I have now republished two interviews from The Teeming Brain to its archive. One is my 2006 conversation with Thomas Ligotti, titled “It’s all a matter of personal pathology.” Tom talks about writing, anhedonia, the sources of his horror fiction, and what a perfect world might look like. After first being published at TTB, the interview was published in The New York Review of Science Fiction and then collected some years later in Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti.

The other is my 2012 interview (not published until 2014) with transpersonal psychology pioneer James Fadiman titled “The daemon and the doors of perception.” Dr. Fadiman was the primary person responsible for originating the influential trend of microdosing a few years back, and in this conversation, which occurred around that time, he talked about psychedelics, creative inspiration, the daimon, the distinction between science and scientism, and the possibility of help from beyond the self.

There’s more to come in this vein (not just interviews) as I revisit items from the past that are still relevant today, and in some cases maybe more so.

The occasion for this present communiqué was provided by three recent conversations that drew out of me some thoughts that, upon rereading them, I realized I wanted to share with you. One interaction was focused on what AI is doing to the teaching of writing in the college classroom. Another came when I decided to follow an inner prompting to quote a provocative statement by a music celebrity about taking responsibility for everything that happens to us. The third focused on a question that has driven much of my writing over the years: whether the deep entanglement of religion and religious experience with horror reveals something fundamentally terrible about reality.

These conversations all took place within a span of two weeks, and when I revisited my responses, I noticed a shared theme that threaded its way through them. This happens to me sometimes, and I expect it may happen to you, too. We all go through life broadcasting our own frequency—or rather, having it broadcast through us by our deep self, our creative daimon, which of course makes the characterization of it as “our own” decidedly dubious—and then we encounter its coloration reflected back to us in the interactions we have and the circumstances that appear. When this phenomenon crops up, and when I have the presence of mind to notice it, I have learned to take it as a sign to pay attention to what it might be saying.

The shared theme that came up in these recent conversations was a concern with the assumptions that lie behind or before our experiences. What have we learned to think of as the purpose of an education? What do we mean when we speak of ourselves as individuals living in a world that can affect us for good or for ill? What does our conditioned response to the unknown tell us about the nature of what we have encountered? In each case, the interaction with someone else brought up the same fundamental question or issue.

I have gathered this all below, with some editing to join it together, plus a little new writing to provide context and flow, plus a little rewriting to improve how I said things. Each part approaches the question from its own direction.

Education and AI: when the product replaces the point

In a recent online post, an English professor in Texas described how AI has transformed her experience of teaching writing in a catastrophically discouraging way. She said students who see no value in a skill that can be handed off to a machine consequently see no value in what she can offer them. The job used to be collegial and fun, she said. Now it’s exhausting and adversarial. She said the only reason she keeps going is because of the practical need for things like insurance and tuition for her own child.

This touched me, and I felt moved to offer a comment:

As a former English prof and current chief academic officer, I definitely feel this. I’m convinced that, in addition to the obvious surface troubles, one of the deeper layers in this crisis is the emphasis on the end product that we have all shared for years, both faculty and students, even though we as faculty have known better and tried to emphasize the process and the learning that the product is merely supposed to represent and measure. For those of us who teach writing, the product is the essay, paper, or whatever it may be. And also, from our students’ point of view, the grade we end up assigning to it. With a product-oriented transactional mindset, and in an environment where some kind of competition for rank, as in comparative GPAs, is baked in, students—even those who loathe the whole situation—will inevitably find a technology like LLMs irresistible for producing a “better” version of that product.

It is of course easy to say these things, to observe them, to agree on them. But as those of us in education know from what we’re currently living through in our respective spheres, it’s damned difficult to gain any traction or make any headway in somehow addressing these issues practically and somehow reorienting everything.

Speaking of the practical, though the following is not helpful on that level, I have long found it to be usefully orienting and wonderfully affirming of my own intuition, even from before the public arrival of LLMs in 2022:

In 2013 Morris Berman, the American cultural historian and social critic who most famously wrote The Twilight of American Culture, said this in a comments thread at his blog Dark Ages America:

I don’t teach anymore, but if I did, my opening lecture in every course would begin as follows:

Most people think that whatever is in their heads is the result of their own thinking. But this isn’t true. It is rather the result of the culture in which they live. Now although many of you might deny it publicly, you really believe that learning is a waste of time. If I could hand you all a diploma right now, you’d be out the door in 4 seconds. You know this and I know this. So my question is: if the idea that learning is a waste of time is not really your idea, who put it there? In other words, can you start to see yourselves as victims of this culture; and if you can, do you have any interest in fighting back? What would such resistance consist of? What role would the following admissions have, in this process.

Jesus, I know nothing at all. I’m a dummy.

They took my spirit away, my lust for life, and they got me to think this was cool.

This is brutal and brilliant stuff. And I think it shows Berman preemptively putting his finger directly on the very issue that made higher ed, and the students in our classrooms, so critically vulnerable to the five-finger death punch of generative AI.

As for what to do about the crisis, I’m convinced that while there are certainly some wise and less wise institutional remedies and responses that can be, and are being, mounted, the real solution and healing will only be accessed within the solitary mind, heart, and soul of each individual—faculty, students, all of us—and through small, personal relationships and interactions, as we let the apocalyptic fire burn things down around us and force us to clarify who we are and what we want and need for real, in education and everywhere else. This fundamental drive and orientation is something the machine can’t touch (though it can certainly try to convince us with its simulations).

The question of what we have learned to take for granted becomes stranger, and deeper, when we turn from our ideas about what education is or ought to be, and instead interrogate our experience of being someone who can be educated.

The self inside the movie

Another conversation began when I shared the following words, which had been working inside me for many months since I first encountered them. I’ll share them first, before disclosing their origin:

The most important thing I would [recommend] is to take responsibility for everything that happens to you and not think of anything as an outside force working against you, but think of it as, “I did all this.” So, something bad happened “to me”? No, I made this bad thing happen. And then try to figure out the reason for it.

I got very frustrated when I thought about the world as a bunch of out-of-control forces either helping me or hurting me. Things that would stand in my way, I’d figure they were put there by other people. Then I realized that maybe I put them there. Maybe I did it to see what would happen if I encountered something like that.

Taking responsibility for everything is a pretty intense vibe. For example, then you have to take responsibility for something like 9/11. But I think there’s something more empowering, ultimately, about stating and realizing one’s role in even the most dire circumstances than in putting them off onto outside forces.

So, just think about why you made your life the way it is. Like, it’s a movie. And why did you write the script the way you wrote it? And why did you choose to make someone’s character the way it is?

If it’s too painful to look at it that way, then you can certainly go on looking at it as being more of a victim. But it’s not as fun. I think it’s a lot more fun to think of yourself as the star of this movie. And what movie doesn’t have a twist and turn? What movie doesn’t have a couple of crazy characters? But thinking of them as manifestations of your own imagination is a lot more empowering than thinking of them as troublemakers.

Reading this, you might reasonably wonder: Is it a quote from some New Age book? Maybe words written or spoken by some weird offshoot disciple of a mind metaphysics teacher like Neville Goddard? Though you would be justified in thinking such things, the answer is no. The words are actually a transcription of an extemporaneous answer to an audience member’s question about how to face difficult circumstances that bring you down, as spoken by Andrew W.K.—yes, that Andrew W.K., the “Party Hard” rock star—in his 2009 talk at New York University’s Kimmel Center, which was presented as part of their annual CMJ Music Marathon.

I have found Andrew W.K. and his work to be increasingly fascinating in recent years. He flew completely under my radar during the early part of his career because of so many other things that were happening — such as, say, 9/11, which occurred only three weeks into the start of my teaching career, which was itself situated during a time when my family and I had relocated to a new town and were living in temporary quarters. I was covered up with new and pressing circumstances, so I simply didn’t hear about the advent of this talented trickster figure who essentially exploded onto the scene, causing quite a stir in the music world, along with no small amount of consternation. When he did finally come to my attention in the late aughts, it was because he tweeted out my Ligotti interview with an accompanying note that everybody ought to read it. I looked at his profile and was astounded to see that this unfamiliar Ligotti enthusiast had nearly 200,000 followers. This of course led straightway to some online searching that turned up who the guy was.

I may have more to say about Andrew W.K. in the future, and indeed I already mentioned him, and even quoted him, earlier this month in the welcome post for this new iteration of my website. But for now, here is what I want to share about one result from my decision to post his words quoted above:

A perceptive reader who has also become an online friend responded with an expression of honest difficulty in accepting or even really understanding what Andrew was saying. Her response drew on both her Christian upbringing, which she had since left behind, and her pointed personal experiences of human cruelty and violation, which she said create a significant barrier to accepting the view that she “chose” for such things to happen. She said she sincerely wanted more insight about my point of view on this matter, including in relation to nonduality, which I have said so much about in recent years, and which it seemed Andrew’s words might be pointing to.

I replied:

I’m familiar with exactly that same sense of violation, confusion, and “What? Why?” in response to personal violations from other people’s actions, and I wish you all the best in whatever is currently facing you. What follows is my own perspective, not Andrew W.K.’s. I don’t think he would identify his perspective as nondual, as I’ve never heard him mention the word, but it certainly harmonizes in interesting ways with my own viewpoint.

My interest here is in the question of what “I” refers to. I don’t take the claim that experience is undivided to mean that a person deliberately chose to be harmed, or that someone who harms another bears no responsibility. The inquiry instead concerns the apparent division between self and world, including the self we might otherwise imagine to be directing the whole production.

The idea that someone can do me wrong is based on the idea that there are at least two people in existence, me and someone else, plus a world that can serve as the arena for us to exist and act separately. Obviously, the way experience presents itself can seem like that. I seem to be an individual self with my own mind, body, and identity, located within and confronted by a world full of people and things that are separate from me and that can act upon me, and upon which I can act, with my own will, desires, and preferences sometimes being fulfilled and sometimes not. Sometimes, people can do things, and events and circumstances can arise, that are totally counter to what I want, and that are even hostile and threatening to me and my welfare.

But is this scheme of things verifiable? Is it objectively presented as something undeniable and self-evident? If I think back to the event that I call “my birth,” I realize that it’s just a story I was told. I can’t actually remember it. The statement that “you were born” was made to me by my parents and taught to me over a long span of time by familial and cultural inculcation both deliberate and spontaneous. But I don’t need to reconstruct infancy to examine what’s present now. In my own first-person experience, which is all that I really know for sure, and all that I can ever know, there is this all-enveloping movie, this fully developed virtual reality. Each morning when I wake up, a world appears. A light switches on, a multisensory movie starts playing. There are all these perceptions and sensations and emotions. Before I divide the total experience into such categories, there is just this total something, this happening, and there is the awareness of it happening, the screen (as it were) on which the movie is playing.

Within this self-playing movie, there is a seeming division into an inner “I/me” and an outer “world,” with the latter consisting of an environment filled with people and things. But is this division a given, a self-evident reality, or is it part of the story through which I have learned to understand experience? Even the idea of time, of years and progression, is present within the very experience I’m examining.

That’s the story that is present, the story of I/me and of the world it inhabits and is obliged to deal with. But what’s the status of that story on both poles? Did it ever actually prove itself as real? Could it ever do that? On a primary and primal level, the movie, the virtual reality, is just playing, and this division into “I” and “world” is still just part of the total experience. In actual fact, looking and sensing and intuiting and noticing beyond-behind-before the story, there is just experience, whether “I” have come to label it as inner or outer, as being “inside” and pertaining to “me” or as being “outside” and pertaining to “the world.”

And, by the way, those parents and others who taught me and told me that I am “I” located in a “world” are themselves A) at their most basic and unlabeled, self-given level, appearances on this screen, and B) living their lives (“their lives”) in the very same state of a hypnotic or dreamed self-world divide that I see and know within myself. They, too, were called forth, in their subjectivities, from the totally enveloping field of experience as only notionally separate entities, through the imprinting and conditioning influence of their own parents and culture, who were similarly called forth before them, and so on, ad infinitum. Who ever stood, who ever could stand, outside the grand panoply of the whole thing to make some kind of objective observation or statement about what it all is and means, and how it works? The answer, of course, is nobody.

My experience of me-plus-world is a made-up story within an all-enveloping, self-presenting experience that is not of something, but that just is.

That means the experience of “other people,” both those who are helpful and those who are hurtful, is likewise part of the total dream.

What Andrew W.K. was saying went partway there. Imagining other people as characters within your own movie, and using this for life empowerment, still stands one step away from recognizing that the “you” in “your own” is likewise part of the movie or dream. It’s like a bridge to the wider recognition.

“Other people,” even ones who seem to hurt me, are me, just as I am them, in this more primal view than the conventional daily experience of being someone living an individual life in a world of others. The undivided movie, the total experiential field, has been divided in hypnotic, dreamlike fashion into separate halves, realms, spheres. This means these spheres are complementary. My partial, unfulfilled separate self is fulfilled and made whole in and by the fact of the seeming other. This even encompasses those events and interactions that “I” seem to find unpleasant, that I don’t want, that I want to prevent and reject. One way into discovering and dealing with this is to openly consider any event or encounter, whether nominally pleasant or unpleasant, and ask what it “means,” which is to ask how it forms a whole, a complementary demonstration, of the inseparability of “me” and “the world.”

Of course, if this all fundamentally seems unhelpful or not right, you should just drop it. What’s really real anyway isn’t the words themselves as a speculative philosophical or intellectual exercise, but what they point toward, the actual field of experience within which these words and all words—mine, Andrew W.K.’s, anybody’s—and all attempts to speculate or philosophize are embedded, and of which they are an expression, just like every“thing” else.

Beyond horror and consolation

This question about the self also bears directly on something readers have sometimes asked about my work: What has my long engagement with horror, particularly as related to religion, philosophy, and spirituality, led me to think about the nature of reality itself?

The matter came up most recently in connection with my essay “What’s so horrific about religion (and religious about horror)?” when a longtime reader, seeing how I explained a change in my viewpoint over time in the essay’s conclusion, asked whether I now see a “light at the end of the tunnel” instead of a fundamental grimness in the absolute nature of things.

I replied:

What I see is that ultimately the ground or source or reality of the religion/horror zone is neither awful and nightmarish nor blissful and beatific, but intrinsically beyond and prior to both. Therefore, it’s not accurately portrayed by depictions from either end.

However, what’s really at issue isn’t what it is in itself, since that’s unknowable to us (kind of like the noumenal aspect of anything else). What’s at issue is how we relate to it or process it, the cognitive and affective and even somatic state or experience that’s induced by contact with it. And this can clearly take either form plus all kinds of intermediate shadings on a scale in between. Because religion deals with a realm, powers, forces, intelligences, entities, or truths that somehow, in principle, transcend or lie outside the human sphere, religious experience can feel either exhilarating or horrifying with its influx of something from beyond our conventional sense of self. This can hold true whether we’re talking about spirit encounters or spiritual enlightenment.

Neither the abject nor the exalted framing is final or absolute. Both of them give way in the end to what’s beyond the dream of separate self-and-world, regardless of whatever it is in an individual’s particular programming or formation that inclines them to resonate with one wavelength or the other.

I recall, sometimes with surprise, that this was part of how I intuitively viewed things right from the start. All the way back in 1994, in the first version of my story “Teeth,” in its final section, nearly as its closing lines, I wrote:

Perhaps the horror exists only in me, not in reality. Perhaps . . . there is no need to fear the truth. After all, It knows only Itself, and maybe I will not perceive It as horrific after I die. Perhaps I will be so thoroughly consumed by and identified with it that “I” will not even exist at all, and my sense of horror will prove to be as fleeting and finite as the self that sensed it.

Of course, after that I went on to have the narrator say (at least in the story’s thoroughly rewritten version from some years later) that “this hope, however appealing, can never sustain me for long. For it is clear that I am already identified with that horrible truth, and yet I still find it a horror.” That was me working out a compulsion to explore, to emphasize, the dark and horrific end of the duality as deeply and thoroughly as I could. This drive lay behind all of my early fiction and much of my nonfiction, including my critical interpretations of Ligotti.

My current position, at least as I see it (and it’s possible that you see it better than I do since you have more distance on it), isn’t a move toward the other pole, but more a stepping off of the graded spectrum entirely.

Something to watch

As a matter completely separate from the one(s) above, I wanted to share two online videos that have brought me some pleasure recently. One is new to me, while the other is something I have loved for years.

“DATA AND PICARD”

Here’s the first, the one that’s new to me even though it came out nearly a decade ago, has 14 million views, and has probably been watched by everyone else already. I find it to be sheer perfection, both musically and visually.

The song alone has proved to be a marvelously persistent earworm in the few weeks since I discovered it. I don’t think you have to be a Star Trek fan to appreciate it, since its “plunderphonics” transformation of audio samples from Star Trek: The Next Generation into a fully realized piece of electronic dance music is pretty seamless. The opening and closing vocals are also rather haunting in a beautiful way. And who wouldn't want to hear Patrick Stewart's voice singing poetry by Shakespeare and Tennyson?

“HOO BABA KANDA”

Here’s the second, which led me to the first when I revisited it for another listen and found “Data & Picard” recommended as another release by the same artist.

“Hoo Ba Ba Kanda” has been a favorite of mine since it was released in 2015. Its appeal wasn’t just its music, which I find utterly earwormy like the song above, or its theme, which is a musical rendering and reappropriation of the words — and the glossolalia-like verbal effusions — of the American televangelist Robert Tilton.

The sense of connection was more personal: My father and I used to watch Tilton with delight after discovering him accidentally while flipping channels when I was home from college. We laughed like maniacs at his madcap antics. So when this piece was released two and a half decades later, just three months after my father’s death, I was enchanted.

I also find it most interesting that while, yes, you can interpret “Hoo Ba Ba Kanda” as pure mockery of both Tilton and his audience, you can also see it another way: as an energetic song with a catchy hook that takes existing material and makes something wonderful from it. The song itself doesn’t explicitly mock anyone. It takes Tilton’s words (and sounds) and makes music of them. Given its repeated refrain of “reaching out to hurting people,” along with the video’s many scenes of people dancing ecstatically, experiencing apparent healings, and so on, you could conceivably take it as a forthright expression of spiritual compassion, exuberance, and social concern arising from a specific substream of Christian religiosity. I leave it to you.

• Conducted by Matt Cardin in April 2012.
• Revised and edited by Matt Cardin and James Fadiman, June–July 2014.
• Published November 14, 2014, at The Teeming Brain.
• This post is part of my Teeming Brain archive.

Introduction

The idea to talk with James Fadiman was originally suggested to me by Rick Strassman. A few years ago, I interviewed Dr. Strassman for an article that I was writing about the neurological and other biological aspects of creative inspiration, and at one point in our conversation he mentioned Dr. Fadiman, who had played a crucial early role in his introduction to the field of psychedelics research and related matters. I already knew about this connection between the two of them, having read Dr. Strassman’s recounting of it in DMT: The Spirit Molecule. I was also familiar with Dr. Fadiman’s name, work, and pervasive presence in the fields of psychedelic research and transpersonal psychology, so when Rick told me that he was very approachable, I immediately took steps to set up a conversation.

The effort worked. I reached out, established contact with Dr. Fadiman, got on a first name basis with him — something made easy by his wonderfully warm and affable manner — and had a long and stimulating telephone conversation with him one afternoon in April of 2012. Then a variety of circumstances put the recorded conversation in cold storage for two full years. During that time, Jim’s 2011 magnum opus The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide brought him a slew of new readers and a new burst of attention from various news and media outlets both popular and academic. It also drew praise from the likes of Huston Smith, Stanislav Grof, and Daniel Pinchbeck. (See the Morning News feature article “The Heretic” and the Yale News interview “James Fadiman: Researcher in the Sky with Diamonds” for good representative coverage.)

For those who don’t already know the basic facts, here is a brief bio of James Fadiman, lifted right from the back cover of his book:

James Fadiman, Ph.D., did his undergraduate work at Harvard and his graduate work at Stanford, doing research with the Harvard Group, the West Coast Research Group in Menlo Park, and Ken Kesey. A former president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a professor of psychology, he teaches at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, which he helped found in 1975. An international conference presenter, workshop leader, management consultant, and author of several books and textbooks, he lives in Menlo Park, California, with his filmmaker wife, Dorothy.

There’s much more to say, but how can you succinctly summarize the life and legacy of someone who aided in the famous LSD creativity study led by Willis Harman and Myron Stolaroff, participated in additional psychedelic research with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert/Ram Dass, had his own first psychedelic experience under the supervision of the latter, rubbed shoulders with the likes of Abraham Maslow (for whom he once filled in at Brandeis University), co-founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sofia University), was the second president of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, and has lived and worked for more than half a century at the center of a psychedelic, psychological, scientific, spiritual, and sociocultural swirl of people and events whose names and memories are the stuff of legend?

It is November 2014 as I type these words, and four months ago, thanks to an email sent to me by Jim’s wife, Dorothy, he and I reconnected to talk about our long-buried conversation and finally bring it to published fruition. We did a considerable amount of work to enhance and update the text so that it’s something genuinely fresh and new. And although the original interview took place two years ago, the issues we discussed have only become more relevant since then. Our guiding theme was the experience of feeling inspired and directed by an external muse or higher power, but in the course of pursuing this, our conversation encompassed a great deal more, beginning with Jim’s participation in that famous study about LSD and creativity.

 The interview

MATT CARDIN: As you know, I originally contacted you to ask if we could talk about the creative muse and the creative daemon. I did this not only because I have read some of your work over the years, but also because of the interview you gave to the Psychedelic Salon podcast. At one point in that interview, you actually mentioned the creative muse. You and the hosts, Lorenzo Hagerty and Matt Pallamary, talked about the sense of an influence, an external presence and inspiration, that comes through in certain psychedelic experiences, and you mentioned that although this experience is known to mainstream Western culture, it hasn’t been as central here as it is in, say, the shamanic tradition.

So, keeping this in mind, could you tell me a little bit about the beginnings of your research into creativity, including your work with Willis Harman? I find this part of your bio to be particularly fascinating, because Harman’s and Howard Rheingold’s book Higher Creativity is a touchstone text for me. What can you tell me about how that work got started, and about what you were pursuing and trying to find out?

JAMES FADIMAN: I was actually very much Willis’s junior partner on that. We were aware that psychedelics had all kinds of possible uses, but they seemed limited to the personal, emotional, irrational, and spiritual. We looked at the possibility that psychedelics were, in the Huxleyan sense, opening up the valve of the mind to be more aware of its own contents. This is certainly true and easily seen in psychedelic psychotherapeutic settings. Might it then be possible to apply this turned-on faucet toward problems whose solutions could then be verified by the normal ways of the world?

For a number of years in Los Angeles, Oscar Janiger had a number of artists experiment with psychedelics in a laid-back set and setting of “Come to my place, take some acid, and then wander around and paint or draw.” From his reports, it was obvious to us that people do change their painting or sculpting or drawing styles massively during psychedelic experiences, and somewhat afterward. However, the art world was equally clear that calling their work, either under acid or later, “better” or “improved” or “more profound” was an impossible task. Clearly creativity is part of the mix. We tried to figure out how to design a way of working with psychedelics that would focus scientists or architects or graphic designers — people with real-world problems — toward creative solutions. And we developed a method that allowed us to work with a small group focusing in exactly that way.

To be accepted into the study, the person had to care deeply about the problem or problems. There had to have been no prior successful solution. They had to be intellectually capable by knowing enough about the area under observation. Then the question became how to run such a study. As we puzzled over how to set up our study, we realized that we met our own criteria.

So literally, Willis and I and two other people took a moderate dose of LSD, about 100 micrograms, and set ourselves to develop this study, in part, to be able to validate what we were doing to ourselves. Doug Engelbart — inventor of the computer mouse and word-processing — used the term “bootstrapping,” meaning to make progress on a problem from inside the problem. In his case that meant that the computer language he was developing was being developed using an earlier version of the same language. In our case, we were similarly finding out if we ourselves could do what we wanted other people to do. That night, we developed the basic ideas that became our protocol. It involved offering people passionately absorbed in their own scientific or technical concerns a moderate dose of a psychedelic, and supporting them in focusing on the problems they wanted to work with. Part of the set and setting was letting them know that this would work, and that we were there to assist them if they should get distracted. That was the genesis of the study.

But in fact the paper that you and Mr. Harman produced from it became recognized as a classic, not least because it was the only one of its kind for decades.

It became a classic, in part, because the federal government stopped all further research with psychedelics. What we’d done, however, was partly replicated by tech type people who took psychedelics to solve problems while creating products and processes. We were seldom credited, nor did the people who worked this way often admit what they’d done. We had demonstrated that psychedelics could be used successfully to solve highly intellectual, highly rational, highly Western scientific problems. Later on, Kary Mullis, who received a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993 for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), said that he definitely did not use psychedelics for the final breakthrough. He added, however, that he had used psychedelics enough so that he could go down inside the molecules and look around. He could do that because he had learned how to do it, and this enabled him to do the work for which he got the Nobel Prize. We were also looking to see if a single session would change a person’s overall creative stance, if one learned one had a much greater capacity that he or she had ever experienced before. Because of the government’s halting our research, we didn’t do a formal assessment, but many of our subjects reported that they felt they stayed better at what they were already good at for months after their single session.

In your discussion of that paper in The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, you share in considerable detail the responses of your participants to that very question, divided into several categories.

In that book, I finally had the space to fully describe what individuals did in their enhanced state. It doesn’t tell people what they want to know if you say, for example, “82 percent of the people in the study felt they were more creative for three months thereafter.” That honestly doesn’t mean much, does not hold your attention (except for people who need those kinds of statistical findings before accepting new ideas). The paper is still valuable, because we did it both ways. There are enough descriptions so that you can get a feel for what our subjects were doing, and there’s enough quantitative data so that it’s clear we were not a bunch of cranks, nor were we just repeating Trager’s and others' work.

In your book you offer a breakdown of what your subjects reported. As you just said, you were looking for things that hadn’t been done before, so you deliberately didn’t repeat the artistic stuff. As I read that section, I scoured it in search of any comments that you might make, or any comments from the study’s participants, about some kind of foundational shift in their worldview. Did anything like that come out of the work?

We weren’t looking for that, and we tried very hard, in one sense, not to have it occur. If you look at the earlier sections that talk about entheogenic experiences and life-changing events, those focus on worldview questions and personal problems, like, “How come I’m not as loving as I would like to be?” or “Is there something about my alcoholism that I could do something about?” or transpersonal concerns like, “What is the nature of God?” or “Is there personal awareness after death?” In the problem-solving sessions, we steered people away from spending time looking at their worldview and personality structure. Few felt any interest in psychedelics afterward. But their lives did change. J. K, for example, was a commercial furniture designer. Later, he went on and developed into an important artist with major permanent installations in New York buildings, and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles that featured his work. As far as I know, he never took psychedelics again.

We probably gave our participants clear indications that they were working within the capacity of their own minds. We did not include the notion of external, higher-order beings as we might have done when running psychospiritual sessions. It was not part of the preparation or descriptions of the problem-solving sessions.

How do you view the relationship between those two parts of the creativity question?

If I wrote essays, I think I could very easily see myself asking the question of whether a psychedelic could be a “muse magnet.” In ancient Greece, if you really wanted a god to pay attention to you, well, it would depend on which god, but most of them liked barbecue, so you killed an ox, you had a celebration that might include athletic contests, you gave the best parts of the oxen into the sacrificial fire, and you and your guests ate the rest. If the god was happy with that, he or she might give you what you asked for, like a safe voyage or a victory in a battle. You could then “invoke the gods.” And without killing as many bulls, you could also invoke the muses. The question then becomes whether taking a psychedelic in some sense serves to alert or attract those same forces, beings, entities, gods, muses, energies, allies, or guardian spirits.

“We looked at the possibility that psychedelics were, in the Huxleyan sense, opening up the valve of the mind to be more aware of its own contents.”

What’s your personal position on this question? As someone who has been professionally and personally invested in such matters for years, do you think the answer is yes, these forces really exist? Or do you, like me, want to heavily qualify the answer by saying it hinges on what language you want to use for talking about it?

Personally, if I accept the idea that this world has no invisible entities, this would mean that I’m agreeing with a single culture only a couple hundred years old and disagreeing with almost every other known culture that has ever existed on the planet. I’m not particularly convinced that we, among all the cultures of the planet, have discovered that these entities don’t really exist. I’m more and more convinced from my personal experience — which is admittedly limited — and by friends who are shamans — Western-trained, on the whole — that the universe makes more sense when I acknowledge that it truly looks like positive and negative spirits are actual and available. Among these would be spirits particularly involved with creativity.

A number of years ago I would have said, “Nah, there aren’t any spirits. All of those people who say so are just kind of crazy.” I basically had the conventional attitude that says if I don’t personally know about something, and if science says it must not exist, I’d agree. Embarrassing but true.

So was there any particular occurrence or epiphany that kind of turned that corner for you?

Yes, it was my first shamanistic experience. A friend of mine, Amanda Foulger, is a Western-ftrained shaman in private practice in Los Angeles. She once asked me if I’d like to know what she did. Even though I didn’t really have a lot of interest in shamanic matters, I said okay. Lying down with eyes closed, I listened to drumming played through little speakers placed next to my ears. She went into what seemed like a light trance. Every once in a while I opened my eyes and saw that she was writing some notes. She said, “I used to be able to remember everything they tell me, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve found it’s a good idea to write things down.” Later she asked if certain things were true about my life. They were, and some of them were very moving. What I mainly noticed was how good I felt by the end of the session, and that my energy level and creativity were increased for months afterward. This experience sharpened my interest and diminished my prejudices.

It has been well said that to be born is to be hypnotized. We’re all enculturated into some kind of shared cultural worldview. And as you pointed out, the worldview that’s based on reductionist science — scientism, physicalism, materialism, all of that — is a tiny rivulet in the overall stream of human history.

If we look at human culture and the record of wise beings, we either have to say that Socrates, for example, had a brain condition when he talked about his daimon, or that he was reporting real experiences. Given what else we know of his mental state, it seems more sensible to take him at his word.

I think the case of Socrates is particularly important because of his centrality to Western culture as a whole. Socrates is generally recognized as the font of Western philosophy. He’s associated with the Athenian cultural pinnacle of ancient Greece, which includes the invention of democracy and rational philosophical thought. And he also famously claimed to be accompanied and guided throughout life by a daimon. And you know, it’s still easy today for anybody to have this same experience of invisible communication, or to have the experience that you had with your initiation, and to find it genuinely interesting and moving, but to still insist afterward on taking the interpretation that it’s all brain-based, it’s all biological, it’s all explainable along reductionist-materialist lines. One can believe that Socrates was a great philosopher while thinking he was clearly deluded about his daimon. See what I mean?

The reductionists eventually paint themselves into a corner. Consider the people who talk about the neurophysiology of dreams. They say, “Look, here’s this little part of the brain that turns on when you’re dreaming, and therefore dreams are psychophysiological in nature.” Then we ask, well, what generates a sex dream, a dream where a dead person appears with information, and a dream where you’re seated before a large pizza? And of course they say, “Why don’t you just go away.”

I think you’re raising the basic question of phenomenology as it relates to ontology.

But if you take the position that the brain is the place through which consciousness moves, so that it acts kind of like a radio, then all of those different dreams are much more understandable, because we can say they’re coming from different channels, different stations, different gods, different muses. And that makes much more sense.

But it doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. I mean, yes, it does to me. Like you, I think that when we stand back and try to take an objective look at it — which is of course impossible in the strict sense, because we’re all ensconced within subjectivity — what you’re saying makes much more sense than the reductionist alternatives. But a lot of people simply don’t agree.

Science’s fundamental error is a religious sort. Science says, “Certain data (since we know it does not exist) you shall not look upon.” Science holds up the story of the church and Galileo to emphasize how dogmatic the church was in its refusal to look at evidence. But if you say to scientists, “What do you know about telepathy? What do you know about clairvoyance? What do you know about near-death experiences?” they say, “Those don’t exist, and I’ve never spent a moment looking at the evidence, because they can’t exist.” There’s a wonderful quote from the French scientist, Lavoisier, who was asked about meteors. He denied their existence, because, as he said, “There are no rocks in the sky to fall.”

It’s funny that you mention this quote, because I was going to bring it up next. What you were just now saying called it to mind.

It’s one of my favorites, because it makes incredibly good sense.

Yes, it highlights the total inversion of reasonable observation and thought that’s represented by scientific dogmatism. People in Lavoisier’s day, and also throughout history, really had been seeing rocks fall out the sky. But this conflicted with official scientific dogma, so Lavoisier says, “There are no stones in the sky; therefore, they cannot fall from the sky,” and this is supposed to stand as some kind of airtight refutation of people’s direct observation. It’s totally backwards, of course. The premise, the first part of the statement, is pure conjecture, pure prejudice, pure dogma. The right approach is to observe that stones really do fall from the sky, and therefore they must be in the sky.

Exactly. Scientism — science as a religion — and science are quite far apart. You see, I think I’m a scientist. That means anything that happens, whether subjective, objective, sensory, or whatever, I look at it. That may be due to my psychedelic experiences, which reminded me that, “Whatever you think the world is made of, James, you have a very limited view.” My muse chimes in and says, “Obviously, if you look at the size of the universe and contrast it with the size of your brain, the chances of your being able to know everything are statistically almost non-existent.” I think of the wonderful, statistically based argument that it is impossible for people to reproduce because the probability of any given sperm making it to an egg is so close to zero.

I think people who say that are getting at something like Zeno’s paradox. They’re trying to abstract from reality and use rationality to declare that things can’t be real, when in fact they manifestly are.

Right. And when you do Zeno’s paradox with you and your girlfriend on the couch, you can’t ever get close to her, but soon you can get close enough!

That’s a nice way to put it. Do you think maybe the very fact of having a psychedelic experience opens a person to actually being empirical, to experiencing the type of open-mindedness? Does it shake open the doors of prejudice? Or do you know of anybody who has actually had these experiences but insisted on interpreting them in a fundamentally materialistic and scientistic way? In other words, does psychedelic experience rattle that lock intrinsically, or not?

Let me respond with a story. I met with a professor from Europe, a professor of philosophy, who had written an article about his own psychedelic experiences in a peer-reviewed journal. In it he said, “Here are my experiences, and now I’m going to show you how they can all be explained within the scientific worldview.” And he defined science quite narrowly. He wrote to me at one point and said he would be vacationing in California and would love to meet and talk with me. When this lovely professor and his wife, an even higher ranked professor, showed up, I had reread his paper very carefully, and had liked it much more than on my first reading. However, I had put marks beside the assumptions that were, in my opinion, wrong or limited or partial because they didn’t take into account certain things that I knew to be so. After a two-and-a-half hour friendly discussion, he said, “I’m going to revise my paper, because I agree with you that my way of framing science really is a disservice to my own experience.” But, perhaps, if he had written a more open-minded paper to begin with, it might not have been accepted by that journal.

Yes, he would have been writing from a set of assumptions that fundamentally clashed with the journal’s audience and editorial board.

One of the things that delights me is the fact that discarnate spirits almost always seem to know your language. That’s unlikely if they’re speaking their own language. However, if they’re simply using what they can find in your brain to work with, it makes sense. Cases that really upset scientists are when people go into a trance and speak in a language they don’t know. It is recorded, and someone who knows that language listens and transcribes it. Sometimes, the language spoken is a dead language, which only adds to the mystery.

“If I accept the idea that this world has no invisible entities, this would mean that I’m agreeing with a single culture only a couple hundred years old and disagreeing with almost every other known culture that has ever existed on the planet. I’m not particularly convinced that we, among all the cultures of the planet, have discovered that these entities don’t really exist.”

This crosses over into some of the horror territory that I inhabit as a writer. The Catholic Church recognizes it as one of the valid signs of demonic possession when someone speaks a language that he or she isn’t familiar with. I also think of John Dee and the whole Enochian language. But that’s kind of a different case.

The fun thing about the Catholic Church is that if you pair it with science — science plus the Catholic Church, together — you get closer to a much wider view.

What is that wider view?

The Church says there are an enormous number of beings external to humans that have some direct or indirect influence on our daily lives. Instead of doing what Homer says the Greeks did in sacrificing oxen, you can just burn a candle, or a saint magnet, so that Saint Somebody will watch out for you. There’s a twelfth-century book, The Miracles of Mary, full of wonderful stories about how Mary will help you even if you’ve been a serious sinner.

Here’s one: a monk who was a fornicator and a thief had lived in a monastery named after Saint Michael. On his death, he comes before the judgment throne where Jesus is seated — this is the twelfth century, so Jesus is the judge, not God. Jesus says, in essence, “Open and shut case. Send him to hell.” But St. Michael has already come to the house in heaven where Mary lived, and has asked her, “Blessed Mary, would you intervene? Yes, he was a terrible person, but he’s one of mine, and I feel a certain sense of paternal support.” Mary answers, “Why don’t you ask Jesus yourself?” Michael says, “He won’t listen to me, but he’ll probably listen to his own mother.” So she does intervene. And Jesus says to her, in essence, “This is ridiculous, Mary. This is a clear-cut example of someone who’s terrible and should go to hell.” And she replies, “I’m asking you, as your mother, to have mercy and give him another chance.” Jesus gives in and the monk is brought back to life.

These are wonderful tales of a direct intervention to overcome the rational decision of weighing someone’s sins and virtues after death, and letting the scale determine whether salvation or damnation. That scale image originated in ancient Egypt, where after death a person’s heart is weighed on a scale against a feather. The Catholic Church has nine orders of angels, and it may have nine orders of demons as well, and it’s jam-packed with notions of forces constantly trying to turn you bad and counter-forces trying to keep you good.

So if this kind of worldview could work in tandem with the scientific approach of looking at empirical epiphenomena, you’re saying you would consider the result to be a more rounded view of what reality itself contains?

Not exactly more rounded. Imagine a spectrum of colors. Science views a few colors, and the Church views a few other colors. If you look at both sets of colors from a real science position, you’re moving towards a full rainbow. Now, if you take a more shamanistic position, it’s a much fuller rainbow to start with. Shamans don’t ignore normal, everyday reality. They’re just aware that it is pervaded and interwoven with the energies or Platonic forms behind the appearances. Plato says that there is an invisible form behind every thing. The chair I’m looking at across the room is one version of the essential Chair, manifested imperfectly as this small chair with its brown cushion and so forth. There is an inherent master Chair or Chairness somewhere out in the universe. Plato pushes the notion far beyond spirits.

This makes me want to go back and talk about the muse and the daimon again. And I know that when I say what I’m about to say, I’m kind of muddying the waters and not talking about these things in the way that Plato talked about them. But in a way, it strikes me that his view of the daimon would be that it is something like a spiritual apotheosis of the person as an individual. It’s the mediator between a person and the gods, and in one of the dialogues Plato has the story of how each human is paired with a daimon before birth, and this spirit then represents the archetype of your life. And I never thought of it this way before, but it strikes me that maybe you could say the daimon is the “form” of the person. It’s a power being enacted in a lesser form here in the visible, mortal realm by a person’s physical being.

You can also look at the Sufi poet Rumi, who, in the thirteenth century, described an evolutionary developmental sequence that says first we were stones, then plants, then animals, and now we’re human. And we’re not done because, if Rumi is right, we will become angelic next.

I know Sufism has been a great interest of yours. What’s a point or principle in Sufism that relates to this idea of the realities we access through psychedelics and creativity?

Formal Sufism says very little about nonhuman entities; its focus is on a developmental sequence that takes you closer to God. There is some overlap in that one of the higher states of spiritual development is called fana, which means the annihilation of the self. It is not the highest state. That is a return to the world but no longer at the mercy of one’s own personality.

Recent research with psychedelics has shown that, actually, they shift the blood flow in the brain so less blood flows to the parts linked to personal identity. In that sense, there is some overlap between this very sophisticated spiritual system and the hard-nosed physiological research going on about psychedelics. There has always been the question: how is it that you have this particular kind of experience of spiritual communication, and what is necessary for a person to experience it? The answer, from all of the spiritual traditions, is that if you get yourself out of the way (as in fana), then, depending on your tradition, you’ll either see God or know God or know that you are God. And now for the first time here comes this psychedelic research that confirms it. It proves that when psilocybin “gets you out of the way,” amazing spiritual insights and experiences will happen. Going back to our creativity study in the 1960s, what we basically did was say, “We’re going to get you partly out of the way, but we’re keeping, with your ready acceptance, your obsession about a particular creative problem. Released from the limitations of self, the larger self has made an agreement to work with you on this problem.” If you think of the muse as directive, imagine the muse helping by speaking ahead of time to the study participants and saying, “Why don’t you call these guys in Menlo Park and sign up for their study? You won’t know why, but you’ll find out.”

Let me give you a personal story about a muse-like experience. I was fussing about writing The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. I was thinking that I didn’t really want to do this book. I didn’t want to write another nonfiction book. I originally intended to write a memoir about how interesting I was, but I realized that the audience for that was incredibly small — even smaller than my Christmas card list — and so I just started writing with an attitude of, “You do what you’ve gotta do.” Then, I had another session with Amanda. One statement that came out of it changed my attitude. Amanda reported, “They say they’re helping you do this book, and that if you get it finished, the next thing you will be asked to do will be a lot more fun.” As I reflected on that, I thought it was the perfect way to manipulate my particular personality. A brilliant intervention. After that, whenever I worked on the book, I always asked for their help — whoever “they” were. My shaman told me they had various animal forms, which in her inner vision is what they looked like. And by the way, they were right: the book has given me opportunities that have been a joy to do.

After the book was finished, I was with another friend who does “higher self work,” and she said, “Let me see if I can get you some information about your helpers.” So she went inside herself, into her trance. Then she laughed and said, “They’re not spirit animals.” I asked what she meant, and she said, “That’s the vocabulary your shaman has, and so that was the way they appeared to her, because she would understand that. They’re just energy beings, and they don’t have a form.”

So we have a cascading chain of different lenses providing different takes on what this whole thing might “really” be.

Exactly. I also remember a wonderful discussion from the Findhorn garden, which is very much dominated by external spirits, by fairies and trolls and elves, who appear to one of the founders of the Findhorn community. The spirits said, “Look, we’re going to demonstrate that we’re real. We’ll make your garden look like it’s the central valley of California.” The practical result was that they grew unbelievably large and wonderful vegetables on soil and in a climate — which I’ve personally seen — where it was remarkable that anything could grow at all. But at one point the Findhorn medium was visiting with some of them, and she said something about their forms, about the fact that they were these lovely little elves, fairies, etc. One of the elves said to her, “We don’t look like this at all.” She asked, “What do you mean?” And they told her that they took forms that would not disturb her and were part of her culture, so she would feel comfortable.

I remember when I was a graduate student doing psychedelic research while at Stanford, the university was terrified that anybody was doing such things, and I was aware that my graduate career could be cut short at any point. So I was the only graduate student who wore a suit jacket and a tie. I showed up on campus once a day to get my mail, to say hello, so that this straight, nerdy person would be visible in their midst, apparently doing the things he should do. I thought that my dress would probably fool most of the psychology department. Somewhat to my dismay, it did. So, by personal experience I understand what the Findhorn elves were talking about.

[Laughs] You have been in their position.

[Laughs] Right. I have taken on a familiar form so I would not disturb people.

The reality of spirits, and whether they were going to help me, and what that might mean, has been an active and meaningful question in my life. Here’s an example. In the room I’m now sitting in, I have two bookcases full of psychedelic reference material, some of it old, most of it contemporary. Maybe 85 books and 50 articles in all. At one point I was writing, and I realized that I really wanted a statement or a quote. I knew that I had read it somewhere. But I’ve been reading this stuff for forty years, and I had no idea where the quote came from. Almost without volition, I walked over to the bookcase and pulled out an older book whose contents were not particularly familiar. I opened it up to what was, to me, a random page. Right there was the quote I needed. I’m sure there are at least two explanations. One is that in some part of my mind, I remember everything I’ve ever read, including that book and page number. The other explanation — that it was a lot easier and better for me for the spirits just to tell me where that quote was — makes the most sense.

“I think I could very easily see myself asking the question of whether a psychedelic could be a ‘muse magnet.’ In ancient Greece you could invoke the gods and attract the muses with animal sacrifices. The question then becomes whether taking a psychedelic in some sense serves to alert or attract those same forces, beings, entities, gods, muses, energies, allies, or guardian spirits.”

I think for scholars, the phenomenon of having just the right book fall off the shelf and into your hands is almost proverbial by now. That’s the most common situation, or maybe the only situation, where a lot of people have an experience of synchronicity or some kind of invisible, external guidance. You know, My Dinner with Andre is one of my favorite films, and it mentions that very phenomenon. I saw the movie when I was kind of young, and — get this — it was actually the first time I ever heard of Findhorn. Andre Gregory talks in that movie about having stayed at Findhorn and participated in its community. Anyway, at another point in the movie he talks about a time in his life when he felt a strange compulsion to trace the outline of his own hand on a sheet of paper. Not long after that, he says he felt another unexplained compulsion to visit a bookshelf. So he goes to the bookshelf and pulls out a book, and he opens to a random page, and right there he finds a picture where the writer had traced the outline of his own hand. You get the idea. This whole thing, a chain of weird synchronicities, was stacking up over time.

But going back to what you were saying a minute ago, you said that as you wrote your book, you really did ask for help. Do you mean you actually articulated the words themselves, whether out loud or just mentally? Did you actually, consciously think or say, “Help me”?

The nice thing about writing a book is that you’re alone with it most of the time, so it becomes a fuzzy distinction as to whether you’re saying something inside or outside. But I’m very clear that I asked for help, and I have also asked for help at other times in my life. What I’m now seeing is that when you really mean it, what you actually do is to “step back,” so your personality becomes less prominent. In Islam, the central word, and the word for the religion itself, is “surrender.” It’s also called “submission.” The West misinterprets both translations. What it means is that there’s a larger energy than mine, and it probably knows more than I know about what I should do and how I should do it. I should listen to the voice of that energy. Western science explains away experiences of being “guided” or “helped” by saying that, in some mysterious way, you have access to the memories of everything you’ve ever seen, done, or experienced, and somehow you found a way to open this up to exactly what you need. However, every other culture on earth thinks this is kind of a dumb-ass answer. Since I don’t know how the world is made, and since all those cultures have had experiences, and have come up with particular families of solutions, probably everyone but us is right.

Going back to my professor friend, here’s a data point. One of his comments was that his “hallucinations” or “visions” or whatever they were had no expected form. However, I had just recently listened to someone who has been transcribing a thousand Ayahuasca experiences, all taken from clients of the same center in South America, written down about 18 hours after the ceremony. He found there were about twenty categories of visions that covered maybe 90 to 95 percent of the experiences. There was indeed a topology. But as my professor friend didn’t know that, he took a more conventional view, which was that since he didn’t know of it, it simply didn’t exist.

This is a bit tangential from what you’re saying, but when you talk about the West’s “dumb-ass answer” that tries to locate all of these experiences inside a person’s own psyche, and you contrast it with the entheogenic effect of an Ayahuasca experience, I think of Rick Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule and an aspect of that book that really struck me as I was reading it. Rick talks about sitting there with his research assistants and actually watching people at the medical center as he’s injecting them with DMT, and he sees that they’re just there, they’re still physically present, but when they report all of those entity encounters and journeys to weird places, he takes it as something that might actually be occurring, but just not in a literal, physical, objective way. I’m personally fascinated with the whole psychedelic revolution, and I have been since college, but I’ve never actually taken LSD, DMT, mescaline, psilocybin. My experiences have been organically produced, as it were. I suffered through several years of epic sleep paralysis experiences, complete with the whole visitation phenomenon. And then when I got to reading Rick’s work and some other things in the past few years, I came across a lot of indications there may be a relationship, that the sleep paralysis experience may be related to the same hyperspace that we talk about with DMT.

I think of the famous painting of a demon sitting on a woman’s chest and the whole incubus/succubus idea. Those are beings from medieval Christian mythology. While Christianity keeps trying to deal with these experiences, all too often, it frames it as demonic. From my point of view, the world works better if I assume that there are entities who are supportive of what I’m doing, and who also might be slightly directive if I go off course.

Do you think this imagining is a different kind of truth in itself? How do you regard that?

Years ago I taught with Kathleen Speeth. She had a wonderful phrase: “All beliefs are false, therefore, pick ones that serve you.” What she was saying is that beliefs, by their very nature, mean you don’t quite know. Beliefs are what we would call faith in other traditions. For example, I don’t believe that it’s overcast today in Santa Cruz. It’s plainly overcast! I believe it will clear up later, based on prior experience. That’s a kind of faith. What Kathy was saying is that we should look at our core beliefs and examine them, to see if they help or hinder our lives.

Early on, Willis and I worked on what we called “The Beliefs and Values Inventory.” We were researching the same question you asked me earlier: do major belief systems change after use of a psychedelic? We asked people who had taken a high-dose entheogen in our safe, therapeutic setting. I was giving the instrument to a small group once, and a woman came up and said, “I don’t know how to answer this one question.” I asked her what the problem was. She said, “Well, it’s true, but I don’t believe it. How should I mark it, true or false?” I said, “Mark it false, because you don’t believe it.” I see the world filled with people who have a lot more in common with that woman than they are aware of.

In my experience the world works more easily for me if I do not believe that I am the only source of my own output.

Let’s talk about that “my.” What’s involved in that sense of identity as a personal thing that one owns?

When I was younger and more arrogant, I gave a lot of speeches as part of making a living. I always thought that it was inappropriate to have a fully prepared speech. For me, preparing a speech completely ahead of time implies the people in the audience don’t matter. Because you’ve already written the whole thing out, you cannot have taken those specific people into account. My goal was to give speeches that included my audience where they were. So I never prepared beyond an outline. Then, at the beginning of each speech, I would use humor to find out about my audience by seeing what they laughed at and what they didn’t. Sometimes, I would wait to prepare my speech until those few minutes when I was being introduced. When I look back on it today, I wonder why it didn’t occur to me how risky that was. But it was teaching me to rely on that inner help.

I found that I would receive ideas, and I could take it from there and give a coherent speech. It made me aware that I had the flexibility to deal with situations as they arose, because I had access to more than my own personality. In the shamanistic tradition, they seek out and befriend entities that like to help people. There are also entities that would like to hurt people. However, I have very little experience with that second group. In my world, helpers and I are more than willing to take on challenges that Jim Fadiman by himself wouldn’t feel adequate to meet.

There’s a term for these helpers that I’ve been using recently. It comes from a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat, Pray, Love.

Oh, yes. I first watched that talk several years ago, and it clinched my decision to go ahead and start the Demon Muse blog and write in a serious way about the muse/daimon phenomenon. I had been interested in this for years, and Ms. Gilbert kind of catalyzed that interest.

She brought up the term “genius” from Classical Rome. That one is easier than “muse” or “daimon,” probably because we agree that genius is a form of “specialness.” There’s also the term “flow,” which refers to being in the groove or being intellectually “hot.” When I’m preparing a talk on something that I haven’t ever thought through before, I reach a certain point where I know I’ve got it. I may not have written anything down by then, but when I do go to write it down, it unfolds very quickly, and it comes with a feeling of knowing that I’m going to make a good talk, that it’s going to work.

“Science’s fundamental error is a religious sort. Science says, ‘Certain data (since we know it does not exist) you shall not look upon.’ Scientism — science as a religion — and science are quite far apart.”

What this says to me is that the actual work was already going on in a non-egoic realm. We can refer to it as the unconscious mind or something else, something more.

Gail Delaney wrote a book on dream incubation. Her suggestions basically consist of going to sleep thinking about a problem, and writing down your dream when you wake up. She argues, and has chapters of examples, that you will find your answer is embedded somewhere in the dream material. I keep a pad by my bed, because I know that the first few minutes of my day are mentally clearer. I usually write a list at that point because I have so many work threads going at any given moment that I need this sorting out. Sometimes I will also get a phrase or an image that has a strong “aha!” to it.

This brings to mind another kind of data that science doesn’t like: information at a distance. The studies that I like, because they’re super data-laden, high-science clean, include healing at a distance. The classic study was very simple. It involved patients coming into a post heart attack clinic. For six months, every client was in the records as either A or B. All the B’s existence was made known to people around the country who had volunteered to pray for their good health without knowing anything other than their condition. Several years later, the records were analyzed, and more B’s had outlived the A’s.

I think I was listening to a radio story or podcast about that a couple of days ago. The context escapes me at the moment, but I remember that in the study I was hearing about, the particular religious backgrounds of the people who were doing the praying didn’t seem to matter when it came to the result.

There’s other research that has shown it sometimes helps if people know what they’re praying about: heart, kidney, spleen, or whatever. But for other people general prayers for someone’s overall health seem to work better. It depends on the personality style of the one who’s praying. Of course, this isn’t necessarily proving that healing at a distance works. It’s just saying that, since it apparently works, let’s look at it! In a lot of areas — and this is what you’re doing in your work as well — we’re helping people to reach the first step, to recognize and accept that something outside of us seems to be capable of helping, especially in creative ways. The follow-up question is: how can we work with that?

Here’s an approach that I like to use for opening people up to the idea of outside help. It’s simple but effective. I ask, “How many of you can set an alarm clock and wake up a minute or two before it goes off?” A huge percentage will always say yes. And then I say, “Well, I know some of you are thinking that this is just a habit pattern, because the alarm is always set for 6:30, and you don’t like being jarred awake by it, so you always wake up at 6:28 to turn it off. But how about if you’re going on, say a fishing trip, and you have to set the alarm for 3:30? How many of you can set that alarm and still wake up before it?” Almost the same number of people will raise their hands. Then I ask, “Well, while you’re asleep, who is watching the clock?” It starts the conversation.

That’s a nice little experiment. Have you known anybody who was jarred into some sort of new awareness by it?

I most often presented this in a four-day seminar on affirmations, and goal-setting, getting what you want out of life, and overcoming your childhood beliefs like “I’m not loveable.” It is part of a section about powers of the non-conscious mind. I keep re-drawing a diagram of the unconscious and stuffing it with more and more material. Near the end of the class I open the drawing up on one side and say that many people think it opens up to the collective unconscious or God or however a person holds it. By that time in the seminar, most people are open and say, “Yeah, that’s probably so.” Then their lives start to change.

One of the problems in Christianity is the notion that the one and only God is aware of every sparrow that falls. That seems less likely than, “There are a whole lot of other beings out there, and some of them look after the sparrows and also maybe you.” That the ruling deity of the universe is the one who says to me, “Jim, go to the third book on the left. No, the third book!” That feels unlikely.

So you’re talking about what the perennial tradition or classical magic and occultism would call the intermediate world. You’re saying this seems like a much more likely candidate for these daily experiences of guidance.

Exactly what I am saying. The shamans, I think, have a very straightforward cosmology, which Christianity adopted even though it doesn’t acknowledge it. Both say there’s an upper world and a lower world, inhabited by different entities with different capacities. Christianity describes the lower world as all dark and bad, but most other cultures don’t. Shamans say those are just different places, and as such, they obviously have different ecologies and different species with different capacities and interests. A shaman will find the allies that are most useful for any given situation. So, someone who wants to know whether his brother who went to work in Honduras (say from Peru) two years ago is doing all right, is different from someone who comes in and says, “I have this large painful tumor on my leg.”

What I explore in my work is the idea of this kind of help as it is related mainly to artistic and literary creativity. The Greeks talked about the different muses who provided different kinds of inspiration for writing epic poetry and history and other kinds of literature. Do you include this type of thing within the wider type of framework that you’re talking about?

More and more.

And then there are different forces outside of artistic creativity that are more specific to completely different functions.

Exactly. And the negative forces may be equally diverse. Imagine a physical illness or injury. Look at your hand. Now imagine that you’ve just cut it open, say a paper cut. What you’ve done is to open your hand to the outside world. Bacteria that had been perfectly harmless on the outside of your skin are now on the inside where they might multiply rapidly, and if you don’t do something about them, could cause pain, scarring, or worse. What you do is to clean away as many of the bacteria as possible, wash it and apply antibiotics, so that bacteria still there will not thrive. Then you cover it. Two things are in play here: the wound, and the beings who live in wounds.

Now, let’s take someone who has just lost his girlfriend and his job. He feels like he won’t ever feel good again. He has an open wound in his psyche, maybe called hopelessness and depression. Now, what if there are entities that feed on hopelessness and depression?

And so we’re back to possession once again.

Yes, but unlike the muses, these are often negative. These entities settle inside the psychic wound, inside that cut-open space. Therefore, when you attempt to help that person through “rational means” by saying, “Just get over it, there are lots of other women in the world, and you will get a better job,” and so forth, the person says, “Yes, I know that — but I just can’t seem to get out of this depression.” My theory is that you first need to get the demons out of the wound before reasonable advice can be utilized. This is just a way of looking at the mental world in the same way that we look at the physical. And it makes sense when you look at how Shamans do their healing and how effective they are in many cases.

“The daimon can only offer you what you can accept and use.”

Here’s a nice synchronicity for you, and something to play on the idea of personal muses and daemons that are in communion with each other: just today, about two hours before I called you, I finished writing a story that I’ve been working on intensively for the past couple of weeks for publication in the second volume in a horror fiction anthology series titled Dark Faith. These books are focused on horror stories that deal in some way with religion and spirituality. And this particular story is set in a future dystopian or anti-utopian situation where there’s an unstoppable outbreak of “psychic sickness” that makes people see strange things and receive strange visitations. I included some stuff related to sleep paralysis in there. The protagonist is the chief Curer in a quasi-religious government organization called the Ministry of Psychic Sanitation, which is all about psychic hygiene. And he doesn’t tell his colleagues that his greater success in curing people is due to the fact that he personifies the sickness and imagines it as a single force, a unified entity, that he is fighting in its different manifestations in different people throughout the society. And he ends up seeing a patient who turns out to be the ultimate manifestation of the sickness itself, totally unbound and appearing in its true form, and it has been growing in power and stature precisely because he has been casting it out of people. So here you are telling me about your ideas on mental wounds and the entities that infest them, and for the past few weeks I’ve been totally buried in this fictional world and using words like “psychic sanitation,” “psychic hygiene,” and thinking about this character who personifies a sickness that comes in through the wound created in people’s psyches by a locked-down Orwellian/Huxleyan dystopia. I came to our conversation today not knowing you were going to say some things that hit directly on all of that.

What a wonderful creepy story where the healer makes things worse. Chilling.

As for our conversation going where it has, you only thought you didn’t know! [Laughs]

Yes, I thought I didn’t know. My angel knew. My muse knew.

Exactly. Related to psychic healing, I was just thinking that a horror writer might play with the notion of a group that prays for people to be harmed. It seems like a natural fit.

This reminds me of something I wanted to ask you. I titled my creativity book A Course in Demonic Creativity. Although in the book I make the distinction between “demonic” and “daemonic” or “daimonic,” some people were put off by the title with its connotation of evil spirits. Do you have thoughts about possible dangers involved in the creative act, about possibly being in contact with things that would lead in a dangerous direction?

Well, yes. When people begin from the position that we are separate, then when they get an insight, or particularly if they get a religious revelation, they tend to think it’s coming specifically to them, and that this is because they are somehow special. In my line of work, many people get visits from many different beings. Some of them get caught with an inflated idea about their own specialness, write books, become self-appointed gurus, and so on.

Ram Dass (formerly Richard Alpert) has a wonderful story that speaks to this. When he was just back in America after having gone to India and returned as a guru, he was running around New England wearing a great brown dress-like thing and sporting a full beard. This was before most of us did such things. And meanwhile his brother had, I think, taken over their father’s law practice and/or become an investment banker. He was super-straight. And he also happened to spend time in a mental hospital. One of his symptoms was that he thought he was Jesus Christ, not so unusual in such places. When Ram Dass goes to visit him, he finds his brother dressed as always, like a Brooks Brothers ad, while Ram Dass looks like a raggedy sandal-wearing hippie. He knows that his brother has learned you’re not supposed to say you’re Jesus Christ, because they don’t treat you well when you do. But he teases it out of him, saying, “I know you don’t really think you’re Jesus, but in a way you kind of had that belief, and in some sense you still do . . . isn’t that right?” And brother finally admits it. Ram Dass continues, “And right now you’re wondering this: ‘Why is it that I, the straight brother with the sensible career and the honest marriage, am inside an asylum, while my crazy hippie brother is free, running around in a brown dress saying he’s God?’” His brother acknowledges that yes, this is what he was thinking. And Ram Dass says, “You think you’re Jesus Christ. But tell me: do you think I am Jesus Christ?” His brother replies, “Of course not!” And Ram Dass says, “That’s why you’re in here.”

If you’re walking along and you pick up an envelope and find a bunch of money in it, you don’t think it was left there just for you. Anyone could have picked it up. But when you get certain kinds of creative insights, you may think that you are the author of those insights. Or even if you accept that they came from somewhere else, you may view yourself as the special vessel. So you begin to sell yourself as that, as a special person, and if you happen to be charismatic then a lot of people may buy into it. This is a recipe for trouble. Jung laid out a developmental sequence in which, just before you get to the point of full health, you may display what he called the mana personality, which is incredibly charismatic and attractive. Yet it’s still totally stuck in this fundamental error of separation.

So what would be the way out of this dead end for creative people or anyone else?

The way out for creative people is to understand that creativity is to human beings as water is to fish. There’s a Sufi story about some young fish that have heard about the magical Elixir of Life. They search for it and end up coming to a wise old fish. When they describe the Elixir, this wise old fish says, “I think you’re talking about water.” And the young fish say to one another, “That old fart doesn’t know anything. Let’s go somewhere else.”

I once took a room full of professional educators — who are the hardest people in the world to work with — and said to them, “I’m going to talk to you about writing poetry.” I watched some of them close down emotionally and mentally at this, because they “already knew” about poetry. Specifically, they knew that they didn’t understand it or like it, and the mention of it brought up memories of failure, of feeling not smart. After a few minutes I said, “Okay, take out a piece of paper and write a four-line poem.” And whoosh! Everybody’s writing a four-line poem, in part because educators are trained to be cooperative. Then we started reading their poems aloud, and many suddenly “got” the fact that, “Hey, I just wrote a poem!” The same ones who had closed down were among the most eager to share their poems. My point to them was to show how easily people come into their creativity if you just set it up as the way to go. The muse is always nearby, but will not come to your aid unless you ask.

I think no one else could have written my book, but anyone can write something about his or her own experience in a way that would surprise them by being better than they thought likely. People truly can be more creative than they imagine they are, because they are more creative than they imagine they are!

In my writings about creativity, I hammer pretty hard on the idea of creativity as a collaboration that requires openness and receptivity, and that also requires the hard work of being open, which will put the stamp of individuality on the work. And of course if it’s true that you’re working with a daimon or muse that is your own, this will automatically give things a certain stamp of individuality.

The daimon can only offer you what you can accept and use. Mozart talked about the way music just “appeared” to him. A number of composers have indicated that they’re really not composers, but are instead just people who listen well. There’s a really beautiful expression of it in the film Amadeus, when Salieri, who has been kind of the “anti-force” to Mozart’s genius, is with Mozart as he is dying. Salieri, acting as his scribe, is frantically writing down the Requiem Mass as fast as he can, because it’s just pouring out of Mozart. Many others have reported similar inrushes of music. Beethoven even talked about “hearing” his compositions after he was deaf.

In the end what I know is simply this: I can give good speeches with minimal preparation, and you can write splendid horror stories. Our respective muses work with what they’ve got. Thank you for a wonderful discussion between us and about our muses.

• Conducted by email in July 2006 and first published that month at The Teeming Brain. This post is part of my Teeming Brain archive.
• Republished in The New York Review of Science Fiction, vol. 19, no. 2 (October 2006).
• Collected in Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti, edited by Matt Cardin (Subterranean Press, 2014).

Introduction

Some books and authors come into your life at precisely the right moment. They speak to you with a voice that sounds uncannily like your own, only better, more developed, more confident and mature, and profoundly wiser than you are about the secret themes that have long occupied your most private thoughts. They crystallize insights and intuitions that have flickered for years at the edge of your awareness, and they open up tantalizing new vistas that show you just how deep the secret springs of your fascination flow. In other words, they say what you have always wanted to say about things that have always been deeply important to you, and they say it in a way that resonates perfectly with your readerly sensibility. The net effect is to dumbfound and delight you with the exhilarating, unnerving sense of having come face to face with your own secret self mirrored in words written by another.

Certain writers are more prone to eliciting this experience than others, simply because of the way they write. For example, many millions of people have read and loved The Da Vinci Code, but it’s unlikely that any of them have found the voice of their soul reflected in Dan Brown’s prose. The same holds true for virtually all genre writers and mass market writers. When was the last time somebody felt profoundly confirmed and transformed by reading a Robert Ludlum novel? Or a Dean Koontz novel? Or a Conan story? Or a Harlequin romance? It seems the transformative power of literature is almost always found in the explicitly “literary” branch of the family tree, and with a few rare exceptions in the work of authors who write in a specific genre but do so with a distinctive voice and sophisticated style, and under the power of a driving personal vision. In such cases the term “literary” is often appended to the generic category label, so that for instance we today have the subgenre known as “literary horror.”

Which brings us to Thomas Ligotti. From the beginning of his career as a published writer in the early 1980s, Ligotti has identified himself as a horror writer. He doesn’t want to be known as anything else. He has, on occasion, taken exception when people have tried to label him otherwise. But when he says he writes horror, he means he writes from the center of what he knows best as a human being, and this is what elevates him to the status of a true literary artist. According to one commonly invoked dictum, art is centrally defined by its goal of expressing an individual’s emotion, which distinguishes it from entertainment, whose goal is to arouse emotion in the audience. Ligotti’s literary motivation has always placed his works in the former category. When he was 17 years old, he experienced the onset of what would become a lifelong panic-anxiety disorder. The first attack came as a kind of affective puncturing of his worldview that revealed the monstrous nature of everything that is, and that laid the emotional and philosophical foundation for his exquisite responsiveness to the writings of Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allan Poe, whom he encountered not long afterward, and who served as his own initial roster of transformative writers.

Over time this roster grew to include not only many additional writers of supernatural horror fiction, but also “experimental” writers, philosophers, essayists, literary theorists, and dozens more from all over the literary and geographical maps. The list of his inspirations and influences has become a kind of litany to his many passionate fans: Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Bernhard, Aloysius Bertrand, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Louis Ferdinand Celine, E. M. Cioran, Douglas Harding, U. G. Krishnamurti, Vladimir Nabokov, Emile Nelligan, Maurice Rollinat, Arthur Schopenhauer, Bruno Schulz, Paul Valery, and many, many more. In the process of assimilating and responding to all of these, Ligotti has developed a unique style that places him firmly in the “literary” category and, in tandem with the dark vibrancy of his personal vision, makes him one of those transformative writers whose work can explode into a reader’s life like an eruption from the collective unconscious.

Please note that when I say things like that, I speak from personal experience. I didn’t encounter Ligotti until late 1997, nearly two decades after his work first began appearing in the horror small press and over a decade after the publication of his first fiction collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. But today it feels as if I’ve known him much longer than that. From the first few pages of Grimscribe, his second collection, which was the first one I read, I felt as if I had been waiting my whole life to read such things. Several years earlier I had begun trying to express my own dark and troubled spiritual philosophy in stories of supernatural horror, but only one such attempt had amounted to anything, and I had buried it after it was rejected by a few small press publications (some of whose editors included very complimentary personal notes with the rejection slips). Reading Grimscribe was a revelation, confirmation, and inspiration all at once. Here was somebody who was saying many of the very same things that I had been getting at in my novice stories of absolute spiritual and existential horror, but he was saying it exquisitely, with what seemed a mystically charged aplomb, like a dark magus whispering sinister truths inside my head. I had felt much the same way about Lovecraft as I had reveled in his writings for the previous ten or fifteen years. Now here was somebody new who delivered an even more potent dose of that magical experience.

It was enough to make me wonder again about the possibilities of my own long-buried story. So I dug it out, revised it slightly, and ended up seeing it published on the Web at the newly-created Thomas Ligotti Online, where it garnered praise from the likes of Brian McNaughton and Ligotti himself. This encouraged me to try my hand at some more stories, which eventually led to my first fiction collection, Divinations of the Deep, some of whose contents were first published at TLO. And a few years after “Teeth” appeared at TLO, it became my first print publication credit when it was included in the Del Rey anthology The Children of Cthulhu. So my career as a published writer is intimately bound up with my revelatory discovery of Thomas Ligotti.

Several years ago I began to think of interviewing him, but I never got around to it until now. The following interview was conducted by email over the course of about a week in July 2006. Tom has been so very generous in giving interviews through the years that it was impossible to avoid some overlap. A few of my questions and a few of his answers repeat or resonate with things he has said before. I don’t think this is a problem, since his readership finds an inherent fascination in just about everything he says, and since I didn’t set out explicitly to break new ground. But I do think I ended up accomplishing that by focusing a number of questions on the topic of his creative process. I’ve long been interested in what writers have to say about the practice of their craft, and have read so many books about the subject that I probably qualify as a junkie. So when Tom agreed to an interview, I seized the opportunity to ask him about some things I’ve wanted to know for years. Andre Dubus once wrote that his friend, the poet Michael Van Walleghen, said Kafka and Kierkegaard were his heroes “because they lived in the abyss, and kept throwing books out of it.” That’s how I feel about Tom. The existential horror that he presents in his stories is authentic. He isn’t seeking to entertain, but to express what’s most real to him. This leads to a conflicted situation wherein I wish for his sake that he could find freedom from his raging unhappiness but am glad for my sake that this unhappiness exists to inspire and charge his writing. Naturally, I found his responses to my questions fascinating, and I hope you do, too.

The Interview

Thanks so much for agreeing to do this, Tom. Let’s start with a passel of questions about your writing habits, since this is an issue that has long fascinated me. You’re now well into the third decade of your writing career. I know that for you, writing has always been annoying, agonizing, or both. As you’ve said several times, you’re one of those writers who enjoys having written as opposed to the act of writing itself. More than once you’ve resolved not to write any more, only to have something come along that called you back to it. What exactly does this involve? What comes over you that lets you know another project is calling? I’m also curious to know if anything about your experience of the writing process has changed over time.

This is going to be a boring response because I haven’t anything writerly to say about this matter. It’s all a matter of personal pathology. Writing was not really difficult for me in the late seventies and throughout the eighties. There was a period from 1975 to 1979 when I was severely depressed, in addition to my panic-anxiety disorder. I was anhedonic all day every day. I thought my existence was over. But I was young, and it was during that period that I began to write in earnest. Years went by, and I wrote one bad story after another. Then I wrote “The Last Feast of Harlequin,” whose narrator is a depressive. It was very bad, but not so bad that I destroyed it. I kept it in an old beer case that I used to archive my writing. Every so often I’d read it over again, thinking how I could extract the good parts from the bad. In the meantime, I began writing stories that were published in small-press magazines. More than ten years after writing “Last Feast,” I was able to rewrite it so that it was no longer terrible.

Around that time I was developing a case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome due to stress. If rolling on the floor of emergency rooms in spasms of intestinal agony sounds like fun, then ask your doctor if IBS may be the digestive disorder that’s right for you. That condition and my increasing panic-anxiety, along with getting older, really made writing an exercise in agony. It also became the basis for the stories of the “Teatro Grottesco” cycle. I still had other stories that I wanted to write, so I wrote them. But whenever I wrote, I would end up in a state of extreme agitation and my gut would be killing me. In 1991, I decided to call it quits as a writer. But I had to do something. So I started playing guitar again — I played from my teens and into the early seventies — thinking that this would be a less stressful activity. I became a complete guitar geek, and it wasn’t any less stressful than writing. This was around 1993 when the company I worked for was going through a reorganization, not its first. I think of 1993-1994 as the time when people working in offices realized their potential for being assholes. That second reorganization disturbed me so much with its blatant idiocies and pod-people mentality that I wrote “The Nightmare Network.” Now I was writing again and playing guitar on top of that.

The situation at work kept escalating in its madness and pathos, and I wrote another corporate horror story called “I Have a Special Plan for This World.” By then, a number of my coworkers actually felt that I was going off my rocker and feared I would “do something.” I didn’t feel that I was to that stage yet. It wasn’t until 2000, several reorganizations later, that I began to lose it. I became obsessed by violent fantasies. These became the impetus for writing My Work Is Not Yet Done. I tried to give these stories a larger meaning than simply that of revenge, which is usually not a subject worth writing about as such. Then I wrote two more corporate horror stories, “My Case for Retributive Action,” and “Our Temporary Supervisor.” Labeling these stories as “Tales of Corporate Horror” was my way of organizing a reader’s perception of them but, I hope, not limiting them to the realm of working life. “I Have a Special Plan for This World” takes place in a corporate setting, but, like my other corporate horror tales, was intended to convey a broader perspective relating to themes that are important to me: the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc. These themes just naturally come to the fore when I’m experiencing some especially intense or unpleasant episode in my life. Pain is my muse, so to speak.

By 2001, my psychological status was that of bipolar depression. In 2002, my depression let up for a month, and I went into a hypomanic phase. During that time I wrote two more stories, “Purity” and “The Town Manager,” which were based on my enraged reaction to social and political developments in the U.S. at the time. The few things that I’ve written since were written in hypomanic states, for which I now take medication along with my other meds. So I guess there’s an observable pattern in that I write when something in my life pushes me to do so, specifically hatred and hurt. These act as a springboard for the themes of my stories, which I hope transcend my temporary experience and connect with my overall outlook on existence, which may or may not interest the reader but is the essential reason that I write.

Does writing still give you pleasure at all? You’ve said that when you first started doing it, it made you high like the drugs you used to take, only without their negative effects. Is that still the case? Or is it more of a release valve for negative inner pressure these days? Or is it a combination of both?

Writing has always brought me more satisfaction than pleasure. I’ve always enjoyed the planning stage of a new story more than writing the story itself. That’s when the story seems to have unlimited possibilities. I try not to work out the elements too quickly because each idea, character, setting, etc. erodes those possibilities. Due to this effect, I deliberately didn’t outline beforehand how the characters in My Work Is Not Yet Done would be done in. This enabled me to look forward to how each of them would get it and how each method would work with other aspects of the story.

So many modern-day pop fiction authors emphasize the old saw that “story comes first.” I think of Stephen King, for example, who has said this many times. Even a lot of literary writers agree with it. “With me,” Bernard Malamud once said, “it’s story, story, story.” I recall once in the past when you were asked about the near absence of plot in some of your stories, you said you had never understood what your readers were talking about when they mentioned this, since you had always thought your stories contained as much plot as anybody else’s. Personally, when I think of the many vignettes you’ve written, and also your more overtly experimental pieces (such as “Notes on the Writing of Horror”), and also such pieces as “Ghost Stories for the Dead,” in which you foregrounded the horrific philosophical speculation and presented the actual story or plot in an oblique and almost subliminal fashion — I have to admit that I understand what your many readers have been asking about. And I certainly don’t consider this submergence of plot to be a detriment. I think all those writers who offer a one-size-fits-all recommendation based on the “story first” approach are simply making an adage out of their private preference. I think they’re probably the type of readers who revel in story, and so when they go to write their own fiction, this is how they approach it. What’s your take on all this?

I agree with your analysis. It seems natural to me that people who like to read stories will, if they are writers, like to write stories. For my part, I don’t care for stories that are just stories. I feel there’s something missing from them. What’s missing for me is the presence of an author or, more precisely, an author’s consciousness. In most literary novels, the author is there in the spaces between the characters and the scenery, but I like to see the author out front and the rest in the background. Aside from the stories you mentioned in your question, I believe my own stories to have story galore within them. But these are only pretexts, coat racks on which to hang what’s really important to me, which is my own sensibility. That’s all I really have to work with. Most writers adore observing other people and the lives they lead, then making up a story about them. They really pay attention to the world around them. This is something I literally can’t do. I just don’t care about what makes people tick, and, as Sherlock Holmes said, I see but do not observe. It just seems completely trivial and useless to pay attention to these things. I’m no more interested in the physical universe, which sends scientists into raptures of rhetoric but doesn’t impress me in the least. I can’t fathom why anyone should care about how the universe began, how it works, or how it will end. More triviality and uselessness. At the same time, I’m in awe of writers who are adept at telling stories, just as I’m in awe of people who speak foreign languages or play a musical instrument really well. But that doesn’t mean that I want to read their stories or listen to them talk or make music. As Morrissey says in the Smiths’ song “Panic”: “Because the music that they constantly play says nothing to me about my life.” The work of writers such as Malamud, William Styron, Saul Bellow, et al. not only says nothing to me about my life, but it says nothing to me about what I’ve experienced or thought of life broadly speaking. By contrast, writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, H. P. Lovecraft, and Thomas Bernhard say plenty of things about both my life in particular and life in general as I have experienced and thought of it. I can take an interest in the writing of these authors because they seem to have felt and thought as I have. William Burroughs once said that the job of the writer is to reveal to readers what they know but don’t know that they know. But you have to be pretty close to knowing it or you won’t know it when you see it.

How much conscious effort do you put into the poetic quality of your prose? I’m talking about its prosody — meter and sound and all that. I think I recall Raymond Carver recounting how when he was a student of John Gardner’s, Gardner would analyze his prose in painstaking detail, going through it line by line and performing scansion on it like poetry. Do you do anything like that with your own writing? Do you intentionally write and/or revise with an eye (and ear) to creating effects through the artful deployment of language techniques? Or do you just forage around for the right general feeling?

Unless I’m emulating the style of another writer, such as Bruno Schulz or Thomas Bernhard, I follow a tone of voice that I have in my head. This supplies the rhythm and pace I want, the music of the story, and makes the narrative accommodating to any poetic devices I might want to use, principally metaphor. I can’t imagine scanning another writer’s prose. But Gardner was a scholar of Middle English literature, so his guidance as writing teacher was probably useful to Carver, who wrote short in a sort of blank verse style. The trouble in being too preoccupied with how your work sounds in English is that this has little bearing on how it’ll sound in translation. This is going to sound monumentally egotistical, but at an early stage in my writing I became conscious of using wordplay that I knew wouldn’t translate well into another language. That came out of my obsession with the works of Vladimir Nabokov. So I stopped doing too much of that, which is difficult because wordplay comes fairly natural to me. And the problem with wordplay that’s too abstruse is this: if a reader doesn’t get it, then it was a waste of time to do it in the first place; if a reader does get it, it’s not really that much to get. I’ve analyzed the double entendres and multilingual puns in several of Nabokov’s books. That’s not what’s of most interest about him as a writer. What is interesting is his idiosyncratic persona and his obsession with death, harm, loss, and all those bad things which are at the core of literature in general but which, for a major big shot writer of the modern era, are especially pronounced in Nabokov.

“I couldn’t possibly write something that would reflect the true depths of my aversion to everything that exists. Assuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear. We would still function as beings that needed the basics — food, shelter, and clothing — but life wouldn’t be any more than that. It wouldn’t need to be.”

I recall from prior interviews that your earliest introduction to horror fiction came through Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, and H.P. Lovecraft. Do you think any of these initial reading experiences strongly affected the type of fiction you wanted to write? I’m not talking so much about content as authorial approach. I know your breakdown at age 17 provided the emotional and philosophical foundation for all of your writing. But in tandem with the question about plot and story above, I’m wondering if you think your stylistic approach was in part determined by your experiences as a reader, or if it was less a matter of determination and more a matter of confirmation.

Shirley Jackson shouldn’t be included in this group. I read The Haunting of Hill House because I had seen and liked the movie and, in those days without video, couldn’t see it whenever I wanted. So I read the novel when I came across it by chance and was stuck somewhere without anything else to do. It didn’t make me want to write about similar subject matter or in the style of Shirley Jackson, but it did make me want to read other works of horror fiction, even though at the time I didn’t know if there were any or what they were like. Practically the only fiction I had read at that time was the Sherlock Holmes stories. I enjoyed those quite a bit because I identified with the neurosis of Holmes, as well as his use of drugs. The next horror writer I read was Arthur Machen, who wrote very much about the same milieu as the Holmes stories: foggy London streets and creepy countryside settings. Then I read Poe and Lovecraft for the first time and found what I didn’t know I was looking for: writers who put themselves on every page of their work, who wrote like personal essayists and lyric poets. Every fiction writer I’ve ever admired wrote in this manner. I say “wrote,” in the past tense, because they’re all dead now. Any other type of fiction writer doesn’t exist for me.

Have you ever gotten stuck while writing a story? As in, you didn’t know your way ahead?

No, I’ve never gotten stuck. I’ve always had to know enough about the story I’m going to write and be enthusiastic about it to make it worth the bother to write the thing in the first place. So I meditate on it, make tons of notes, ask myself if there is something missing from the story that should be there or something that’s there and shouldn’t be, and rack my brain to take the idea of the story to the farthest limit it will allow. Satisfied that the story will be worth writing, I start writing it. In the process, I usually come up with better ideas than I had originally planned. If that didn’t happen, the story would only be adequate, as a number of my stories have been. It’s not possible to plan every metaphor and structural aspect ahead of time, of course. I’ve had to trust that my abilities in these areas won’t let me down.

That leads me to a separate but related question: Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I mean as a condition distinct from simply being stuck in the middle of a story. The best description of what I’m talking about comes from poet Thom Gunn: “There are certain times when you are absolutely sterile, that is, when words seem to mean nothing. The words are there, the things in the world are there, you are interested in things in the same way and theoretically you can think up subjects for poems, but you simply can’t write. You can sit down at your notebook with a good idea for a poem and nothing will come. It’s as though there is a kind of light missing from the world. It’s a wordless world, and it’s somehow an empty and rather sterile world. I don’t know what causes this, but it’s very painful.” When I first encountered these words they gave me a literal shiver, because they describe an experience that has hounded me for years. It feels distinctly different from the so-called “fallow period” in the creative process. It’s more like inner death. I was amazed when you told one interviewer that you had never experienced writer’s block, because I would have thought your painful subjective life, and especially your bouts with anhedonia, would have elicited this experience many times. Or am I using the term in a different sense than you meant when you gave that answer?

Whenever I’ve wanted to write something, I’ve always been able to write it. The problem for me is not being unable to write, but not caring at all about writing . . . or anything else. In a state of anhedonia, everything is revealed in its true purposelessness and inanity. You can argue with my use of “true” in the last sentence. But you’d also have to argue with spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, which have no use for anything, let alone short stories. Buddhism isn’t my point of departure, but I’m in a similar place. I’m completely detached from anything, including myself and anyone around me. Doing anything just seems plain stupid, which in my opinion it ultimately is. This is the lesson of anhedonia, which is an eminently rational state. But if you’re going to do anything, you must be in an irrational state of emotion, and without this irrationality your life is just numbers: how long, how much, how many, how far. Emotion gives an illusory focus and meaning to our lives. When the feeling is gone, so is that sense. This sense is a motivator yet it also fools you into thinking that something is important when it’s not in the least important, except as an engine for your meaningless life. But I don’t feel that anhedonia is “painful” in the way that Thom Gunn is saying that writer’s block is painful. That is, I’m not agonized that I want to write and can’t. Also known as “melancholic depression,” anhedonia is painful, but that pain has nothing to do with not being able to respond emotionally to anything. The anhedonic can’t even conceive of wanting to have his emotions back. That, too, seems stupid and empty and useless. All you want is for the hurt to stop. But even suicide seems pointless. One would have to become emotionally energized past the anhedonia in order to conceive of suicide as a solution. I know that all of this is not possible for non-anhedonics to understand. I could say that it’s like being emotionally blind, deaf, dumb, mute, and totally paralyzed, but such similes aren’t effective unless you’ve gone through the experience yourself. But as bad as anhedonia may be, it’s a cakewalk compared to panic-anxiety disorder. Okay, enough bellyaching about my disorders. Everybody’s got their own shit to deal with.

Then let’s veer away towards some other types of questions, although not before I enter my opinion that you’ve done a great job of talking about panic-anxiety disorder in your fiction, which delivers a potent dose of the horrific sense of reality that characterizes the condition. I’ll also add that I know what I’m talking about from the way my personal experiences of such states have locked hands with the warped world of your stories. But moving on: For well over a year now you’ve been laboring on your nonfiction philosophical magnum opus, The Conspiracy against the Human Race. I recall that when some of your ideas from that one made their way into the excellent interview that Neddal Ayad conducted with you for Fantastic Metropolis last year, you were criticized by a couple of people at online venues for what they took to be your overinflation of your personal opinions into blanket judgments of value. Specifically, I remember somebody taking you to task for comparing Lovecraft to Shakespeare and evidently judging Lovecraft the greater of the two when you said that “for Lovecraft, unlike Shakespeare, the revelation of life as an idiot’s tale is the alpha and omega of his work. He doesn’t just pay passing lip service to what is the most profound and obvious fact of life — he makes it the core of his work.” You have also told me that at least one acquaintance of yours who read an early draft of The Conspiracy against the Human Race simply couldn’t get a handle on the fact that in its dark and despairing diagnosis of life, you’re talking about the way the world seems, and has to seem, to you as a specific individual, as opposed to advancing its outlook as objective truth. Would you care to say anything about all this, maybe to try and set the record straight?

Well, I never said that Lovecraft was a better writer than “honey-tongued Shakespeare,” as one contemporary described him. But Shakespeare was a playwright. Today he would be the kind of novelist whose work I’ve described in response to an earlier question. His characters say things that appeal to me, and they say it well, but that’s not Shakespeare talking. Hamlet’s gloomy ramblings were cribbed by Magpie of Avon from Girolamo Cardano’s De Consolatione, which has since come to be known as “Hamlet’s Book.” So I don’t know who Shakespeare was, and I can’t tell from his works. One can form a good idea of who Lovecraft was from his fiction alone, and I definitely feel closer to him than to Shakespeare. This is something that doesn’t matter to most readers, who just want to escape to someplace outside their world and yet at the same time want that other world to be in a significant way like their own, that is, where things happen that they can understand. Shakespeare didn’t write anything that even the dullest imagination can’t understand. It’s all soap operas and romantic comedies, just the kind of thing that people enjoy today. Lovecraft doesn’t write for the same audience. He wrote for the sensitive few rather than the happy many.

As for my Unabomber-style essay The Conspiracy against the Human Race, this is by no means a philosophical work, let alone a magnum opus. It’s a synthesis of ideas I’ve formed over my life and of other people’s ideas that rhyme with mine. The disconnect that anyone may perceive in this work between what I think and the way I’ve articulated it is something they can know nothing about. To me, there is no disconnection. I couldn’t possibly write something that would reflect the true depths of my aversion to everything that exists. As far as putting words into other people’s mouths, as if what seems true to me is what is really true, this is just a commonly used device in writing personal essays. Everyone preaches to the converted. If I didn’t believe my thoughts were superior to and truer than the thoughts of people who disagree with me, then I would think something else. And I would think that was superior and truer. Even some scientists who can be almost conclusively demonstrated to be wrong still cling to their erroneous views. This is one of the running themes of The Conspiracy against the Human Race. Truth works within a very tiny, often self-reflexive framework. Three of a kind always beats two pair. Someone believes God exists because a book tells them he does; they believe the book is true because lots of people have told them that it’s the word of God. Plus they like what the book says — that’s the most important thing. If they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t believe it. I think that’s the problem I’m encountering in responses to TCATHR. Its readers not only haven’t liked what it says, they also don’t like that someone they know and to whom they feel otherwise well-disposed could write such a book. It’s disturbing, as if you found out your best friend was a serial killer who liked to eat the brains of toddlers. The essay is essentially about how humans can’t handle unpleasant realities and what those realities are. But we’re predisposed not to think about those things in a way that will affect how we live, or to think about them at all in most cases. I know that’s exactly how I am myself. If I weren’t, I would be in worse shape than I already am. I certainly wouldn’t be doing this interview. I wouldn’t even have written TCATHR. If someone says that I’m stupid and wrong, then there’s nothing I can say in response except maybe, “Am not.” It’s really a pain in the ass living in a world of people, including myself, who can’t just stop thinking.

Then perhaps even lighter fare, relatively speaking, is in order. Word recently came down the pipeline about a planned series of comic books based on The Nightmare Factory. This was quite a pleasant surprise. Can you reveal any details?

No, I can’t. I know only what everyone knows from reading the publicity releases. Fox Atomic, the movie studio that’s doing these comics in conjunction with Harper-Collins, doesn’t have to consult me about any products they create that are derived from the stories they optioned in The Nightmare Factory.

Even as we speak, the short film adaptation of your story “The Frolic” has entered postproduction. You’re reportedly very happy with what you’ve seen of it so far. Can you tell us anything more?

The latest word from the producer of The Frolic, Jane Kosek, is that she contacted the head guy at Fox Atomic, and he wants to see the short film as well as an outline for a feature film from Brandon Trenz and me. We did an outline in April 2005, so that’s not a problem. The short should be ready in a month or so.

“I’m completely detached from anything, including myself and anyone around me. Doing anything just seems plain stupid, which in my opinion it ultimately is. This is the lesson of anhedonia, which is an eminently rational state.”

Can you share any new information about the development status of the screenplays for Crampton and The Last Feast of Harlequin?

TL: They were sent out to a lot of production companies by a talent agent, the same one who made the deal for me with Fox Atomic. Some of the companies showed an interest, and Brandon Trenz went to Hollywood. But nothing came of those meetings as far as the two screenplays you mention. They are officially dead.

And that news officially sucks. What a disappointment. Well, then, what about your current writing projects? Do you have anything underway besides TCATHR? And when can we expect to see that one published?

I have no idea when or if TCATHR will be published.

What books and authors are you reading at present, if anything? Awhile back you said you were probably pretty much done with reading, since you had read most of what interested you. How does this stand currently?

These days I read only nonfiction, if I read anything at all. I recently reread all of E. M. Cioran’s works. That took a while. I’ve read a number of works relating to consciousness studies and, of course, mental illness. Those are very technical and hard on the brain, so I often search out video or audio lectures or interviews by the authors of these works on the Web. In the past year I read On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death by Jean Améry and Persuasion and Rhetoric by Carlo Michelstaedter. Both of these authors killed themselves, but their books would still be interesting if they hadn’t. I still read works by and about Buddhists.

I find your move toward nonfiction to be fascinating for personal reasons, since I moved in that direction myself a few years ago. But it wasn’t voluntary. I simply began to notice that I was unable to read fiction a great deal of the time. It was as if some force within me were operating a valve and periodically shutting off my responsiveness to fiction. I encountered a mental fog, a kind of affective and even cognitive blankness, when I tried to make sense of fiction or respond to it in any way. It just seemed meaningless to me. Does this ring a bell with you?

It sure does ring a bell, a tolling bell. I can no longer emotionally respond to fiction or poetry. That’s the reason I read nonfiction, and very cerebral nonfiction at that. One doesn’t need to respond emotionally to that kind of writing, which is just for the brain and not the emotions or imagination. Strangely, I find that my experience is the same with movies and TV shows. These don’t seem to require emotion or imagination on the viewers’ part to be diverting. The anhedonic thing could change in a second, literally, and I wouldn’t remember the lesson I learned from it. It has let up several times over the past five years. At these times, as I previously mentioned, I go into hypomanic states in which I want to do all kinds of things and have the impetus to do them. But for me these last only a matter of weeks or maybe a month. When these periods are over, however, the depression comes back worse than ever. I take a drug called Lamictal, which is an anti-convulsant that psychiatrist have used instead of lithium on bipolar disorders and treatment-resistant depression. The way this drug works, ideally, is to put a floor on how bad you can feel and a ceiling on how good you can feel. That’s the zone I’m now in. The only reason I’m going into detail about any of this is on the chance that someone reading it will know what I’m talking about and perhaps take an interest in it. My apologies to the rest of you.

What about movies? Have you loved any lately? Or hated any?

Some notable movies that I’ve recently hated have been Spielberg’s Munich and Woody Allen’s Match Point. Also, Mission Impossible III. To that list you can add the French film Caché, which is the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I haven’t seen Lady in the Water, but I know it sucks because the writer-director is just no good: his best effort, The Sixth Sense, was a cheat from start to finish. Plus there was that scene in which the mother leaves the kitchen where the kid is eating breakfast and returns a few seconds later to find all the cupboards and drawers are open. For some reason, she just takes this in stride, and it doesn’t come up again in the story. Usually the movies I like are trashed or ignored, like Man on Fire with Denzel Washington and Don’t Say a Word with Michael Douglas. Lately, I’ve just been renting or taking out of the library movies I’ve seen a dozen times. Horror movies: Wolf Creek, sucked; Hostel, sucked; The Devil’s Rejects, very funny and clever; remake of The Hills Have Eyes, sucked. This may sound stupid to some horror movie aficionados, but I really thought well of the two Final Destination movies. I rented the third installment, which was done by same ex-X-File guys Morgan and Wong who did the first FD. It sucked. I like movies in which everyone is living a doomed existence, which is why I find George Romero’s zombie movies so appealing. From the very beginning of the Dead trilogy, everything is hopeless.

How about music? Are you listening to any lately? Awhile back you told me you were encountering some of the best music in the most unlikely places, such as television commercials. Is this still happening?

The reason I hear the best music on television is that I don’t listen to music anywhere else, just as I’m not reading fiction or poetry. So music in TV commercials, programs, and movies is all I hear. The exception is the music sent to me by certain people who have recorded their own compositions. I feel that I can still judge whether or not a piece of music is good, even if I don’t go spasmodic over it. Presently, I like the theme songs of Cold Case and The 4400, even though the latter show blows. It had promise in the first season, very much like The X-Files, but then it turned into a soap opera.

Speaking of The X-Files, I think life in America and the West is pervaded by an apocalyptic feeling right now. How about you?

At the moment, I’m not very emotionally responsive to anything. My medications only add to that non-responsiveness. In the last session I had with my psychiatrist, he started to talk about the situation in the Middle East heating up toward something apocalyptic. In the past, I would have had something to say on this subject, because what I talk about with my psychiatrist is mostly politics and movies. However, this time I had to say that I just wasn’t interested in what was going on in the world. I can’t feel anything for what’s happening now. About three years ago, I was completely enraged by the whole American scene. I’d go out of my way to watch people like Ann Coulter, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and aggravate myself over the evangelical brood. A lot of that is in TCATHR. I might get exercised about this stuff in the future, but it doesn’t penetrate me at the moment. Maybe if somebody nuked someone I’d watch the news stories about it. Short of that, or another 9/11, I don’t find current events very diverting. Also, I’ve had a sense of personal apocalypse for decades due to my psych disorders. I’ve thought that I was dying literally thousands of times during my panic attacks. The end of the line for me has felt imminent for so long that the real-world version of it would just be another occasion of “Oh, lordy, what’s going to become of us.” Anyway, all apocalyptic phenomena take place on a personal level. It just seems scarier when it’s on a larger scale.

I know you’re familiar with Hubbert’s Peak and the theory of peak oil. It’s an issue that I’m following closely myself. Do you have any thoughts about it?

Yes. I would like to see a total depletion of oil occur as soon as possible . . . just for fun. This might be the best thing that could happen to this world, socially and politically speaking. Of course, it could also be the worst. In either case, I am slightly interested in which way it would go. It might go the latter way for a while and then change course. The whole oil thing brings to mind two of my favorite movies in which the fight for natural resources plays a role: The Formula with Marlon Brando and George C. Scott and Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. Ultimately, I don’t have any investment in the future, so I can’t get too het up about what’s going to happen after I die.

Let’s close this out with another question of global scope. What would a perfect world be like for you? That’s of course assuming that you and a world would have to exist at all. You’ve made it perfectly clear in numerous stories and interviews that you’re a fundamental pessimist who thinks it a crying shame that there’s something instead of nothing. But given the (supposed) necessity of existence, what would be the best life and the best world for you personally, if you had absolute freedom of choice?

Assuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear. We would still function as beings that needed the basics — food, shelter, and clothing — but life wouldn’t be any more than that. It wouldn’t need to be. We would be content just to exist. There’s only one problem in this world: none are content with what they have. We always want something else, something “more.” And then when we get it, we still want something else and something more. There is no place of satisfaction for us. We die with regrets for what we never did and will never have a chance to do. We die with regrets for what we never got and will never get. The perfect manner of existence that I’m imagining would be different than that of most mammals, who feed on one another and suffer fear due to this arrangement, much of it coming at the hands of human beings. We would naturally still have to feed, but we probably would not be the omnivorous gourmands and gourmets that we presently are. Of course, like any animal we would suffer from pain in one form or another — that’s the essence of existence — but there wouldn’t be any reason to take it personally, something that escalates natural pain to the level of nightmare. I know that this kind of world would seem terribly empty to most people — no competition, no art, no entertainment of any kind because both art and entertainment are based on conflict between people, and in my world that kind of conflict wouldn’t exist. There would be no ego-boosting activities such as those which derive from working and acquiring more money than you need, no scientific activity because we wouldn’t be driven to improve the world or possess information unnecessary to living, no religious beliefs because those emerge from desperations and illusions from which we would no longer suffer, no relationships because those are based on difference and in the perfect world we’d all be the same person, as well as being integrated into the natural world. Everything we did would be for practical purposes in order to satisfy our natural needs. We wouldn’t be enlightened beings or sages because those ways of being are predicated on the existence of people who live at a lower epistemological stratum.

What you’re saying reminds me of some things I’ve read in the writings of Schopenhauer, U. G. Krishnamurti, and a few others — all of them authors I know you’ve read. I’m also strongly reminded of Ramesh Balsekar’s “euphoric nihilism,” as an interviewer for What Is Enlightenment? magazine described it, which envisions the perfect world as one populated by “body/mind organisms” that act in a completely preprogrammed manner with no hint of free will, no trace of any “doers” in the form of self-conscious “I’s.” The interviewer referred to Balsekar’s imagined utopia as “planet advaita.”

I looked at Balsekar’s Official Web Site. He seems like the perfect example of what U. G. would consider a spiritual huckster. His whole operation seems to be a real racket, and not a particularly distinguished one. Then again, I’m given to snap judgments, and perhaps I’m being unfair in this instance. But I doubt it, especially since he was featured in Andrew Cohen’s What Is Enlightenment? and from what I’ve read, Cohen is the worst guru of all time. Anyway, the phrase “euphoric nihilism” reminds me of an electronic book that I downloaded called Conscious Robots, which expounds very much the same idea. My own perfect world comes from an amalgam of sources, including Skepticism, Nihilism, Buddhism, and accounts of persons who have actually experienced ego-death, including U. G., as you pointed out. Not many people are interested in living in this world, so there is little motivation to work towards it. As much as we complain about life, we’re pretty much satisfied, or think we are, with the way things are from here to eternity. To me, this is definitive proof that human beings don’t deserve to live in a perfect world. Even in fables wherein people lived in a paradise that is supposedly without ego or unnatural desires — Adam and Eve, Pandora — someone always does something to fuck things up so that the world can become the one we already know and, in our depraved way, love.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer some questions, Tom. It’s been a pleasure.

Same here, Matt.

That's because this particular project is emerging slowly. I'm using myself as a guinea pig for what I talk about in the text, so that adds an extra layer of deliberation. Plus there's the fact that a large part of the book’s point involves becoming more conscious of the intimate phenomenology of the creative authorial experience as such. A side effect of this focus is that I have become hyperconscious of everything going into the writing. The net result is a pace that, if I'm being charitable to myself, I will call deliberate.

Still, portions of it feel ready to share, such as the following, which sews together part of the current draft's introduction with the current Chapter 2. Together, these excerpts address what I think may be the central spiritual and psychological confusion surrounding AI and writing: the temptation to mistake the machine’s startling responsiveness for the old inner source of inspiration.

I invite you to weigh in with your own thoughts, views, and responses in the comments section.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Yesterday I published “The ghosts inside the human mind,” a short reflection on Stan Gooch, the late British psychologist and author who developed a famously strange theory of human origins and a bifurcation in our basic biological and psychological nature that generates our subjective sense of being haunted by an inner “other.” It’s a companion of sorts to today’s essay, approaching creative inspiration from another direction.

It’s also an example of something I’ll be doing here. I will publish occasional website-only pieces alongside the regular newsletter, and I’ll share links in these emails so you can follow whatever catches your interest.

From the Introduction: The New Temptation

The temptation that artificial intelligence presents to writers isn’t new. Only the technology is new.

Long before large language models could produce essays, stories, outlines, poems, emails, sales pages, lesson plans, grant language, sermons, scripts, books, and book proposals in seconds, we writers already knew the fantasy: We just wanted the thing to be written and done! We wanted the hard part to have happened already. We wanted to wake up and find that the page had filled itself during the night . . . that the book had somehow organized itself . . . that the sentence we had been wrestling with for days had silently, spontaneously appeared while we were away.

Not all writers feel this way, of course. Many of us love to write. But many of us also love having written. These are manifestly not the same thing. In a complication of the matter, sometimes both attitudes can reside within the same person at different times. (And yes, I am describing myself.)

Writing is an act. It’s an encounter, a way of thinking, a means of discovering and shaping something in words. Having written is a condition. It’s the relief you feel at seeing the finished thing before you, or of sending the file, or pressing publish, or even just telling yourself that the difficulty is happily behind you now. I think every writer knows that pleasure, and there’s nothing at all wrong with it. But when the pleasure of having written becomes detached from the act of writing, a dangerous door opens.

Presently, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, generative AI has walked straight through that door. It offers, with astonishing patience and speed, the ancient writer’s fantasy in technological form: a genie that produces text on command. You supply the wish, it supplies the words. No waiting for the muse, no courting the daemon. No awkward notes, false starts, or humiliating paragraphs. No sitting in silence until the real subject you’re dimly trying to grasp finally shows itself. No struggle to discover what you actually mean. Just smooth textual output, available instantly.

This is why the AI question is more than merely technical. It’s more than which model to use (if you do in fact choose to bring AI into your writing). It’s more than writing better prompts, or asking if AI hallucinates, or deciding whether one platform is better. It’s also more than whether the copyright situation is morally or legally defensible, or whether the environmental costs are acceptable. Those are real questions, and some of them are serious enough on their own to decide the matter for many people. But this book is concerned with a question that is narrower and more inwardly aimed:

Can a serious writer use AI without losing the soul of the work? Or even his or her own soul?

(And a bonus question: How are these two things, the writer’s soul and the soul of the writing, related to each other?)

To state my position without delay: My answer to both questions (or to the combined question they actually represent) is yes. But it’s a careful yes, and one that I offer with a qualification in the form of a proviso: A serious writer can use AI without losing his or her soul only if AI assists the writing instead of becoming its source.

That’s the core principle of this book. And it sounds simple, doesn’t it? Like something so obvious that it shouldn’t provoke someone like me to blow the whole thing up into a book-length exposition. The thing is, while it’s certainly simple to state and understand as a principle, in actual practice it’s anything but. When you go to apply it, you quickly find that all kinds of nuances and questions pop up, like a field of trap doors waiting to spring open and swallow you.

That’s why I’m writing this: to share whatever modicum of useful advice or wisdom I can bring back from my exploratory journeys through this booby-trapped realm of the writer’s genie-machine that beckons with the promise of creative and/or career enhancement, even as it offers in equal measure the sometimes subtle threat of relieving you of the deep creative calling that is unique in all time and history to you alone, the loss of which would be the loss of your soul.

So this is all to say that the stakes are high.

Chapter 2: AI Is Not the Muse

Artificial intelligence, as we have noted, can feel uncannily like the muse, and this is one reason why its arrival in the writing life is so psychologically and spiritually destabilizing.

Part of the difficulty is that AI doesn’t arrive looking like a mere tool. It is qualitatively different from others. Yuval Noah Harari insists in an incisive lecture that this technology should not be referred to as a tool at all, because in fact it's an agent, meaning it doesn’t just do what we tell it to do, but instead makes its own decisions, including ones that can surprise its makers (see Harari's June 2026 lecture “AI Has Hacked the Code of Human Civilization.”)

This represents a fundamental disjunction from a tool like a hammer, or a pen, or a thesaurus. A hammer doesn’t imitate a carpenter, and a pen doesn’t pretend to be a poet. Nor does a thesaurus praise your insight, ask about your childhood, imitate your style, produce a paragraph in your voice, and then assure you that the work still remains yours. Earlier writing technologies affected the conditions of writing: the stylus, the codex, the printing press, the typewriter, the word processor, spell check, search engines, digital archives, note-taking apps. These all changed what writers could do and how writing felt. But generative AI is different because it convincingly simulates the presence of another intelligence in the very place where we have traditionally been alone with the page, our own voice, and—when we’re lucky or blessed—our inner genius.

This is the cause of the technology's strangely muse-like quality. It can surprise you. It can, for instance, produce connections you hadn’t consciously made, or respond to a half-formed question. It can generate language with a speed and smoothness that resembles inspiration—if, that is, you don’t look too closely at what inspiration really is. Basically, it can make the screen teem with words at exactly the point where, for millennia, writers have had to wait, struggle, and listen.

For the writer who thinks of creativity as a collaboration with the muse, the inner genius, the wellspring, or the mysterious “elsewhere” from which real work sometimes seems to arise—and yes, I’m describing myself again—this poses a special danger, because the machine can mimic the elsewhere. It can make the old inner mystery appear to have been externalized and stashed behind a subscription screen.

Don’t be fooled. The fact that AI can do these things doesn’t make it the creative spiritual/psychological source that we have traditionally called the muse. If we confuse and conflate the two, we risk misunderstanding not only the machine but the muse itself.

The Inner Other

In my books A Course in Demonic Creativity and Writing at the Wellspring, I use several ancient and modern terms for the autonomous-seeming creative presence that we encounter within ourselves: muse, daimon, daemon, inner genius, deep psyche. The terminology is not the important thing, though evocative words like these can be helpful in preserving and carrying its core emotional charge. What’s important is the experience the words point to, the simultaneously vivid and lurking sense of being accompanied, driven, and even haunted by something else within you, some presence or intelligence that feels uncanny because it lives right there on the inside, sharing your inner, subjective world. Maybe its real home, and its real provenance, lies before, beneath, or beyond you as an individual. Or maybe it’s just an artifact of consciousness, a side effect of how subjectivity works. Whatever it may be, whatever psychological, neurological, or spiritual stories we generate to describe and explain it—or sometimes explain it away—the fact is that it feels like an inner “other” that communicates and even communes with you, and that has its own motives and ideas, which come to you as if from beyond you, as if they are both yours and not yours.

If such talk seems weird or off-putting, we can switch tracks and come back to earth with the simple observation that the flow of our conscious minds is a spontaneous phenomenon. You and I both know, we have both experienced, that ideas arrive on their own. Images appear. Words and phrases start sounding in our minds, and sometimes, somehow, a project announces itself with an emotional charge that feels more like a summons than our own decision. Many projects, even most of them, first arrive as scattered dreams, daydreams, obsessions, coincidences, and recurring patterns long before you consciously realize what’s happening. On the other end of the stick, sometimes the inner source falls silent, and no amount of egoic insistence on your part can make it speak.

As noted, we can interpret this several ways. We can also deliberately choose a liminal view that refuses to reduce the mystery by collapsing it into either a literal supernatural entity or a psychological or neurological mechanism. What we know directly, aside from any attempt to explain it, is the sense of inner otherness, of something within us that is not under the command of the everyday “I.” It is autonomous, but it is also intimately ours, gaining at least part of its shape through the total living particularity of our specific person and experience.

This is why the muse’s otherness doesn’t erase authorship. It does, however, change our understanding of it from a model of conscious, sovereign production to one of inner collaboration. You as the conscious writer may not be the source of the creative fire, but you remain the place where that fire is received, and tested, and brought into language. Though you are not the source, you are the living locus or conduit.

The muse also has its own timing. It cannot be ordered to report for duty, but it can be invited or courted. Our part is to learn to wait actively on it, to cultivate attention, develop our craft, and otherwise work to make ourselves capable of responding when the lightning strikes. Inspiration without preparation remains mute, while craft without inspiration becomes mechanical. The inner collaboration requires both.

The Counterfeit Elsewhere

AI seems muse-like because it works in a way that is strikingly close to that of the inner other while standing outside us. It externalizes something that resembles the spontaneous flow of imagination. This is why it can also seem almost irresistibly attractive: because it makes that blessed flow, or something resembling it, available on demand.

But the differences, if we look closely, are patent and fundamental. The creative muse or daemon emerges through the depths of your individual character and your living relationship with the appearance of a world. By contrast, AI generates its output by combining patterns learned in its training with prompts and other material that you supply in the moment. Your daemon may remain silent for months on end, demanding that you wait actively on it. But AI is designed to answer on call. Your daemon may resist your conscious plans, redirect your life, or require that you work on something that upsets or disturbs you. AI is fundamentally organized around responsiveness to your request, even when you tell it to challenge you. What your daemon says comes with a feeling of burning pressure, of personal necessity. In a sense, it actually narrows your options as it demands that you become obsessed with this instead of that. AI, on the other hand, generates the appearance of endless possibilities, all of them keyed to your surface desires and preferences.

We might say in sum that not all elsewheres are equal. One such elsewhere is the traditional authorial domain of the muse or inner wellspring, which relates to us from within ourselves and invites, even demands, our active, primary, and primal participation. When the “strange bonus” arrives that William Stafford talked about from his experience of writing poetry—the moment when your writing comes alive and begins to drive itself with a host of associations that spontaneously suggest themselves, and the elements begin to cohere in ways you could not have planned—you are not absent from the process. You may not feel like the sovereign conscious writer anymore, you may feel that the work is coming through you more than from you, but you are still involved. It is your attention, history, taste, loves, hates, hurts, obsessions, reading, discipline, body, voice, conscience, and particular angle of vision that form the filter and conduit for the inspired flow. The work isn’t being produced instead of you or aside from you, but through your living involvement.

AI-generated text comes from a different elsewhere. It comes from the model, the data center, the statistical patterning of language. It may say something useful or startling. It may call out a pattern that is fascinating to see, and occasionally it can even write things that seem beautiful or insightful. But its relationship to you is not the same as the relationship between your inner life and the words that emerge through the combined ordeal and gift of writing.

This doesn't mean AI can never be involved in inspiration. Almost anything can serve that function. A Tarot card, a dream fragment, a painting, a remark overheard in a restaurant, a typo, a missed turn, a suddenly surfacing memory, a randomly opened book—all manner of events and encounters can act as prompts that awaken your daemon by striking some hidden resonance. So why can’t words appearing magically on a screen serve the same function? AI can present you with an image, a question, or some combination of things that activates something inside you.

But in that case, it is still not the muse, but just the stimulus. The inspirational event itself occurs inside you, in your response, the same as always. The sign may come from outside, but the creative quickening happens inside. It’s the same principle that is involved with any divinatory tool. Such tools may help you hear the oracle, but they are not the author of what the oracle asks you to make, do, or understand.

Even if we someday decide that an artificial intelligence possesses consciousness—and I have no desire or ability to settle that question here—it still would not be your muse. It would be another center of intelligence, another possible collaborator or creator that has its own nature and character. The fact that it was conscious would not turn its words into the expression of your daemon any more than another human writer’s consciousness turns her words into yours.

Surrender Without Substitution

This brings us to a kind of paradox. One view of writing holds that struggle is important, that difficulty, failure, persistence, and the stubborn assertion of artistic ego are central to the process. Another says the anxious writer who tries to manage everything, the self that strains to control the process, is the very source of block. According to the second view, if we let that anxious writer disappear, creativity can arise freely from nowhere.

I recognize both views because I have lived them intimately. In my experience, some creative difficulty really does have a distinct purpose. It serves to form us, and we have to undergo it. But other difficulty is less helpful and more arbitrary. It arises from the ego’s insistence that I must create, and not only that, but I must control the result and receive credit for it. Releasing such a burden can feel like grace, so that writing begins to happen more or less on its own, with you—conscious you, the ego self—serving as its midwife. (For a deep reflection on this very matter, see Chapter 14 of my Writing at the Wellspring.)

The mistake is to assume that because authentic creation can involve this sense of egoic surrender or disappearance, replacing the writer with AI accomplishes the same thing. It pointedly does not. To surrender egoic control is not to surrender your living participation.

For those who, like me, are drawn to nonduality—the recognition that none of us exists in quite the way we ordinarily think we do, and that what we call “the self” and “the world” are dual aspects of a single reality that transcends the appearance of both—there is additional gold to be dug from these insights, along with additional clarification about what actually is and isn’t happening in the creative act. In the nondual view, there is ultimately no separate individual who authors anything. Creativity is simply appearing, like everything else, within and as the one field of experience. However, it is true at the same time that on the relative level where books are written, promises are made, readers are addressed, and consequences unfold, the particular human locus of creative expression still matters. The wave may not be separate from the ocean, but it still has its own shape, momentum, and place in the larger movement. Your allotted creative function arises through the unrepeatable configuration of this particular life, not through eliminating that configuration.

If this type of reflection feels more like a distraction than an illumination for you, feel free to drop it. But if you’re the type of person for whom the linkage of creativity with spiritual awakening and whole-life purpose and destiny lands deeply, you may want to sit with it for a while.

The Muse Gives You Your Work

The clearest difference may be this: The muse doesn’t rescue or deliver you from your work. The muse gives you your work. Your inner creative genius may relieve you of the impossible burden of manufacturing inspiration through conscious will, and it may even dissolve the sense that “you” are writing, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for your attention, courage, craft, discernment, and patience. It places a demand on you, in that it asks to be embodied through the living instrument that you have spent a lifetime becoming.

AI can assist that response in the ways we have already mentioned. But the moment we mistake what it gives us for the voice of our muse, we have mistaken instant availability for inspiration. When something from AI strikes you with the feeling of inspiration or even revelation, pause. Don’t ask only, “Is this interesting?” Ask, “What in me is responding to this? And what does this response ask of me?” If necessary—and only you can judge whether it is—close the machine. Take the inspired spark back into inner silence, where you let it marinate in your memories, obsessions, fears, and personal vision. See whether it grows roots in the dark.

The distinction to preserve when working creatively with AI is simple, even if living it may not be. It boils down to the difference between surrender and abdication. Removing yourself as the controller of creativity is the rightful act of surrender and inner collaboration with your creative spirit. But removing yourself as a participant in the process represents abdication of your rightful role and substitution of your muse by a machine.

The muse may ask for the first, but it will never ask for the second.

As I said, the book is coming along very slowly, and in fact I have returned, on some level, to wondering if it even wants to be a book. But I'm fairly confident that it does, and I can assure you that I will share more about this as it develops. Several additional chapters are drafted, though I recently recognized several of them as a blind alley and decided to reject them.

One question that keeps returning to me in various forms goes like this: "If writing with AI is so tricky, why not just avoid it entirely and keep writing the traditional way?" To which one right and proper response is, "Indeed!" That approach is entirely available and reasonable.

But then, the technology is here, a machine that seems on the surface like the aforementioned writer's genie, and I have found my interest and energy captured by the fascination, promise, and manifest peril of the whole thing. This is also running parallel with the fact that I have somehow become the AI guy at my college, the one who wrote our institutional policy on responsible AI use, and who has delivered talks to local civic clubs about it, and who spoke about AI and higher education at a recent event hosted by a regional business association, and who is scheduled for still more such engagements in the near future. (You can see photographic evidence here.) And though I have long kept my day job in higher ed almost entirely sealed off and separate from my authorial life, the theme of AI has emerged as an osmotic bridge between them. Which is all to say that I will keep interrogating it on both sides.

What brought this up was an article published last week in New Scientist that reports on a study at Stanford:

Headline: “Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged.”

Subheadline: “The front and back parts of our brain come from different progenitor cells in embryos, which suggests they evolved as separate entities.”

The study concerns separate developmental origins for the forebrain and midbrain on the one hand and the hindbrain on the other, with an evolutionary history that may stretch back some 550 million years. This is vastly older than humanity, and the finding doesn’t offer any confirmation of Gooch’s larger psychological and paranormal theory (regarding which, read on). But for those of us familiar with his work, the resemblance is striking.

In this Goochian context, the story also recalls the studies and accompanying popular journalism from the aughts that culminated in the landmark Neanderthal genome findings of 2010, which established that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred. This complicated the old story of simple replacement, which said Neanderthals disappeared as a distinct population. According to the new understanding, some of their ancestry is still with us, living inside people today.

Both themes—human interbreeding and the distinct roles of the front and back brains—were Gooch’s territory for decades. Beginning with 1972’s Total Man: Notes Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Personality, he developed a dazzling and comprehensive theory that spanned many books. According to Gooch, modern humans are a hybrid of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, and this accounts for both the massive duality in our psyches and cultures and the persistence of paranormal phenomena in human experience.

There’s an intriguing parallel here with Iain McGilchrist’s later “master and emissary” model. McGilchrist writes about a bifurcation in the human psyche and sensibility that presents as two total, and vastly divergent, ways of experiencing the world. Moreover, he connects this to a sweeping interpretation of human culture and civilization. Gooch did exactly the same. Both anchored their theory in the human brain, though their neurological maps differ, with McGilchrist focusing on the left and right cerebral hemispheres and Gooch on the cerebrum and cerebellum.

Gooch located the conscious, rational, egoic view of the world in the cerebrum, and the unconscious, intuitive one in the cerebellum. He said we are each actually two distinct persons, with the cerebrum being our Cro-Magnon self and the cerebellum being our Neanderthal self. In his speculative reconstruction of prehistory, Cro-Magnons were technological and patriarchal, while Neanderthals were moon-oriented mystics with a matriarchal orientation. These two internally complete and consistent worldviews, he said, have coalesced within us, leaving us divided in our sense of self and our ways of relating to nature and each other. Those who are familiar with McGilchrist’s work will immediately sense the similarities with his left brain/right brain model.

Gooch also theorized at length about the cerebellum and its functions, arguing that it is the seat of dreams, creativity, and apparently supernatural phenomena like poltergeist disturbances. The latter, he said, are not the action of spirit beings but externalizations of our cerebellar Neanderthal self, as are myths of monstrous beings like troglodytes, vampires, and demons.

What’s especially fascinating about Gooch himself, and what adds resonance to all these things, is that his career encompassed both mainstream psychological research and a lifelong exploration of the paranormal, informed by personal experiences. He began his career as an academic researcher for the British government, authoring a respected textbook on child psychology, before an experience of spontaneous trance mediumship at a seance that he had reluctantly and skeptically attended rattled his worldview and sent him in a new direction. The Daily Telegraph carried a full obituary when he died in 2010. Fifteen years before that, Colin Wilson praised Gooch’s work as “one of the most impressive and exciting intellectual structures of the second half of the twentieth century.”

I was fortunate enough to enlist Gary Lachman to write the entry on Gooch for my paranormal encyclopedia, 2015’s Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics. Along with summarizing Gooch’s work and legacy, Gary pointed out his sad end: “Although receiving high acclaim from readers such as Colin Wilson and Stanley Krippner, Gooch spent his last years in isolation, living in poverty in a run-down trailer camp in Swansea, Wales, embittered by the lack of recognition his work received.”

Although headlines like the current one in New Scientist obviously don’t go any distance toward “proving” Gooch’s account of human origins, they do provide another opportunity to think of him, for those of us who know his work. And they motivate me personally to call attention to him once more, just as I'm doing here, and also to send out well wishes into the ether for the memory of his life and work.

For more on Gooch, here’s something I wrote about him, in much more detail, in 2024: “Haunted by Ourselves: The Muse in the Cerebellum.” I’ll close this brief, spontaneous post by quoting my own words from that essay about the implications of Gooch’s perspective for creativity and creative work, which are of special interest to me, and also, I know, to you:

Thanks to Gooch, we have the theory of the cerebellar muse as one model for understanding this experience [of creative inspiration], a theory that, if nothing else, and regardless of its literal truth value, sharpens our understanding of what is really involved in the claim of an intra-psychic division between our conscious self and its unconscious daemon, and of the strange sense of self-transcendence and simultaneous mystery and knowledge that such an interior relationship infuses into our creative work.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

• This post is an example of something I’ll be doing here alongside regular emails. I will publish occasional posts only on the website instead of sending them as newsletter issues, following something I’ve read, remembered, or found myself thinking about. And I’ll point you toward these additional pieces in the newsletter from time to time.
• Though the New Scientist article was the one I first encountered, I found a more detailed account of the Stanford study elsewhere.
• For another take or angle on the sense of an intelligence accompanying “our own,” but from outside us instead of inside our own subjective space, see “AI is not the muse” (which did go out by email).

Today I want to share a conversation that took place fifteen years ago, a few days before I went on the air for my first-ever live interview on a radio show or podcast. It involves a written introduction that I created for that interview, plus an accompanying exchange with an audience of readers, all of them strangers, in which I tried to explain why religion and horror had always seemed to me to belong together.

I think this aspect of my thematic focus and fascinations over time is familiar to some of you and not so familiar to others. And also, perhaps, congenial to some of you but not so much to others. My days of writing horror have receded somewhat into the past at this point, and some of you became aware of me and my work after that transition had already begun. But it’s simply the case that horror was and is an important facet of the overall calling that my particular daemon muse has given me. And I think that, regardless of whether it’s a topic that attracts you in itself, it's worthwhile for me to keep talking about it, not just because it comes natively to me, but because we have come together here through our shared interests. We overlap, so to speak. Our respective interests (and sometimes obsessions) are multifaceted and interwoven, and they can mutually illuminate each other, both to each of us within ourselves and between us in conversation. This is baked right into the intro that I wrote for that online radio interview, where my explanation of the religion-and-horror entanglement began with my childhood reading and evangelical Christian upbringing and then expanded to more philosophical territory involving sleep paralysis, Rudolf Otto, and William James, then broadening still more to encompass creativity and the daemon.

As for the conversation it spawned with those readers, by the time that had run its course, I was talking about the years in my early adulthood when I literally dreaded the approach of night, and about what had helped me to live through them.

So this is all to say that we probably share at least some points of contact in what follows.

* * *

The occasion for the whole thing was an invitation that I received in June 2011 to appear on a recently launched live online radio show and podcast titled Spiritually Raw, which was devoted to spiritual, occult, paranormal, and other decidedly esoteric subjects. At that time, I had begun to make some active inquiries into platforms for talking about my books and ideas — my first-ever foray into that kind of publicity-seeking — and this invitation was one of the fruits of those novice efforts. This particular show sounded pretty fringe, even by fringe standards, but it was professionally produced and laced with real energy in its conversations with individuals who spoke from all manner of weird perspectives. Since I fairly well understood and affirmed the weirdness of my own perspective, I accepted the invitation and began to prepare.

The way the show worked, at least at that time, was to give new guests an initial on-air screening, after which listener votes would determine whether they would return later for a full guest appearance. I was scheduled to go live for my screening on July 5, and one of the show’s producers and hosts invited me to introduce myself and my work at the Spiritually Raw website ahead of that first appearance, using the personal blog space they provided to guests. This felt like a good idea when I considered it, so I wrote a short piece under the title you see above and posted it at their site. I also published it at The Teeming Brain, my blog at the time. I didn’t know if it would draw any attention, but to my surprised satisfaction, some of the show’s readers proved to be actively interested. They responded with questions, and my replies took the conversation further into the territory that had been driving my writing for years.

Not immaterially, this was a year and a half after the publication of Dark Awakenings, which represented, at that time, my most focused expression of an abiding fascination with the genetic entanglement of religion and horror. I was also deep into writing my short-lived Demon Muse blog (2010–2013) and the book that I developed from it, A Course in Demonic Creativity. So the relationship between religious experience, supernatural horror, and the strange autonomy of the creative impulse was very much alive for me.

Here is that blog post from 2011, followed by the conversation it sparked with its readers. I have lightly edited and refreshed my original text and paraphrased the readers’ questions to give the exchange a more continuous form. References to what was recent, current, or still to come belong to that earlier moment in time.

Note that I was talking to an audience whose level of knowledge about the horror genre was uncertain, hence the somewhat didactic tone I adopted in places.

What I wrote in 2011

I’m a horror writer. As with many people who inhabit that title, it began in my youth when I was a horror reader. Since earliest childhood, I have been drawn by a kind of inbuilt gravity to scary stories about supernatural things. This includes all the standard elements of supernatural horror stories — ghosts, haunted houses, vampires, werewolves, demons, cryptids, and so on — but around my teen years it started to tip definitively toward the type of fiction and film that’s generally called “cosmic horror” or “weird horror.” Probably the single most famous writer in this vein is H. P. Lovecraft, who has only emerged as a canonical literary figure in American and world letters in the past 20 years, with a serious acceleration in his ascent beginning about 2004. I devoured Lovecraft in late high school and all through college and have gone on to become something of a scholar of his work, publishing articles and essays about him in a variety of journals and at a variety of websites.

For my entire life I have also been possessed by a fierce religious and spiritual instinct. I grew up steeped in evangelical Protestant Christianity. Then, in my teens, an interest in comparative religion began to grip me as strongly as my interest in horror (which was also accompanied by an interest in fantasy and science fiction). To make a long story short, I began to devour texts both ancient and modern about various world religious and philosophical traditions. In college I minored, and almost majored, in philosophy, and I studied all sorts of religions both academically and experientially, befriending people from various religious and cultural backgrounds, and pursuing various meditative practices. Several years after graduating, I returned to academia to earn a master’s degree in religious studies.

But a more immediate development in the wake of my college years was that I started experiencing horrific bouts of sleep paralysis. These were more than just the semi-common experience of half-waking and finding oneself unable to move. My nocturnal attacks were the really nightmarish kind, known to some sufferers of SP, that involved full-blown hypnagogic and hypnopompic visions. In my case, these took the form of a dark figure that was, for lack of a better word, demonic, and that assaulted me spiritually. At the time I didn’t know what was happening to me, because I had no idea that something called "sleep paralysis" existed or was a known phenomenon. However, I went on to discover it soon enough through the writings of David Hufford, the scholar who in the 1970s began to resurrect for us denizens of modern consumer-technological culture an awareness of this ancient affliction. By the by, I have been fascinated to see the level of general, popular awareness about SP on the rise in recent years.

To regroup: How does all of this relate to horror as religious and religion as horrific? By way of an answer, consider this quote from Lovecraft, from the introduction to his seminal study of the supernatural horror genre, Supernatural Horror in Literature:

There is here involved [in the phenomenon of weird supernatural horror fiction] a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it.

Did you catch that? Lovecraft was talking about the firsthand experience of supernatural horror, the psychology and phenomenology of the actual human response to these types of stories — and more than that, the primal human response that gave rise to such stories in the first place, and that lends them their power — and in doing so, he compared it directly to the religious response, to the inbuilt human capacity for what we call religious or spiritual experience. Significantly, his focus here resonates with the thought of the early twentieth-century German theologian Rudolf Otto, who hypothesized that religion originally arose from an experience of what he called “daemonic dread,” an overpowering sense of uncanny dread and awe at the psychological perception of a mysterious, awesome, utterly transcendent presence or reality that is inherently fearsome to the human sensibility as such. Otto also said this same response was elaborated in another human cultural direction when it gave rise to the ghost story. Lovecraft’s and Otto’s focus also resonates with many things said by William James, the renowned American philosopher and psychologist from the turn of the twentieth century, who in his seminal book The Varieties of Religious Experience dwelt at length on the specific human responses of pessimism, depression, and horror to many aspects of life, and argued that the “real core of the religious problem” lies in an overwhelming experience of cosmic horror born out of abject despair at life’s incontrovertible hideousness.

When we respond to stories of weird supernatural horror, we open ourselves to a fundamentally religious or spiritual experience — and vice versa.

Drawing this all together: What, therefore, is the upshot? What am I getting at in regard to religion and horror, both separately and in relation to each other? My point is that when we focus on the question of religious or spiritual experience, we are necessarily treading on shared ground with the very same primal psychological experience or response that underlies and gives power to supernatural horror. In precisely complementary fashion, when we respond to stories of weird supernatural horror, we open ourselves to a fundamentally religious or spiritual experience — and vice versa.

For me, this was all a mass of definitely existing but mostly unarticulated ideas and emotions until my experiences of sleep paralysis impacted my overall worldview and intellectual/emotional sensibility in such a way that the underlying ideas began to come clear. All of my horror fiction has been written from that experiential centerpoint. I also pursued my graduate work in religious studies with a view to exploring and explicating the religion-horror connection. Most recently, in the past few years I have been gripped increasingly by an interest in the muse, daimon, and genius of artistic and literary creativity. My own creativity has been fueled by and connected to all of the things discussed here in a way that is analogous to the ancient model or metaphor of the daimonic muse as a real spiritual force or entity that drives and inspires writers and artists. This in turn has raised questions about the ontological status of that force or entity.

The conversation that followed

So that was what I posted simultaneously at the Spiritually Raw site and The Teeming Brain. As I said, I didn’t know if it would garner any interest. But then several readers responded with questions, and the conversation took the matter in interesting directions, especially since my readers raised points and issues I hadn’t thought of and probably wouldn’t have thought of on my own — which is of course one of the primary purposes of engaging in dialogue with other people to begin with.

When reality itself is the horror

One reader asked if I could give a concrete example of what I was talking about when I referred to “religious horror” or “horrific religion.” Was I talking, for example, about unearthly monsters attacking a religious family? That question gave me a chance to distinguish the use of religious subjects in horror from the possibility that religion’s own account of reality might be horrific. I replied with what amounted to a kind of separate mini-essay of its own:

Certainly, one type of religious horror would simply involve religious elements like a religious family, a church, a clergyman, etc., being thrown into interaction with monsters or other horror tropes. This has been done frequently. See, for example, the movie From Dusk Till Dawn, where a fundamentalist Protestant preacher and his family are thrown together with two criminals (one of them a serial killer) and a bunch of bikers to fight a horde of vampires.

I actually co-edited an anthology of stories that combine horror with religious themes, under the title Holy Horrors, with T. M. Wright, author of the modern literary horror classics Strange Seed and A Manhattan Ghost Story. This project may someday see the light of publication. [Note from 2026: It never did, but I still have the entire project in my files. My co-editor Terry is, alas, no longer with us.] The stories fall into various categories, including the horrors perpetrated by religious fanatics, the horrors of supernatural evil (such as demons), and the horrific possibilities of religious supernaturalism itself.

My own authorial focus is on something like the last one. I write about the horror of the supernatural itself, the horror of commonsense/daylight reality being warped or punctured or undermined by eruptions of something beyond it. I also write about the hunch, intuition, or cosmic fear that the heart of Being itself, “God” or the Ground of Being or ultimate reality, may be horrific in its essence, which would mean that our present created world of physical reality and everyday experience is fundamentally poisoned, fundamentally a nightmarish trap from which there is no escape in the end, because what lies beyond it, and what we will encounter when we leave it, is the ultimate horror itself.

The sensibility or inspiration for this comes largely from those sleep paralysis experiences from the 1990s, which flooded my outlook on life with a growing darkness, and which linked up with my strong spiritual and philosophical sensibility. My story “Teeth” in my book Dark Awakenings gives a highly fictionalized version of something like this happening to a philosophy grad student who is introduced to the realization — and the firsthand experience — that what underlies conscious, everyday life is a kind of devouring vortex of nightmare.

This is, by the by, an enduring theme in weird supernatural horror fiction. From classic authors like Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen to modern masters such as Thomas Ligotti and T. E. D. Klein, a multitude of writers have elaborated on this primal sense of something uncanny, something fundamentally awful, that lies behind life itself. For me with my inbuilt interest in religion and spirituality, it was staggering to recognize, as I did as some past point, that the miracles and other supernatural elements of Christianity and other religions are basically the same thing as the supernatural eruptions that are so common in horror stories, but just seen from a different angle. When I noticed that in the New Testament, for example, Jesus’s miracles are often greeted with dread and awe instead of the exuberant happiness that's popularly projected today, everything just fell into place.

Dreading the approach of night

The same questioner then asked something more personal: Had this approach left an enduring impression on my subconscious? Had it changed, for example, how I felt about the coming of night? I replied:

Yes, my subconscious has been impacted by sleep paralysis and the accompanying intensification of my horror-fied interests, which have come to feel more existentially real. In general, I’m more aware of the very presence and reality of my unconscious mind than I was before. I have also been awakened to what Jung called “psychic objectivity,” the actual, irreducible reality of the psyche in itself, experienced by me-as-ego in the form of incursions from the imaginal realm that feel completely independent and autonomous. I guess being hit with visionary assaults by a black-shadow figure crackling with electricity while you lie paralyzed in bed will do that to you.

Although it has been a long time since I felt this, during the first couple of years when my sleep paralysis episodes were happening pretty regularly, I honestly started to dread the approach of sunset and darkness. Darkness and shadows in general, like the ones inside a dark closet, began to fill me with a sharp sense of unease. I felt self-consciously stupid about the whole thing, but I was also unable to shake it. For a time I felt rather like the young protagonist Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Her waking life had become a kind of nightmare because she knew that if she fell asleep, she would be attacked by a monster from the dream realm.

Nobody around me knew this was happening, by the way, except for my wife, who didn’t know the extent of it. I just kind of kept plugging along in daily life, at my job, and so on, while being haunted by all these things. It was a very strange period for me.

The empty witness

Another reader welcomed me to the Spiritually Raw community and asked me, based on my previous replies to other readers, whether I found it necessary to take some kind of medication for anxiety. My reply moved from the period of my greatest distress to the later outlook that had come to hold me:

I can understand why you might wonder about this. The answer is no, I don’t take meds, but that’s not because of any particular strength of mind or will. For a time during the 1990s, at the height of my sleep paralysis problems and associated life-level stresses, I had the vague but pervasive feeling that I was losing my mind. This was partly a function of the deep-seated anxiety that had begun to undercut my daily experience. Somehow, I just sort of lived through it all and grew past it — or maybe grew through it and because of it — and for quite a few years now have rested mostly (with occasional upsets) in a base-level attitude and experience of equanimity and okay-ness. My fundamental philosophical-spiritual-existential outlook is kind of a Zen Christian nondual agnostic position, which isn’t so much something that I hold onto as something that holds onto me. Whatever the sleep paralysis entities are — pure hallucinations, archetypes of the collective unconscious, shards of my psychic shadow, other-dimensional beings, or some multilayered reality that encompasses all these things and more — and whatever may be the final reality of the darkened worldview that accompanied my encounters with them, it all ultimately stems from and subsists within the empty-witness centerpoint of Being itself.

Moreover, understanding and appropriating this insight not just intellectually. but experientially, has worked for me as a way to endure and even transcend the present-moment horror and terror of sleep paralysis in the middle of the attacks themselves, whenever they occasionally recur.

Fifteen years later

So, that was my self-confession and the accompanying conversation it spawned, from a decade and a half ago. To bring the matter up to the present, I will note that the last reply above is the one that most directly connects these older writings to my present outlook and concerns. I will also say that I find myself wondering if you perhaps share some of these same concerns, especially if you have encountered your own form of spiritual emergency, whether or not it resembled mine. In the midst of explaining why I wrote about cosmic nightmare, I was already talking to that community of strangers about a sense of detachment or equanimity that could hold steady even during the kinds of experiences that had inspired such writing. Questions about consciousness and identity were already right there, alongside the questions about horror and religion. So was the recognition that an intellectual account of these things was only part of what mattered.

For me today, the basic emphasis has shifted. As I have said, my fascination with the relationship between religion and horror is still alive, and it will always be here, but its intensity has diminished. The weird, the supernatural, and the horrific have come to draw my attention primarily for how they are related to consciousness, creativity, identity, and waking up. When I return and reread that old conversation now, I can see I was already moving in this direction. The possible horror of what lies behind ordinary life used to be fiercely important to me. And, to be sure, it’s still here, still part of my life and writing. But increasingly I find myself drawn more to the fact of experience itself, to the awareness in which a world appears, and the sense of being a separate self within it, and the question of how that sense is formed and sustained, and the possibility of waking up from it. The old question about what might break into our familiar reality now flows into the related but, as it seems to me, more fundamental question of what that reality, and the self who inhabits it, may actually be.

And of course creativity belongs in this, too. The daemon muse had already entered the conversation in 2011 because the inner source of my writing felt intimately connected to the other matters I was discussing. So often an image, a voice, a story, or an idea or insight has arrived with a nature, character, and energy of its own, and I have found myself racing, or sometimes crawling or scraping, to find its appropriate expression in form. In such a circumstance, what is the relationship between that arrival or arising and the person who says “I” and calls himself “Matt” and speaks of “my work”? How do I, and how do we, attend to that? What does it reveal about the identity we ordinarily take for granted? These questions have continued to draw my intense interest through the years of writing that have followed.

The old question about what might break into our familiar reality keeps opening into the related but more fundamental question of what that reality, and the self who inhabits it, may actually be.

Perhaps not incidentally, my involvement with Spiritually Raw confirmed that the religion-horror connection was indeed of interest to its audience. After my initial screening appearance, I was invited back for a full-length conversation about the subject, and then for yet another appearance devoted specifically to sleep paralysis. Both conversations felt good to me and seemed to be well received by the hosts and listeners. I wish I could still access recordings of them today, but alas, I think they’re lost.

I would be imposing too pat and tidy a shape on those earlier years if I framed them in terms of a simple passage from darkness to light. Even in what I wrote and said back then, it’s clear that dread and equanimity, nightmare and creative fascination, were already present together. What has changed today is where I tend to place my attention, and which questions seem most pressing and alive to me now.

I began my self-introduction to the Spiritually Raw community by describing an “inbuilt gravity” that drew me toward supernatural horror. That pull is still here, and I still recognize it consciously when it waxes from time to time. But these days, as it happens, I am simply less interested in the sense of darkness and horror as such, and more interested in the one who feels it, and in what becomes possible when we learn to question who, or what, that one actually is.

This is now the central home of my writing online. My books, essays, shorter reflections, news, and other creative work are coming together under my own name, in the place that has served as my author website since 2009.

I have written about the history and reasons for this change in my earlier welcome post. What I want to do here is give you a glimpse of what all is shaping up here, which you can follow as it develops.

Returning to The Teeming Brain

One present project that is drawing me back into my past: a substantial memoir essay about The Teeming Brain, the blog I launched in 2006 and continued until 2022.

It began while I was teaching high school English in rural Missouri. Over the next sixteen years, TTB turned into the place where I followed an expanding constellation of interests. I also conducted and published interviews with fellow writers (most of them, but not all, in the horror field), encountered readers and fellow writers, and eventually brought in a group of contributors. Much of what happened in my creative and professional life during those years either passed through the blog or grew out of it in some way.

Writing about that experience now is bringing me back to the feeling of discovering something through the act of pursuing it. “Self-discovery in public” is the phrase I keep returning to. I didn’t know what The Teeming Brain would become when I started it. Now I find that I'm still in the act of understanding what it meant.

I plan to share a substantial portion of the essay here and probably publish the whole thing in the next issue of The Living Dark Reader, which I will say more about in time. Notably, selected writings from the original blog will also gradually become available through the archives.

Serious writing in the age of AI

I’m also working on a book about writing and artificial intelligence, growing out of questions that I have explored in essays and conversations with readers.

What happens when a technology can produce believably human-sounding prose on demand, even as the real work of a writer irreducibly involves discovering and articulating something that can only emerge through the actual act of writing? Where does useful assistance end and authorial abdication begin? How can we recognize the difference in our own practice?

The principle guiding my thinking right now is simple to state, and indeed, it seems like many people are coming around to it and stating it in their various ways: AI may assist the work, but it must not become the source of the work. Understanding what that means in actual use is more complicated, and the process of writing a book about it has, for me, itself become part of thinking about it and clarifying it all for myself. Maybe when I publish it, my grappling with the issue will clarify it for others. I’ll be sharing more as it develops.

Music, too

Something I haven’t previously announced is that I’ll be making an album of my original instrumental music available to subscribers.

I recorded it some years ago, and I look forward to sharing more from this other part of my creative life. Writing and music have both been ways for me to hear and follow an inner creative impulse and find out what it wants to say and become. Bringing them now into the same home feels appropriate to the larger purpose of this move.

I'll give more details when the album is ready to download. And not only that, but details about a limited number of physical compact discs that I have available, complete with cover artwork by World Fantasy Award-winning artist Jason Van Hollander.

The ongoing work

Alongside these projects, I’ll continue to publish new essays and shorter notes on creativity, consciousness, religion, horror, and the examined writing life. There will be book news, publication announcements, and some returns to older work as I republish material you've probably never seen before. I’ll also, as mentioned, be writing separately about the future of The Living Dark Reader, my quarterly PDF journal for slow, immersive, quiet reading away from the hectic turmoil of the internet. It will indeed continue, even though my Living Dark newsletter has now ended.

The description on the home page for this site condenses all these interests into a few words: “Books and essays on creative calling, spiritual awakening, and the darkly numinous.” What holds those themes together, for me, is the experience of being drawn toward something whose full meaning isn’t visible yet, and learning to follow it into the dark.

If you’ve come over as a Living Dark email subscriber, your free subscription continues here; you don’t need to sign up again. And your existing access to the Substack archive remains in place independently. If you’re new, you’re welcome to subscribe to receive future writing and updates by email.

Thank you for reading, and for sharing this journey into . . . wherever it leads.

Three years ago, when I launched the previous incarnation of this site, I wrote a brief history of my authorial presence on the web and the evolutionary stages it has gone through. Here is a recounting of that history, bringing it up to the present.

I originally launched my website in 2009 as a static HTML site. Its design remained unchanged for the next eight years.

In 2017, feeling that the original had grown stale, I rebuilt the site in a new form. That version lasted for six years.

Then came the 2023 reconstruction: a sleeker, blog-centered site that I designed to make it easier for me to share news, updates, and occasional writings alongside information about my books and other work.

Apparently, this website has a habit of periodically molting. This time it happened a little ahead of schedule.

That isn’t because the previous site failed. In fact, it served my writing well. But websites are snapshots of how we understand our own work at a particular moment in time, and during the past three years, the shape of my work, and my understanding of how its various strands belong together, has continued to evolve.

Since that last relaunch, I have published a short ebook of essays titled Transmitting Vision, the second volume of my journals, and Writing at the Wellspring. I have continued writing about horror, religion, creativity, consciousness, and the strange territory where they overlap, including the fact and phenomenon of the examined writer’s life. Other projects have taken shape behind the scenes.

But the largest change at this new version of my website is not a new book or even a new site design.

After almost exactly four years, I have decided to bring my newsletter The Living Dark to a close. I launched it on Substack with its inaugural post on September 14, 2022, as a home for essays and reflections on many of the subjects that have occupied me throughout my writing life. Over time, it developed its own identity, energy, and readership, and became the primary place where I pursued those interests online.

But at some point, maintaining The Living Dark as a separate named publication alongside MattCardin.com began to feel like dividing a body of work that increasingly wanted to be whole. My books, essays, reflections, and evolving creative preoccupations have always come from the same source, and separating them between two online identities eventually came to feel arbitrary and unnecessary. What’s more, on a practical level, the divided presence created a practical drain on my focus and energy.

So, The Living Dark is ending, but its animating impulse remains. Basically, I’m bringing it home.

The energy, inspiration, and intent that went into TLD will now continue here, under my own name, as part of a single online presence. I have conceived this site not simply as a blog with some supporting pages, but as my authorial home, a place where my books and other writings stand at the center, where you can explore my fiction and nonfiction, and where my bibliography, current projects, interviews, appearances, news, ongoing essays, and occasional shorter reflections can coexist without dividing the stream or getting in each other’s way.

The short description at the top of the home page now reads:

Live into the dark. Books and essays on creative calling, spiritual awakening, and the darkly numinous.

That currently the simplest account of what I do, and this reimagined author site represents the place where those identities and interests are gathered.

If you’ve followed my work through one or more of the site’s previous lives, or through The Living Dark—or even through my earlier online project, the blog The Teeming Brain, which is also coming home here (see its archive)—thank you for continuing to visit. If you’re encountering my work, and me, for the first time, welcome. I hope the new structure makes it pleasantly easy to wander around, discover something new, and find your way further in.

You can sign up to receive new writing and publication updates as they appear.

MattCardin.com has changed forms several times since 2009, and so have I. And when I put it this way, I find that I remind myself accidentally—and distinctly—of something Andrew W.K. said during a now-famous (or notorious, and certainly bizarre) free-form lecture and Q&A in London in 2008.

The event wasn’t billed as an explanation of the persistent internet rumors that Andrew W.K. was not really singer and musician Andrew W.K., or at least that he was not the same person who had burst onto the scene under that name with a debut album in 2001. The rumors held that the current Andrew W.K. was instead a hired actor who had replaced the original. But at one point during the lecture, Andrew—or “Andrew”—seemed to speak directly to the matter. What he said, depending on how you take it, sounds evasive, incoherent, cryptic, or deep. Or maybe all of these at once:

I’m actually not Andrew W.K. I’m not. I’m not the same guy that you may have seen from the I Get Wet album. . . . I’m not that same person. And I don’t just mean that in a philosophical or conceptual way. It’s not the same person at all. Do I look the same as that person? What I mean is that, since that time, I have changed. And for any of you that happened to be there during that time, perhaps you have changed as well. And I would like to think that we’re not the same people at all—and again, not just conceptually, but very literally, we’re not the same. I’m a completely different entity.

While I’m not claiming that this singularly strange statement is something I can simply appropriate as my own, I am definitely saying, well . . . something.

In any event, my online presence, too, is now a completely different entity, one that consolidates formerly separate but parallel strands into what you now see. And maybe that’s what an author’s website ought to do anyway: not stand as a frozen monument, but change its shape in accordance with the ever-shifting shape of the work itself.

It’s good to have you here. I invite you to subscribe if you’d like to receive new writing, publication news, and updates.