Matt Cardin's Blog, page 12

Cosmic Creativity 1: Resistance Is the Enemy Within

Welcome to The Living Dark. I’m Matt Cardin, and this is my blog/newsletter on waking up at the intersection of religion, horror, creativity, nonduality, and the numinous unknown. You can subscribe by clicking this button:

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Dear Living Dark readers,

This is the first in a series of planned essays on the transpersonal, cosmic, and ontological roots of writing and creativity. I will share some very personal things in these essays, couched in highly philosophical-sounding terms, because m...

Cosmic Creativity, Part 1: Resistance Is the Enemy Within

If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button above so more people can discover it on Substack.

Dear Living Dark readers,

This is the first in a series of planned essays on the transpersonal, cosmic, and ontological roots of writing and creativity. I will share some very personal things in these essays, couched in highly philosophical-sounding terms, because many of these ideas and insights are drawn from entries in my private notebooks that I did not include in my two-volume Journ...

The Inner Call to Absolute Inertia

In addition to this newsletter, I keep a shorter-form blog over at my author website, and last week I published a post there that will probably be of interest to readers over here since it intersects with two recent Living Dark posts on the tension between creativity and spirituality.

Here’s an excerpt:

Are you ever tempted to abandon all of your creative projects? Let them collapse? Maybe even let your whole outer life crumble as you sit there silently and just watch it all burn down? Is there ev...

Notes & Gleanings: Nick Cave's Christianity, Evil as Transmissible Disease, and the Fallacy of Meditating for Improvement

Greetings, all. With today’s entry, I’m initiating a new format for these occasional posts full of links and commentary. In addition to using them as I’ve done the past—to present roundups of my recent reading and viewing, accompanied by commentary and reflection—I will now include a section titled “Notes,” consisting of items that I have recently published through Substack Notes, the company’s new Twitter-like feature for sharing shortform posts. The first section of each post like this will be...

Creativity and Spirituality: It's Complicated

Commencing with this post and moving forward into the indefinite future, I’m diving headfirst into the subject of creativity, spirituality (or nonduality), and the demon muse. I will still of course publish posts about a wide variety of things, but creativity, and most especially the deep, and deeply fraught, relationship between the drive to write and the drive toward spiritual liberation or awakening, will come to the fore. So will the question of the relationship of these matters, which have ...

A New Name for This Newsletter: Welcome to The Living Dark

Seven months after the launch of this newsletter, I have decided to act on a suspicion that has whispered itself in my psyche from the start: that the title “Living into the Dark,” which I used for this project when I rolled it out last September, is not entirely effective. Beginning now and going forward, this newsletter’s name will be The Living Dark.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love, and in fact conduct my life according to, the principle of living into the dark, defined as embracing the etern...

Episode 1: The Remarkable Story of God's Autobiographer, Jerry L. Martin

Episode description

In this inaugural episode of the Living into the Dark podcast, I explore the remarkable story of Jerry L. Martin and his book, God: An Autobiography, as Told to a Philosopher. Jerry, a former skeptic and philosophy professor, shares his personal journey of experiencing an unexpected encounter with a voice claiming to be God. We delve into the problem of spiritual discernment, the role of faith, and the varied reactions from others when they learned of his experiences and conve...

The Wisdom of Silence in the Age of Online Writing

The peril and promise of Substack Notes and other social media

A week ago, Substack launched its new “Notes” feature, which you may have heard about, including from me. As the company’s first foray into social media-style interactions, Notes is a kind of Substackified rival to Twitter. I have been using it for several days now and rather enjoying it, since, as a writer with a newsletter on Substack, it enables me to share short ideas, quotes, links, etc., that wouldn’t add up to a full newsletter...

Join Me on Substack Notes

This week I started using Substack Notes, a new space to share ideas, links, quotes, photos, short posts, and more:

I’ll be using it for things that don’t necessarily fit into a newsletter post, like quotes from books I’m reading, links to fascinating articles, short thoughts and reflections, and brief updates on my works in progress.

I hope you’ll consider joining me there. After a couple of days of using Notes, I can report that so far it has a positive feel and a friendly tone. All in all, quit...

That Gift: A Poem

Six months ago I published a poem that had unaccountably emerged from an unlikely source, namely, me. Three weeks ago, it happened again. As with the former one, I honestly don’t know if it’s any good, but I decided to follow precedent by going ahead and sharing it with you here.

Unlike the first instance, which was the product of a freewriting session in the early morning hours that engendered a kind of creative trance, this one happened during the daylight hours, as I was walking from the kitch...