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The Occult & Meaning
I’ve been working a lot with this idea about the occult/New Age as a sort of “meaning on overdrive” type of thing. Like what if rather than being a counter-cultural pursuit, it’s actually culture taken to the max? Meaning colonizing everything.
A reader named Rob left a really great response to this idea:
The practice of finding meaning in everything is a way of training your mind to discover the malleability of meaning, of the cultural aspects of “stories” about life, in order to break through the preconceptions you’re trained and inculcated with from birth.
And then you find, a’ la Doug Rushkoff, that what this does is makes the re-defining of the story, for yourself, as THE major occultic act.
Making your own story, changing the story, IS magic.
Excellent insight and well phrased at that. Although it does draw me back into this argument about the inherent meaninglessness of things, if you can just go around and infect everything with meaning. But Rob had a great elixir for that type of thinking as well. It comes from Joss Whedon:
“If nothing we do matters then the ONLY thing that matters is what we do.”
You know… that just might be crazy enough to work!
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July 4th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
Glad you found some of my ramblings useful… the ideas of projecting meaning onto everything in order to break through and realize the malleable nature of meaning, I got, I think, from some of Wilson’s writings about Crowley. The stuff about “stories” and changing the story and creating your own story I got from Douglas Rushkoff’s Nothing Sacred and Club Zero G. The whole search for meaning stuff comes from a wealth of existentialist stuff…
Oh, and the full quote, since you dug it, from Joss Whedon/Angel is:
“Angel: Well, I guess I kinda — worked it out. If there is no great glorious end to all this, if — nothing we do matters, — then all that matters is what we do. ’cause that’s all there is. What we do, now, today. — I fought for so long. For redemption, for a reward — finally just to beat the other guy, but… I never got it.
Angel: All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because — I don’t think people should suffer, as they do. Because, if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness — is the greatest thing in the world.
Kate: Yikes. It sounds like you had an epiphany.
Angel: I keep saying that. But nobody’s listening.”