On inspiration: Letting go of results to focus on method

A mysterious thing

This post discusses the mysteries of inspiration, how it comes and goes, and the corresponding loss of ego and expectations that come if one decides to follow it. It is a process of letting go of results to focus on method. This post also explains some of my motivations for writing here.

Why do we have the interests that we have, and how do those interests arise in us?

I was pondering this question after reading

Tree of Woe

’s fairly recent post. He felt he covered everything he had intended when he started his Substack and he wanted reader feedback on what to do next. I responded: “There's nothing wrong with expanding your horizons into different subject matters. Are you finding inspiration anywhere? What are you reading, what entertainment are you consuming? It doesn't have to relate to anything in particular…perhaps branching out into your other interests and bringing the reader along would a good thing.”

Paul Kingsnorth

had a recent post where he wrote that as he grew as a person, his interests shifted and he followed them in unexpected directions. He started an ongoing fifty part series on Irish holy wells that he visited and photographed.

In the back of my mind I share a worry too that I may run out of inspiration for this Substack. Maybe it’ll happen today, maybe it’ll happen a year from now, maybe it’ll never happen and I’ll write forever like powerhorse Zman, who writes consistently 4x a week and does an audio post 1x a week, with additional material on the weekend, while the late, great Lawrence Auster used to write so consistently too.

John Carter

wrote an excellent weekly compendium of right-wing Substack posts for awhile which everyone loved until he burned out from so much reading (who can blame him?).

New Right Poast

has done a commendable job with his own version.

Anyway, there is something special that comes from the writer/reader interaction. I think of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” where a formerly popular artist loses the public’s attention and then starves to death, unnoticed. As critic Maud Ellmann argues, it is not by food that we survive, but by the gaze of others and "it is impossible to live by hunger unless we can be seen or represent doing so". What good are insights unless they are being used to improve the lives of both oneself and others?¹

Where does inspiration come from? Ideas pops into our heads out of the nether of our subconscious, and further subconscious processes determine how much weight to assign to a thought and how committed to be to follow it through, which we then rationalize to ourselves as somehow based in logic (it’s not).

Delicious Tacos

comments on this process:

If I could write something good I’d love myself. But you get a good story about three times a year. It comes in the shower on a day you have time. Couple hours to crank out, couple more to edit and there you have it. But you aren’t responsible. It’s from some antenna you put out and it happens to pick up a signal. Ideas sit for years before the way to crack them hits you. You can’t force it. All you can do is try not to fuck it up. Stay out of its way.

Brett Andersen believes that thoughts are merely a cascade effect of opposing subconscious forces that utilize relevance realization in furtherance of one’s will to power, seeking not just fulfillment of our desires but the refinement of processes which makes future fulfillment of those desires easier to attain.

He quotes from Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning on the importance of listening to our inspiration:

Interest is a spirit beckoning from the unknown – a spirit calling from outside the “walls” of society. Pursuit of individual interest means hearkening to this spirit’s call – means journeying outside the protective walls of childhood dependence and adolescent group identification; means also return to and rejuvenation of society. This means that pursuit of individual interest – development of true individuality – is equivalent to identification with the hero. Such identification renders the world bearable, despite its tragedies, and reduces unnecessary suffering, which destroys faith, to an absolute minimum.

This is the message that everyone wants to hear. Risk your security. Face the unknown. Quit lying to yourself, and do what your heart truly tells you to do. You will be better for it, and so will the world. (MoM pp. 346-347)

The ancient Roman historian Sallust has a similar message, where at the start of his Conspiracy of Catiline he argues:

All men who seek to be better than the animals ought to exert themselves with the greatest efforts, lest they pass their lives in silence as if they were beasts of burden, which Nature has conditioned to be prostrate and subservient to their stomachs. All our powers are situated in our minds and bodies; we make use of the mind more for control, and the body for service. One of these we hold in common with the gods, and the other with the wild beasts. For me it seems more proper to seek glory through one’s natural character than through the efforts of naked force and, since this life that we delight in is short, to fashion a legacy for ourselves that is as lasting as possible. For glory derived from riches and appearances is transitory and brittle, but masculine virtue is pure and eternal.

And Diogenes of Sinope, who I will discuss in a future post, highlights the importance of following one’s inspiration in this anonymous Greek anthology snippet:

Diogenes the Cynic, on his arrival in Hades, after his wise old age was finished, laughed when he saw Croesus. Spreading his cloak on the ground near the king, who once drew great store of gold from the river, he said: “Now, too, I take up more room than you; for all I had I have brought with me, but you, Croesus, have nothing.”

Inspiration is keyed to each of our own unique paths, and the more we listen to it the more we become uniquely ourselves. But perhaps it wants to lead us down a path that we are scared to follow. In “Self-Reliance” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.” Maybe we feel the need for financial security and prefer a job we hate instead of pursuing a risky creative passion. Or maybe we settle for an unsatisfactory spouse out of fear there’s no one else out there. It’s not like these fears are necessarily wrong; plenty of people follow their passion or inspiration and fail, ending up in worse situations than if they had never followed them at all. Or perhaps one’s inspirations can’t easily be monetized or projected outwards as part of one’s power process.

Perhaps our political and other beliefs are merely expressions of our phenotypes.

To derive fulfillment in life requires at least acknowledging our interests. We are not alive simply to be office drones, digits on a screen to be manipulated at will the way globohomo wants us to be. When one looks back at one’s life on his deathbed, a person will judge the value of his lives by his relationships with friends and family as well as to the extent one followed his inspiration, not by how much money was made or how hard he worked in a job. We are here for a short amount of time. I recently read the famous 1969 book about the five stages of grief, On Death and Dying, and there are so many stories of children and young people, or even middle aged people who were dying and it was about their difficult journeys toward acceptance of their fate before they had a chance to figure out who they were, to have a chance at fulfillment. Memento mori.

We aren’t promised tomorrow, so the most fulfilling thing one could do would be to listen to our inspiration. If we keeps inspiration bottled up, it will burst forth initially as resentment and then curdle into Nietzschian ressentiment. Sometimes inspiration must lead “through the filth” in order to integrate one’s Jungian dark side of our personality, as

Theodore Atkinson

argues.

Where does one draw the line between listening to our inspiration and respecting the practical realities of living? Should we blindly follow our interests or instincts? It isn’t that simple. Blindly following your passions, “do what you love”, is as dangerous as the opposite is soul-deadening. It is about balance, the weighing and integrating of competing interests. Julian Assange said, “People often say, ‘You are tremendously courageous in doing what you are doing.’ And I say, ‘No, you misunderstand what courage is. Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance.”

Assange listened and followed his inner voice. As he stated: “We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.” He enjoyed what he did and he enjoyed fame and success from it; but then the twisting, seemingly random turns of fate have brought him to the lowest lows as he rots in prison, being tortured by a sadistic globohomo, possibly forever.

There is no guarantee that listening to one’s inspiration will have a happy ending. We see survivorship bias where the uniquely rich, powerful, creative, etc. took risks to get where they are, acted independently and had great success, so they are (very shallowly) inclined to recommend to others that they do the same — but it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for most.² But at least an element of fostering inspiration is needed to keep life from becoming soul deadening.

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A little bit of my story

I can empathize with the struggle that many younger people are going through, torn between their instincts, their interests, and their desire to hold down a steady job, as I went through it myself. I always had an interest in politics and psychology from a young age, although the interest was disjointed, surface level, never tied into a synergistic whole. I spent decades in a haze of uncertainty and confusion; I saw myself almost like an alien, looking at everyone around me and society in general thinking: why do these people believe what they believe? Why do they act the way they act? They express confidence in a world of endless flux, a world of total uncertainty and lack of control - why? What am I missing?

I slowly came out of this haze during the early Trump years when I realized and started to understand the NPC phenomenon, which was conceptualized thousands of years ago by the gnostics per

Daniel D

as hylics (i.e. the lowest order of the three types of human. Unable to be saved since their thinking is entirely material). Most people are simply meat robots and they do what they’re programmed to do by the media and society at large, regardless of level of so-called intelligence. It’s a strange thing. But even with this understanding I still had a hole in my heart or soul, I still was puzzled by human behavior — why is everyone so obsessed with equality and egalitarianism? What is this nonsense about “natural rights”? It was plain as day to me that there are no natural rights, all rights ultimately derive from the point of a gun or at least the ability to manipulate the masses via propaganda and to think otherwise is madness and decadence, a frightful delusion. Why do people believe in something silly like “the Constitution” when it’s clear that, maybe other than the Second Amendment, it doesn’t exist, it’s just fig leaves to keep commoners pacified? Why do people fail to learn appropriate lessons from current events and recent history, and act like amnesia patients where nothing is ever learned (such as from the COVID scam)? Am I the insane one here, or is everyone else?

The aha moment came to me a few years ago - as a flash of light, more or less - when I read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, followed by a number of books by other authors on this subject.³ Essentially I came to understand society’s core values are based in Christian-derived egalitarianism because Paul of Tarsus inverted Roman values 2,000 years ago as a revenge strategy against Rome, which intensifies over time as a ratchet effect. Before that society had at its core warrior derived master morality values. This wasn’t as much of an intellectual realization as it was an emotional or spiritual realization; it filled some deep hole in my soul as to why things were the way they were. And I don’t mean it as an attack on Jesus or early Christianity; I think warrior and priestly energies should be in balance, there were important reasons why it conquered Hellenism (especially because it sucked being on the receiving end of the few Roman elites practicing master morality), and I wrote a post analyzing the strengths of Orthodox Christianity.

Hello there.

Somehow this realization spiritually filled me up, it crystallized the way I saw the world. I wasn’t expecting this to happen and it wasn’t nearly as much of an intellectual aha as it was an emotional and perhaps spiritual one. It spoke to a fundamental truth that was ultimately to me beyond words, based upon my own perspective and personal journey. It was akin to seeing truth in a flash of light. I don’t expect my realizations to have the same emotional impact on anyone else, really, as everyone has their own unique perspective and spiritual journey they are on. I know many people on their own paths that have conventional drives and passions from a young age without such an odd and convoluted journey. That is in some ways a blessing not to have the burden of such an unconventional outlook. But perhaps the decades I spent in this haze gave me a greater appreciation for this realization and for the effect it has had on me thereafter. What a bizarre, unexpected thing to experience…

Archimedes before his “Eureka!” moment

From this experience everything else in my worldview shifted to accommodate it. I have never felt something like it before or (so far) since. It led directly to my understanding of the Rothschild central bank scam. It led to me autistically typing out over the course of six months or a year the Neoliberal Feudalism Substack with over 1,000 underlying citations to it. And it then led to this short-form Substack. The words have flown out of me after being bottled up my whole life, waiting for its outlet. I write now both to relieve the burden of the endless stream of thoughts bubbling to the surface (at least at the moment; maybe it will desert me now or later) and to honor what turned to be an extremely surprising emotional and spiritual catharsis that I didn’t even consciously know I was looking for. In this sense it is a letting go of ego, a surrendering to the process of impulse and thought bubbling to the surface, to say “okay, I am going to follow this process where it leads me, to an extent outside of my conscious control, because it is interesting to me and it brings value and meaning to my life” while still understanding and trying to integrate normal responsibilities that keep one grounded to reality. After all, courage is not blindly chasing impulse, but, per Brett Anderson, the integration of thought and impulse into a synergistic whole, as also discussed here.

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The effect of complexification and spiritual epiphanies on one’s personality

Becoming wiser does not always result in external changes. The odd thing about spiritual or intellectual epiphanies is that, for the most part, you feel like the revelation should somehow make you ascend to something higher, that there should be concrete changes occurring in your life. Instead you just go quietly on about your life, doing the same things, making scrambled eggs, working your job.

Curiously, tracking changes via the Big 5 personality test may be a way to measure the effect of spiritual epiphanies. It is the best personality test available to the public, far better than the muddled and confusing Myers Briggs. The Big 5 measures the following five attributes:

• One’s openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious),

• One’s conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless),

• One’s extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved),

• One’s agreeableness (friendly/ compassionate vs. critical/rational) and

• One’s neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/ confident).

Because one’s personality and outlook generally doesn’t change much in life, it is expected that taking the Big 5 test at various points in life should yield relatively similar results. You can take the test here if you like.

Based on personal observation ideological dissidents score very low on agreeableness. They are extremely disagreeable, and how could they not be? If they were agreeable then they would simply accept society’s dictates. Ideological dissidents are also generally more introverted and with some greater degree of neuroticism compared to the average person, but the agreeableness ranking I’ve found to be the clearest indicator of dissidence.

Anyway, I had taken the test in 2019 and these were my results:

Open-Mindedness. High scorers tend to be original, creative, curious, complex; Low scorers tend to be conventional, down to earth, narrow interests, uncreative. You prefer traditional and familiar experiences. (Your percentile: 3%)

Conscientiousness. High scorers tend to be reliable, well-organized, self-disciplined, careful; Low scorers tend to be disorganized, undependable, negligent. You are very well-organized, and can be relied upon. (Your percentile: 83%)

Extraversion. High scorers tend to be sociable, friendly, fun loving, talkative; Low scorers tend to be introverted, reserved, inhibited, quiet. You probably enjoy spending quiet time alone. (Your percentile: 6%)

Agreeableness. High scorers tend to be good natured, sympathetic, forgiving, courteous; Low scorers tend to be critical, rude, harsh, callous. You find it easy to criticize others. (Your percentile: 9%)

Negative Emotionality. High scorers tend to be nervous, high-strung, insecure, worrying; Low scorers tend to be calm, relaxed, secure, hardy. You are a generally anxious person and tend to worry about things. (Your percentile: 98%)

Close minded, disagreeable, negative emotionality, very introverted but with high conscientiousness. In other words, the life of the party at dinner parties.

I took the same test very recently and was surprised by the results:

Open Mindedness. 63% (up from 3%).

Conscientiousness: 76% (compared to 83%).

Extraversion. 19% (compared to 6%).

Agreeableness. 12% (compared to 9%).

Negative emotionality. 99% (compared to 98%).

Most of the results were relatively unchanged, but my open mindedness went from 3% to 63%. That is an extreme change, indicating perhaps the effect my realization has had on my life. I now see every interaction in life as an opportunity to grow, to expand, to complexify my thought processes, versus before when I simply viewed everyone else as incomprehensible aliens with extremely strange and scary beliefs. And this has had a measurable impact on how I approach new situations and people. So perhaps there are benefits to be gleaned from following one’s inner voice and one’s passions even if those benefits are not felt monetarily; spiritual changes felt on a different plane.

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Conclusion

What drives and interests you? Life change us and we can’t always know ahead of time how or why we will be affected by events. Do what you can to listen to your inspiration and interests, which provides soul satisfaction and a sense of “letting go” or ego-death when you listen to it, while integrating those drives into a grounded sense that you still have to live in the real world and make a living in it. Not everyone can make a living from their passions, but one should still find an outlet or it will manifest as resentment and then curdle into ressentiment.

Lack of time is not an excuse. I know people who have a tremendous amount of work and things to do on their plate, and they are able to take on additional heavy work. What this does is crystallize the art of efficiency with one’s time and effort, versus I know people who have open and empty schedules and getting them to do the simplest thing is a major hassle. Note this great quote by

Librarian of Celaeno

from here:

“It is also important to bear in mind as well that Boccaccio, a writer of the highest caliber, had a day job.  Like the Gen-Xers to come, he sold out and went into working world, taking up the family mantle of civic responsibility.  He went on important missions for Florence and performed a number of government jobs, including welcoming Petrarch to the city, beginning a great and influential friendship.  But he was never fully free to pursue his art, a fact true of nearly every artist then and up to the present.  Consider that greats like Brunelleschi and Michelangelo were businessmen working on commissions; their time spent managing staff and studios must have far outweighed their time with brush and chisel.  Even profoundly prolific writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were employed full-time as professors and had all the demands of family life (weirdly in Lewis’s case) as well.  Let this be a lesson to those of us who would be artists if we had more time; we always have time to do the things that are important to us.  The habits of industry and discipline mean as much as imagination and creativity.”

As

The Inmate

at The Asylum writes, “Do you have something you want to say? Say it. Don’t worry about your qualifications - your experience. Your life experience is your qualification. Maybe, just maybe, the thing you want to say that you think will have no impact will have a huge impact. And if it doesn’t? So what? It might have an impact on one person. It might change a family member’s mind. You will never know until you try. Something else may come of it that you did not anticipate, that could never have happened without the writing of your book.”

With all that said, there are no guarantees in life other than death and taxes; this is not meant as a “kumbaya” call to “follow your passions at all cost”, but rather to integrate your deepest interests cohesively into regular living somehow.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you find this helpful in some way.

1. My most popular Substack post so far was about trying to live well below your means, “The era of empty, secular mass consumption is over”. The more practical a post is, perhaps, the more interesting people may find it.

2. In the West today, perhaps throughout the world, to make a living in the hopes of one day having and supporting a family one needs to look to see what edge they have and exploit it to the greatest extent they can. That is the only way to get ahead of the masses. For some this involves marrying rich. For some it involves emphasizing personal talents a person has, maybe they are geniuses at math or science or unusually outgoing and likeable. For some it is following in a family business, or having a friend with strong connections who can assist in securing a “good” job. For some it involves luckily stumbling into a unique niche that hasn’t yet been monetized or exploited by others, then perfecting that technique and monopolizing it or hiding the process from others. But generally speaking, everything today is devolving into “who you know” and not “what you know” as western civilization ossifies into neoliberal feudalism and a permanent India-equivalent unstated, amorphous caste structure. And everything is harder for the Loser clique (all regular internet posters are at least half Loser clique).

3. Some include the book “Dominion” by Tom Holland, who had a wonderful and succinct interview on this topic, and here is a relevant 8 minute clip of it:

Others include Europa Soberana, “Rome Against Judea” available here, Marcus Eli Ravage’s Commissary to the Gentiles, Nietzsche’s The Antichrist.