On feeling the call to absolute stillness

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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 ever an inner spiritual call to do this?

This is a question and a temptation that has suggested itself to me multiple times over the course of my adult life. The peculiar nature of my mental-emotional makeup apparently renders me highly susceptible to such thinking. Naturally, this has made itself known in my private journal. The example below is a case in point that shows me grappling with the pull toward absolute inertia.

When I wrote those words, I was deep into editing my mummy encyclopedia and conceiving the proposal for my paranormal encyclopedia, while also carrying on a full-time job as a college writing center instructor and English faculty member, even as I was managing all the necessary responsibilities to my family. In the center of this swirl of competing calls and obligations, the desire just to let everything go was a constant whisper, a silently thrumming inner suggestion that hovered on the margins of my awareness and sometimes converged toward the center.

And into the midst of this came the above-quoted passage from the works of Oswald Chambers—who would later become the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation—to amplify the whole thing. That particular journal entry will appear in volume 2 of my collected journals, whose proofs I’m currently editing for publication later this year. I share it here for those who will immediately grok what I’m talking about, those who are personally familiar with the inner call to total silence and stillness.

I have no particular advice to offer about this experience, other than to state that it needs to be recognized and honored. Just a couple of days ago I encountered the following words from nondual teacher Robert Wolfe, from his booklet “Elementary Cloud-Watching: Contemplating the Meaning of Living in the Moment” (excerpted in his biographical essay at Amazon). They convey the mood of this inner stillness as well as anything possibly could:

Civilization and stillness—quiet, inactivity—do not go together. Civilization is a continual process of choices; stillness comes without choice. There is nothing which can be done to create this stillness. It is not something which is to be acquired; it has no value as currency. It is, put another way, priceless.

One must relax, to breathe this stillness. Not just the body: the mind, the psyche. One must relax ambition. Ambition and stillness are not compatible. There is no ticking of the clock here. There is no effort in stillness.

The wisdom of silence and peril of social media

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

A week ago, Substack launched its new “Notes” feature, which you may have heard about. 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 post but that can still serve to connect with readers and foster enjoyable communication.

And yet, as I have used it, I have also noticed myself gravitating toward a realization and a principle that is necessary to bear in mind: Writers in this age of online hustle need to make a deliberate practice of focusing on the writing itself as an end in its own right. The other alternative is to give free rein to our egoic-addictive craving for attention and validation, and thus become its slave. If you’re actually meant to write, anything of value that might come from doing it will arise out of an inner attitude and outer practice of silence, not from a frenetic grasping for validation via likes, clicks, or shares.

Yesterday I published a reflection about this matter at my Substack newsletter. And yes, I’m aware of the inbuilt irony of using an online newsletter to publish a cautionary reflection on the creative and spiritual dangers of online writing. Still, maybe it will speak to you: “The Wisdom of Silence in the Age of Online Writing.”

The monk, the apocalypse, and the demon muse

I’m currently tending an idea for a new book. It has arisen in connection with the following two thoughts, which in turn follow on from my reflections a couple of weeks ago on Ray Bradbury’s “book people” and Morris Berman’s “monastic option.”

First, for the past decade-plus I have felt/suspected that America’s collective adoration of apocalyptic fictions and fantasies is not unconnected to the now patent emergence of some truly catastrophic trends and scenarios in real life. This predates, by the way, Demon Lindelof and Brad Bird’s savvy exploration of the same idea in Disney’s Tomorrowland movie (which I heartily recommend even though it’s flawed).

Second, in The Twilight of American Culture—a book that I can hardly believe is now 23 years old—Berman mounted a devastating analysis, both academic and polemical, of America as a country and culture that is definitively past its peak and on the downhill slope of collapse.

Berman expanded his critique into a trilogy consisting of Twilight plus two additional books with similarly winsome titles, Dark Ages America and Why America Failed. In the latter he explicitly explained one of his guiding principles in writing it, which actually articulated an approach that had guided the previous two as well: He deliberately did not include what one reviewer referred to as a “happy chapter. Too many books, said Berman, mount a compelling, even an unanswerable, argument that some current situation is grave, dire, a clanging emergency—and then conclude with a single glib, fatuous chapter that lays out a plan to “fix it.” “[B]ooks of this sort,” he said in Why America Failed, “or any book about the United States, is required to conclude on a positive note, showing how things can be fixed, how they will be different in the future if only ‘we’ (which is who, exactly?) take matters into our own hands and create a different outcome. But this is fantasy. History doesn’t work that way, and I am not going to join the legion of authors out there who out of naïveté or a desperate kind of hope (or maybe just a desire for sales) attempt to pull a rabbit out of a hat at the eleventh hour. There is no rabbit, and the hat is coming apart at the seams.” In Twilight and the other books in the series, Berman said his view is that 1) history clearly shows a cycle of maturation and decline playing out in every culture and civilization, 2) this never, ever varies or reverses itself, and 3) the U.S. is clearly living out its own decline stage right now. As Agent Smith said to Neo, “You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.”

I find this view quite persuasive. So I guess I’m saying that I think we currently have both things happening at the same time. On the one hand, our collective addiction to apocalyptic fantasies is both spawning and reflecting a proliferation of real catastrophes. On the other hand, this trend or tendency is wrapped within a real and irreversible trajectory of decline and collapse.

As I mentioned two posts ago, Berman’s suggested action during such a time is to adopt what he termed “the monastic option”: Follow the lead of the famous Irish monks who “saved civilization” by finding some worthwhile area of endeavor—a field of knowledge, a set of skills, a blueprint for a humane way of living, whatever calls deeply to you—and deliberately seek a way to preserve and transmit this to a new culture that will arise in the future, after the present one has burned itself to the ground. To illustrate and flesh out the point, Berman explicitly makes reference not just to the witness of history, and not just to what he takes to be “new monastic” efforts that are currently underway (such as the Clemente Course in the Humanities), but to various manifestations of this theme of cultural preservation through a post-collapse dark age in apocalyptic and dystopian fictions, including, as mentioned, Ray Bradbury’s “book people” in Fahrenheit 451, who memorize and effectively become books during an age when reading is banned, so that one day, when things have changed, their knowledge can be written down once again.

You might infer from my recent focus on these things that such ideas have been occupying my attention. You would be right. As I said at the top of this post, I’m currently, and speculatively, incubating an idea for a new book that will fuse these ideas with my A Course in Demonic Creativity. In other words, a book about the discipline of the demon muse, the discipline of divining and aligning with your inner creative genius, as a way of identifying and cultivating your own monastic option, your own unique “great work,” in the face of the apocalypse.