Matt Cardin's Blog, page 6

Creativity's Third Eye: DMT and the Neurochemistry of Inspiration

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today I pose a question in the hope that attempting to answer it will prove both fruitful and fascinating. Or rather, it has already proved to be both of these in my own experience. Now I’m hoping it will appeal to you as well. The project draws on and updates some of my previous writing and research from years past—though this material has not been publicly available anywhere for more than a decade—and it pushes my, or rather our, ongoing consideration of creativity and ...

Journaling into the Void

Dear Living Dark reader,

What follows is an interview with me that was conducted six months ago by writer, independent scholar, and role-playing game designer Michael D. Miller. It appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Dead Reckonings, “a review of horror and the weird in the arts.” I think the content of our conversation will be of distinct interest to readers of this newsletter.

What prompted this conversation was the publication of the second volume of my Journals in October. Michael’s review of ...

The Living Dark Manifesto

Dear Living Dark reader,

For months now this publication has seen an ongoing influx of new readers. It recently broke the 3,000-subscriber mark. And while I don’t usually talk about things like subscriber count, since my interest is not in numbers as such but in high-quality writing and communication in pursuit of our mutual interests and callings, I thought it might be a good idea to pause with a short post to orient all of you who are new around here—and to remind those of you who have been her...

The Muse's Paradox

Dear Living Dark reader,

Having a system in place—and more importantly, an abiding, disciplined intention—to capture fleeting ideas whenever they arrive can be immensely powerful and helpful, and even necessary. HOWEVER,

you can also trust that if an idea is meant to be realized, it will come back persistently over time.

This dual understanding has been a part of my philosophical and practical approach to creativity, encompassing both my writing and my music, for many years. I mention it today beca...

Of Phantoms and Forbidden Transmissions

NOTE: This post is slightly too long to appear in an email, so if you’re reading it in that format, you will need to click through to the web version to see the entire text.

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today’s post is exceptionally personal. You have already seen me talk many times in frankly personal terms about my experiences of the creative daimon muse, and my struggles with creative block and sleep paralysis, and my general experience of being a writer and human being who has embraced the viewpoi...

Writing in the Cosmic Slipstream

Dear Living Dark reader,

Alan Watts ends the first chapter of his classic The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are—which is about seeing through the illusion of being an isolated ego that’s separate from the universe—by beautifully addressing what some might see as a contradiction in his act of writing such a book at all.

On the one hand, he says, the book contains “no sermons, no shoulds and oughts.” This is because

on seeing through the illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of ...

America's Higher Education Apocalypse

Dear Living Dark reader,

“Higher education serves learners best when it has one foot in the library (the accumulated knowledge of humanity) and one foot in the street (the real world of careers, families, and communities).”

This statement comes from a recent opinion piece at Inside Higher Ed by three American higher education experts. I found it neat enough that it moved me to write and publish this post with reflections on a matter that departs from my usual Living Dark focus on writing, creativi...

Reading Notes 2

Dear Living Dark reader,

This is the second entry in Reading Notes, the ongoing series of posts in which I track what I’m presently reading, researching, studying, and textually imbibing and enjoying—books, articles, essays, stories—by paraphrasing and labeling core points, quoting especially striking passages, and noting down my brief thoughts, reactions, and reflections. I have always taken notes on my reading. One of the most productively useful aspects of such an activity is the recording of ...

The Enlightening Pleasure of Writing by Hand

Dear Living Dark reader,

Consider this a micro-post. It’s something that surfaced today during the very early hours when, as sometimes happens, my regular morning act of sitting in meditation for half an hour or so was replaced by the spontaneous decision to extend my private reading and writing time. I was reading and annotating a book—The Awareness of Self-Discovery, by the late American spiritual teacher/writer William Samuels—and was focused on this passage from a personal letter that Samuels...

The Consolation of No Exit

Dear Living Dark reader,

My focus here has always been double, encompassing both creativity and the daemon muse on the one hand and nonduality and self-realization on the other, with a theme of cosmic dread or horror winding its way through. Today’s post is, on the surface, located wholly within the spiritual wing. But I think it also includes the others, even if only implicitly. I say this simply to set the tone.

I was reading a recent essay by the spiritual/nondual writer and teacher in her won...