The mystery of the self and the dream of reality

We commonly overlook the fact that the ultimate mystery of existence and reality is our own mystery—the mystery of the self. We ourselves are the center of the wheel. And at those moments when we reawaken to the wonder, fascination, and longing of it all, what we are really feeling and perceiving, often unawares, is our very own Identity: the awesome Absolute in its sheer being, consciousness, and imperturbability.

“The world is nothing but the picture of your own ‘I’ consciousness,” Nisargadatta Maharaj once said (as recorded in Prior to Consciousness). “Do not worry about the world. First start from here: the ‘I Am,’ and then find out what is the world. Find out the nature of this ‘I.’” And also, as recorded in Consciousness and the Absolute (the final book of his transcribed and edited talks to be published before his death in 1981, “Not only is the body-mind unreal, but this manifest consciousness, this universe, is also unreal. The ‘I Amness’ is dream-like, ephemeral.” And thus: “Find out what you are and you will get all the answers.”

Having assumed the dreamlike perspective of individual beings inhabiting an objective world that is separate from us, we begin to receive intuitive intimations of a higher unity and an awesome, scintillating mystery that characterizes both our inner and outer experience. And it dawns on us that this wondrous infusion of a new felt perspective, which inflects and transforms our sense of both self and cosmos, is simply the way it feels for a dream character to recognize its simultaneous illusory nature as a separate being and its real identity as the One that dreamt all this, and that is still dreaming it now.

The algorithm of experience

Everybody talks about “the algorithm” these days, the invisible principle, or rather the collective set of them, that governs what’s delivered in our daily, individual interactions with the interwebs. An enormous slice of what we see and hear every day, the content that fills the container of our experience, is determined by hidden code. But there’s a deeper layer to consider: what might be called the algorithm of experience itself.

This is a metaphor just waiting to be extracted. In an age when the notion of “the algorithm” has become iconic, rising from the level of a mere technical term to become a universal, zeitgeist-level principle suffused throughout the cultural aether, it’s interesting to remember and reflect on how reality at large is essentially the expression of an algorithm that’s perpetually serving up everything that arises. And by “reality” I mean our individual experience—what Peter Brown, the late nondual spiritual teacher, helpfully characterized as our “experiential field.” Because at root, for each of us, it means the same thing. Reality is what’s experienced, what shows up. It’s all that’s ever encountered or known. Even thoughts or speculations about what might lie beyond immediate experience are only ever known in and as immediate experience.

This algorithm of your experience—which, again, is synonymous with reality, the only reality you can ever know—is fine-tuned with sheer, perfect accuracy, better than any tech company could ever build into their social media feed, for giving precisely what’s needed, whatever it is that inevitably has to emerge. A perfectly calibrated experiential feed. How else could it be? How could anything arise that wasn’t “meant” to?

When the point hits home, it marks a significant and subversive shift in perspective.

Weird horror, spiritual awakening, and your creative daemon

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:3 mins read

The very idea of the muse, daimon, or creative daemon is infused with mystery, and even 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 the murky unknown and evoke feelings you can’t quite describe.

The daemon 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 a weird horror story. 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 becomes entangled with vivid outward synchronicities that propel you through the gates of Chapel Perilous and into a fertile state of spiritual emergency.

And even more: This very fact — the fear of your inner genius — contains the seeds of its own solution. The experience of the daemon muse is essentially dissociative. It’s a phenomenon in which 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 means it can serve as the seed for nondual self-realization, an awakening to or remembrance of your 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 self and a world arise.

To say the whole thing differently: 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.

When reality outweirds fiction

At what point will we no longer need to read weird fiction or watch weird cinema anymore because we can just look out the window, step out the door, watch the news, or introspect for five minutes to encounter everything we always sought from such art and entertainment?

There’s a great deal of strangeness and dread afoot these days as we navigate collectively—and, it seems to me, rather blindly—through a kind of transformational gauntlet across every dimension of life: social, cultural, political, psychological, economic, educational, religious, spiritual, ecological, and even biological. It will be fascinating to see what this all does to art and literature. Or maybe, with the meteoric rise of the weird to an unprecedented level of cultural prominence and centrality in the early twenty-first century, we’re already seeing it.

The real question may be just how truly weird reality will end up becoming. On this note, one can’t help wondering: Would—or will—that quality of weirdness be located only in our subjective experience, in our minds and perspectives, standing as a mere mental interpretation and emotional coloration laid over an objective world that remains unchanged? Or will it also, in the manner peculiar to the very mode or genre of weird storytelling, manifest “out there” in the world, revealing a nondual identification of outer and inner? Will it perhaps take on the guise, role, and unsettling force of the Old English root of our modern word “weird”: wyrd, meaning fate, destiny, and/or a supernatural force that controls both.

More: Has the weird already done this, already alchemized the inner-outer field of our experience, working a fundamental and still-unfolding transmutation upon it, while we simply weren’t paying attention?

Is our current global weirding not an aberration, but an indication, an unveiling, a revelation of a deeper order?

When the self is only a puppet

Those who have long inhabited, in their imaginations and fascinations, the crossover territory between religion and unitive spirituality on the one hand and supernatural horror on the other—in other words, people like me—will find much to fascinate in the following passage from Terence Gray, writing famously as Wei Wu Wei. The Ligottian vibes are especially strong in this articulation of the way the self is only a puppet:

[A] sentient being objectively is only a phantom, a dream-figure, nor is anything done via a psycho-somatic apparatus, as such, other than the production of illusory images and interpretations, for that also has only an apparent, imagined or dreamed, existence. All phenomenal “existence” is hypothetical…

“Our dreamed “selves,” autonomous in appearance, as in life, can be seen in awakened retrospect to be puppets totally devoid of volitional possibilities on their own. Nor is the dream in any degree dependent on them except as elements therein. They, who seem to think that they are living and acting autonomously, are being dreamed in their totality, they are being activated as completely and absolutely as puppets are activated by their puppeteer. Such is our apparent life, on this apparent earth, in this apparent universe.

—Wei Wu Wei, Open Secret (1965)

For comparison, here are two sections from Ligotti’s poem cycle I Have a Special Plan for This World that articulate perhaps the darkest possible angle from which an organism can intuit the nondual reality of things, including its own identity. It’s no accident that these appear next to each other, in succession, among the cycle’s thirteen numbered sections. I consider them to represent high points, veritable mountain peaks, both thematically and artistically, among Tom’s total body of work.