Ideas & Essays · August 2026
Ryan Holiday had just read back the things Pressfield says he believes, prayers to the muses, reincarnation, the daimon, and asked what all of it actually means to him. Pressfield declines to soften any of it into metaphor and describes the arrangement literally, as a place above us that writers reach into. In the same breath he says part of him stays skeptical, because he lives in a material body.
Transcript
mean, nobody, right? Yeah. And, you know, such a great contribution, you know, to have a mind like his, you know, that's going to really commit. Yeah. God bless him.
Because I mean, you believe, like, you, you say a prayer to the muses, you believe in reincarnation. You, you believe in the Daimon, like the voice that talks to you. What does all that mean to you? Like, that's clearly an important part of your both your sort of practice as a person, but also your creative practice.
I ask myself, we all ask ourselves, how does the world work? Yeah. You know, and like you say, our dumbed-down world says, oh, we're only this body, da-da-da-da. But I absolutely believe that there are at least another dimension directly above us where the muse lives, you know, angels, whatever. And that we as writers, and I'm really interested to hear what you say about that. That's what we kind of access. That's what we channel. Yeah. That's where the books come from, or movies or everything like that. And, but a part of me, of course, is really skeptical. I'm, you know, I'm born here. I'm a live a material body. So I really try to reinforce within myself the reality that there are other forces and other entities out there that are on our side and are aiding us. And it's our job to connect to them, to open ourselves up to them. And so if that's the sublime, I don't know what you call it. It's the divine anyway.
There's something beyond us that we don't control and can't fully conceive and certainly can't comprehend. I'll concede to all that. You know, there's something. I mean, just what you, one of the, one of the ways you're in touch with that as an artist or a creative or anyone that makes something is that sense of like, where did that come from?
Yeah. You know
what I mean? I mean,