“Occupy. And practice divination”
(or: adventures of a healer trapped by the double bind of capitalism)
This is post #2 of a 5-part essay which continues relaying the saga of my entrance into the mirror world of alternative healing where I soon became trapped in the double bind best captured by this syllogism: this stuff really works AND this stuff is trapped in a toxic system THEREFORE is this stuff actually toxic?
Down the rabbit hole
As a child, I experienced astral projection for the first time. I had a dream of flying through a brick maze and then the dream felt real, I was being sucked as if through a wind tunnel into outer space.
When I was 18, my mother lost her five-year battle with breast cancer and died, right before my eyes. I bought a book on lucid dreaming and repeatedly tried to contact her on the other side. She finally began appearing to me in dreams.
When I was 30, my father took his life and a couple nights later I was in his house, dreaming yet wide awake, watching as the ceiling transformed into glass, crashing down and pulled me into a frighteningly loud place where my father was scrambling to find his footing.
These kinds of experiences continued to replicate in my life like fractals of broccoli florets, and I continue to turn towards spiritual practices to both access these states and give them context within centuries of human knowledge-systems.
Divination, tarot, hypnosis, trance -- whether scientifically provable or not, these practices fold worlds beyond worlds into our lived experience and point to fields of influence and information that exceed what we are able to see with our eyes or access with our rational minds.
When we get stuck, fall into despair, are overwhelmed by loss, grief, and hopelessness humans from all cultures, from antiquity to the present, consult oracles, shamans, and medicinal herbs. Cards, crystals, yarrow sticks, herbs, rocks, dictionaries, springs: there are many ways to direct your vision to see future(s); there is no singular future to be divined but the cast of the die helps set one in motion.
For me, these techniques have worked.[i] I divined, tapped, fire-breathed, and self-hypnotized until my grief became a bird rather than a mound of concrete. I weaned myself off anti-anxiety and migraine medication and I haven’t experienced debilitating depression or anxiety since. This doesn’t mean I have done everything right, or that my life has been a bed of roses.
Where spiritual practices become harmful is when they are mistaken with “solutions” for all of life’s problems. Any practical usage of healing magic also must include its opposite – the placebo and the nocebo are but folds in a field of constant flux. In other words, these techniques can be helpful, and they can be harmful.
Meditating, praying, self-hypnotizing, doing yoga, kundalini fire breathing, forest bathing, seed syllable chanting… these practices are a revolving Janus Head that spins your mind between extremes of feeling in control for a little while, and then feeling completely neurotic and out of control in another. It’s also a slippery slope into deep work that can expose trauma and often leaves people feeling vulnerable and exposed. If people don’t have a therapist or other support network--socially or culturally, to integrate spiritual information into “real” life--this can be dangerous.
But this isn’t the fault of healers. It’s the fault of a culture where binary separations between “science” and “spiritually” congeal around individuality and the equation of purpose with money, (not to mention the absence of any kind of social safety nets). All of this leads to vast misunderstandings of how spiritual practices work in the field of cause and effect.
Not to mention what happens when the flow of capital determines the structures through which spiritual teachings are disseminated.
Next Post: “Capitalism is the biggest cult of all”: reading Walter Benjamin in a bath with rose petals.
Future posts include:
Dispatches from the front line of spiritual materialism: Instagram vampires, wanna-be cult leaders, and dictators attend weekend hypnosis seminars.
* “Occupy and practice divination” was said by Joshua Ramey in an interview with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel in the podcast “Weird Studies.” https://www.weirdstudies.com/guests/ramey
[i] For more details about the history of hypnotherapy and how I genuinely understand and appreciate its “power”, see my essay A Syntactical Drip: Hypnosis and the healing art of language (Forecast Magazine, Fall 2022).