It's Called "Woo" Because It's Fun

Have you ever wanted to explore woo? Like tarot cards, astral projection, magic spells. You know. Spooky shit. Perhaps even some spicy woo, completely indefensible and clearly-not-possible woo, like astrology, telepathy, telekinesis.

Maybe there's something to it. For some reason, despite everyone's best efforts, these weird woo people refuse to go away. And they never seem to shut up about it.

Of course, I'm one of those woo people. I used to be a not-woo person. I was very concerned with "truth" and reasonable, rational, and clear thinking. Spent a lot of time vacillating between the fact that truth was scientifically locked down by experts versed in the holy art of statistics and the simultaneous implication that all of it meant nothing and there was no purpose except the purpose I solely alone made in a world focused around cynical hustling for "fuck you" money or "just please let me live a fulfilling life" money against the backdrop of ever increasing societal decay.

I used to not have much fun.

But it's called woo because it is fun.

People don't really sell woo well. Corporations do a great job of it, because that's their job. They hawk fraudulent "soul readings" to vulnerable and fearful people, monthly subscriptions for lucky numbers and quotes pulled straight from The Secret, and paragraphs they call "horoscopes" which could apply to any person on any day of any year.

But the real practitioners mostly mind their own business, dabbling in the esoteric, the occult, the subtle, the fundamentally hidden. In the depths of the obscure arts lie entire worlds of experience that most people never touch in their whole lives. There lies a dragon of unending length and infinite mass, an ouroboros of self-discovery and rich multiplicity. You can learn to feel new sensations and remember those long-forgotten. These are pathways which enable the reclamation of the heart and soul, the reconnection with the deep awareness that there's something suspicious going on here.

And besides all that, it's just fun. There's an entire world, an aesthetic to be explored, and it's not just woo-woo (derogatory) love-and-light ungrounded fluffy starseed bullshit with pink and indigo rainbows and good vibes only please. The themes of the vast umbrella of woo (complimentary) cover ancient myth, star lore, psychology, legacy, purpose, family, fate and fortune, and basically every inch of lived life and expression, and have a vibe to match.

These aren't just cute stories created by primitive peoples, either. These are stories about us. Our world and our lives. The tale of Cronos eating his son could very well be an inexplicable ancient understanding of how Saturn's rings are formed of a destroyed moon. For some reason, somehow, the ancient Egyptians seemed to have been able to measure the earth and build proportional, to-scale pyramids. Venus' recurring morning star and evening star cycle is reflected in myth as the scorned lover who destroys her foes in a terrible fury, and then mourns the destruction she has wrought and tries to mend her ways. Man, been there.

Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya

But these stories don't just stay in the past. History never repeats but it often rhymes. They are eternal recurrences, and modern practitioners and explorers import ancient modes of thinking and being into very contemporary contexts, like shitposting about the Moon on Twitter or creating new and incredibly irreverent yet effective forms of magic like "chaos" magic which pick and choose from modern mythical figures such as Spiderman and invoke them in a magical circle, to hilariously effective and tangible results. There's mass-distribution of magical symbols as technomancy, astrologically-powered machine learning stock trading applications, and plenty of bizarre and out there weird shit like the exhaustively documented (and recorded) tapes of the mediums who channeled the "social memory complex from the planet Venus", Ra, in The Law of One. There's a little something for everyone.

And if that's not your speed, you can ignore all of it. There's nothing stopping you from just doing your own thing and ignoring everyone who seems silly and wrong or scary and weird until you're comfortable, or staying right where you are.

Here's the thing, though.

I imagine there actually are plenty of things stopping you, as there were for me. The biggest thing is that if you grew up in a largely Westernized, secular materialist culture, there are massive mental blocks which prevent us from engaging with these topics. It's ironic that our preconceptions about how things are supposed to work prevent us from trying anything that might prove otherwise--even if it might make our lives more interesting, exciting, or effective. In other words, limiting beliefs. Luckily, all that's required is the willingness to say, "Show me something interesting."

However, there are powerful social forces and pressures that do prevent us from saying that, even in the complete secret isolation of our own homes. How many times have I sat there in my room, feeling stupid for even contemplating thinking about potentially perhaps maybe possibly trying a magic spell or read a book at astrology? A lot of our success in modern society is based on being intelligent, rational, efficient, analytical, and "objective". At first blush, incense and cards with pretty pictures on them can seem very... not that.

Indeed, if you accumulated a friend group or even established a reputation for being that type of person, there is a whole lot of pressure to stay that way. There's that idea that you're strongly influenced by your 5 closest friends. But you're also influenced by your broad friend group, the larger community, the entire culture you live in, and the national countrythink. Many rational thinkers, presented with the unthinkable horror of exploring ideas that were common a mere 300 years ago, tend to start foaming at the mouth and fear they'll lose you to a slippery slope of irrational madness.

I used to think this was silly, as if every single person in the world is actually a gullible idiot on the precipice of a slippery slide into darkness if not for the guiding light of Reason. It's actually a very reasonable, measured reaction in response to the subconscious awareness that most people are disconnected from every form of sense-making that doesn't involve forcing gray matter to contort itself over abstract figures and statistical averages. Indeed, without the guardrails of rational thinking, that Reason, most of us are lost--because we were told that other ways of being are Bad and Wrong and the skills we had for navigating the world in those ways atrophied, long forgotten.

Does this make sense, though? Does it make sense to condemn the innate parts of being human as simply irrational, useless, something to be fought and guarded against? Does that not slowly create a cavernous itch within the self of something that was long forgotten? Despite our best efforts, do we not yearn for more than facts and figures and the endless jogging on a Sisyphean hedonistic treadmill? The heart is an inconvenient thing which defies rational wrangling and optimized guardrails. May as well humor it.

Besides, there are ways to orient yourself. These are old languages relearned, not to override but to balance the rational mind. There are plenty of clueless, credulous, and genuinely deluded folks using esoteric ways of living to exacerbate anxieties, avoid confronting personal problems, or shift blame for their personal failings to the cosmos or the spiritually “inferior”. But these tools are inherently neutral, like electricity which can be used to power civilization or execute people. Instead, what we should strive for is the balance and harmonization of all things within ourselves: sensitive intuition, hard-earned wisdom, penetrating insight, powerful imagination, incisive thinking, and deep love. These parts should all work together, guided by the inner and inexplicable resonance which persists underneath the endless layers of stuff we accrue.

The place we generally start is with the body. Do you trust it? Are you aware of its signals? Do you know how to take your phenomenology seriously and move your finger? Ironically, putting our minds before our bodies pushes us to a default where our mental preconceptions preempt our direct experience. We ignore the reality before us, because it couldn't possibly be true. We know! We were told so. The rules have been clearly outlined and drawing outside of the lines or using the wrong colors is not allowed. Why are we so stuck in our heads, though? Could it be that being detached from our bodies is an essential condition of being a productive cog in a capitalist structure where only the ruthless survive, riding hockey stick analytics as the measure of success? Might almost all of our current society be pathologically focused on our intentionally failing to notice ourselves? Just some little things I like to think about before I fall asleep.

The fundamental issue is that these are subtle and esoteric arts. These ways of experiencing and interrogating reality depend (almost) wholly upon our mental and emotional orientation to them, so the moment we dismiss it, we pinch off any further experience. The placebo effect, confirmation bias, and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon are actually the bottom rungs of genuine mystical/magical experience which transcends the boundaries of that which is considered "possible". The things to pay attention to are the chances of such an unusual thing happening, the timing, and the responsiveness. I created something called The Rubik's Cube Test which you can spend a minute or two on to test it for yourself. From there, the sky's the limit.

Further confounding is the fact that the number one--and sometimes only--input into most of these practices is intent. Thus, if your orientation toward the experience is "this isn't going to work" or "I sure hope this doesn't work because that would be very inconvenient for me in the peer group I have chosen", chances are that you won't get very good results. Did you hear the one about the experiment where a psi-believer and a psi-skeptic used the exact same procedure to stare at study participants and detect whether they could "sense" the stares, and the believer got an effect and the skeptic didn't? It's not a joke but rather an actual 1997 study called "Experimenter effects and the remote detection of staring", though frankly, it is very funny.

I'll tell you some things I wish I had known when I first started exploring these topics.

First of all, is it's not Harry Potter. You can't say some incantations, wave a stick, or wish on a star and magically get what you want. Life in the physical is the tangible and material world and more often than not, magic is used as a tool for navigating this world, delivering connections and insight, and helping you accomplish things. Still, it'll do so in ways that defy probability: bringing you exactly the right person or idea at the right time, impelling critical revelations in your self-understanding, or opening opportunities where the road seemed dark and closed off.

But I've also seen, done, and experienced things which are supposed to be impossible. With hours of practice you can accomplish telekinesis. With months of practice you can develop the ability to intuit what people are feeling and thinking. With years of practice you can learn to predict the outline of someone's life from an astrological chart. I have spoken to animals, used magic to have incredible luck at poker tables, helped pull trauma from body parts with intuitive communication, had altars devoted to deities knocked over out of nowhere as a show of telekinetic will, and told people things about themselves they hadn't shared with anyone. It has taken years to develop the confidence and intuition and external verification to say, "Yes, this is happening," and even still, I tussle with the implications. I check myself frequently. It's part of the process. I spent a vast amount of time learning to talk to spirits of various kinds, which is almost entirely about self-awareness and discernment. This isn't a game: it's a skill.

The second is "As Above, So Below" and "So Below, As Above". This means that there is a parallel mirroring nature between the unseen and the seen, the material and the immaterial. An easy way into all this spooky shit, for instance, is to consider that for every metaphysical impossibility there is a concretely explainable possibility that exists in the observable physical world. These are less causations than correlations, confluences, or synchronicities. After all, things which were previously considered to be "magical" were found to have physical corollaries such as thunder, eclipses, magnetism, and more. There is no problem with this: we use magical thinking intentionally, not so much an epistemic statement about the world as a strategy for interfacing with it. Still, this idea scales well. If there are many different cultures and modes of organization and conflict, this must also be the case in the "spiritual realm" (whatever that means exactly). If physical life requires discernment and careful thought and consideration, our interaction with spiritual life must require that, too. There may (or may not be) things which move beneath or beyond the physical realm in higher dimensions which leads to inexplicable, seemingly acausal yet synchronistic effects we can experience.

The third is mystery. The deeper into this you go, the weirder and more inexplicable it gets. Many experiences literally transcend or obviate language in their nature. After a certain point of undeniably real inexplicable absurdity, you give up trying to come up with "rational explanations" for things, and go with the flow. Part of the beauty of all of the woo-sploration is that there are certain things which defy time, physics, and all sense. There are experiences which take you beyond everything that is known, which you can only gesture at with obscure occult shorthand which will have the uninitiated scratching their heads or scoffing at, because they simply have no reference frame whatsoever. But it's out there. For many, the mystery is the point.

Fourth and finally: why are you doing this? Do you know? Can you tell? Are you seeking power? Are you seeking a way to escape your suffering? Are you trying to fill a void? There is no wrong answer to this question, but knowing yourself will give you grounding. I started exploring because I thought that I could make myself more effective at life. I was right, but it confronted me with the realization that the life I was living was not the life I was satisfied with. It turned out that "effective" meant "completely different". These practices and explorations can make the life you live now untenable. That is one warning I will give you: there do indeed be dragons in these lairs. It is especially important to understand the risks of common traps such as spiritual materialism.

So, if you would like to explore, I recommend beginning with divination. Tarot cards are a great place to start. I like the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, but use whatever calls to you. You don't need to wait for someone to gift you a deck. Draw a card every morning, and then take notes of how your day went. Learn the meanings from the book or a website and compare them to your daily experience. Do this for a year. Preferably more. If you really want to fall down the rabbit hole, pick up some astrology books. I have a few recommendations here. You can also find more at my website, sadalsvvd.space.

If you do this and bring your whole and present self to it, you will see. If you suspend both belief and disbelief, doubt and faith, the aliveness of reality will reveal itself to you. You will ring a bell you cannot unring.

Have fun!