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

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... See more

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 ... See more

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" w... See more

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-sploratio... See more

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 ... See more

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 b... See more

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 pre conceptions pre empt our direct experience. We ignore the reality before us, because it c... See more