If the 20th marked the beginning of the natural new year, the days following mark the beginning of a new life. Friday was the moment when day and night stood in perfect balance, and today is the day when the scales begin to tip towards our next frontier. Hopefully, in the same way that the celestial scales tip towards the daylight, the scales that govern our lives will also tip towards the metaphorical light as well.
What’s most interesting to me is that I already had a rough draft written for this post today that I was ready to hit send on as soon as I cleaned it up (it was mostly leftovers from the previous post that didn’t make sense adding to the tail end of it as it was already plenty long and it changed the topic of conversation completely). After coming home from visiting a few friends just now, I suddenly felt a need to rework the vast majority of what I’d written, as some new thoughts began brewing in my system.
What was meant to be only about new steps moving forward for the Rune Academy project left me actually mulling over quite a few more things that have occurred over the past few years. Let’s look at it from the perspective of… if yesterday’s post was about the physical aspects of the past few years of my life, let this post be about the spiritual aspects. I have endless opinions about exactly the sort of thing that this project started off as. To the point where I can’t really continue in the same trajectory as it began, specifically with regards to spirituality and teaching magical types of knowledge, as if the project was some sort of mystical school, the likes of which you can find literally in any corner of the internet you go crawling into.
And I do remember years ago making a post about how I no longer wanted to pursue the idea of yet another magical school because it was so overdone, but also so dry and clinical that it left me with absolutely no room for creativity. While working on this website was a joy, working on the lessons, digital structures they’d be presented within, and gamification of trying to get users to come back by implementing badges and streaks was genuinely making me dislike most parts of the project. There were a few moments when I almost didn’t want to continue at all, especially since what I was really itching to do was tell a story, share some of my personal experiences, and express my artistic side. What I really wanted was to make an impact, which “yet another course on the internet” doesn’t really provide to anyone anymore, no matter how much people like to say that it does. I wanted to create a world, not get caught up in what other people told me I ought to be doing. And I have a big problem with getting excited, going 100% at 100 mph, realizing it’s not sustainable or not worth the hassle, and quickly burning out after realizing all of that time and energy spent was a waste. What ended up happening was that the people I told my ideas to gave me advice, I blindly followed that advice, even though in my gut, I knew it wasn’t the best course of action for what I ideally wanted to achieve. But in exploring those options still allowed me to learn more about what I DIDN’T want to be doing. To the point that I’m now staunchly against including certain features in the project just because I’ve already tried them and hated them. In hindsight, I don’t regret any decisions I’ve ever made within this project, as with life as a whole. This is because I fully understand that everything was a useful learning experience, the knowledge gained from which has been used multidisciplinarily across many areas of my life.
What I’ve slowly begun to realize over the years is that the projects that are really worthwhile keep coming back to me and stay in the back of my mind daily. So much so that they meld themselves into my personality. There have been, and still are, many moments in my daily life when something funny or astounding occurs, prompting me to immediately start a workflow in my mind to see how I can translate it into something magical for users to experience in the world of Rune Academy. I end up accumulating stacks of scribbled scratch paper, filled to the brim with ideas (and now is the time for me to go through them all). Since it’s been going on for years, almost automatically within me, even when I didn’t have physical access to my computers to work on the project, I know it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. So I might as well throw myself full force into it. Why not?
And now especially, I think I’ve come to some final conclusions about what I want the project to be, especially when taking the core reasoning behind it into account. My path before me is now clearer than ever before, and I’m more confident moving forward with many of my decisions.
A million years ago, when I first came up with the name, I only wanted to pass along to others the knowledge I was personally excited about gaining after years of learning and studying what seemed to me to be “forbidden topics” – basically something fun and exciting that it was rare to find others talking about. But as the years went on, the knowledge itself became more widespread, less “forbidden”, and incredibly easy to access via social media. There was no reason for anyone to ever go on a separate website, which arguably ran slower than most social media, as they have prioritized bandwidth, and that got updated far slower, because it was mostly just me, with whoever else was listed as being “part of the team” being more cheerleader than anything else. The project has always been run and contributed to “solo-dev style” by yours truly, no matter how many people I included in the “about-us” section. Perhaps it was due to insecurities stemming from other aspects of my life that I wanted it to seem more official and more solidly grounded. Perhaps I was projecting the wish to have a project to work on with my friends that could bring us all together more. I would genuinely have some fun times working with those friends on the project whenever they felt like humoring me and doing something interesting for a night. But those moments were far and few in between, and at the end of the day, they would go back to their lives and forget everything we worked on, while I would go back to mine, and the project would still be my entire life, consuming and exciting me at all times.
I’ve since removed mentions of the original people from the “About Us” page, as nothing has really been contributed in any meaningful way to the project in its current state, and I’ve implemented rolling credits for everyone who has actually helped me. No photographs now, and the names are only included as far as those participating feel comfortable sharing. If anyone doesn’t feel comfortable being included, they simply won’t be (it hasn’t happened yet, but I’m not opposed to allowing for full anonymity, as I enjoy privacy myself). I’m eternally grateful to all who have helped me thus far, even in the smallest ways.
Now, when it came to realizing exactly what I actually wanted to do, which is create a rich story and fantasy world built on my own experiences and inner world, I was more than happy to drop the “learning platform” portion of the project within the blink of an eye. It really got to me after a while that I was simply aggregating information and repackaging it in my own theme to present to others. Sure, I was learning a lot along the way as well, but that’s not what I wanted Rune Academy to be about. I also didn’t feel comfortable giving the weight I did to some of the topics when I didn’t fully embrace them myself, simply because it was what people expected. It felt very inauthentic, but I was worried that what I was creating wasn’t enough and wouldn’t be received well. It was a difficult decision, as the sunk cost fallacy can affect anyone, but in hindsight, it was very quick, considering how long I tend to mull over all other decisions in my life. I’m trying to operate from a place of greater authenticity to myself and my vision now. I’m trying to believe in myself more. Especially since, when I uploaded my art to TikTok as my first video on there, it exploded. That definitely got me excited, but it also actually confused me. Because of the place that I was in my life, surrounded by the people that I was, I felt like I’d never measure up or get anywhere with my art or the worlds I wanted to create. So seeing the opposite as true for the first time in a very long time actually helped me to start seeing life through a slightly different lens.
Leaning away from the plain teaching model was also spurred forward by a few hard realizations. Namely, those that had to do with the state of most religious/spiritual/pagan communities out there in the world today (which are some of the circles that I fell into while trying to create the learning platform). The first realization was that every single one of the communities I came across was fundamentally the same with regards to human behavior in the “us vs them” department. And as someone who’s been a member, and in some cases an “extended guest”, across a massive number of these groups, I can tell you that I’ve casually observed, as well as experienced, animosity towards what was deemed “the other” in every single one of the communities that I’ve been to. So much so that I’m now on the path of vehemently rejecting belonging to any group or system of belief, and fully being on my own path, even though it’s the loneliest option. I guess over time, you get used to it and simply stop trying to look for, reach out, and attempt to forge new connections. Too many disappointments along the way.
This was a massive spiritual roller-coaster of a transformation that overtook me over the past few years as well. More than in my entire life up to that point. It was concentrated, powerful, and extremely eye-opening. Everything genuinely came rushing at me all at once, exerting exponential pressure.
It basically started by very slowly stepping away from lifelong church indoctrination, including the last main time I was part of a cult-like “Bible-study group” that multiple friends had to help me get out of, sometime before the pandemic began. This all had its start shortly after I left college after fully leaving that group, and realizing I hated how every religious group (specifically within Christianity and Catholocism) came together on the surface level to say “we’re all one” and “we all believe in the same God”, but then inwardly hated on other groups and used predatory tactic to “steal” members from other groups to join their own. Namely, when they all, without fail, used the same spiel of saying that other churches teach their followers to worship wrongly, and that by worshipping in such ways, their followers will all go to hell. However, they are the only ones that will go to heaven, as backed by x,y,z passages as proof. This exact thing happened to me on multiple occasions as I church-hopped in efforts of finding one that let me just be without a constant threat to my immortal soul constantly looming over me. Now, keep in mind that while I was church-hopping, I was also exploring various alternative spiritualities and practices to help me find meaning in my life. And at every turn, I had to keep it a secret under threat of going to hell… which weighed very heavily on my conscience, especially since I’d often gain more meaning from my own private “extra-curricular” spiritual practices than from interaction with many of the groups I’d been part of.
I’ve heard it all, from the fact that the Eastern Orthodox church I grew up in, with its beautifully decorated altars and icons, which were all idol-worshipping and evil and going to hell (and they wouldn’t listen to my nonsense about the history of why it is that way)… (I can’t even imagine how they’d react to the fact that most of Eastern Europe still simultaneously did fortune-telling and believed in house spirits, etc., while also practicing their Christianity), to the fact that the Charismatic/Pentacostal churches that convinced me of the former part were all evil and going to hell because they allow demons to possess and speak through them (and they wouldn’t listen to my nonsense about being “overcome by the holy spirit”), to the unnamed Korean church group (because I genuinely don’t think they had a name as I’ve never heard it mentioned) that tried to tell me that unless I devoted my every waking moment to Bible study and God, even to the point of asking me to take leave of absense from my job, breaking up with my boyfriend, and losing all of my friends for their hearts not being in the right place, I was going to personally be one of the worst tortured in hell for knowing what I must do to get into heaven and vehemently refusing to do it. That was the last group I ever joined, as then I realized how dangerous hopping from group to group could be, and not just to my mental health. They all blew up my phone like crazy, made me feel unsafe, and then completely shunned me, to the degree that when I’d see one of them in the street, they’d look right through me as if I was a ghost, because that’s exactly what they taught. That anyone not in the group was a dead man walking and hell-bound, in the eyes of the Lord. I’m forever grateful to my friends for helping me out of that, as that group found me at a very vulnerable moment after just moving back home from college and not really having many local friends or much of a support system to lean on. All of these experiences still taught me a lot and shaped me into the person I am today. And I’m still grateful for all of them.
I’ve never discriminated in where I got my information from. Before that very last group that made me swear off joining any such groups ever again, I fell into Creationist crowds that preached a Young Earth and basically worshipped Kent Hovind and his long sermons about how the Bible should be taken literally as the literal word of God, instead of parables. They found evidence of a dinosaur footprint and a human footprint fossilized in the same place, and believe in a flat Earth with an ice dome over it that all melted during the great flood. I’m still grateful for getting wrapped up in that and for the endless hours of videos I was made to watch on the subject, as my experience with them taught me that indoctrination exists, as people can be considered brainwashed in any direction, if they believe something too strongly, especially when evidence can be taken to construct whatever argument you’d like if it’s presented cleverly enough…. but it also taught me that I shouldn’t simply believe everything that is taught to me in schools either as most of the modern education system was created to crank out the perfect little factory worker, to get people used to a prison-like system from an early age, and to stop people from thinking for themselves and simply following orders. The fact that theories of all sorts exist in the first place, such as the Great-Ice-Wall theory, the Hollow-Earth theory, etc., and that people who dare to question and think outside the box are all treated very poorly by society, is more proof that indoctrination and mass control are very, very real historically as well as currently. And in today’s day and age, the new “Age of Aquarius,” as astrologers put it, where all the world’s terrible secrets are being made public, and the world is starting to shift its mindset on a massively global scale, many conspiracy theorists are actually being proven right. Which is actually kind of scary.
And, upon realizing that most of the themes of my life are centered on avoiding such “control” and on controlling people and situations, I wanted to be as free as I could be and started venturing into areas where society dictated I shouldn’t go. I was part of two All-Black Bible-Study groups (with maybe 2 or 3 white people in each). One, I was an active member of when I was in college and went to their cookouts, slept over their women’s only house, and actively proselytized with them on campus, and the other one I was much more loosely affiliated with, as, at that later time in my life, I was no longer trying to get too deep into any more such groups. What was interesting was that, as with all groups everywhere, they still contradicted each other. The first, I want to say “main” group, understood Jesus to be a Middle Eastern man, who loved the world so much that he wanted to spread God’s word to everyone on the planet, no matter the race. They had a lot of controlling customs about how men and women should interact and what could and couldn’t be worn to prevent brothers from straying, etc. But it wasn’t that bad all in all. From my understanding, it’s pretty standard for most serious churches. My absolute favorite part of being in that group was the singing… and that’s taking into consideration that the food at the cookouts was stellar. The singing was the part that made me understand what true trance was, and the effect crowds get at concerts, singing along with whoever the performer is… and why megachurches get the effects they do out of their members. We were a very small group, but every single person in that group had amazing singing talents. And I always sang in the choir at my Eastern Orthodox church, so this was the experience that I wouldn’t change for the world, as it was my absolute favorite. Especially when we got into the group flow state, and the song took on a new life, continuing endlessly as every single person in the group improvised on it. Genuinely, this group was the best experience I’ve ever had out of all of them, specifically for the sheer connection I felt with the divine through these singing trances that I’ve never gotten with any other group. I will forever be grateful to have experienced that and will forever be chasing that feeling again. And maybe that’s why I tried to get close to the second group. But that one was very different.
The second group, I kind of stayed on the outskirts of. They taught me a lot in our short contact, and explained to me that Jesus was originally black and that the colonizer race lied to everyone about how Jesus was white (they specifically were outraged by the blond-blue-eyed Jesus theory, and completely disregarded that Jesus was a brown, Middle-Eastern man). There was also a few interesting, uncomfortable moments where they attempted to forcibly get me to understand that by my being white, I should carry white guilt about my anscestors enslaving theirs… even though my entire family line never left Eastern Europe and my parents and I were literally the first of our entire lineage lay eyes on, let alone interact with, any race other than “Generic Eastern European” for generations. This, they actually had me prove on my 23andMe DNA app, which was interesting because it showed I’m 99.9% from the same area, since my ancestors were too poor to ever move from one spot (and WW2-related reasons, etc.). And this led to more uncomfortable interactions about “pure-bloodedness” that genuinely angered me. There were awkward moments when nobody knew how to proceed, which also spoke to the indoctrination in the situation, and once you stepped outside the script, people didn’t really know how to react. I began to understand, with each interaction, that others were trying to jam narratives about what I should be thinking into my own head, based on someone else’s mold of who I should be as a person. Which is yet another theme of control in my life. This experience taught me to be more wary of interactions, as just because I look a certain way, a lot can be assumed about me. As it can be with anybody. And this is because society pre-programs certain information about others into everyone’s minds. Also, unfortunately, it taught me to stay in my lane. As I would be taught over and over again after I left, when the idea of searching for anything Christian-adjacent was entirely off the table. Because, believe it or not, the witchy, pagan circles behave entirely the same way.
My interactions with that group were about when I began to consume more “de-programming” content in the form of “Bible studies” that actually focused on more of the stuff that regular churches don’t teach, such as the fact that most of what we believe today was invented by them as a form of controlling the masses and isn’t actually in the good book at all (such as the entire concept of hell as it’s been historically taught). I learned about just how contradictory the Bible is to itself, and just how much violence and, when viewed from an objective standpoint, extremely messed-up scenarios are hidden within it that aren’t normally spoken about or known by the average Christian… or worse… glorified. This led me to explore other systems of belief, which I’ve always been interested in on many levels, and consume more psychological works that examined themes at both macro and micro scales. This included everything from population control and basic mass human psychology in general to aggression on the individual interpersonal scale by narcissistic personalities and how they gain power and control. This made me realize that everything is much deeper than most people believe, that almost nothing in life is black and white, and the more someone tries to tell you that they know all the answers, or tries to force you into ways of how something MUST be done, the more they’re worthy of staying the hell away from.
And the more I started trying to find others that I could connect with who wanted to specifically get away from mass organized religion and take back some of their own autonomy regarding their thoughts, beliefs, spiritual practices, and ways of connecting with the divine, the more I fell into and started exploring the more alternative side of life. I would notice the same micro-aggressions made towards different groups of people, the same way that I noticed within the Christian groups. Everyone came together in the fact that they shunned organized religion and that they were free within their disorganization, but in trying to get people to join their systems of belief, they would get preachy and begin proselytizing in exactly the same way that was happening among the people they were vowing to no longer be like. This was beyond annoying to me, as I was still actively trying to get away from all of that. And saying I was an atheist was not an option, as I’m genuinely a very spiritual person to my core, and I’ve had many spiritual experiences that helped me survive a lot of difficult moments and helped shape me into the person that I am today.
One of the most annoying things about going into the void and exploring all the avenues of alternative spirituality was that everyone was so gate-keepy while genuinely not knowing what they were talking about. And believe me, as someone who’s been around the bend spiritually, it was very easy to tell when someone was just being loud for the sake of just being loud. As most of this world exists predominantly on social media, where all such movements gain their strength and audience, it was very obvious that most creators were using their alternative spirituality as a way of getting clout and attention on various platforms. The crazier the opinions they expressed, the more attention they would get. The harder they stood behind certain ideals or causes, the more they could get the backing of others and avoid getting cancelled. The thing is, you never knew which ideal or cause would get cancelled next. It was overall very toxic and hard to find someone who was purely chill and laid-back, just looking to have a meaningful time without taking a hard stance on anything or going to war for any cause.
Any type of spirituality I wanted to explore, more of which were via book recommendations, came with heavy caveats that if I wasn’t of a certain race or ancestry, I was not allowed to practice it or even get too deep into learning it. There was sometimes a beautiful sense of curiosity among different practitioners of different paths about what everyone was doing, and they’d get into deep conversations about why they do certain things the way they do, but then turn around and talk absolute filth about those same practices in different, later contexts. One of the cases that stands out to me the most is the case of Wicca, which sparked the entire movement of alternative spirituality. I remember secretly getting together at friends’ houses when I was a kid to call forth some goddess or another while playing and pretending to do rituals, and it was exciting because it was so new and taboo. The people of the Wiccan churches worked very hard to bring Wicca forward in society, to be accepted as a major religion, and to pave the way for all other spiritual practices. Today, it seems almost like an eye-roll whenever someone says they’re Wiccan, at least from what I’d seen from the reactions of spiritual practitioners online. And many go so far as to rant about and cancel Wiccans due to cultural appropriation and misinformation regarding ancient ancestral practices. Many of which are very similar across cultures, and if Wiccans hadn’t paved the way for these alternative expressions to be allowed within the broader context of society, they wouldn’t have the luxury of moaning and groaning about it in the present day. This is also not including the fact that by trying to adhere to the natural ways of the world, Wiccans excluded all trans people by speaking only to the male and female energies, which actually many religions in the world do, but the only reason they’re excluded from the “attacks” is that they’re much older (think yin and yang, solar and lunar energies, and the basic concepts of day and night).
And all religions, due to cultural diffusion, are, in some ways, derivatives of one another. Just as languages are. Everything evolves, and if you go learning about old gods across multiple cultures, you can see how ideas spread, linked up, and evolved as the cultures evolved alongside them. Thor is to Perun what Svarog is to Hepheistus. But the roles have either a greater or lesser presence among the people who told stories about them and worshipped them. Svarog, for example, is one of the main gods of creation in most Slavic traditions, whereas in Greece Hepheistus is only a side character. And many cultures happen to share similar traditions, such as the Sweat Lodges of Native American traditions and Banyas and Saunas across all of Eastern Europe and Scandanavia, the Sweat Lodges of Native American traditions maintained more of their sacred aspects whereas the sacred aspects of purification in the other cultures gave way to more social aspects, as the colder climates made if far more necessary to partake in the heating/sweating/pruging that happens within more frequently to help cure various viruses/infections. One particularly infuriating interaction I had was when I was planning on doing some posts about the house/banya spirits of Eastern Europe alongside all of the other spirits that the people retained their beliefs in throughout Christian control, and someone smart-ass came down on me that my white-ass shouldn’t be appropriating Native American sweat lodges.
Many such interactions led me to believe that everyone must “stay in their lane” when it comes to being inclusive and accommodating different forms of spirituality. That sometimes means that, in expressing our appreciation of different traditions, we’re not allowed to talk about or even learn much about them if we’re not part of the groups sanctioned to practice them. Sure, there are level-headed people who can hold interesting discussions on a plethora of topics, but the vast majority of people I’ve personally come into contact with screamed every gate-keepy message on the planet that they obviously learned from others when, at one point or another, they tried to explore something new themselves.
This was one of the things (among many others) that genuinely made me not want to be part of the community anymore, nor to post any more educational content, and to fully shift my focus to creating my own world. Social media breeds an outrage culture in spiritual circles in much the same way it does in political circles, etc. And the more you go deeper into certain topics, the more niche they become, the more entrenched you get into various “wars” people have amongst themselves in efforts to achieve greater self-importance. Very similar traditions can pop up all over the world and have different names. The more I read books from different traditions, the more I realize the same themes are presented to all of humanity to learn, hold dear, and guide them. There’s always a trickster, a wise guide, a mother figure, a damsel in distress, a hero, etc. These are archetypes as old as time. But the connections are not allowed to be made, studied, or talked about because a massive number of people will go up in arms over likes, views, and clout. And yes, I may be over-dramatizing it a bit, but these are genuine takeaways I’ve gotten from many of my interactions and observations of interactions between people in these circles. And the fact that many of the comments I’ve read may be bots, in a very dead-internet-theory sort of way, is another story altogether. I’m going to have to make a completely different post about my thoughts on all of that and AI in general after this. Because it won’t fit here, and I’m going to have to get through all of my heated opinions here first before I even start thinking about anything in that one.
Our ancestors used to believe in all of these gods before Christianity & Abrahamic religions (which are all also derivatives of each other) conquered/took over everything, while incorporating aspects of each pagan culture they conquered into themselves. It all goes back to the “conqueror religion” archetype and themes of control. Wicca drew on many aspects of other religions and sought to create something more nature-based. This, in turn, paved the way for people to explore the religions and belief systems of their ancestors. I’m not a fan of Wicca, but I can acknowledge the big role it played in allowing what we have today to unfold. And I can acknowledge that it has many of the same traits of Christianity. Mainly in the fact that it tried to imitate the structures of organized religion, as do many other groups that try to start their own “churches”. It tried to take a lot from a variety of places and create an all-encompassing system of belief that contains a little bit of everything for its followers in very much the same way that Christianity kept a lot of pagan practices so that people wouldn’t feel like they’d be getting a bad deal when converting away from their ancestral practices. That’s the whole theme of appropriation that everyone is so angry with.
Whereas cultural diffusion and celebration of certain ideas of the past, and allowing them to grow and spread and evolve to become part of the timeless architecture of all of humanity (not just certain groups), used to be what was all the rage in the past, what appears to be most important now is the hyper-individuality of preserving the customs of extremely distinct groups and proving how different and unique they all are over and over again and keeping them sacred to the point of attacking anyone who gets too close. Especially by self-righteously offended members of groups who are in no way adjacent to the groups they’re defending. And I’m not taking any sides in these arguments; I’m simply observing where the trajectories are pointing and explaining what got me so annoyed and made me want to leave the scene. It was basically the interactions with uneducated people who were actively attempting to block the education of others. I felt like I needed to avoid talking about and posting about the topics that actually interested me the most, which was mainly finding all of the similarities between all of the cultures out there and proving that on many levels, “we’re all one”.
This wasn’t just the simple “your beliefs will send you to hell, you need to believe this instead to save your soul” over and over again. This was a much more involved, hyper-focused-on-details, nitpicking-to-an-infuriating-degree phenomenon. I needed to be extremely careful with how I worded anything, or people with something to prove would start making outrage content out of the smallest things. And it didn’t even necessarily happen to me too frequently, but it made posting anything difficult because of the threat of someone absolutely losing their shit over something minor, since I’ve seen it frequently enough on other profiles. We now indeed live in a time when unique and different people with unique and different beliefs are all vying for attention in an endless echo chamber of millions of others who are equally different and unique.
Another interesting phenomenon I experienced, both in the Christian circles and in the alternative spiritual ones, that proved to me that people will sadly never change, was all of the spiritual warfare. In Christianity, it’s an open conversation that we’re always in the middle of a spiritual war with Satan and the Devil and with the forces of light v/s evil and heaven v/s hell. Alternative spiritual circles actually mostly evolve away from this and fully embrace the idea that darkness and light are both necessary parts of life and humanity, and that we need to embrace and integrate both to be an equally balanced person, not suppressing anything in a very psychologically healthy way. What they had was a different sort of spiritual warfare. When I was exploring more of the alternative side earlier on, I joined two groups with people from all over the world who were internet friends who created their own circles/covens and met up via Zoom every so often. The latter (time-wise) group I interacted with was a lot more stoic and spoke more about the self and self-improvement, and was honestly a joy to get together with. I genuinely miss them. The 1st one I ever joined had a much more heavily rambunctious group of friends who lived for and created a lot of drama for no other reason I could gather other than proof of self-importance and alleviation of boredom. They actively created curses and hexes and sent them to other groups that had some of the same prior members who’d branched off for one reason or another. It was a wild and entertaining mess, very reminiscent of witch hunts in early colonial America. Members would complain of ailments and random aches and maladies that they swore up and down were caused by curses cast on them by members of other groups. The entire group would all then band together in grand gestures of camaraderie and do rituals to lift curses and heal their brethren. Similar to how some mega-churches do with pastors who have immaculate control of the “powers of the Holy Spirit” and heal members right there on the stage, live on television… but this would involve sigil and candle magic. It all left me with a very strong sense of how powerful the mind can be in belief, but that we’re all ultimately the same, and that no matter where we venture or what new systems of belief we think we create, we all end up pretty much replaying the same, either lesser-evolved or more-evolved versions of the same scripts. Very much the same way that astrologers say there are more and lesser evolved versions of each sign, which is why they’re all so different. Each person can choose to be the greater or lesser evolved version of themselves at any moment. It doesn’t really matter what system of belief, organized or disorganized, they choose to follow.
I think the main conclusion that I’m at right now is that I no longer want to say I’m part of any group at all. I’m not someone that can be categorized, especially with my varied interests that are very expansive in their breadth and depth across a plethora of topics, not just spirituality. I mean everything from ecological preservation and more eco-friendly/alternative types of architecture such as fully off-grid Earthships and Earth-Bag homes and being a fully self-sufficient country bumpkin hermit in the middle of nowhere to the complete other end of the spectrum with game development, virtual reality, electrification, AI and where that whole future is headed. I don’t want to fit into any mold any longer. I don’t want to be told what I should and shouldn’t do or think anymore, and what mold I should fit into. I care deeply about the well-being of my plants and animals AND I also care deeply about the well-being of my machines and computers. If I had my way, the perfect world would be fully solar-punk with sunshine and clean energy and computers and neon lights co-habituating perfectly and harmoniously in massive greenhouse living spaces with at-home orchards and vegetable patches and fresh eggs from attached chicken coops. That’s too much of a daydream in today’s day and age though, where such freedom can only remain a day-dream.
This, trying to constantly escape from the grasp of organized religions and organizations of all sorts, has lately been the bane of my existence. Anywhere we turn, there seems to be some large corporation holding a tight grip over some aspect of our lives. MEGA-everything and BIG-everything are spying on our every move and trying to sell us something at every turn. I try to get away from it all, but it’s so hard. I wanted to include a lot of my thoughts on AI as well as big corporations like Google and Meta, and whatever Elon Musk is doing in this one, but it’ll have to wait for another time. This post is already too long, and I didn’t even get to most of what I wanted to cover. It’s been very freeing to be less aggressively private and actually share these pieces of myself with the outside world. I came to the conclusion that I need to get all of these thoughts out of me so they don’t eat me alive anymore, and so that theres a record of this out there and the reasoning and story behind why my project is that way that it is and why I’m the way that I am as well. For anyone who’s interested.
Most importantly, I realize now, which I never really put much importance on before, that I need to share all of my work that I’m doing on the project with the world to almost legitimize it… and I’ll go over all of this in the following post… but with what’s happening with AI now and the sheer amount of people that are questioning basic reality is insane to me. What I used to believe was that I needed to quietly work in the shadows and keep my head down, then come out with something major that would surprise and wow everyone out of nowhere. I’m realizing that that’s definitely not the way to go here. That I can include the people who care in every aspect of the process and make them feel like they’re a part of it all right alongside me. So they don’t have to question whether I actually made something or not, or whether my own silly little human brain is capable of expressing all of its education on a sheet of paper (or computer screen) without the help of AI. Yes, I’ll go on and on and on forever, but it’s who I am. I’m not concise, and I have a lot to say with all of the stories that I want to tell. If I’m too much for you, go find you someone who is less.
But that’s exactly the reason why this world-building project is so important to me. Because I have a LOT to say and show and express. Ever since I was small, I wanted to create and create non-stop. And this project as had many rocky starts, but now that I’m finally settled on my medium, I’m going through with it at full force and I want to share every moment of it. Not hide any of it any longer.