Before proceeding with today’s essay, two items:

First, remember that my album of original music Daemonyx: Curse of the Daimon is available to free subscribers as a digital download, and that CDs are also available.

Second, I wanted to share some news that connects directly with its subject: Weirdosphere is reopening enrollment in my course Writing at the Wellspring.

Originally taught in fall 2024, the course explores creativity, spiritual purpose, and the daemon muse through five modules of lectures, readings, discussion prompts, and exercises. This time, you can work through the material at your own pace, with access to recordings of the original lectures and office hours. We’ll also gather for a new live Zoom session with me on Sunday, December 6, at 3 p.m. Eastern.

Enrollment is open for a limited time. You can find the full description and enroll here:

Writing at the Wellspring: The Course

The regular price is $180, but free subscribers to my newsletter can take $45 off, bringing it to $135. You’ll find the discount code and a few more details at the end of this post. If you’re new here, subscribing to this newsletter is free and gives you access to the offer.

Now, on to the haunting that is you.

After publishing last week’s essay about my other creative life in music, I shared a passage from it on Substack. This brought about a brief interaction with a reader on the subject of the daimon, and about whether it makes sense to regard this inner presence as a metaphor or as something literally real. Around the same time, I shared a passage from a book that had elicited a deep thrill of affirmation, and another brief exchange with a reader happened, this time about spiritual awakening and the meaning of perfection.

In the days since, I have found myself thinking about these conversations together, as both seem to lead toward a question that has occupied me for years: What happens when we pay close attention to an experience without deciding in advance what it is, what it means, or what it ultimately tells us about ourselves and the world? As I often note, both to myself and to my readers, the question becomes even stranger when the experience in question is the experience of being oneself.

Born possessed

Here’s what I posted about the daimon, slightly edited/adapted from paragraphs in my Daemonyx essay:

To review, for those who are unfamiliar with it: The idea of the daimonic is loosely related to the idea of the muse. The idea of a personal daimon refers to a guiding spirit whose influence can be felt in the passions, tendencies, and sense of calling that seem to arrive with us rather than being chosen by us. We have all noticed that everyone seems to be born with certain predilections and personality traits already firmly in place. It seems that each of us possesses, or rather is possessed by, innate passions and interests, attractions and aversions, traits and tendencies. It also often seems that we are each led to encounter and experience certain sorts of life experiences and circumstances that are beyond our power to prevent.

One doesn’t have to believe in this literally in order to feel its pull or sense its marvelous explanatory power. It’s possible to view it as a kind of perfect metaphor. It’s also possible to refuse to assign it an ontological status at all.

It was the point in the second paragraph that prompted a reader to ask, in effect, why we should stop at metaphor. Why shouldn’t the daimon be real, even if its reality is immaterial?

That’s certainly a legitimate position to take. One can believe in the daimon literally. One can also roundly reject that position. But my own greatest energy has come from refusing to assign or assume any kind of definite ontological status for the daimon at all, leaving it instead as a darkly glowing question mark.

In stating this, I also can’t help noting that this position is rather in the vein of what David Hufford did with his study of sleep paralysis and cultural traditions of nocturnal spiritual assault in his seminal 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night. His methodological and attitudinal approach to this heady subject was stated in the book’s subtitle: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. The “experience-centered” approach challenged the cultural source hypothesis, according to which pre-existing cultural beliefs produce or shape apparent encounters with supernatural beings. Hufford’s research showed that recurring features of these encounters could appear among people who lacked prior knowledge of the relevant traditions. In other words, experience could help generate belief, rather than simply being generated by it. This left room for the reality and importance of cultural influence while dethroning it as the sole explanation for spirit encounters. Hufford clearly showed that it is not sufficient to attribute all such experiences to the psychologically priming and programming influence of cultural beliefs.

The primary datum, on this approach, is the experience itself, the episodes of sleep paralysis with accompanying perceived supernatural assault. Also of critical importance is Hufford’s careful explanation of the fact that beliefs about this experience can be rationally elaborated in different directions by people hailing from different cultural backgrounds. The same experience can be explained and interpreted in starkly different ways—such as belief in literal supernatural entities on the one hand and belief that such things are hallucinations on the other—without either account departing from or becoming dishonest to the basic experiential facts. Hufford’s later account of the experience-centered approach in “Beings Without Bodies: An Experience-Centered Theory of the Belief in Spirits,” included in editor Barbara Walker’s Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural (Utah State University Press, 1995), develops this distinction between experience and the beliefs that grow around it.

There’s a vein of power in allowing these matters to retain something metaphorically akin to wave/particle indeterminacy: a both-and field of possibilities that keeps the question open and seems to suggest something that transcends and bursts wide open the human capacity to perceive, conceive, and believe.

So is there an answer to what these experiences and the supposed spiritual beings involved in them “really are”? It’s worth sitting with the question for a while if it catches you, and noticing how the fundamental epistemological question “How can I know?” is suffused throughout all attempts to take a definitive position.

To return to the point—or maybe everything here is the point—the daimon, and also the muse, and their fusion in the figure of the daemon muse, and the experience of creative and spiritual inspiration they’re associated with, occupy a similarly liminal territory. They reside squarely on the same dividing line between subjectivity and objectivity, between an inner experience and an encounter with something other, that becomes so vivid in sleep paralysis and the associated hypnagogic visions or encounters.

As a kind of anti-upshot, I’ll state that a Robert Anton Wilsonian attitude of thoroughgoing model agnosticism suggests itself, at least to me, as the proper attitude. There’s a vein of power in allowing these matters to retain something metaphorically akin to wave/particle indeterminacy: a both-and field of possibilities that keeps the question open and seems to suggest something that transcends and bursts wide open the human capacity to perceive, conceive, and believe.

The weird within

The attraction, for me, lies especially in what happens to attention when we allow the experience to exceed and surpass all the accounts we try to attach to it. Because if you really, deeply, clearly focus on the muse, daimon, or creative daemon for a while, you may notice that the very idea of it is infused with mystery, and even, as it happens, with potential fear. The sense of relating to an other within oneself, of receiving inner communications from an outer source, is frankly uncanny. In fact, there are distinct parallels between the idea and experience of the daemon muse and the signature artistic-emotional effect of weird horror. Both dive into a realm of the murky unknown and evoke feelings you cannot quite describe.

This is because the daemon, as a basic experiential matter, is a mysterious presence playing hide-and-seek in the psyche, much like the elusive object of fascination and fear in a story by Lovecraft, Blackwood, or Ligotti. Your daemon muse haunts you with — and more, it haunts you as — an aspect of your very self. This is distinctly reminiscent of the numinous dread that pervades the kind of weird horror story in which the entire narrative, and most especially the protagonist’s consciousness, is haunted by an implied presence, by something too vast and awful for its reality to be seen directly, even if the story does offer a provisional concretization in some masklike form such as Cthulhu or the arachnid monstrosity lying behind the Pennywise persona and the title entity's various other appearances in Stephen King’s It. (And speaking of something too vast and awful — or aweful — for its reality to be seen directly, should we invoke, or even just briefly mention, examples such as Semele’s incineration when Zeus reluctantly grants her wish to see him in his unmasked divine glory? Or the warnings in the Hebrew scriptures that “no man can see God and live,” such that Yahweh has to protect Moses from the full sight of himself as he moves past the mountain — a sight that the hapless Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark were privileged to, as it were, enjoy? Should we mention this? Yes, I think we should.)

In the case of the daemon muse, to live in conscious communion with this presence, entity, force, or intelligence is to live in a darkly enchanted universe, one where the boundary between inner and outer is blurred, where the infusion of creative inspiration can become entangled with vivid outward synchronicities that propel you through the gates of Chapel Perilous and into a fertile state of spiritual emergency.

Your daemon muse haunts you with—and more, it haunts you as—an aspect of your very self.

And even more: This very fact, the fear of your inner genius, contains the seeds of its own solution. One way of describing the experience of the daemon muse is to call it dissociative: one part of the psyche, the ego, perceives another part as separate or different, as an autonomous presence or intelligence with which “I” interact. This description leaves us with a further mystery that leads to a fruitful question: What is the “I” that experiences some of its own impulses as alien, that draws a boundary within itself and then encounters some of its own being as lying on the other side, behind the cosmic curtain?

The experience can thus serve as the seed for nondual self-realization, an awakening to or remembrance of one's real identity in and as the whole, not only the whole of the personal psyche, but the whole of the cosmos in which this self is embedded, and beyond that, the Absolute Subject in which both a self and a world arise. Or at least this is the language that I instinctively reach for when I try to describe it all. The words seem meaningful to me, even as I recognize them as fundamentally provisional and ultimately inadequate. As I’m fond of saying, if something is ineffable, this doesn’t mean you can’t say anything about it. Rather, it means you could talk about it forever, to eternity and infinity, without exhausting the metaphors or capturing its actuality in words. Therefore, talk away, and the more vivid and moving the metaphors you manufacture with a kind of ecstatic abandon, the better.

To say the whole thing differently, and to illustrate the point: In the darkest depths of Chapel Perilous, where you encounter the sense of an invisible and inescapable presence that feels simultaneously helpful and haunting, immanent and transcendent, intimate and mysterious, the very flavor or texture of this destabilizing experience may serve as the catalyst for a shattering instant of self-remembrance. It may trigger a reawakening to your real identity beyond the both of you. After that — though, to be precise, there is no “after” in a zone without time — all bets are off.

Including, perhaps, the bet that spiritual awakening will make everything turn out the way we want it to.

Dreaming in the first person

Sometimes when reading a book, I crash into a passage that elicits a deep thrill of affirmation. This happened recently as I was leafing through Essence Revisited by the nondual writer-teacher Darryl Bailey and came to this:

Spiritual awakening can’t build an ideal society, because it’s the realization that nothing we do is autonomous; our apparent personal actions are the impersonal movement of existence. Everything, just as it is in any apparent moment, is the already complete and pure expression of nature.

Everything we’ve apparently done, are doing now, and will ever do, is a movement of the cosmos. We are that inexplicable happening spontaneously expressing itself.

To realize this is the freedom the great spiritual teachings point to. It’s not the freedom to make ourselves and the world match some fantasy of perfection.

These words nicely illuminate an additional aspect of what I have been talking about here, as Bailey’s point contains or represents an extension of something already implicit in the experience of creative inspiration. Sometimes a piece of music, an image, a sentence, an idea, or some other creative leading or impulse comes to us, and we find ourselves answering it. What Bailey says enlarges the field of spontaneous mystery to include everything we have apparently done, are doing now, and will ever do. So, when we apply it to the matter of creativity, we see that our very act of answering the call of creative inspiration, no less than the call itself, belongs to the inexplicable happening that is everything.

When I shared Bailey’s words online, a reader suggested that maybe the point should be redirected. Maybe, this reader said, our desire for perfection is itself the universe dreaming and attempting to create through us. Maybe our efforts toward achieving an ideal, even an unattainable one, belong to this freedom, and therefore spiritual realization still leaves us with a dance to dance.

This is a fruitful way to put it. Our efforts and aspirations indeed belong to the perfection. And along with that, the question remains as to what “perfection” may consist of. It might range from, on the one hand, experiences, occurrences, and phenomena that delight and fulfill the passionate desires of relative beings, to, on the other hand, ones that oppose, undercut, overturn, and deny in the starkest possible way those desires — but that in doing so, create the perfection of a drama, perhaps a tragic one, perfectly played out.

The one who answers any creative, intellectual, or existential call is fully as mysterious as the source of the calling itself.

The word “perfection” changes as we try to define it. The perfection of a tragedy is different from the fulfillment of the characters’ desires, and both are different again from the completeness that Bailey points toward. Additionally, the aesthetic perfection of a tragedy doesn’t give us a warrant to frame someone's actual suffering as necessary or good. The desire to relieve that suffering, and efforts to make things better, are also movements of the cosmos, if we’re going to take the thought seriously.

The moving target and infinitely faceted jewel of “perfection” — I mean the real thing, if we can speak of such, rather than a limited and biased personal fantasy of it — and the associated multitude of trends and phenomena that might therefore constitute improvement or movement toward an ideal, are what’s left to be answered by reality when we adopt the view (or, depending on your outlook, have the realization) that the universe is dreaming of perfection and wants to craft it with, in some way, our participation.

Or maybe the universe is itself an unfolding dream of perfection. Maybe “perfection” is already too much to say. The possibility that existence is complete in each apparent moment leaves open the question of whether it’s ultimately aiming at anything at all.

Here, too, I feel the pull of the daimon’s darkly glowing question mark, which now expands to encompass . . . well . . . everything. Literally everything resides on that enigmatic line between the subjective and the objective. It's just that some phenomena, particularly weird, supernatural, or preternatural-seeming things like inspiration, or spirit encounters, or synchronicity, or UAP/UFOs, seem inherently to call attention to this fundamental fact when we really focus on them and try to pin down their nature. One doesn't actually need such appearances to arise for the point to become clear. It is demonstrating itself continuously in the given experience of what's presenting itself in and as this moment. You could get just as far by trying to pinpoint the reality of a glass of water, or a chair, or a cloud, or a bout with indigestion. Which also of course accounts for the paradox of the point's hypnotic self-concealment via trancelike, ubiquitous familiarity. Being jarred by appearances that seem to upset the applecart of the familiar dream can lead in circular fashion to the recognition of the point as evident not just in the exotically uncanny, but in the blandly familiar.

Thus it is that the daimon imparts its dark glow to the strangeness of there being anything here at all, including the ideas of perfection and imperfection, the phenomena of artistic creativity like writing and music, music, the universal experiences of fear and longing, the appearance of a world full of entities, events, and items both marvelous and mundane, and the sense of being someone who is apparently experiencing all these things and more.

That last is the inward turn where the real mystery resides, at least as regards our first-person access to it, since it is in fact the very mystery of the first person as such.

Which is to say it’s the darkly glowing recognition that the one who answers any creative, intellectual, or existential call is fully as mysterious as the source of the calling itself.

Enroll in the Wellspring course

If the words above speak to something in your own experience, my Writing at the Wellspring course offers a way to explore these matters through your own creative work.

It draws on my books A Course in Demonic Creativity and Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius. Across five modules, the course explores creativity as an inner collaboration, the relationship between inspiration and self-understanding, and the sometimes puzzling tension between the drive to create and the pull toward stillness.

This reopening of the course includes:

• All five modules, with notes, suggested readings, discussion prompts, and exercises.
• Video recordings of my lectures and office hours with the original cohort.
• A new live, interactive Zoom session with me on Sunday, December 6, at 3 p.m. Eastern, included with the course. The recording of this session will also be added to the course materials.

Enrollment is open for a limited time, and the material is self-paced.

If you’re someone who took the original course, you’re warmly invited to revisit it and join the December gathering at no additional charge. I’d love to hear what has stayed with you since then, and also what has changed and what may have emerged in your writing or other creative work since we last met.

Purchase link:

Writing at the Wellspring: The Course

Subscriber discount:

The regular course price is $180. Newsletter subscribers receive $45 off, bringing the price to $135. If you’re already subscribed, use the code below with the purchase link above. Otherwise, subscribe for free to access the code.