Demon Muse

Embrace your inner genius

Posts Tagged daemon

In Search of Higher Intelligence: Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson (Theology, Psychology Neurology – Part Two)

May 23

Posted by Matt Cardin in Creativity and Consciousness, Creativity and Society, Tapping the Creative Unconscious | 14 Comments

NOTE: It’s tempting to begin with an exclamation like “And we’re back!” For the past several months, Demon Muse has been on hiatus as I’ve done some necessary clarifying and recharging in communion with my creative source. If you’re a long-time reader, I thank you sincerely for your patience, and for the expressions of ongoing interest that some of you have sent me. If you’re new to Demon Muse, then I hope you’ll enjoy and profit from this ongoing exploration of the theory and practice of inspired creativity, and will add your voice to the conversation in each post’s comment section. In particular, you may find it worth your while to explore the Course in Demonic Creativity, which organizes this blog’s “backbone posts” into a coherent course of self-study in the art of creativity as a muse-driven or daimon-driven pursuit. (For an even more easily accessible and portable presentation, look for an ebook version later this year.)

Be advised that the present post inaugurates a new format that will include 1) occasionally longer articles with endnotes and 2) a drastic reduction in the number of in-text links. For a rationale concerning the second part, see “Experiments in delinkification” by Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and its book-length expansion, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Also see “To link or not to link? That is the question” at The Economist and “The Hyperlink War” at the Barnes & Noble Review. Or do a Google search for hyperlinks + distraction. For a rationale concerning the first part: Endnotes keep a reader engaged in the same text instead of leading attention away.

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Image: ConsciousnessTo review, in the opening post of this series I raised the question of whether the personification of the creative force that we’ve been pursuing here at Demon Muse is “really real.” Is the muse, the daimon, the personal genius — that gravitational center of our creative energy and identity — truly a separate being/force/entity with an independent, autonomous existence? Or are such words and the experience to which they refer simply convenient metaphors for the unconscious mind? The first thing we discover when we truly begin to consider the issue in depth is that arriving at a viable answer will not be, and cannot be, as straightforward a matter as it might first appear. All of our attempts run us into immediate difficulties, because whichever side we try to choose, we find we’re automatically skirting important issues and begging crucial questions. Hence, the value of reviewing some of the various ways in which intelligent individuals have understood the experience of guidance and communication from a muse-like source.

Of all the myriad strands in the cultural conversation about this issue, it would be hard to identify a more pertinent — or fascinating (and entertaining) — one than the line of influence connecting 20th-century occultist Aleister Crowley to psychedelic guru Timothy Leary to counterculture novelist-philosopher and “guerilla ontologist” Robert Anton Wilson. The dividing line between objective and subjective interpretations of the experience of external-seeming communication from an invisible source is highlighted not only in their individual stories but in the plotline that connects them. In particular, Wilson’s final “resting point” in terms of a belief system to encompass the whole thing is helpful and instructive in our search for the muse’s ontological status, and can prove a helpful tonic for dogmatism, because what he ended up with was more of an anti-belief system that highlights and hinges on the irreducible indeterminacy of any possible answer.

By way of a warning: Prepare for high weirdness! What follows is a strange story. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Aleister Crowley, daemon, Holy Guardian Angel, Magick, muse, Occultism, Psychedelics, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, unconscious mind

To Thine Own Daemonic Self Be True

Jul 12

Posted by Matt Cardin in Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

Flickr: GothicaI grew up in an Independent Christian Church, one of those conservative evangelical Protestant congregations that represent the right-leaning doctrinal divergence of some Restoration Movement churches from the über-liberal Disciples of Christ denomination circa the early and middle parts of the 20th century. One of the mottos of my childhood church, which I learned directly from the lips of my father, is this: “Where the scriptures speak, we speak; where the scriptures are silent, we are silent.”

Anybody who scents in this saying a close analog to the muse/daemon/genius-based approach to artistic creativity is surely onto something. As I said in a past post (“Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm, Part 2“), in a discussion of how important it is to find your natural creative condition, you simply can’t know your innate creative rhythm — occasional, erratic, or prolific — until you actually do the work of finding out who you are by making friends with your daemonic genius, and then by approaching your work openly and experimentally in order to discover the pace and volume at which your creativity wants to emerge. I illustrated this with examples, excerpts, and insights from the lives and works of  Philip Larkin, Alice Flaherty, Joe Hill, Amy Lowell, and Victoria Nelson.

Here I present a few more examples to illustrate the point — which, to repeat, is that there’s a wide variation among people in how their creative demons consent to being accessed and how their muses consent to being courted. The crucial thing is to get in touch, and then to stay in touch, with your own demon muse, so that when your it speaks, you speak, and when it’s silent, you remain silent.

But bear in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be writing the whole time. This is not a contradiction but a subtle distinction. For more such seeming contradictions, wade into the following choppy sea of advice from well-known authors. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Christianity, daemon, dani shapiro, discipline, flannery o'connor, gayle brandeis, jurgen wolff, muse, stephen king, Steven Pressfield

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 3

May 3

Posted by Matt Cardin in Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

I ended Part 2 of this series with a description of the “realm of infinite inner richness and raw, self-evident meaningfulness” that offers to inform your writing when your unconscious mind acts as muse or genius by speaking to you in mental images, persistent thoughts, and intensified emotions. You tap into the nightside of consciousness when you deliberately seek and allow this guidance from beyond your ego shell.

To circle back around to where we started in Part 1, in order to accomplish that necessary nightside tapping you have to give up the idea that you know what you’re doing and where you’re going with it. The reasons for this should be obvious, but in case not: If you think you know what you’re creating, where it’s headed, how it’s going to turn out, what you’re trying to accomplish, what its overall structure is supposed to be, and so on, then this sense of knowledge will almost inevitably result in an attitude of control and ownership over the results. And this is, bar none, the most surefire way to block out the light, whether of the bright or the dark variety, that your genius is trying to shine through you.

The way to overcome this problem is to sidestep it entirely by embracing conscious ignorance and relying on your daemon to carry you through and inform your work with a deep, organically coherent direction. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: daemon, daimon, daimonic, demon, Federico Fellini, genius, Huston Smith, Mad Men, Marion Milner, Matthew Weiner, muse, ray bradbury, William Stafford

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 2

Apr 26

Posted by Matt Cardin in Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

As explored in Part 1 of this series, communications from your unconscious mind are recognizable as such by the fact that they occur spontaneously. From your point of view — that is, the viewpoint of you-as-conscious-ego — the voice of the unconscious arrives in the form of involuntary promptings from a separate, independent, autonomous source within your subjectivity. This source — to restate the fundamental insight that animates this blog — is, or is equivalent to, the muse, daimon/daemon, and personal genius of classical antiquity.

(It’s also equivalent to a few additional and equally potent metaphors that we haven’t talked about yet, such as the Spanish duende as described by Federico Garcia Lorca. See “A Writer’s Guide to the Psyche, Part 1” and Part 2 for more detail about the daimon and such.)

Learning the specific “language” of your unconscious mind is therefore crucial to the cultivation of an empowered creative life. It doesn’t do you much good if your genius is trying to speak to you but you can’t understand it, or if you don’t even recognize the sound of its voice.

What you have to do is figure out, via careful attentiveness to your inner states of mind and emotion, the form(s) and the channel(s) by which and in which your inner partner wants to communicate and collaborate. We’ve already explored the general idea and some specific techniques by which you can get to know your daemon’s character (see “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1,” Part 2, and Part 3). Now it’s time to take a look at what’s effectively the converse side of things by considering the specific ways in which your daemon tries to make itself and its wishes known to you. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: brewster ghiselin, buddhism, carl jung, creative unconscious, creativity, daemon, daimon, dorothea brande, dorothy canfield, duende, eckhart tolle, federico garcia lorca, fourth way, genius, gurdjieff, h.p. lovecraft, james bonnet, john gardner, mindfulness, morning pages, muse, religion, sandra lee dennis, Tapping the Creative Unconscious, unconscious mind, zen

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1

Apr 19

Posted by Matt Cardin in Creativity and Society, Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | 5 Comments

When you get into a serious study of creativity like the one we’re pursuing here at Demon Muse, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the forest among the trees. That is, it’s easy to get caught up in the attractions of ideas and theories, to the point where you forget what the whole thing is really about. This can dampen your enthusiasm for actually performing creative work, whereas recalibrating your attitude can have the opposite effect of inflaming your muse.

What it’s all about, this daimonic or daemonic approach to creativity, this muse-based theory of inspiration, this discipline of embracing your inner genius, is the alignment of your creative act with your deep creative intent. It’s about divining your daemonic passion and then letting this be your guide when you write (or compose, paint, perform, etc.).

The thing is, you can only get it right when you’re not self-conscious about it. During the act of creation itself, you can only ride the daemonic wave by focusing your attention exclusively and intensively on your sense of rightness — or, as a corrective, your sense of wrongness — as you seek to follow the thread of your passion.

So this is all to say that when you come to the actual moment of putting down words on paper, the way to unleash your demon is to forget all about it. The moment of creation isn’t the time to be reflecting on — or, God help you, deliberately trying to follow or implement — psychological theories or concepts about creativity or anything else. Rather, it’s the moment when you should abandon all reflectiveness about what you’re doing, willingly embrace a sense of ignorance (and therefore openness) about where you’re headed and how you’ll get there, and simply heed the impulse of what wants to be said.

And how, exactly, are you supposed to do that? Simple: You find and follow what feels right, for this is the irrefutable and infallible voice of your creative demon speaking. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: carl jung, creative process, creative psychology, creativity, daemon, daimon, daimonic, james hillman, muse, stephen diamond, unconscious mind

Stoking Your Creative Fire: Identify Your Daemon’s Work Habits

Mar 22

Posted by Matt Cardin in Dealing with Creative Block, Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

Have you gotten to know your creative demon? (If not, see “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1,” and also parts 2 and 3.) Have you begun to learn the specific personality of the deep psychological force that organically motivates you to be passionate about, fascinated with, and energized by this instead of that and some things instead of other things? Have you experimented with reading your life’s trajectory, both inner and outer, as a work of art or literature that embodies central, recurrent motifs and themes, and have you recognized these as clues to the natural direction your creativity would like to take you?

If so, then you’re way ahead of the game. Many people never do these things, and you, by contrast, may be experiencing a new or renewed sense of creative potency and possibility. This is a heady and alternately (or reciprocally) frightening and exhilarating development.

It’s also an ongoing one. You can never exhaust the depth of discovery in your muse or genius. This is built into the very structure of human consciousness, since the unconscious genius lies perpetually “behind” the conscious ego. The harmonizing and integrating of these two selves in a quasi-Jungian process of individuation — which is really what we’re about here: individuation as experienced in or applied to artistic creativity — represents not a discrete, one-time accomplishment, like a finish line to be reached, but an ongoing, ever-deepening relationship in which communication flows with increasing freedom between you and your daimon.

In this process, getting familiar with your creative demon’s general nature is only the beginning: a (very) necessary step, but not a sufficient one. This is because you’ll soon discover that in addition to a general direction, your demon muse has specific habits and desires. These can sometimes pertain to things so seemingly prosaic and trivial that you’ll be tempted to dismiss them as meaningless. But that would be a mistake.

The experience of creative diminishment or full-blown creative block often arises from your unwitting attempt to force your genius to deliver through channels or means that it simply doesn’t like and refuses to comply with. Conversely, you can stoke your creative fire by finding and using the right approach for your genius.

In short, through trial and error you can learn exactly how your creative demon likes to work, right down to the most humdrum daily details of method and material. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: creative process, creative writing, creativity, daemon, daimon, genius, nick cave, rudyard kipling

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