Today I am having a realization, which I have heard a lot about. Sometimes the dismissive quality of atheists can blind them to deeper truths.

I have made a habit of studying Positive Psychology. This is the scientific study of those things we use to describe maximum mental health.

These wonderful scientists have established clever ways to operationalize the phenomena of mental health, to establish controls, and to establish causality beyond the rigorous fire of peer review in the premier psycholgical journals, especially the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

This is as scientific as we can get about this stuff.

But social psychologist Tal Ben Shahar, says that there is a point of consilience with this stuff and the New Age movement.

I reject a ton of stuff from the New Age movement, but I do see how this kind of thinking does a lot to cultivate positive psychology in individuals. I believe that the weird academic tendencies of occultists, make these folks kind of like DIY researchers in positive psychology.

I just recently read an article about a former hipster Thelemite; Alan Cabal from the New York 70s avant garde scene reflecting and describing his occult practices as, “a form of radical self-help and advanced covert sales technique.”

Radical self-help and covert sales techniques would do much to describe Positive Psychology, and sales and business books can take many occult parallels as well. Its all intertwined.

It can be summarized for me in this way, the purpose of life is to be a fucking Artist.

To make your life your Art. The people who I have met that really do this are the people who I feel have attained true power and personal enlightenment.

Creativity and imagination are a beautiful bloom to rise from a chaotic universe governed by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which basically predicts the ultimate decay of everything). Creativity and imagination are how we increase the valence of our positive emotions. It is how we turn up the knob on our best moments and our day to day life.

The best atheist ethicists leave us with the conclusion that we are left to make our meaning in life. I think that to do this we must truly have a freedom of heart and mind to pursue experiments of meaning.

This is Art. This is creativity and imagination.

I believe the world suffers much from two horrible aspects of human nature, ignorance and unimaginativeness. To be unimaginative is as serious a weakness as failing to understand the evidence of Darwin’s theory of evolution. To be unimaginative is as bad as believing in a talking right-winger in the sky and calling him the Holy Spirit.

The human being in bloom is a creative being, as much as he is an intelligent being. I believe that if we accept the rationalist charge to create meaning in our lives for our selves, to actualize, to achieve a kind of DIY excellence, creativity is essential.

In short, the purpose of life is Art.