Daemonic Expertise
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March 11th, 2022
People keep asking me about the daemon - sometimes written throughout history as daimon - as if I am some kind of expert on it. I am not. I use the term half-jokingly, and often synonymously, fluttering between other terms like spirit, source, and inherent intelligence. There is probably some signal I can boost here though.
How do I describe the daemon?
To my materialist friends: a kind of intuition that points your life in a certain direction. The direction does not offer a guarantee, nor confidence that it will be the “right or wrong” direction, but when you follow it, a sense of aliveness emerges.
To my fellow weirdos: a primordial and amoral creative energy that has directionality, which makes you dangerously come alive when you move towards it.
Socrates talked about his daemon, who told him what not to do. While Bernardo Kastrup’s daemon tells him what to do. Mine is like Bernardo’s. I do not like saying my daemon though, and prefer saying the daemon, as I can sense whatever this thing is is also in others.
Why did I start using this term? Well, my mind stopped working for me a long time ago. All my complicated rational thinking felt like quicksand, burying me deeper in a sense of meaninglessness. It became increasingly hard to motivate myself to act. The times I did manage to act came from this well-spring of pre-cognitive energy, one that felt wild, alive, and really old. I ended up doing cool stuff when I followed this. Usually creative stuff for its own sake, that was next to impossible to instrumentalize toward making money.
I basically needed a word to describe whatever this was, and no words approved by our secular, atheistic, and materialist intelligentsia dominating our truth-validating institutions did the trick. I was originally introduced to the word daemon through my favorite novel of all time, Demian: The Story of a Youth by Hermann Hesse. The book kicked my ass so hard when I read it as a teenager. It is the book I have returned to most often. No book I own is more beloved.
So many passages struck me as daemonic. Like this one…
I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I’m beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.
This passage lands so well. As does this one…
All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?
Yeah. Why is this so difficult for so many? Maybe it does not have to be so difficult. Maybe we just have to go a little crazy and risk-taking this thing seriously. From my experience, it is a risk, as the daemon seems to lead to “demons.”
I sense it would be good to consider there being two broad relational orientations: eudaimonia and dysdaimonia. The former term is about being in a good relationship with the daemon, while the latter term is about being in a bad relationship with it. The Stoics famously argued that being virtuous is the same thing as being eudaimonic, hence why I am a big fan of this virtue thing.
Dysdaimonia is a term I discovered from Stephen Diamond’s book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil and Creativity, which he describes as:
The insight, creativity, inspiration and ecstasy of voluntary possession, can quickly deteriorate into destructive, involuntary possession, otherwise known as madness or psychosis.
Dysdaimonia is about having the daemonic energy channeling in a way that leads to destruction, internally or externally. Internal examples: musicians creating amazing music who join the “27 Club.” External example: Adolf Hitler, who seemed intensely possessed by something.
The terms “eudaemon” and “cacodaemon” mean “good” or “bad” daemon, the latter basically being a demon. Perhaps we need more materialist-friendly terms to describe what a demon actually is. Maybe unprocessed trauma with a congestion of dark emotions - such as intense hate - taking on a “life” and “voice” of its own?
I sense the art of living and being an “artist of life” (aka being a Stoic) is to be orientated towards eudaimonia, arriving at a daemonic flow. I do not think there is a “goal” to life, but if there were one, it would be sustaining a daemonic flow in a regenerative way, aka a way that promotes a daemonic flow in others.
I could be wrong about all of this. I am also not attached to any of this. I sense it is good to share my current models of the daemon though, mainly to disabuse any pretense I am an expert, and to invite the perspective that you may already be more of an expert than you think.
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