> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mattcardin.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The machine, the movie, and the truth we fear - URL: https://www.mattcardin.com/the-machine-the-movie-and-the-truth-we-fear/ - Published: 2026-10-01T07:00:02.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-01T17:29:06.000Z - Description: Three conversations about the assumptions that shape our experience. - Author: Matt Cardin - Tags: Religion, Nonduality, and Consciousness, Horror, the Weird, and the Imaginal, Writing, Essays Before the meat of today’s post, here’s an update on my slow restoration of selected pieces of interest from my previous online writing: 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](https://www.mattcardin.com/thomas-ligotti-interview/).” 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](https://www.mattcardin.com/james-fadiman-interview/).” 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](https://www.mattcardin.com/welcome-to-the-new-site/) 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)?](https://www.mattcardin.com/whats-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.