Tag Archives: Manifestation

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology

Stuff You Don’t HAVE To Believe: Reincarnation

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We talked about Karma and manifestation. Now let’s tackle reincarnation. Unlike manifestation, which is based on pure New Thought superstion and is indefensible from all standpoints, logical, philosophical, moral and practical, reincarnation does have a noble tradition behind it. Still, the magical inheritance of Victorian occultism has made it almost so as if reincarnation is another one of those compulsory beliefs that come with the Spiritual Outsider starter pack.

Reincarnation reentered Western occultism largely through the many misunterstandings of Eastern doctrines perpetuated by the Theosophists. Yet, contrary to what some may think, reincarnation is not an exclusively Eastern belief, and it is found in many parts of the world, including in pre-Christian (and sometimes even Christian) Europe. In fact, the idea of reincarnation is probably suggested to the mind by the observation of the cycles of nature, so it is, in a way, a somewhat valid inference, at least from an analogical standpoint.

But analogical inferences do not reality make. If that were the case, you could slap four wheels on your grandma and call her a Ferrari. Regardless of how reincarnation may be suggested to the mind of ancient civilizations, let us ask ourselves why it is the go-to belief of many self-styled independent thinkers.

I would submit that, once the average Westerner abandons the idea of Heaven and Hell as expoused by our main religions in order to approach the occult or magical worldview, they find themselves wanting for another destination for their great hereafter, so they grope around for the first purple-covered book in the local esoteric library, where they invariably find reelaborations of reelaborations of reelaborations of the same Victorian metaphysical dogmas, they mistake them for something new, refreshing and forward-looking that goes well with their new crystals and adopt it.

I don’t want to crap on reincarnation, because, as I will shortly discuss, I do believe in some version of it. What I want to drive across is that independent thinking starts with challenging dogmas, both the mainstream and the counter-mainstream ones.1 It is perfectly legitimate to examine, question and argue and to reach other conclusions, just as it is legitimate to adopt the belief in reincarnation, or some variant of it.

As for me, I would believe in reincarnation if I believed in individual souls. To me there is only one universal soul which is present as a whole within each part of existence. That soul definitely reincarnates. I may even go further and argue that, since this universal soul reincarnates continuously through endless amouts of beings, at some point some of the beings that are born are bound to have some semblance of continuity with some beings that have died before, and since the individual being who dies loses its ability to distinguish time t1 from time t2, from the standpoint of its individual perception its death and its rebirth are contiguous. Needless to say, there is nothing karmic or retributive about this view of reincarnation.

These are my two cents, very succinctly explained. Feel free to take them, leave them or add them to your collection of two cents.

MQS

  1. Not to mention the ability to know when and how to question and when how not to. ↩︎
Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

Stuff You Don’t HAVE to Believe: Karma

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I talked about manifestation, now let’s tackle karma. This is one of those things that grind my gears about the spiritual community, largely because it unveils how derivative, unoriginal and moralistic it often is.

To understand this we need to remind ourselves of one of Nietzsche’s criticisms of his philosophical predecessors, who, according to him, were trying to safeguard religious morality even after doing away (overtly or covertly) with the concept of God.

This exact same thing happened to the spiritual community, which often reacts allergically to Christianity, yet seeks to safeguard the moralistic notion of hell (“if you do X you will be metaphysically punished”) by transfering its role to a vaguely defined “universe” whose task is, somehow, to uphold the believer’s social, political and spiritual views and punishing those who contravene them by causing bad things to happen to them.

Let us grant that this is somewhat of a misunderstanding of the original concept of karma found in some Eastern philosophies, even though it is not THAT much of a misunderstanding. The fact remains that, as used by most Western “alternative” thinkers (who somehow always end up believing the exact same crap), karma is just a lazy excuse for maintaining the holier-than-thou attitude they accuse traditional religion of: hey, enough with the badly understood Christian superstition! Time for the badly understood Oriental superstition!

Except that at least traditional religion has something grandiose and awe-inspiring about it (some passages from the Bible could be turned into a cool metal opera). The alternative spirituality of many girlypops has a way of pettifying everything: wow you left your girlfriend via message? That’s bad karma! What? You acted like a douche your whole life and suffered no consequences for it? That’s for another life then! If this is not the epitome of bitchy passive aggression I don’t know what is.

As many silly beliefs, this, too, has its glimmer of truth hidden in it. The Platonic myth of the soul, according to which our soul chooses what to incarnate as, offers much food for thought and meditation on the nature of our choices and how we must then live with the traces that those choices invite into our soul. There is no need to add metaphysical burdens on top of it.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism, Spirituality and Psychology, Uncategorized

Stuff You Don’t HAVE to Believe: Manifestation

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When someone decides that conventional spirituality just doesn’t cut it and takes the logical next step, namely they start being told what to think by the Mind Body Spirit section of their local library (or its social media equivalent), they are often presented with a starter pack of beliefs and practices: lighting candles, burning sage, rubbing crystals, gazing mystically at their daily tarot card, manifesting. 

These are often handed out as some kind of miraculous tool for breaking free of the matrix (while in fact they are so commonplace that you scarcely find anyone in the corporate world who doesn’t practice them. You know you’ve become stagnant when corporations agree with you).

The concept of manifestation is especially popular, possibly because several popular aspirations find some type of answer in it: 1) the wish for a solution to one’s problems that is just one thought away; 2) the wish to be seen as doing something magical while not actually doing anything; 3) the wish to gain some sense of control over one’s life. Most of all, manifestation is often presented as the great inner secret™ practiced by successful people and taught by all great religions and philosophies.

In reality, through thousands of years of recorded magical practice there is no mention, explicit, implicit or implied, of the principle of manifestation as we understand it today, unless we stretch and misinterpret everything we read.

I have several objections to manifestation, some logical, some philosophical, some magical. I also think that, like many ideas I consider wrong, it does capture a fragment of truth, even though it twists it until it’s unrecognizable. Maybe I’ll explore all this in the future. But that’s not the point here.

I’m not in the business of telling people what to think. But always remember that there is a universe of teachings, practices and beliefs outside of the 1960s repackaging of Victorian esoteric fads that animates the current spiritual-but-not-religious community, and it’s fine to question, explore, expand, revise. Just because a belief is popular doesn’t imply you HAVE to accept it. If that were the case, you’d be served much better by conventional religion.

MQS

Occultism and Esoterism

On The Stupidity of TikTok Witches

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I am an ecumenical troll: I will pour salt wherever I can regardless of political, religious, ethnic and gender affiliation, IF what I see is a sheer display of stupidity. This is one of those cases.

As most people will know by now, a certain oddly-colored politician has been reelected into office. Amongst the predictable TikTok meltdowns that were caused by the event, one peculiar trend caught my eye: that of witches sending him curses, either to make him croak or, and I quote, “having him willingly resign from the office so that Harris can take his place.”

Let us pretend for a second that this is how politics works (if it did, most politicians would dread winning an election more than losing it). What never ceases to amaze me is the complete detachment from reality that informs the witchcore scene.

Magic used to be the logical next step on the path to wisdom after mastering the worldly sciences. Now it’s a hobby for people with funny hair who need to unlearn anything resembling critical thinking in order to be able to tell themselves in front of a mirror that they are “witches”.

In large part this is due to the process of specialization and separation of knowledge that occurred after the scientific revolution, which virtually left no space for magic in the curriculum of the wise. This has led to two opposite tendencies developing: the “science confirms our eternal truths” tendency and the irrationalist tendency.

The “science confirms our eternal truths” strategy is typical of many XIX and XX century occultists. It makes no sense. Science is an open and ever-evolving body of theoretical and practical understanding which would survive even if it threw its most well-established theories overboard. If “scientific theory X is actually a reformulation of our eternal occult wisdom”, what does it say about that wisdom when, in 500 years, that theory is disproven and science moves on to the next one?

The scientific path is generally characterized by a flattening of magic onto (pseudo)scientific rationality. The irrationalist path, on the other hand, is characterized by the abandonment of all logic and understanding. It is typical of most milquetoast magical practitioners nowadays. This is the path that leads people to say with a straight face that you can manifest the result of an election and you can substitute sage with a piece of paper with “sage” written on it.1

This kind of irrationalist magic is the variety practiced by the TikTok witches sending curses to Trump. Rest assured that curses do exist. They mostly require some kind of contact with the victim, and even then almost no one can pull them off.

Even from the point of view of sending influences at a distance, Trump is as loved by those who voted for him as he is hated by those who didn’t: from a purely numerical standpoint, these influences cancel each other out, with something left over in his favor.

Finally, whether one likes it or not, the movement he leads has its own well-established etheric egregoric presence, which was created not just internally by those who support him, but also just as much externally by those who loathe him. A simple study of the life of Donald Trump, and even of the last months, shows that it would be very hard–not impossible, but hard–to hurt him, either physically or esoterically. Do you seriously think you lighting a candle and regurgitating formulas from a grimoir you bought on Etsy is going to change the course of humanity?

MQS

  1. Substitutions CAN be operated in magic, but they are an art in an of itself, and require understanding ↩︎