Colin Wilson quotes someone (maybe Ouspensky) as saying that what got them into the occult was, precisely, the forbidden nature of it in the eyes of culture. The fact that it’s obscene, stupid, mocked, derided. I feel the same way: I often want to talk, in my posts, about things that are not generally accepted, ideas than run counter to culture. But I am ashamed, afraid of talking about them, because they will clash with other people’s opinions. And there, right there, is probably the key as to why I want to talk about them! Because of this clash.

What I mean, and what Wilson discussed in his book, is this: the occult doesn’t just refer to a series of topics and ideas like spirits, the astral realm, precognition, magic, etc. It also refers to the fact that they are occult, that they are hidden. If those ideas formed the basis for our mainstream culture, if precog and spirits and all that were widely accepted and part of the norm, then, in a sense, they would no longer be “the occult”. I know this sounds like the usual “cool kids” thing where certain trends are no longer interesting once they become mainstream, despite the trend itself, the content itself, being the same. But I think it goes a bit beyond that (or, perhaps, the “cool kids” archetype is less shallow than it seems!). I think that, for me, the occult was attractive against my will: in the sense that, by feeling attracted to it, I was forced to “confront” others.

I am constantly trying to avoid conflict with others, so say stuff that will be agreeable, to bury my own interests and my own opinions inside. Because I’m afraid of them clashing against those of others. So it’s almost like, the more this repression grew, the more my interest in countercultural topics grew, as a sort of defence mechanism of the psyche, a balancing mechanism: the more interested I became, the more strongly I felt the need to speak out about it. But, if I ever did, I would be mocked, ridiculed, my opinions wouldn’t be shared by anyone! In a word, my opinions would be mine, not collective, they would be purely personal (despite there being a huge community of people who are into the occult — I mean that the occult serves as an interest for “individuals” to have, by the very fact that it is not “collective”, not mainstream). So, via this process, I was “forcing” myself to “open up” to the world and to the possibility of conflict, to the act of “existing” in the world, instead of effacing my own existence to avoid confrontation with difference and multiplicity.

This was a clear trend: first I got into Buddhism, and I thought “I’ll never get into real spirituality. Buddhism is just a philosophy, I’m taking it from a secular point of view, everyone can agree with that”. But then, “against my will”, I started believing in spiritual phenomena (from personal experiences, precognitive dreams, synchronicity, etc, etc). So I was screwed: now I had opinions and beliefs that required me to stand alone as an individual in front of the collective — a defence mechanism from the psyche for an ego which had become too submissive to outer will, and was not expressing its own interests strongly enough. A violent way of getting myself to “speak my truth”: if I hadn’t wanted to speak my truth when my truth was totally digestible by the mainstream, and had repressed it for so long; well, if I didn’t want it the easy way, I would have it the difficult way, I would develop interests that weren’t palatable to culture, and which, furthermore, were so intense that I had no option but to talk about them (this is more or less when I started making YouTube videos, blogging on now defunct old blogs, etc). A violent way of getting myself to “speak my truth”: that’s what the occult represented to me in a certain way. A violent way of accepting who I am, of “coming out of the closet”, so to speak, to not let other trample over you, to not let yourself be dragged around by others. A violent shock to practice extreme “honesty-speaking” in front of others / the world.

The occult seems to be connected to the subjective in this way: whenever something is accepted publicly, it becomes “culture”. The occult, in this double sense, tends to deal with topics of the inner world, the subjective: dreams, visions, phenomena of the spiritual real, that is, the inner realm. So the occult seems to be, by nature, countercultural, in that culture can never integrate the inner world fully. The inner world always remains “occult” and hidden to the culture. It’s like a vortex, a cornucopia of darkness that never runs dry, formed of the experiences of alienated individuals, compiled into a body of work and tradition. But when the tradition becomes too mainstream, then even weirder, even more “personal” insights, shared by no one else, will emerge as “the new occultism”. Occultism never runs dry. Its essence is not specific subject matter (candles, magical salts, rituals, etc), not the external phenomena of “occultism”; but the alienation of the subjective in the face of external reality. An alienation which is good. It “alienates”, that is, defines as separate, the individual from culture. It “individuates”. It forces the individual to “exist” (instead of adapting itself to the existence of others out of fear of conflict).

Of course, “the occult” is many other things, and can be seen from many other angles. This is just one aspect of it that was important for me, and continues to be so. So yeah. Anyway, thanks for reading.