Divine Implications - Who Cares About the Universe?

My journey from curious teenager to skeptical adult to practicing astrologer to answer the fundamental questions: what is reality, and what do we do with it?

This is the inaugural post of Divine Implications, my new podcast where I’ll talk about the nature of reality and what all of it implies. You can read the essay form below, or listen to it on YouTube or your favorite podcasting platforms.

---

When I was a teenager, I had a big problem. I was trying to figure out how I should live my life. Sure, I knew the difference between right and wrong, but how much did it matter? I was watching the world outside turn and burn after the naive glow of the American 90s. I wondered how it was that bad people seemed to run the world, causing harm and destruction in their avarice and hunger for power. Outside of my agnostic parents' teachings to be a good person, my only reference point for moral meaning was the cultural milieu of Christianity which seeped around the edges of my awareness. Yet it seemed like the moral balance of the world didn't act very quickly if at all, and heaven and hell both seemed unlikely as well as impractical.

So I was stuck with my problem: was there any particular point to being any particular way, or was it all random? A crapshoot? Are we truly completely alone in the universe, spiraling through space on a hunk of rock that just happened to grow sentient life through a miraculous (yet completely meaningless) coincidence? Or is there something deeper going on? Did our choices matter, or was it just about survival and success at all costs, as the outside world seemed to suggest? I decided that to know how to live my life, I had to understand what reality was made of. Also, I should probably figure out whether hell is actually real, just in case.

I had a strong interest in the idea of psychic abilities. I had a weird friend in high school who was into psionics (perhaps exactly to be confused with the American science fiction psionics of the 50s and 60s). He had learned about it from PsiPog, a small website of mostly kids attempting to develop psychic powers like telekinesis or making "constructs" out of psi, a proposed mental energy that could be accumulated outside of the body. Psi sounded more scientific than "chi" or "prana", but besides that, it was mostly a bunch of kids making stuff up in between real energy work phenomena. Still, I tried it. I remembered how making "psi balls" would make the insides of my palms tingle like nothing I'd felt before, and how dark and splotchy my hands would get with blood rushing to them at the same time. One time, I put it somewhere with my mind and had a classmate stick his hand through it; he recoiled, and said it felt warm.

I didn't have the language or sophistication to comprehend what I was experiencing or what it implied about the world or reality. This led me down a haphazard path on the internet reading secret society PDFs and acquiring a very narrow view into the world of the esoteric and occult. I almost achieved an out of body experience but backed away out of fear after the visceral experience of feeling my entire consciousness shake violently while my physical body rested peacefully. Up until then, I had never really seriously considered the subjects of my fascination real in any way. My parents weren't particularly religious, and my presumption of the world was strictly materialist. The weird stuff was fictional, a flirtation with impossibility, almost daring myself to believe it could be possible.

I tried telekinesis. You use a "psi-wheel"--a piece of tinfoil folded so it can spin around a nail. A/C off and holding my breath as tightly as possible, I encouraged myself to believe that I saw it twitching, that my experience and its material were one. It twitched. Then it began to turn, ever so slowly, but continuously--then stopping, and turning back the other way. Erratically, seemingly in response to my influence. I had no explanations. I showed my mom, I showed my friends. We all agreed: that wasn't wind or anything else. I learned to read tarot and did readings for my friends and family that were eerily accurate, and doing so gave me headaches and left me feeling drained, which eventually stopped occurring as I practiced more. I read quantum physics books making haphazard connections to spiritual notions, Deepak Chopra, even The Secret. I tried manifestation, and it seemed to work with miraculous timing: I spent all of a few minutes imagining having a guitar and learning to play it. The very next day, my mom came home with a perfectly serviceable guitar she had picked up at a garage sale. I spent time thinking about Rubik's cubes--turning them over in my hands, solving them--and began to see Rubik's cubes everywhere. Of course, my mom soon bought me one without my asking, because a mom is the easiest route for the universe to manifest the wishes of a 16 year old.

Small, tiny little experiences like these accumulated, pressing against a dam somewhere deep in my psyche, until it broke. I was in my living room on a weekend day, creating a psi ball between my hands while contemplating the implications of all that I'd been experiencing. Then, it happened. All of a sudden, everything felt distant and unreal. It was almost as if what was in front of me was a mirage projected onto a screen, and if I just reached out, I could rip the fabric away, holding the whole farce aloft. But there was nothing to grab onto. I spent days in this mess, going through the motions of my routines and not understanding why I was doing any of it. What did it mean? If this stuff was real, why was I living a boring human life? Why was it so complicated and intricate and subtle and why did it sometimes seem to work incredibly and other times not at all? It felt too good to be true and impossible all at the same time.

Skepticism

As time went on, I became distracted. School, hobbies, and puberty occupied most of my focus, and then I went to college. My interest in the mysteriousness of reality ceded to material concerns. I didn't have any clear ideas of what I wanted to do. I had grown up drawing, so I figured, art? We certainly couldn't afford it, but my mother supported me in pursuing any future I wanted. Thus, I was initiated into the American heritage of student debt at a very expensive private art school, even after significant scholarships. There, I never quite felt like I fit in. This was a consistent experience for me; I had always felt too strange for normal kids, too normal for the weird art kids. I spent the time "in-between", a morass of unrecognized depression and yearning for something deeper.

I had dalliances with the mysteries, learning about hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, and generally skimming psychological material from the 70s and 80s. But I spent most of my time in my junior year teaching myself to code. I had started a small but lively Minecraft server, and I learned how to create custom plugins for it for fun and basic web development so that I could promote my server and personalize the experience. Eventually, I hoped to make video games. This would lay the foundation for my future professional career in software.

Eventually, I came to sense that a career in the arts wasn't for me; I just couldn't imagine it in my mind's eye. Go to Hollywood and what, try to hack it as a cinematographer? It sounded cool, but it didn't feel right for me. After finishing my third year of college, I dropped out. I traveled the country briefly, and wondered if the world would end before I even got started on life.

According to a very fanciful interpretation of the end-date of the 5,126 year cycle of the ancient Maya long count calendar, the world was supposed to end, or otherwise significantly transform, on December 21st, 2012. Nothing particularly noticeable to me seemed to occur, and I was mildly disappointed. This was the final nail in the coffin of my already waning interest in "woo" subjects, so I buried my hopes of a magical world. I must have just been fooling myself the entire time, deluded and irrational. Everything I experienced, including the unexplainable--especially the unexplainable--was just a coincidence. I thought these things with a sense of superiority; I had finally figured it out, and I wouldn't be one of those stupid, gullible people who talked about planets and crystals. I still somewhat believed in ghosts, and aliens, though, since I had heard family ghost stories from my mom growing up and actually saw unexplainable lights driving through the desert on a road trip when I was young. It's funny the arbitrary lines we draw in our minds about what is feasible and what isn't. I've come to learn that often the only difference is experience.

Tumblr Witches

I first stumbled upon magic as an adult in 2016, in the form of "tumblr witches". They were described in a VICE article called I Used Emoji Spellcasting to Prevent a Hangover about Tumblr users creating sigils out of emojis to create spells. I thought it was ridiculous, but something stuck in my mind. I was unconvinced of the effects people claimed to have, and the author of the article tried it to cure a hangover, which could be a fluke, anecdotal evidence, etcetera. But I had to wonder: why? Why would so many people do this? Sure, most of the people in the article were casting spells to save the bees or destroy capitalism (impossible to verify your personal effect), but doubtlessly there were people attempting to use this for real, personal problems. Obviously, this was not an ironic joke, meant to fool me, specifically. I was at an age where I was dismissive of Tumblr woo aesthetics, but I was hard-pressed to believe every single person who was doing this was just doing it on a high of communal-driven delusion and confirmation bias. And I knew it wasn't just Tumblr people; I at least knew that there were many, many people who believed in and did many different types of quote unquote "magic", whether that was vision boarding or full on rituals with the robes and the waving of the wand and all that. Through history, even! For thousands of years! By some very smart people!

Why?

The materialist culture around me would readily accept any combination of "crazy", "stupid", "gullible", and "uneducated" as the answer. All the way through history, idiots, all of them. But that struck me as lazy thinking. There had to be more going on here. And there was one of two options: either it worked, in which case, holy shit. Or it didn't work, and the people doing this sort of thing were getting something out of it so valuable which I couldn't see on the surface that they kept doing it anyway. Being a hustle-brained tech worker at the time, I figured that if there were any chance that it was real, if I could get even a 10% edge in effectiveness, it was worth a few years of investigation. So I went off on a reading adventure, and found Ingrid Burrington's bibliography, Some Recommended Reading on Magic. It had enough entertaining and accessible writings on magic that I figured, what the hell. I didn't have anything to lose. Worst case scenario it doesn't work, I tell no one, and never think about it again. Best case scenario it does work, and everything changes.

If you're at all familiar with me or my work, you can probably guess what happened. Not only did I find out that it worked--beyond doubt, repeatedly, sometimes with external verification and impossible timing, it worked--it changed my entire life, and put me onto the quest to understand why and how it worked. I started with magic and tarot, and read dozens of books.

In general, I read everything I could get my hands on. Books on tarot, astrology, psychism, energetic protection, telekinesis, crystal gazing, "miracle" healing, animal communication, evoking spirits, dowsing, other divination methods, and anything else that seemed weird, unusual, and typically considered impossible. I even spent a fair amount of time reading the subreddit of wildly varying quality, /r/occult, where every voice imaginable shared their map of reality--some clearly edgelords, some deranged, some very thoughtful and cogent.

Anywhere I could find some shred of corroborrating information that I could hold in my mind as I continued to learn, I looked. Not everything was high-quality and I found plenty of what seemed like nonsense to me, but I had found enough and had enough strange personal experiences to put me on this path for good. It wasn't the stuff of movies or children's books--no instantaneous levitation here (most of the time) or dramatic spiritual visions (again, most of the time). Rather, how magic worked reflected a view of reality as being of mind first, a complete inversion of the typical materialist view.

The basic idea was that the universe was in fact much more responsive to the mind, intent, will, whatever, than mainstream worldviews would have you believe. By utilizing ritual, symbology, and heightened emotional states, one could project one's desire into the world. There were many systems from different lineages and practices, but most magical practice had a distinctly syncretic (combining) style. While some magicians believed in keeping their lineages completely self-contained, most perspectives I read were interested in what worked best and would mix-and-match based on their results, leaving metaphysical theories aside as an exercise for the interested reader.

The manner in which magic tended to occur was also subtle, more often through a funny feeling and a strange coincidence that delivers the result you want--often through a way that almost feels like the universe is winking at you. Unlike mainstream depictions, magic took the simplest route to work, such as suddenly making just the right connection you need, finding exactly the info you were looking for, or even just feeling especially inspired and magnetic for something like a job interview.

Divination

I skirted around the edges of magic and divination and made small prods. Strange things happened when I used my intention, well, intentionally. By this time I was having many weird experiences, riddled by synchronicities, and getting better at divination every day as I started playing around with tarot cards. I would ask all kinds of questions: about how my day would go, advice on romantic situations, predictions about the future, about myself, and pretty much anything I could think of. Divination was addicting: here was something that I could ask anything, and receive a more-or-less useful answer from. And most importantly, divination was working.

As I was learning, the tarot "worked"--by which I mean it seemed to repeatedly deliver answers that made perfect sense in context of the question. They matched the traditional meanings of the cards described in the books I was reading. Tarot managed to convince me that divination was subjective but it wasn't random. My "hit rate" went way above chance almost immediately. It went far beyond simply "reading into" the cards; I would receive the same cards repeatedly, over and over, repeating their themes as they directly applied to my life, like a point being put right under my nose insistently. My "card of the day" would invariably predict, time and time again, the experiences I would have that day--including elements and dynamics that were completely out of my control and unexpected.

As I began to get opportunities to read for total strangers, I found that the cards would still manage to describe their lives with great relevance and clarity far above chance. One time at a party I did a reading for a skeptic, and after pulling two kings and The Emperor, I asked him if he was a boss or worked for himself. He told me he ran his own business, and asked me if I had been eavesdropping on his conversation earlier! I had not. It says it right there on the cards, dude. Around that time, I decided that I had to confront divination seriously: my worldview had no satisfactory explanations for this. I spent time reckoning with the tarot.

It seemed that the tarot could return a relevant result--possibly including real-world factual information I did not know--to any question. I was in awe of the possibility. You mean I could know anything? The gravity of it set in quickly. If tarot worked, and it sure seemed to, then it was also a massive responsibility. And in working with the tarot, I quickly came to see that it wasn't just some arbitrary store of information I could access. It responded to my subjectivity, so it was hard to know the truth about things I cared intensely about. If I was hellbent on a certain outcome being true (no matter how wrong I was), I would get cards confirming my desire back--and then be in for a nasty surprise. If I anxiously flooded the oracle with question after question, I would begin to receive cards indicating anxiety and fear, or they would simply begin to seem truly random and not apply to my questions at all. It seemed that the tarot was intelligent, dynamic, and responsive. It had just about infinite patience until I begin to ask questions disingenuously, already knowing the answer, or neurotically asking the same question a dozen different ways.

For a long time, my fear of the unknown and unfamiliar translated into a desire to be told what to do. I would ask "Should I do X thing? Should I talk to Y person? Should I make Z choice?" and the cards would invariably either describe the situation or yield Justice, Judgment, 8 of Swords, 2 of Wands--all the "make a choice" cards. Often reversed. That's because at the end of the day, it's my life. "Should" questions were no good, because the responsibility of the choice was ultimately on me. I eventually learned how to ask better questions, such as:

• What happens if I do A or B?

• What are my actual motivations?

• What options have I not thought about?

• What would the best version of myself do in this situation?

• What am I afraid of?

• What is keeping me stuck?

• ...and so on

These helped me answer my own questions when it came to matters I cared about, and the direct line to wisdom helped me navigate my life considerably. But I still had the fundamental question: why was it working? What did it mean that I could shuffle a deck of images and get contemporaneous, accurate meaning out of it? How did the cards get in that order?

Magic

For all my explorations through reading and tarot, I was still very cautious in my approach. Magic seemed like no joke; it was a powerful force that could touch something vital in your life and change its course in a moment. I was afraid of it, and what it could do to my life. There were other implications, too. It seemed that to be a magician meant to take responsibility for everything in one's life. If I could influence things in my life directly--if it was all within my reach--I would have to confront the degree to which I am complicit in every unhappiness I abandoned parts of myself in. The idea of the power and freedom to induce change was exhilarating, and the absolute culpability for screwing it up was intimidating.

My first proper spell was a chaos magick style sigil to meet an "Unusual Fuzzy Animal". I had fantasized about somehow encountering someone in a coffee shop who had a sloth attached to them or something equally implausible. Instead, about a week later at a show I went to with a friend on a whim, I ended up being given two dinosaur toys in the same evening by separate people. I didn't make the connection until a friend pointed out that could be the closest thing to my request. But obviously, hoping for that sloth unreasonable of me, and not exactly how magic works. The universe doesn't bow, but it nods. That first experience was small, but I would have many more much more dramatic and pointed magical experiences.

I was interested in poker at the time, and wondered if I could affect the odds. On a day I was planning to go to the card room in the evening, I cast a Jupiter spell for luck at poker. I put on my favorite song about money with a blustering saxophone blasting on my headphones and drew out a sigil for good poker hands. Two hours later, I received a BCC spam email from an unknown email address "clouderesearch7877 at gmail", titled "crossby" with the text "zeusliving" repeated 24 times, followed by "check this". I could find absolutely nothing on this email's sender or any of its contents. Of course, it was impossible to miss the fact that Zeus is associated with Jupiter; I was drenched in the strange and inexplicable almost immediately.

That night, I hit incredibly lucky hands, over and over and over. Most notably, I made a straight flush over another person's straight flush and won his entire stack, which is a 1 in 72 million chance with 9 players. Then in the same night, I won another player's whole stack when I made quad 2s (which statistically occurs roughly once every 7,735 hands, or 0.013% of the time). Then, in the next hand, the guy I won against won someone else's whole stack because he also got quad 2s! The odds of that happening back-to-back is something like 1 in 60 million.

Statistically, the chance of both these events happening in a single night is so small that you could play poker every night for thousands of lifetimes and never see it—let alone participate in both of them personally. In case you're worried about the implications of luck magic, don't worry: I lost it all back by the end of the night, because no amount of luck or magic can save you from bad poker habits. In fact, I'm pretty sure my overexcitement at the wins led to my eventual loss. Life, and magic, are funny that way. I should have asked to become a better poker player!

In any case, I had some things to think about.

One white crow

I had read Surviving Death by Leslie Kean early on in my explorations. This is a groundbreaking book (and there's a Netflix show about it by the same name available now), as it's a compilation of the most convincing cases for consciousness persisting outside of the body and potentially after death by an award-winning journalist. Especially notable to me were the cases where young children remembered dozens of facts about a previous life which were subsequently confirmed and found to be so obscure that it would be beyond reasonable imagination for the child or family to fake. I especially recommend looking up the story of past-life fighter pilot and WW2 casualty James Huston. He goes by James Leininger now--no relation, except for the past life thing. Another fascinating one is Ryan Hammons, who remembered his past life in Hollywood as the agent and extra Marty Martyn whose history was so obscure that they had to access Hollywood archival data to confirm Ryan's facts.

But perhaps the most valuable thing I took from this book was this quote:

If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you musn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.

• Henry James

I feel lucky to have read this quote early. It's been formative for me. I had to reckon with the fact that if even one piece of unexplainable, inexplicable experience remained, which could not be explained under the materialist paradigm, I could not in good conscience just dismiss it out of hand with all of the reflexive, uncritical strategies I'd heard (and used myself): confirmation bias, mass hallucination, temporary psychosis, under the influence, naive and credulous, being manipulated or scammed, outright lying for attention... the list goes on. All of these kinds of explanations, of course, have the interesting side effect of painting the subject as somehow incompetent, not worthy of being taken seriously, whose experience was wrong.

The problem is that those assessments can be correct; most of these occurrences happen at a level that is not dramatic, and takes the most direct route, which can easily be considered totally mundane or magical. Of course my mom got me a guitar, she saw one and thought it was a good deal. But the very next day, without my having said anything about it? Sure, I could be just the lucky one in a hundreds of billions chance to witness that crazy night of poker. But the same night I did the luck spell? I could definitely just be overinterpreting the tarot cards and confirming my bias. But over and over and over and over, with practically 100% consistency, and it turns out the cards actually have pretty concrete meanings that would be super clear if they're not applicable?

I had too many white crows, and they kept coming in, squawking.

I had also read the first few books in Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan series, a highly psychoactive read about an anthropologist's initiation into the world of Yaqui magic by several wise men. Carlos Castaneda is a controversial figure, but one idea from the books was important in helping me navigate my own initiation. In the series they admonished that becoming too settled in one's belief of how reality truly works can prevent one from seeing further, sometimes for the rest of one's life. I took this to heart, endeavored to try to view everything I learn with equal weight, and avoiding settling too firmly on any one interpretation, fixing my concept of reality.

At the height of my practice, things got bendy. I would think about things and then they would be there in the world around me, immediately. Synchronicities would pile up in such quantity in so little time it would freak me out. I practiced my Rubik's cube test on various things. But I also went through derealization spells as I reckoned with what I was experiencing. I had nights where my mind was haunted and it was impossible to tell if I was just scaring myself or not. Learning that your mind influences reality can make everything feel hallucinogenic. I was learning to see a subtle layer behind all of existence, and it required constant reorientation and grounding work to connect it to my real life and not spin out.

Astrology

So I decided I would back away a bit. I stopped meditating as much, stopped doing intensive mental exercises, stopped doing magic, and things got less spooky. Instead, I decided I would keep exploring divination and understand reality that way, at a safe distance. As it would turn out, divination contained perhaps more hints as to the nature of reality than anything else. The fact that I could do divination on just about anything I wanted, as much as I wanted (with some caveats), meant I had lots of data to work with. Instead of messing with my life through magic to understand how reality worked, I could observe reality directly.

I was interested in learning more about the deep correspondences between various esoteric images in the tarot. So I bought The Hermetic Tarot deck, a beautiful black-and-white deck full of them. Most obvious were the astrological associations, which gave me pause. As much as I'd read about it tangentially, everything I'd heard about astrology most my life was that it was bullshit not worth my time. I figured, OK, fine, I'll buy a couple astrology books, learn the planets and signs or whatever so I can interpret cards better, and then never think about it again. I'm sure you understand the pattern of how this goes by now.

I read Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas, currently the most renowned "historical astrology" book that viewed the past through the lens of massive astrological themes and archetypes, pointing out correlations and repetitive cycles all throughout history. It was intriguing but I couldn't gauge it: it's easy to cherry-pick similarities from all of human history, after all. Next I got The Only Astrology Book You'll Ever Need by Janna Martine Woolfolk, a book on natal astrology for examining one's own birth chart. It was a bit hokey, yet it nailed me for most of my placements. Most importantly, I saw that I didn't relate to the interpretations for other placements which numbered in the dozens. This wasn't just a 50/50 coin flip, but really more like nailing me over and over on a 1/12 chance ten times in a row (~10 placements being in 12 signs and 12 houses).

My forays into astrology were voracious. Hungry for self-knowledge, I read every scrap of information I could get my hands on and eventually accumulated two bookshelves worth of astrology books. The more I learned, the more I realized that there was an entire world of deep and advanced astrological practice that was hidden from the mainstream world, especially ancient astrology. Not the soft, unconfirmable and bias-ridden work of personality (though they talked about the nature of the soul frequently), but matters of events. Success, failure, wealth, attainment, love and loss, injury and sickness--all of these were topics that ancient astrologers dealt with bluntly before the turn of the 20th century, when a British court forced astrology to go underground in the guise of just a personality system. That's a story for another time, but look up Alan Leo if you're curious.

Most importantly, and this is the entire point--it worked. It worked on me, it worked on my friends, it worked on the past, it worked on the present, and it worked on the future, depending on my level of understanding and skill. The more I learned, the better I got, and the more deeply fascinated I became with it. Astrology had a language that could help me map the inside of myself, as well as the future. Prediction fascinated me most. After all, if I could know what was coming, I could prepare for it. It wasn't just practical, though--it also showed that there was meaning and timing to life. I could predict when good and bad times were coming; it allowed me to have higher highs and higher lows, knowing when to lean in and knowing when to buckle down. It brought me deeper into the natural rhythm of life, and I learned how to identify when it was the time to strive and thrive and when it was time to go with the flow. I learned how to see the pattern in a life and the archetypal, mythic elements that accompanied it. I learned to understand how nature and reality itself spoke through the language of planetary correspondences, identifying omens and interpreting them.

All along the way, it nagged at me: why was any of this possible? What did it mean? What is reality made up? Why are we here, and what are we doing? What is fate and what is fortune? Do we have free will, are we living out a script, or something in between? If the universe is truly responsive to our thoughts, what do we do with that responsibility? What can we even do with it? What happens after we die? Will what I've learned in this life matter?

The thing about all of it is that contrary to exterior perception, magic and divination are not an escape from the world or the self. Done correctly, they bring you deeper into your own life, and make you understand just how extremely real it all truly is. I wanted to know how reality worked; it asked me how I worked.

Today, I am deep in the thick of these questions, and that's what I'm here to talk about. The world I see around me now is mostly uncurious about where we come from, and why and what it all means. There are good reasons for that. We have so many things to contend with and worry about in this era of wild, turbulent, painful transition. But pondering these questions can widen our perspective, grow understanding, and provide meaning. I hope, and believe, that we can reduce suffering if we increase wisdom. There is so much to be gleaned from these practices that can tell us their hints about the nature of human beings, society, and our place in the world. I feel that if we knew (or perhaps remembered) how to work within the world rather than against or upon it, we would live better lives.

That's why I care about the universe, and why I think you should, too. I've been Sadalsuud, and you've been reading the Divine Implications.