collects actually the entire contents, the fiction contents of Dark Awakenings, all of Divinations of the Deep, plus some uncollected stories, and then had an essay collection come out in 2022, most of my important nonfiction over the past 20 years, which is titled What the Demon Said, and so I've been searching for a pattern in my past life with these things.
And along the way, I've written a lot about creativity and the muse and the demon and the daemon and the experience of relating to one's creativity as a seemingly separate source, recognizing that ideas and not only ideas, but just one's whole character and personality and the flow of thoughts and the flow of memories and the things one is interested in the things that I am drawn to and that are drawn to me are just spontaneous I claim to be this ego self and the very nature of ego is to feel like it's this conscious agent that is in control, and that is separate from the world and yet really what is it?
You know this all plays into the supernatural horror as well the sense that there are forces at work that are very fundamental and that you're not actually in control of so for me, creativity, horror, all this kind of thing is played into my journey as a writer and a thinker. And also even my teaching, I taught a course at one time titled what is it?
A religion and the supernatural in literature that drew on these kind of things. So you're asking me who I am, where I'm coming from. what's my mission? It's all bound up with that somewhere.
Rebecca West and Patterns
Matt: I mentioned Rebecca West. She was a great British journalist and Dame Rebecca West, Damn Rebecca West, we should say.
And in a, near the end of her career, her very last interview or one of her last interviews was with Bill Moyers. I think this was in the early eighties. And she was famous for a lot of reasons. One thing she was famous for was for her reporting on the Nazi concentration camps and what had been going on there and what was found out by the allied powers, near the end of her career.
World War II, and she had seen changes in the world over the decades, and Bill Moyers asked her in this interview, wide ranging interview just about her life and career in general and about moderate society, what she thought could be identified as the spirit of the age, what is the zeitgeist, what's the tenor of the times, and she paused for a split second and then she said, a desperate search for a pattern.
Now that was some 40 years ago, between 40 and 50 years ago. But if I had to name something about my own mission as it's playing out here and the relative plane and with me as this seeming self probably would be that I'm involved in a desperate search for a pattern and for whatever reason, I'm wired to be somebody who also writes about it and likes communicating about this with others.
Understanding Non-Duality
Leafbox: Talking about patterns, I love the metaphors you use in the Wellspring book, and one of which stood out for me was the magic eye puzzle pattern piece. Maybe you can talk about that and how that starts playing into what in the spectrum of reality, the spectrum of the muse, the spectrum of patterns.
Matt: You bet.
Of course, it's my second book on creativity. My first one was I published, self published just as a PDF in 2011 titled A Course in Demonic Creativity. Subtitle, a writer's guide to the inner genius. And that was my first real foray into talking about inspired creativity. Like I'm saying that came that actually I put together from essays I had published at a blog that no longer exists titled Demon Muse, this next book Writing at the Wellspring, whose subtitle I'm still fiddling with.
You know that in the course I had the subtitle on the manuscripts Creativity, Life, Purpose, Non duality, and the Demon Muse. We'll see if that stands. It's draws the subject of creativity in this mode much more directly into relationship with non duality, which as you pointed out is, somewhere that I'm centered as well.
The magic eye picture metaphor comes in, I think it's, I forget whether it's a middle chapter or a late chapter in the book, but it refers to those pictures that we all became familiar with. I assume beginning in the 1990s that you would see in shopping malls and elsewhere where you see those dot patterns, and it just looks like some sort of psychedelic or kaleidoscopic type pattern.
And I thought it was fascinating when I figured out what these were and finally figured out how they worked and how to see it. You stare at it for a while, you you're like, it's just a random pattern. And when you finally figure out how to let your eyes relax, I know you're familiar with this too, right?
You learn how to defocus or something, and it still blows my mind that this can be done. Suddenly you see that 3d picture that is involved in this seemingly random pattern of dots or other tiny shapes and I found it also fascinating that it doesn't seem so much like it's coming out at you.
It's more like it drops inward, suddenly it has depth and it's like you're looking through a window and you can see these patterns and shapes of. I've seen it looking like cars in a parking lot or a forest or dinosaurs or just any number of things and the the metaphor. Is that our primary experience?
The experience that. awoke and that started happening immediately. In an all enveloping sense, the minute each of us opened eyes on this life is similar. It's like the surface of things that we see is what it is. We all know what our sensory experience is. The collective totality of our five senses or six senses, if you count, the mind or conception.
Has been usefully called the sensorium. The totality of it. When we're having this experience of being a point of consciousness, a point of subjectivity of selfhood being confronted with what seems to be like an outer world, including our very bodies, which as Douglas Harding would point out, when you really pay attention to your field, the vision, our body just seems to sprout out of nothing.
You can't see your field, your actual site, right? Your sense of touch, your sense of hearing just seems to come out of nowhere and picks all this stuff up. It's like the whole pattern of what we're seeing up here is a magic eye picture. There's a, there's another depth to it that if you learn how to, how do you want to put it, learn how to unfocus your gaze, learn how to hold your head or your mind or something drops into an unseen dimension that opens up many more possibilities than would seem to be afforded by, I guess what we could call the consensus view, which as I said, is it being an independent self.
Maybe extending to the limits of your skin on your body that is that is located in a world of objects that are completely other. And that's just the way it is. Your job is to find out how to negotiate your way through that with the combination Of a provided cultural indoctrination and training and formal education and your own wits and skill and whatever your native equipment is that you have on hand, wait a minute, is there a different way to see this?
Where is the actual boundary between what I'm calling myself and what I'm calling everything else? When you really start to investigate that in a first person sense, that's when the magic eye picture suddenly gains that added depth. And your mind is blown.
Non-Duality and Creativity
Leafbox: Yeah, the non dual aspects of this are just so profound that you should fit them into a writer's book, which is very fascinating, the combination.
And I think what I really enjoyed about the book is that, I keep coming back to your journals, these two paths are running. How to be a writer, how to find your path, how to be creative, how to do this. But then your awareness and the spiritual awareness that you're coming to this non dual perspective.
Matt: I also talk about in the book, I also talk at length and in the class I talked at length about negotiating what can seem to be the tension between those drives, right?
With the potential drive for just silence and stillness that comes that can come with a perceived spiritual yearning or spiritual quest. As contrasted with the creative drive, which would seem to be separate, that leads you to want to engage, that leads you to want to speak, or to write words, or to make music, or to do whatever it is that you're going to do in your creative art.
And that fusion of things or that that contrast of things, but yet fused in your own experience combined with what seems to be also the undeniable for those who want to look at it, for those who want to notice it, aspect of creativity is just this thing that's happening, just this thing that occurs, even if it's just the spontaneous flow of your thoughts or the images in your mind, And relating that to the ancient ideas of the muse and the daemon, all that together is what went into the newer book, Writing at the Wellspring and in the book in one or two crucial chapters, I try to actually finally articulate, which was, again, that's what I say I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to understand these things for myself and other people I bring in, by writing about it. The, where it comes together for me seems to be that desire for stillness, which can seem to be a contrast with a desire for creative action. Maybe it's not really in contrast with it at all.
You can be still while continuing to move, like how a tree grows or something like that. Wu Wei in Taoism is the idea that comes to mind. Is stillness really, and is spiritual awakening really a danger to creativity? As I'm seeing you on the screen right here, and as you're seeing me on the screen 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.
That's the level that I think one can arrive at where non duality and creative expression just. emerges two different ways of saying the same thing.
Discovering Non-Duality
Leafbox: Can you just going back in time a little bit in your journals, could you talk about when you first discovered non duality? And you had a teacher what his tradition was.
And you're not coming into this, it doesn't seem like such a Buddhist tradition. It's more of a, yeah, tell me about that experience of finding.
Matt: Yeah I haven't ever been the only formal religious or spiritual path I've ever been involved with in terms of being involved in an organizationally or having any formal training or something is the evangelical Protestantism of my youth.
But I think one of the the, one of the first books that opened me up was Jonathan Livingston Siegel by Richard Bach, followed by his book illusions, the adventures of a reluctant Messiah, which is actually amazingly fertile with additional depth. Each time one revisits it over a lifetime. I first read it when I was 17 in the high school library and just found by accident at a Goodwill store a few days ago, a first edition hardcover copy of it.
So that was fun. But I graduated from those books to like Alan Watts, that was one of my first real contacts with somebody who's widely recognized as a spiritual writer teacher in this modern milieu. And so I don't even remember when I first heard the term non duality or non dualism, but you've seen me in the journal begins in, what, 1992 the first of the two volumes.
So you see me back as early as the 1990s using the term non dualism and non duality. And I think my understanding of what it was actually referring to has been clarified over time. But I guess what strikes me as being important about it or just what has drawn me to it was the idea that there really is an answer to what I didn't recognize what I didn't, what I didn't know to think of maybe as the problem of my existence or the riddle of my existence until I read some people who were articulating that for me like Alan Watts, for example, I think his first book that I read as with so many people was The Book.
I don't know if you know that one titled just The Book and it's subtitled on the taboo against knowing who you are. It talks about, in fact, I got some of my basic terminology for speaking and thinking about these things from him talking about 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 and at the skin surface, was talking to a very young me as he did to a lot of people to light them up to this about the interesting fact that you can start paying attention in a more subtle way to the fact of your experience and the fact of the world and the fact of your positioning in relation to the world and the fact of your own subjectivity and recognize way things are not as they, as I have been thinking about them.
In fact, the way I've been thinking about them is like a hypnotic trance. I've been taking this sort of mental model. As what's real, I've been identifying with just a hallucinatory view in a way I thought that was fascinating and you saw you see me in those early journals, just writing about that, bringing in book after book at the same time, like I said, as I was really eaten up with supernatural horror and also trying to gain a deeper, understanding of Christianity and the tradition that I had been raised with.
Alan Watts early on, I found the Ramana Maharshi and when Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now came out, I found a very early edition of it in a bookstore. I think it was titled Renaissance Books and Gifts in Springfield, Missouri. And I read it and thought, this is one of the best articulations of this I've yet read.
Now you're talking about me having a teacher. There are two in college. This is, this would be in 1989, 1991. There was a one of my college professors, when I was studying communication at the University of Missouri he himself was a Tibetan Buddhist and never really, didn't teach me specifically anything about that.
But he became an informal philosophical mentor to me. Like he's the only, he was the first person I met besides myself who had read Robert Anton Wilson. So I just thought that was fascinating. Turns out that he had read essentially everything I wanted to read. So we had some interesting conversations.
He gave me some of the initial advice on meditation. The first advice I ever had from a real life human instead of a book. And then later in the mid late 1990s, there was an online teacher named Scott Morrison and he ran a website. This is the nineties web. This is like first gen web when everyone was still going crazy about this wonderful free and open information field that was going to undo all the corridors of top down on bureaucratic power and all this he had a website titled open mind, open heart.
org. And it was basically an ongoing public satsang where he would receive emails from people and then put their questions and then. Give answers that were just beautiful, and then he put them into a couple of books, which I still have one of the books actually has at least one question answer that was, from me, so I became part of this online community with Scott, and that was very interesting and an insight mentoring type way for me to be filled with these ideas that I had no living teacher.
It's very difficult to be an autodidact as, and actually get it. Real purchase, get real hold of these things and understand them and it was helpful to read him dealing with real people and their real questions and him answering these questions about self, about meditation, about human relationships, what is it, what is, if I'm espousing this non dual philosophy, what does that mean for my relationship with my wife or my kids or my job or something like that?
And unfortunately, I fell out of touch with him and found out two or three years later when I tried to get back in contact that he had had gallbladder surgery and died on the operating table. So Scott was just suddenly gone. And since then, which the latest period that I would have been in contact with him would have been like 98 or nine.
I forget when he died right around then. I've not had anybody who counts as a someone who's offering me instruction or teaching, it's all been me blundering my way through life and I found a number of writers who've helped to sharpen my reflections and my personal apprehension of these things that have been with me for so long now.
Meditative Practices and Teachers
Leafbox: Do you still have a meditative practice or you said insight was that his main technique, insight meditation or?
Matt: When I say insight meditation it, I, it's, I know that's a term that I'd like Vipassana and what all the, all these things I have never done anything formally other than sit in a semi informal meditation, just a sitting meditation, which I can't achieve the Lotus position I tried for years.
It's just not going to happen unless I break my ankles, sit in a chair and yeah, I had for years beginning when I, from when I first discovered Alan Watts as a late teen, I probably went. 18 19 through my 20s and into my through my 30s and into my what early for about to that age 40 or something like that off and on meditation all the time.
And then from age 40 or 41 until this year, every day, rain or shine at least once in the morning, sometimes once in the evening. Whether I'm at home or staying somewhere else. So there's a good 12 or 13 years of, yeah. Of daily meditation practice and sometimes bringing in things on my own, like I have used the Lord's prayer, or if you're a Catholic, the, our father as a, as an object of meditation, there, there are depths to that most people don't see who've been raised in a church and are just used to sometimes reciting it as part of a communal liturgy or something sometimes.
And I have also used body observation, observing the inner body or the subtle body feeling it, breath work counting. And I guess what Zen people might call shikantaza, just formless sitting, just sitting. But again, never practiced Zen, actually have never had a Zen teacher, had never been to a, never meditated with another person.
It's all been me privately.
Leafbox: I highly recommend you try a sangha or try a 10 day retreat or it could, I think you're already so sharp in your practice, it seems if you've done the 10 day, all the things you talk about manifest awareness of the self, awareness of non duality. The only question I would ask is, without a teacher sometimes, There's an alienation aspect that can come with the awareness and the depth and you write about horror so much that often times people who do a long retreat or a long meditation become it's called the dark night of the soul and that can become a quite destabilizing experience without, you become so attuned to experience that it starts to feel formless and that formlessness feels meaningless and then it falls into nihilism and it can be a trap, but you have to push through that and eventually bliss and many things will happen many Buddhist teachers or teachers can better explain than me, of course, but
Matt: yeah I'm aware again from a distance of what you're talking about, some of the accounts that have been that have been written in recent years of some of the dangers that have come that people have encountered with the, I don't know, I don't know if it is too free and loose, a modern application and universal prescription.
Of some pretty deep meditation techniques or the recommendation to attend retreats or what I don't know if it is really that's ill advised or not. Maybe it is. But yeah, some of the accounts of what people have encountered who were not actually ensconced within what would be a helpfully structuring situation so that there's like a misguidedness among those who think they're guiding them or there's just a lack of structure.
So they encounter it dark night, or that horrifying loss of identity that you're talking about, or even those full blown psychotic episodes that we read about people having. Yeah, I'm hip to that, and maybe, who knows, that may be something that I'm not able to let go in a certain way and explore certain things on my own for fear of that.
The horror thing, I don't know why, it's the same thing, why has that been given as an interest to me? You've seen me, if you've read any of my other writings trying to understand and explain to myself the relation between cosmic horror, specifically weird supernatural cosmic horror and religion and spiritual awakening, which it seems to me it's almost like a magic eye picture in another way.
You can see the horror in religion and you can see the religion in horror,
The Monastic Option and Cultural Preservation
Leafbox: yeah, I think there's purposes to attune with all those things. One, before we jump to horror, I want to talk about your, the end not in the wellspring, you talk about the monastic option. Which I thought was an interesting, also, I keep coming in from a Buddhist perspective.
I recently interviewed a very long term meditation teacher and he, I was like, what happens after a year of sitting when you're doing a year of intense practice? And he's describing the exact same things, the breakdown of the self, non duality, bliss, horror, absolute suffering, all these feelings.
Like you said, the magic eye just starts flowing and you're just, in a stream of psychedelic, the gates are just fully open. But then at the end, you realize what is the purpose of all this? And in your book, you get to it so well, you also reach to the monastic option. So in the sense that the creative purpose of all these things are to one, cleanse yourself and then create and help the stream.
In your sense, you're a writer and you're guiding the stream through the creative practice, so maybe you can expand on what the monastic option in your book is and what it means to you as a collapsing civilization and all these issues.
Matt: You bet. Yeah. The term, as comes from Morris Berman, the the cultural historian who first rose to some prominence.
He's an American writer and academic. He rose to some prominence in the nineties with a trilogy of books on the history and evolution of which are still well worth looking up, I think. And then achieved his more major fame with his trilogy of books. He calls it the America trilogy. And the first one is the one most people have still read and got reviewed in the New York times and various prominent cultural organs is titled the twilight of American culture.
And so it represented his both scholarly and first person, just emotional polemical take on and response to what he felt was wrong. An American culture and civilization that had reached a peak and was heading forward into a rather just open and garish period of decline economically, politically, intellectually, educationally, culturally, socially.
And it's a compelling book. It really still is. It came out in 2000 and he deliberately didn't search for a solution. And he said, I'm not talking about trying to reverse this. I'm not talking, I'm not writing one of those books where I lay out this devastating argument. That is just unanswerable and then have a 10 step plan in the final chapter for how we're going to fix things.
He says, no, this book is a forensic examination of reality that has value in its own right. Whether you agree with him or not, find him persuasive or not, a person can determine by reading his book. Or his next two books, but something that I think I and a lot of people found so fascinating as you do is what he laid out is he called what he called the monastic option, the option to become what he called NMI.
I think he was in a way, deliberately employing, terminological gimmicks to point out how it may be silly to put these names on it. A new monastic individual, NMI. And he said, if this is happening, if we're looking at the American, as a nation collapsing, not in some Hollywood sense, where one day people wake up, and everyone's running around in the streets wailing, but in the protracted way that has happened to every culture and civilization throughout history irreversibly.
What is there to do? What kind of meaningful life can a person who sees this and holds it to be true have besides just being a doomsayer? And he pointed to the example of the famous Irish monks who quote unquote saved civilization during the dark ages. Of course, the idea of the dark ages has also been exploded by many who want to say there were many things going on during the Western dark ages of, the latter half of the first century.
Right? So that's not even a good term to use anymore. But using Berman's term, he pointed out that these Irish monks supposedly save civilization by saving cultural treasures from the past. And it is true that we have a whole lot of ancient manuscripts and knowledge of the ancient world that would not be there if it weren't for these monastics who made it their mission to do something of cultural value by preserving things that could become the seed of some sort of future renaissance, through preserving them through a very, difficult period.
And Berman was making the point with his idea of the monastic option, that we can each do this, not enter a monastery necessarily, could be that, but he meant make a monastery out of your life, a monastic preservation and cultural transmission activity, the mission of your life here in the world. And as he neatly put it, referring to technology that was ascendant in the time he wrote the book in the late 90s, this doesn't mean we're going to put the classics on CD ROM so people can access them later.
I know that the last couple of laptop computers I've had haven't even had a CD ROM drive, so that shows part of that problem. And he was saying, no engage in something. It could be writing something. It could be making some kind of art. It could be coming up with some sort of social structure or relationships among you and other people that creates a humane way of living on some small local scale that can actually be either scale bigger or passed forward into the future, so that he's talking about people in their own way, coming up with things that you think are valuable to save, produce, whatever that might be. And he names three different fronts on which it can happen.
I won't go into those, but, he says we're looking at a situation where, yeah, we're going to have a collapse, probably long term of what we think of as America and American civilization, and therefore, since so much of the world is Americanized, the whole network standing out from that, what can you do that's valuable. How are you going to weather the storm? What do you, what seeds are you going to plant that a future civilization might find of use? And he uses examples from science fiction, like Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, where you find out that in this future dystopia, where books are banned because they make people think and reflect and have the ability to question the rightness of the dominant order and their place in it.
That there is this society of book readers, book people on the outskirts who have read books and memorize them, absorb them, effectively become the books, and so they aren't breaking the law because they've now burned their own books. But they live like literally on the outskirts out in the woods on old unused train tracks or whatever and form these enclaves and they recite their books to each other and they're waiting that maybe they'll pass it down to their own kids.
Maybe they won't see the fruition of this, but someday when things have changed and this dystopian order has passed and it's okay to preserve knowledge in written form again, they will recite their books. The books will be written down again and maybe become the seat of some future order. This is the idea.
So that's what I lay out at the end in the conclusion of the Wellspring book as perhaps one way to employ this idea of coming into contact with your creativity and recognizing your life essence and mission and whatever your daemon/demon muse wants to do. Combined with awakening to the spiritual reality of the world and yourself how do you employ that in a practical life?
Maybe gently try to find some way that you can employ the monastic option. What do you think is worth handing down to your kids or relating to relating, using as a way to relate to other people right now? What kinds of ways of being, what kinds of knowledge, just what kinds of structures or ideas or whatever it was you want to survive the apocalypse. What could you contribute to some future phoenix rising from the ashes of the present order when it goes away? It really moved me when I read Berman talking about these things and it stayed with me for years and years now. And I've been hashing around for 20 years.
Like how does that relate to these other things? My interest in non dual awakening and understanding myself and the world that way, my interest in, even in the horror and the other types of literature and art that I find fascinating, my interest in creativity, I finally managed to draw it together, at least preliminarily, in the Wellspring book by having the first many chapters talk about this fusion of non duality with a focus on the muse and the demon, and then saying maybe this can be used to find your own way to identify a monastic activity you can undertake, if that appeals.
Leafbox: Yeah. Just to take it even a step further, I think when you said about the, this moment, when we first began the talk about this moment is arising and ending, that's the message, right? The whole, you're taking a civilizational aspect. The self is always arising and ending and your creative craft.
It's just, what's so beautiful about your Wellspring book is that it's all about relaxing into that cosmic stream. And then the muse will speak to you through these exercises and, tuning that, yourself in a relaxed way will help you tap into that monastic option .
Tuning into the Muse
Matt: Yeah. Thank you for noticing that because it would be ascending out into the world, maybe the wrong kind of energy wrong in terms of maybe what a person who's interested in these things would want to create.
If you tried to strong arm it, if you tried to effort your way through these things and really take too much of a cerebral view and go, ah, now I'm on a mission, I have to find out what my, My new monastic activity is going to be, I want to do this. I want to do that.
I want to see these results. No, the things that are most likely to endure are the things that. Arise on their own, right? You know what? Suddenly, for no good reason, I reminded myself in saying that of the part of the canonical Gospels, where some of the Pharisees and Sadducees are meeting, all those scenes in the New Testament where they are really disturbed by this Jesus guy and what he's doing and what a challenge he mounts, that framing of them, the canonical Gospels.
And Oh, who is it who speaks up? Is it Gamaliel? It's one of the it's one of the really wise actual historical figures, that, that is included from ancient first century Judaism in there. And he tells everybody, you're going to be, you're going to be very wise to be careful in how you approach this.
And he speaks what I think is just one of the greatest expressions and it's weird how it's in a document that sometimes is rightly viewed as being somewhat anti Jewish, trying to be a Christian point against Judaism. He says, if what this Jesus of Nazareth is doing is of God, which we don't know yet, you're not going to be able to oppose it.
You are going to break yourself trying to oppose it if it, but if it's not from God, it's going to collapse on its own. You don't need to do anything. It's I didn't think of that when I was dealing with these things in the book, like what we're talking about, but that's exactly the point that I'm making when you can align yourself with just the stream of creativity that's happening already by the fact that you're awake and perceiving a world and figuring out what's the relationship between those two things.
Then what happens will happen and is unstoppable, just like you can't stop this experience from happening right now. I suppose you could do violence to yourself or something, but I think some of us who've been involved in a long term meditative practice recognize that's not going to be the end of experience.
There's just, this is, there's a given this to this just happening.
Effortless Action and Creative Quietude
Matt: So that's what Wu Wei from Daoism is all about. What is effortless action? What is creative quietude? Which is what Houston Smith called it instead of the more famous translation, Effortless Action, in Smith's book on the world's religions, how do you get from just efforting things to having your, what you view as your creative activity be the same creative activity that's causing you to breathe and your hair to grow and the metabolic functions of your body to be happening right now and the clouds to be going past in the sky outside my window and matter to be existing and on.
Kind of unstoppable at that point. And you're also not too attached to whatever the form is that comes up, but whatever comes up. We'll be coming up through you, not some, not as something that you take some kind of egoic credit for. And again, will endure in a way that if you had been just trying to effort something into the world, it might not.
Exploring Western and Eastern Perspectives on Consciousness
Leafbox: Coming back to your journals, there's a line I read this morning that I liked. It said, you're fighting with the Western and Eastern perspectives on consciousness. And you say consciousness is something more than just a spectator. You keep talking about this non dual perspective, and you have the Christian uprising, how, what's your relationship to the God figure now?
It's still unclear from, I never could really tell where, are you still battling that, or do you externalize that position, or is it a non dual? Everything is.
Matt: Not still battling that.
The Concept of God and Mental Projections
Matt: The the God that that I think I don't I it's, I used to speak in a general, in broad generalities and not even recognize that I was maybe painting with too broad a brush, I was about to say the God that most Christians believe in,
how am I supposed to know? It seems that way. It's I'll qualify that by saying it seems the God that most or many Christians or even just theists in general, followers of the great Abrahamic traditions or any other theists, the God they believe in, I think.
Is a partial God or it's 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. There are others who are perhaps more in tune with that, even though it may be mixed up with something. I certainly don't claim to have perfection achieved myself, but I don't really, I don't struggle with that anymore because I'm fine with the word God, because there clearly is that, whatever it is, from the point of view of the rational mind, right?
And the point of view of speaking, the the thing that is just the thing the source of suchness, as we would say in a Buddhist term that is what this all is. And I am, I have at least become astute and sensitive enough in my observing of these things, maybe with the help of some meditative practice to recognize that if I'm here speaking as I, this unit of consciousness, which seems to be looking out from a central subjectivity.
That clearly not as a matter of trying to prove it to myself or anyone else, but just as an obvious matter, this refers back to maybe I'll use the faulty term and absolute subject, and that, that would, that is necessarily the same as it is for you right now and for any, anyone else. And it's necessarily the same thing that is a source of the far interior to use an incorrect spatial metaphor of the table that my laptop computer is sitting on right now.
It's not something I can prove, 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, I think, perfectly, fruitfully in metaphorical terms as the personal God.
Houston Smith and the Perennial Philosophy
Matt: I got a lot of help from this early on when I encountered Houston Smith in the nineties and rather than his book, The World's Religions.
First called the Religions of Man in the mid 20th century being introduced me to him as it has been for so many people. I first found his book of essays titled Beyond the Postmodern Mind in an outlet bookstore in Branson, Missouri. And he's really Hugh Smith, who died just a few years back, was really hooked into the classic tradition of perennialism, the perennial philosophy.
Interesting how much he stood personally at the center of this huge nexus of writers and thinkers and forces in the mid 20th century. He's hanging out with Alan Watts and Tim Leary and Aldous Huxley and knowing most of the big movers and shakers in the world of religious studies and so on.
And serving as one of the major figures himself. And he very helpfully in that book, Beyond the Postmodern Mind, and some of his other books, one called one titled forgotten, is it forgotten truth? Is that what it is? The wisdom of the world's religions, subtitle. That you, the great chain of being idea that obtains both in like classical Western Christianity.
And there's a version of it also in, in some Eastern religions works perfectly. And you have the physical level and mental level and kind of astral level, and beyond that the image of the creator God or the theistic God works. It's part of the, it's part of the primal pattern that you can see it's there. It's just that it's not the final word.
So what do you have beyond that? The one, the Godhead, which is involved in Christianity. Roman Catholicism is way deep into that. Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Christianity is way into that. Even your Protestant mystics, of whom there are blessedly few will get you there.
So that's the kind of Christianity and the kind of God belief that works for me at the same time as I recognized that for when I was younger, for most of my life, and I think for virtually all of the people who form part of my religious education, we were all stuck in a worshiping that mental idol.
So you can use the term God and use it in a wrong way and be just completely distracted and spend your whole life in that distraction, never getting past that and wondering why things seem so screwed up and difficult. Or, you can use the same term, some of the same concepts, but see through them. It's this, I think it's the same, it's the same as referring to any idol, right?
The idol can become a barrier, but you're stuck on that idol. Or you can recognize that there's nothing wrong with the idol in itself, but you're using it as a window, or a prism, through which you're accessing the thing that the idol only represents.
Leafbox: Coming back to the puzzle the magic eye puzzle or pattern, it's the same relationship with the God head or the God figure.
Matt: That's a very good point. That's a very good point. Yeah. You could, I guess you could view the the theistic, the God of theism, as a big magic eye figure, right? You look at it, you're dazzled by it. And then that previously unseen depth suddenly opens up within it. That's great. I'm glad you said that.
Horror in Religion and Spirituality
Leafbox: Switching to horror for a second. I'm curious, there was an interview you had on the, I think, the Weird S tudies podcast. And the host asked you, there's Lynch not Lynchian Lovecraft, who thinks that horror comes from in ourselves. And then Ligotti thinks, no, it's You know outside or I think the quote is he says it's internal one of them is without internal without meaning and the other one I think is Ligatti is it's external malicious and meaningful and absolutely horrible in terms of wanting to either destroy or do things.
What's your take on how to fit what you just said about the Godhead and these two takes on evil or
Matt: actually the way you described that is, is perfectly accurate, helpful. Just flipped.
Lovecraft vs. Ligotti: External vs. Internal Horror
Matt: It's actually Lovecraft where the, where it's a horror of outsideness. And the Ligotti that it's a horror of inside. Lovecraft, of course, is one of the exemplars of cosmic horror, one of the creators, one of the originators of the modern idea of cosmic horror.
So for Lovecraft, as he expresses, not only in his stories, but in his classic. Let's say supernatural horror in literature from the, what, late 1920s. The idea of cosmic horror. He wanted to say this was just what makes supernatural horror, or just horror in general. He was really talking about the kind of horror that he liked to write and read is the sense or the idea of external forces.
Of unseen figures, unseen wings, he said, beating beyond the rim of the known universe, and maybe awful shapes clawing at the rim of the universe to get in. Now, do you mean physical universe? Do you mean your psyche? That's an interesting question. In his work, you can go both of those directions, and in his life and that there is some, the idea with him is that there is some awfulness, if you could see the big picture.
He gets at that famously in the first paragraph of the Call of Cthulhu. Where he says, the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. And he goes on to talk about what a, what an unacknowledged blessing it is that we can't actually put together everything we've learned from science and so on, because if we did, we'd be absolutely horrified.
And we would either basically go insane from it and be destroyed by it, or retreat into a new dark age. And so his is the horror of outsideness. And then Ligotti. is like the archetype of the horror of deep inwardness of there being something bizarre in the world that also corresponds to something bizarre in oneself.
That reality itself at any moment can tip over into nightmarish weirdness. He refers to with various metaphors to things like the great chemists, referring to these powers and principles that seem to just run with reality, however they want twisted, mutated, make it very plastic. And in ways that don't seem to account for these sensibilities of creatures that are self aware. And he's also tied in, of course, to the idea of extreme cosmic pessimism, total meaninglessness. Sure, there's a malevolence to these powers, but it's more like everything is just recognized as this shrieking void in, inside of which conscious existence is a nightmare.
The Intersection of Horror and Spirituality
Matt: So how do I hook those things and my interest in those things and my delineation of those things to my interest in spirituality? That's an interesting question. Actually, right now I'm in process of writing an essay for an online magazine that I've got a due date for that is about exploring the relationship between horror and religion.
Religion as a Cosmic Order and Its Horrific Potential
Matt: And saying, how might religion viewed in some ways be intrinsically horrific, it seems to me, it seems to me that religion can be viewed as any religion. And I know there's some question when it comes to things like Buddhism, which are commonly talked about in books and courses on world religions.
So whether it should count as a religion or philosophy or psychology, but it seems like any religion posits a cosmology. In some way, it has, it is conveying and one is trying to, if you're an inherent, you're trying to get on the inside and see from its point of view what reality is, who am I?
What is reality? What does this mean for everything, including me? And in a way, you can say that every religion therefore constitute it. The religion itself builds a cosmos, right? It builds a world picture. And when you do that, you're automatically inviting the possibility of there being things that don't work with that.
You're creating a sacred canopy as Peter Berger calls it in his famous book of that title, the sociologist Peter Berger, and it's a system of meaning the savviest of religious and spiritual traditions will try to remain aware of that they'll try to remain flexible and so on. But, the quote, great religions of the world, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, all this stuff, all of them in some way, posit a world system.
This is the way reality is set up and in doing so, it's possible that they are partial. And so therefore the understanding of self and world that they give is partial. And so therefore there are things that can enter this sacred canopy of meeting the metaphors of stretching stretching a canopy over the unbounded sky that tells you what things are like, shows you a world.
What happens to return to Lovecraft's metaphor of outside is what happens when some facts, some experience, comes in that you don't know how to account for. This can be very literal. It can be being someone on what we now call the North American continent. The day that a European ship shows up and they have absolutely no, this is not on their map.
It's not on the Europeans map either. Your whole world is ripped open at that point and the effects are going to play out over time. There could be something that happens in consciousness when somebody goes on one of these meditation retreats and is not ready for what they encounter. Something causes a rip in the canopy or in the LIggotian model.
Maybe something emerges from deep within on that meditation treat. And again, it was something that you weren't accounting for in the conscious model that you came in with. Your cosmos is punctured. Is that an occasion for joy and bliss? Is it a revelation from beyond? Is it like angels singing and hearing the hallelujah chorus, and, or recognizing that you've suddenly experienced moksha or something like that?
Or is it the old ones awakening from their slumber of eons at the base of the ocean after some time of beaming horrific alien dreams into the minds of sensitive poets and writers around the world, like in the Call of Cthulhu? The human sensibility that's built up can receive it either way. The same dang thing.
Spiritual enlightenment, for example, by any other name. Can be received as this wonderful thing or even by those who are seeking it. It can, I think arises something that you weren't expecting. You didn't think it was going to be like that. And why did I ever court that nightmare? So I think this is beginning to get at what we're talking about.
There are other way. There are other ways to talk about it. But religion being something that inherently is constitutive of a cosmic order. And therefore being something where I think real religion is automatically going to go beyond itself shows how should the danger of the perilous waters that we're treading and I don't know if you read my essay initiation by nightmare that is included in my book.
What the demon said, and I put it as a supplemental text in the course, but it's thought it talks about my sleep paralysis episodes that really overturned me in the nineties. And tries to deal with those and wonder, to interrogate what was that darkness that was stalking me, sometimes appearing as a demonic dark figure.
And I end up by the end of that essay, linking that to my demon muse. My creativity seems like it's the same source. How is it appearing to me as horrific? Right? Same type of thing. In that essay, I quote I quote is, am I'm trying to remember, am I quoting from, oh, Terrence, I'm having a retrieval issue here, help me here, psychedelics.
Leafbox: Terrence McKenna.
Matt: Yeah, Terrence McKenna. Am I quoting from Terrence McKenna or that memoir, that book about him by Dennis McKenna? I forget, but basically, I think it's him the idea, the line is that all of us who perturb consciousness, that's the phrase, who perturb consciousness. Are putting ourselves in a perilous place because there's no telling what's going to arise from that religion is a perturbing of consciousness.
It's a perturbation of the universe. When I say that, I reminded that there's actually a book. I think it's a book of of deconstructionist criticism of Lovecraft's text called Lovecraft disturbing the universe. Religion is a perturbing or disturbing of the universe, including the universe that is oneself and the entire conception that goes with it that is provided by the religion to possibility to tip over from horror or to bliss or whatever is right there.
So it's legit to say that religion isn't one sense horror itself. It erects a world. Only to go beyond it, and all you have to do is look at the religious traditions of the world like Christianity where eruptions of miraculous things, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament, are usually not accompanied by joy.
They are apocalyptic events and people are terrified and the Lord Jesus performs a miracle. He walks on the water. His disciples see him from the boat. They think he's a ghost and they're scared out of their minds. The the angel comes down onto the stone that's rolled across the tomb where Jesus is laying and there's the Roman centurions guarding it.
And they are so thunderstruck and so terrified that they all pass out, you get that in other religious traditions. One of the, one of the things I always refer to from an Eastern tradition. Tradition is the Bhagavad Gita and the vision that Krishna shows of Krishna's self and the universe to Arjuna.
He's just overcome. He's stop. I can't handle this. You're playing with fire when you're playing with religion because it creates a world. And then there's this infinitude that it also lets in that is going to blow up that world. You might receive that as horror. You might receive that as joy.
Lovecraft had that right in his own. Sensibility, he would write in letter after letter about his sense of yearning and adventurous expectancy and longing and nostalgia at sunsets and at architectural vistas and providence and all that kind of stuff, and then it turned around and say the most the most horrible thing that's possibly conceivable by a human being. And he said this in his stories, in his letters is a suspension of natural law. Something being overturned. It seems like it's rational and orderly. He had those longings right there in himself. And I think that's how that's at least one place.
Where you see real religion and spirituality being implicated always in the possibility of the horrific.
Leafbox: Matt, I know your time is very limited. I wanted to end there's a quote from your journal, coming back to your journal. There's so many great quotes that bring all this back perfectly. Early you, you say, I think the world is sick. But no one sees it everywhere. No one sees it. But then you end later. The easiest thing in the world should be to relax fully into the arms of the universe and trust whatever happens next. But that that, and then that, I think that can maybe lead us to the next conversation. You yourself are battling with all this, you, you accept that you should just relax into the phenomenon, the independent and midst of the spectrum.
But. There's always that horror that really breaks the self and maybe that's the purpose of the horror is to be a mirror, right?
Matt: Yeah. And part of the horror, part of the horror could be one's own inability ever. We're not ever, but at a given intermediate point ever to fully relax, the continued arisings of clutching, gaining sense, an effortful sense.
Like I talked about, no, I want to relax into the arms of the universe and accept what comes next. If anybody has read, who's listening, has read a book illusions by Richard Bach that I mentioned at the start, he tells a little parable at the start about creatures whose only way of life. They knew they all live at the bottom of a river.
And the only way of life they know is to cling to the rocks, to not be swept downstream. And one day, one of them gets the idea. What if I let go? And he just is swept off by the river. And then he like comes to other communities of these creatures and they think he's supernatural. He's flying past other than they're like, others are like, what are you doing?
It's crazy to let go. You're going to die. He's no, look, the stream loves to carry us. It's horrifying to those who haven't done it. It's probably even horrifying to the one who does it. And there's no guarantee he doesn't go there. Richard Bach doesn't go there. That very one who's flying with the universe may at some point have an attack of self consciousness and go, Oh shit.
And then suddenly we've got to cling again. I think that's the dialectic that so many of us, I know myself, find ourselves living with.
The Wellspring Book and Future Plans
Leafbox: Matt, what is the status of the Wellspring book? Are you going to self publish it? It's still a draft.
Matt: I had considered self publishing it. I have submitted it to some agents.
I've gotten, some good responses, but some nos I have a list of publishers that I have made and something about, I'm waiting for one of these bursts of energy to make me actually go with it. I have some likely there's there, there's a few, I was surprised to find out that have published publishers that accept unagented submissions.
That actually have published some books that have been important to me, that are, that would be perfect publishers for this book. I think I've got, had a couple of things that are leading me to change the book proposal that I've created to go with it. I've been in a very busy period of work in my day job and have not had the energy to do it.
I'm waiting for a burst of motivation to make an alteration to the book proposal and send it out to some of these publishers. Publishers that accept unagented submissions. I think I'm probably giving up on the agent end. It doesn't feel like it's right When will I reach the point where I say maybe it needs to be self published.
I don't know I don't think i'll be putting it out there like a free pdf like I did all those years ago with a Course in Demonic Creativity. But i'm serializing the book for people at the paid subscription level on my living dark blog and newsletter online right now. So that's available there. And I may at some point reteach the class that uses it as a text for Weirdosphere.
And that could be who knows how long down the road, months or a year down the road or more. It currently exists, the book itself exists in manuscript form and is waiting for the right conglomeration of forces to tell me what's, what it's formed for reaching the rest of the world is going to be.
Leafbox: Matt, I really appreciated the effort in the book. And I took many things from it, from the new non dual to the exercises, to just connect with your own creative practice are so useful. So thank you. I think people should follow your work at living into the dark. There's so many more things I could ask, but I know your time's limited, Matt.
Final Thoughts and Appreciation
Leafbox: Anything else you want to share today or anything?
Matt: Just to say that I appreciate your vibe. You, when you, I appreciate you being in the class. And then when you asked me if I would be interested in this conversation I listened to a podcast that you'd sent, and I, you have a very open and just calm and accepting way of going about these conversations.
And it's clear that you, you're interested in things and interested in talking about these things. I think that brings the best conversations out. So didn't mean to make this suddenly a mutual admiration society, but just that's all I would say, I think as far as talking about the things we've talked about, we'll let it just end right there.
Leafbox: Great, Matt. Thank you so much.
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