Clyde the Rainmaker

I have a TikTok account where I post mystical content and I'm trying to stoke the fires of inspiration tonight. How would you describe western esotericism and the occult to someone with no experience in the field? The simplest starting point that I can think of is that it is a means of connecting with our ancient roots.

I think most people at a certain level of spiritual awakening decide to stop pursuing spirituality directly due to intense experiences, but then they subsequently often phase out of this. Once you walk this path, you can't really go back. Spirituality will still find you and you may have to face some of these things head-on with more direct practice. I just mean that your lack of spirituality right now could be intensifying an inability to deal with these emotions. But I also don't know if that's the right call either-- only you know what's best for you and your psyche. I just speak from experience as somebody who has also had to abandon direct practice because of the intensity of experiences with psychedelics and such. The shadow I try to ignore and repress during these periods of non-spirituality always finds a way to resurface, and embracing my spirituality again always seems to resolve the emotional tumult. Sometimes a break is just necessary though and I don't mean to project my experience onto yours.

1. Tarot 2. Astrology 3. Jungian Alchemy 4. Dream Journaling 5. Drinking herbal teas like wormwood

Integration is key. The psychedelic ether facilitates literal voodoo healing miracles, but the problem is that experiencing too many miracles can make it difficult to chop wood and carry water unless you keep some kind of balanced approach. It can be a gut-wrenchingly saddening thing to realize how different life would be if we lived in a psychedelic utopia. That kind of higher consciousness can make it incredibly frustrating and unfulfilling to do everyday activities in the real world.

Psychedelics did wonders for me on a physical and neurological level. I am much more coherent in conversation now, but before magic mushrooms, I was selectively mute and could hardly make eye contact because of neuro-ocular problems that have gotten significantly better. I used to suffer from tremors in my body that I now don't experience. It felt like I had neuropathy (nerve damage) in my feet for about two years and magic mushrooms made that entirely disappear. I had a greenish fungal infection on my left big toenail, but because of psychoactive botanicals like nutmeg and wormwood and dandelion, the discoloration is now gone. The healing voodoo factor of psychedelics cannot possibly go unsaid-- they are literally magical. However, let's definitely not act like they're not without their side effects. You can analyze yourself into a corner. Some of the trauma that I unearthed from returning to magic mushrooms in 2023 and mixing them with psychoactive botanicals and tarot cards drove me utterly mad and made me dissociate from my identity. I went into a schizophrenic, synesthetic world of my subconscious's creation. Beware of the ether of psychedelics. Jungian alchemy and tarot cards are the real deal but you can overdose on them and end up a lunatic lost in conspiracy theories. That's not to even say that there's no such thing as conspiracy theories. Obviously, the nature of the psychedelic awakening is that you become more conscious of darkness in high places and spiritual warfare and false conditioning and childhood trauma and the failings of science. But suspending your disbelief about pseudoscience can be dangerous if you don't toe that line carefully. Once you start embracing the idea of God and magick and alchemy and psychic intuition and entities and whatnot, you might be liable to start believing just anything, you might suspend your disbelief too much and frantically dissociate from your identity, and I say that from experience.

Absolutely agree with you here. I started having more false psychedelic awakenings in recent years as someone who's had probably over 500 psychedelic trips. Psilocybin mushrooms for me used to bring me to a place of Absolute Truth, they used to unite me with the Spirit in a purer, truer way. But all of my psilocybin trips in 2023 led to schizophrenia. Don't get me wrong, I still achieve such creative, ethereal, alchemical, supernatural, psychoanalytical, and consciousness-expanding experiences, but I just fall so deep into the abyss of it that it always turns me into a zany, schizophrenic madman in due time. My psyche can't quite handle the bottomless nature of the awakenings. Psychedelics don't get you to the end because the abyss is bottomless. You can get to a point of such Absolute Truth that it spirals into demented, harebrained, schizophrenic fiction. I'm just glad that I can still handle THC edibles and psychoactive botanicals like nutmeg and chamomile even if the magic mushrooms that once healed me greatly tend to be too much. I think that when you learn enough about the occult, the idea of psychedelics ever possibly being the "end of all suffering" or "the end of all awakening" starts to feel so ridiculous. Although I will add that the alchemical and neurological transformation that psychedelics incited within me is the only thing that ever catalyzed me to start feeling higher sober awakenings because it's the only thing that led me to start cutting out harder, unhealthier drugs.

"The Devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand." --Tom Waits

Well-said. The Roman Catholic Church and the papacy certainly bastardized the word of Christ. I believe in the historicity of a revolutionary alchemist named Yeshua or Jesus who called Himself Christ was put to death by the Roman government for upsetting the establishment and performing miracles. But I do not doubt that most people take the "walking on water" and "turning water into wine" far too literally as if it isn't alchemical symbolism. He mostly just had some sort of supernatural gift for healing the sick, and probably a knack for reading situations and spooking people out on a psychic, almost omniscient level. People really miss out on the metaphysical properties of the symbolism at play in the story of Christ (and other stories in the Bible, such as Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden) and fail to realize how much overlap there is between Christianity and eastern traditions, as well as occult traditions. Hell, even if Jesus is a historically fictional man, the mythos of His story is too metaphysically powerful and alchemically suggestive to shrug off. It's just a shame that most folks are put off by Christianity because of the conservatism and institutionalism of most modern branches. I hope more people can learn to just think of the kind of Christianity that entails televangelists and megachurches and homophobia and Crusades as a warped, deceptive, capitalizing misinterpretation of Christ.

@Leo Gura There's more substance in her words than in the corporate elite. I'd rather take a bet on a glimmer of hope than let the cycle of centrism continue. The dam of upheaval has been penetrated and may be starting to give way.

Marianne Williamson is a progressive Democrat running to primary Joe Biden this year. She is the only Democrat who ran in 2020 election who did not ever endorse Joe Biden and she takes a firmly progressive and spiritually-influenced stance on a multitude of issues. In her Drug Policy, she vows that she would immediately decriminalize and legalize and regulate and reschedule cannabis and psilocybin. She also says she would pardon and grant amnesty to those convicted of nonviolent drug possession. Bernie Sanders was pro-weed, but he would've never dared to mention psilocybin, let alone endorse it. She also reveals herself to be a proponent of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in the third section of her Drug Policy on addiction treatment and recovery. https://www.instagram.com/p/C2x86f0xypy/?next=%2F&img_index=2

The Bible, particularly the story of Jesus and his crucifixion in Luke 23, when analyzed through a gnostic lens, is like a grimoire. The mythos of the Bible points to alchemical and metaphysical truths.

Magic mushrooms used to bring me to a much more normal spiritual realm. I had experiences along the lines of Leo Gura and Terence McKenna and Carl Jung, experiences where I became aware of their ideas, experiences where I became aware of God and the healing power of plants. I wrote beautiful poetry and began to understand what the occult is, what mysticism is, what psychoanalysis is. My views on spirituality, theology, psychology, philosophy, ethnobotany, history, politics, etc. changed. I did hundreds of trips between 2020 and 2021 and they healed a few medical ailments of mine and actualized/transmutated me. However, in late 2021 and in 2023, I have had three schizophrenic episodes that have come from magic mushrooms. The last of these times was when I started picking wild conocybe mushrooms with psilocybin in them that were growing in my front yard in July 2023. I entered a completely false reality where I had a different biography than my actual life story. It was a dissociative identity crisis full of delusions of grandeur and persecution. I thought that I was raised by wolves in the jungle until I was found by humans at the age of one. I was a hyper-intelligent baby who could talk at age one and ended up adopted by parents. I thought that my dad threw me off a deck when I was a baby and that I miraculously survived and that that incident was the cause of some of my physical afflictions I grew up with in real life. I thought that I was babysat by the singer Annie Clark when I was a kid and I heard her voice in my head. I thought she was sending me psychic signals to reunite with me after over fifteen years because a Native American tarot prophecy had married us together by metaphysical and spiritual law in a fourway marriage that also included the supermodel Cara Delevingne and Eva Green. I thought that my town was a pedophile sex trafficking cult and that Annie, the Native Americans, and I were in the process of busting the ring. I thought that my great-grandmother who died in 2015 was still alive and I heard her voice in the form of "psychic signals" in my head as well. At the end of it all, I smashed my laptop and lost my phone and didn't have any technology at my house. I only had contact with the outside world when I'd see my neighbors, walk to stores, or when family would come knocking at my door unable to contact me. I thought that mushrooms could bring people back from the dead and in general, I just ended up in a really deluded, warped reality with multitudes of conspiracies and an infinitude of layers. It was one of the best experiences of my life, but it was brutal to come down from. I ended up in the psych ward on August 16, 2023, because I thought I was mutating into a crab and I was given antipsychotics for a while. I had grown attached enough to the world and my romantic connection with the voice of Annie Clark that I was hearing in my head through "psychic signals" that I had dark night of the soul vibes for months.

Psychedelics are the quickest way to deconstruct societal conditioning and suspend disbelief in the ethereal. They are the quickest way to usher alchemical transmutation. If you have done psychedelics in the past and now reach better states of consciousness without them, then it could be that your mind now naturally perceives life in a permanently mystical and psychedelic way. Your natural state of consciousness may be more psychoactive.