Here is kind of a very short biography of my spiritual and philosophical journey which has lead me to this forum, and the reason why I'm writing this, reaching out. The reason as I understand it is because I want to have a dialogue with people, see if anyone can give me any insight, if others have had similar experiences, and if people could point me in any directions in the form of books, tips, drugs, art, instructions, whatever. :) I have referred to myself as an atheist ever since I “grew up”, but have in the latest time begun to approach some sort of spirituality, which I now want to explore with others. There are some references in this text, but even if you have no idea what I'm referring to, you could probably give me input on other stuff if you feel like doing so. :) I'm sorry if my thoughts are hard to follow and for all the errors I've might done: if I don't post this now, I'll probably never will. I've been burnt out for a couple of years and I'm really really tired most of the time, so bear with me.
I've long been interested in magic. Well, I certainly wanted to believe in it very much as a kid, to much extent because of my mom being a total freak (if you're looking for someone combining belief in a christian god, aliens, ghosts, jewish conspiracies, and much more, look no further!) when it comes to magic. But not only magic practice, or rather not magic practice in itself, but just a lot of beliefs that have no necessary coherence. Combine this with a really fucked up way of raising a kid, with shame, guilt, lies, powerlessness and possessiveness as main ingredients and you get me, and one reason why my disappointment in lack of magic in this world has persisted for a very long time and indeed still lingers. It's emotionally very much connected to the failure of my mom to be a good parent, and of promises never fulfilled.
Definition
You may have noticed that I haven't defined magic yet. Well, it's kind of hard for me, but it's along the lines of transcending the rational, that which isn't proven by an underlying methodology which one can account for, repeat, and understand within the frame of reference which I have. As for spiritual, well, something along the lines of having a reverence for life, surroundings, things, in everyday life, and maybe also here in a non-scientific way. I've always wanted to get feelings of greatness, of wonder, of the sublime, and since I've been a rationalist, atheist, and even dabbled in satanism (laveys, the self-righteous, in my view kind of childish and protectionist), I've long felt that something has been lost to me. I've been thinking that this something is the child within me, the uncorrupted parts, the ones who have a wish for love. That they've atrophied along the way.
Existentialism
Certainly, I would like to practice magic to learn more about these lost parts of myself (haunting me in my dreams), but the need goes beyond that. The existentialist condition eats me from inside. How do I explain suffering? No, not explain, but accept—no, not accept, but make sense of? How do I give myself some time off, stop blaming myself for my own suffering, and how do I transform suffering into something meaningful when I perceive no gods, don't give a shit about the continuation of the human species (see no intrinsic value in life), and on top of that believe that a lot of the shit out there about "suffering ones way to wisdom" is just rationalizations, puritan bullshit, and a fine example of the absurd (in camus sense) tragedy of man and life? This even extends to my work; if I see not pleasure in doing what I want to do, then I might as well do the shit in order to save the good experiences for later, to have something to look forward and to have something to show for it along the way. (This is why I need to remind myself that the journey is more important than the destination from time to time).
Inspiration
Well, about suffering, I'm working on it. Perhaps in the future, suffering won't be necessary? This is where science and sci-fi comes into my life, and how I've used it. Sci-fi has introduced me to hope for future people, but not necessarily for myself , and a responsibility of not fucking up to much so that future generations can transcend the chains of man, become posthuman, transhuman, become cyborgs, clouds of energy, whatever, so that suffering can be minimized and so that the absurdity of desire as desire for something else than that which is now (in deleueze "positive", productive sense, instead of the freudian one), that never ends can just stop somehow. (I've never reconciled with the notion of just putting people in bliss-boxes of the kind as in the matrix though) The sense of greatness and wonder has also for me come often science, often, and not just because I move mainly in the realm of the logic, the rational, with ideas of political science and whatnot, but also through physics and quantum mechanics. It's sort of like magic, some of the things in those fields, and they are great, spans across galaxies, and makes me feel insignificant, yet somehow meaningful. A sense of belonging, with everything else, is at the the center of this and much of my need: to have the love my mother didn't give me (self-help popular psychology), to return to the primordial soup (dna, ancestry, shamanism), return to the womb (lacanian psychoanalysis), etc.
Free will
For example, I've been thinking about free will a lot in my time, troubling myself over the notion that I just can't accept free will because it just isn't there when one perceives the world as a mechanical system, thus one cannot find a logical consistent way of perceiving free will that corresponds to the free will which people so often attribute to themselves. This belief I think mirrors my own sense of being betlittled, not having a very large focus of control (social psychology), and my interest in sociological issues, my world-view of everything from the myth of the lonely genius being a construct to promote certain interests, to the fact that I think the boundaries between people are very small and people are very much affected by forces outside themselves, thus not necessarily so much in control as they would think.
Quantum
Well, free will; what happens if the theories of quantum mechanics which states that consciousness collapses things proves true? Double slit experiments, with observers not only being biased, but actually creating stuff along the way that it is observed. Or spooky entanglement, traveling faster than the speed of light. What if chaos is not only a measure of how much information there is, a term to denote the failure of scientists to enter a system and perceive what's there (and how to control it), but if chaos actually exists, and random things happen all the time, thus dislodging the universe from it's clockwork frame and freeing man from the constructs of determinism, leading to free will? These thoughts blow me away, and I've long been interested in philosophy of mind, study of artificial intelligence; once again, sci(fi)ence as a platform to discuss the human nature and condition. To a large degree though, I'm a cynic, and fall back to not so grand notions of humans not being anything special, the spiritual world just being atoms, and me not seeing the grandness in people and life which others seem to see and use to move on and aspire towards.
Imperfect science
My cynicism has not only been bad though, because it has opened up some very interesting paths. I'm cynical about my own rationality for example, and the rationality of others, which is why I have such a great interest in psychology. Perceiving the world through Norrestedts "User Illusion" for example, Gladwells "Blink", and Gilberts "Stumbling on Happiness". We think we are in control, but there is more to our bodies and brains than we think, and in the words of Robert Anton Wilson, “what the thinker thinks, the prover proves”. We believe ourselves to be this rational person, and we think that what we think emanates from within us, from our own capacity, while it seems that often our body has decided what we should do before we realize it (as in libets famous experiment), or that there is some other force within us that we aren't aware of, with people who are most cynical about their own knowing of these forces even sometimes are those who have most control over them (as is the case with commercials, where some studies indicate that people who believe themselves to be easily affected actually aren't). We think we know what we want, but experiment after experiment argues that this is not the case, and that the experience of others is a better measure to what we can expect to like and be happy from. Or what about the fact that much of our knowledge is silent, just perhaps as Schopenhauer had it, that intuition comes from logic, but that logic at some point just needs to be cut of to go ahead with the task at hand. Or consciousness, rather, should be cut of.
User illusion
We think that we need to focus, apply ourselves, when often letting go is a crucial way of doing stuff good, and of being happy, yet in conflict with control need, rationality, and the fact that we think that what we come up with is really ours. When I'm into something, it just might as well be god speaking through me, because I sure as hell don't think about what I'm writing just now. If I did, I'd lock myself out and there would just be a big dark, not able to move.
What magic for?
These ideas lead me to magic in the sense that I want to open up to my own irrationality, open up to the possibility of being something more than me, to live in symbiosis with it, and not just assume that I know everything about me, or that I am in control. To deal with these control issues that I have. Quote: To look at science as in some sense socially constructed offers a way in through the back door to religion as an epistemological partner in the construction/discovery of nature and culture. Religion, which has long been attacked and deconstructed as mythic delusion, can now claim some pragmatic parity with the scientific worldview that attacked it.
Emotional side
I have ignored my emotional sides for too long, or rather I've been in more or less constant anxiety for 13 years (I'm 23), cutting myself, taking pills, displacing thoughts, keeping busy, trying to get by, masturbating, developing addiction to video games, and more...I've been having a hard time imagining whatever I want to imagine, which was one of those obsessive thoughts I got as a ten year old. Everything I would try to imagine, I couldn't. I imagined I played tennis, and I couldn't get the ball over the net. The more I tried, the more I failed. I started to choke and imagined myself that I couldn't swallow my saliva, that when I started running, I couldn't stop, etc.
Eternity, bad mental health
I got interested in philosophy in third grade and got interested in eternity, for some reason. Eternity is hard to imagine now for me, but I actually tried to imagine the eternal then, and got really frightened, but also excited. I could connect somehow to this notion, and used it to freak out and feel a sense of... not belonging, but just, of being alive. This was why when as a kid when I went home from friends at night and vision was bad, and even though I imagined that there were really hard, thin, sharp ropes laid out everywhere outside, I would run and just run. I also started to imagine that something was running after me, and so I had to run, sort of. Kind of like the double bind of everything I felt was my growing up, that no matter what I did it would go wrong, as in the kind of absurd example of my mom thinking I shouldn't take the buss because it might crash and I might die (making my mom sad), and my grandmother (whom I had a lot of contact with) saying I shouldn't walk because I might get hit by a car!
Dreams horror
I was very interested in horror too as a kid, and stephen king especially, but then it got harder and harder and in periods I haven't watched horror at all because I just get more anxious. Then I developed fear of eternity and had dreams of it, really frightening ones. I also had other really scary nightmares, and some of them very so inspiring that I wanted to have them, that I felt not-real when I woke up and just wanted to go back. “Was I a human dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly...”, and such. A sort of nostalgia that I also have felt very strongly over my childhood for the last 6-7 years, and now perhaps in a wish to synthesize my moms emotional, acting out side with my dads, distant rational side, within me. To forgive all those demons, people bullying me, and find that person inside me that feels sorrow and not just anxiety.
Imagination
I think a lot of my problems stem, or are related to the fact that I have a hard time imagining stuff. And to the fact that I have no trouble imagining by default, which I do all the time, but it's just that I can't direct my imagination (which is why lucid dreaming attracts me). Sometimes I imagine something so strong that I can hear myself say something when I snap out of it, but this happens only when I fantasize about something awful, scary. I often have voices telling me that I'm not worth it, voices that even fool me sometimes to think they're positive ones, like for example when I go up the stairs and just want to cry because my body can't take it anymore, and I use a sort of anger towards something to make it. But when I make it to the top, it's just sort of... not a pat on the back, more like nothing, or a cynical comment, “yeah you fucking asshole, “good for you””. Like this drill sergeant working me up.
Be positive, doubt
I have a hard time invoking positive emotions, to get less anxious. Positive thinking has been hard for me, leading to more self-loathing, and me reading books on positive thinking as an industry, making me more cynical. Like really, how can I tell that people are honest about their feelings and their own happiness? Are people even capable of remembering correctly? And even if they are, a lot of people who talk about loving your neighbor, or just feeling sorry for those who haven't discovered the cure of positive thinking, or god, or whatever, are really very, very hateful people. Like everything about what they say and how they act is so damn... fuck, it makes me really sad and cynical. And I also wonder if I'm crazy because others don't see it.
Dark sides
I've been even thinking that maybe one has to be an asshole to be happy, something I thought about a lot during my high school years, where I imagined myself going on killing sprees on a daily basis, and developed (or strengthened) a real cynical way of looking at things by looking at how grown ups fucked up the world with politics and child-care and everything else. Like how do you get power? By being an asshole, and claiming that those who are worth happiness and a privileged position will crawl up from their mediocrity and become like those in power, leaving those who cannot manage in the dust. A hate for weakness, a fear of it, of it spreading, isolating those who are weak, distancing from them, making them unhuman, etc. This is at the heart of politics, to a large degree, and in highschool it was definitely what all of it seemed to me. Depressive realism, I understood my own clarity as.
Borderline
Coming back to being connected, with others, I've been thinking a lot about how others effect me, how strong my ego is, how my borderline tendencies work, how people really are animals with primal needs, for their infancy forever a part of them, and I've been thinking about how all this relates to self-hate, and how I think I punish myself because I have learned that this is the proper reaction against people “like me” (sexual deviants, weak people, people with different opinions, different needs, bad thoughts, bad bad bad). I read some Ayn Rand before, and still love Atlas Shrugged, for the sense of entitlement it gave me, a sense of being chosen, of strength. Things that to some degree are problematic and rhetorical, dangerous even, but still gave me strength to put up with the day. But I still despise Ayn Rand and the politics zie stands for and I believe that I was right-wing before in order to hate myself even more. In order to destroy the world because I hated it so much, which is what the effect of right wing politics is according to me.
Autonomy
The conflict of depressive realism still haunted me (do I have to be unhappy to see reason, and is everyone who really sees the truth and their own inability, their unreason/insignificance just destined to be unhappy?), and I have tried ways to think myself strong, or realize my potential, think positive, and find a logical way to become what I want to be. I have a little voice within me who tells me that to abandon a certain kind of logic is betrayal of oneself, and I've been struggling to reconcile the notion of people being social animals controlled very much by forces around them, and the philosophical notions of Der mann (Heidegger), bad faith/inauthenticity (Sartre), slave moral (Nietzsche). I've been trying to strengthen my sense of me, of will to power, not hiding behind polysemic words which are vague enough not to make it apparent what I really think or where I stand. I've been trying to see the world as under my control, and tried to convince myself that to give up belief of growth, change and capacity, is just a weak act of self-loathing, regress to an immature state of being, and something essentially for psychic vampires and false, cowardly people.
Cynic
Contrasted to this are the notions of superiority I've felt when thinking that I'm too smart to be happy, and that I'm really just one of those people who actually knows how much of an asshole I am, and since I'm not able to convince myself of my greatness, I might as well find my superiority in the fact that others fool themselves that they're better than average (which most people think in like everything, the figures are astonishing, and every experiment that I've seen has confirmed this) and by fooling themselves this, they reap the fruits by getting jobs where they get a lot of money, a lot of chicks, all the love and respect, yet destroy the rain forests and leave me here not just without any of those above, but contempt and a political agenda where they try to push me down, out on the streets, even more.
One could get angry for less, of course. :)
Dualities
Mirroring these dualities which I've been walking across, trying to reconcile, are my thoughts on rationality and emotions. I don't trust my rational capacities, because there is something behind them that I have no clue over, yet I cannot believe intuition, because it leads me to self-destructive actions and to just keep up the behaviors that I've been doing that lead to self-hate. Therapy for me has been much about making aware, taking up to the surface, that which is below, just beyond, and for this I've had to (?) use rationality. All of this is mom and dad, all over again, trying to be reconciled. My own experience of something as a child in conflict with with the reality of the grown ups, imprinting me, leading to self-doubt on my part. Oh, it doesn't hurt? Oh, ok... After a while, you start to believe WHATEVER your parents tell you, if they're good enough brainwashers, and the whole institution of family is kind of that (not just in a negative sense).
Downside of rationalism
Even though science (and “psuedoscience” like psychology) has helped me a lot then, I cannot escape the fact that I come back to just feeling kind of unsatisfied,of atomising stuff so much, reducing it to so small components that it in the end makes no sense, in the sense that it doesn't feel meaningful. Oh, is that all there is? There's too little magic, simply put. More awareness, more knowledge, seems to have made me more cynical, but also lost more touch with my self/the spiritual. I say it again: the rational world is boring. Well, not exclusively so, and certainly quantum mechanics, astronomy, dna, evolution, and many many oher things are mind-blowing and amazing. Yet, somehow, there is this need for fantasy, beyond, within me. The search for cool things. Well, yes, really the word I'm looking for is cool. I'm not sure how immature this is considered, or if it is indeed immature, but I think we all need something to feel empowered by, something that we can find focus and ourselves in, and “coolness” is one way of putting it for me. Something evocative, provoking, etheral, eternal, I don't know, ancestral, awesome. Like the notion of tarot cards for example, or the aesthetics of wicca, or something else.
Some theories
Enter baudrillard, who maybe can give me an explanation. A quote: Baudrillard asserts that Dick's novel depicts a gigantic "hologram in three dimensions, in which fiction will never again be a mirror held toward the future, but a desperate hallucination of the past" and that in its historical moment this type of science fiction is produced by societies that have lost the pioneering imagination, that have spanned their territory from ocean to ocean, because "when the map covers the whole territory, something like the principle of reality disappears" He argues that human excursions into space, which effectively project earthly habitats into the transcendence of outer space, signal the "the end of metaphysics, the end of the phantasm, the end of science fiction" and the beginning of the era of hyperreality.
So maybe I want the hallucination of the past, the ancestry, the eternal god, the wholeness, as a side effect of my map covering so much, just self-references spearing everything, no fantasy left, the rational mind encompassing all so that everything must be proven or disbelieved, and nothing beyond that, and since we need the fantasy, that beyond, that productive desire, shit just hits the fan... Although this hyperreality could mean the end of reality as “veil of maya” of firmed reality and perception of being singular and not all-encompassing too... even if much of my thoughts concerning becoming my own are about being separate, because only then can one truly make contact with other, without fear of being under their boot. It's sort of like transactional analysis, where one has to give grown up messages to a grown up receiver for communication to work. Love oneself to love others, that sort of thing. From Haraways Cyborg Manifesto:
Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics --rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selflhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginaw. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life.
Entropy
But is there a turning back from knowledge? It's more a question of perception I guess, knowledge as not something static, which incidentally reminds me of how those who make magic/spiritual journeys in cultural artifacts often are asked if they are prepared for that journey, because there is not turning back... and so magic maybe for me is what changes the perception of science, and eternal fuckery and dread. Like for example entropy, take that as an example. Everything is going to hell, basically, the heat death of the whole universe, according to the laws of thermodynamics. This is something which is kind of cool AND depressing, something I think I could work into a spiritual practice because it is something I both fear and admire and cannot keep away from. It is the meaning of life, people being the opposite of entropy, the forces combating chaos, the mythological chaos. Maybe we're not just dumb animals, but dumb gods...
Time
Maybe there's a eternal recurrence in the universe, an infinite number of universes with infinite amounts of time, thus making me come back and back and back... well, me and everyone else, of course. This too is kind of frightening... I think eternity is key for me to spirituality. Like Prot says in K-Pax, basically paraphrasing Nietzsches conception of the eternal recurrence, said: I wanna tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, that we K-PAXians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.
Another quote: According to Eliade, this yearning to remain in the mythical age causes a "terror of history". Traditional man desires to escape the linear march of events [the forces of entropy being something that made the difference in the newtonian conception of time, introducing the time of arrow and thus explaining why time is not the same backwards and forwards], empty of any inherent value or sacrality. In Chapter 4 of The Myth of the Eternal Return (entitled "The Terror of History") and in the appendix to Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, Eliade suggests that the abandonment of mythical thought and the full acceptance of linear, historical time, with its "terror", is one of the reasons for modern man's anxieties. Traditional societies escape this anxiety to an extent, as they refuse to completely acknowledge historical time.
From http://www.occultcorpus.com/forum/showthread.php?13999-Story-Of-My-Coming-And-Of-Whence-To-Go-From-Here&goto=newpost
