Do you ever walk around feeling the full weight of history on your back and shoulders?
We swim in the ghosts of the people that came before us.
All of the sidewalks and signs and street layouts were designed by someone just as human as you or me.
We shoot down the waterslide of time and there are no brakes.
Thank You Twitter, and Jibran
I’m in a whimsical mood today, writing this post, if that was not already apparent.
Doing Jibran’s 100-day writing challenge has helped me get a little bit more loose and experimental in the writing process.
Thank you, Jibran! Check out his writing here.
I also want to thank Twitter for disabusing me of the notion that joining an intentional community will solve my loneliness.
I mean it might, but there’s no guarantee.
I am prone to magical thinking. I find that it helps to QA the magical thinking before it’s put into practice.
Why? Because time and money are finite, and heartbreak is good, but in moderation.
The magical thinking is a gift I think, more than it is a curse. It is definitely both, but more of a gift, especially when it’s leavened with the consideration of the realities of finite resources, past experiences(both myself and others’), and deep and sustained introspection on why the magical thinking exists in the first place.
Where Does Magical Thinking Come From?
And what is magical thinking?
Wikipedia defines it as:
Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, [1] is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects.
But I thinking magical thinking is more just a delusional belief in a vision that you have. I think it is also the raw visionary material for creating beautiful things in the world. Magical thinking is, like many things, a dichotomy.
For instance, for me, I have a vision of living in a beautiful, forested place, with a bunch of friends, with ample free time, leisure, shared meals, shared experience, and much cooperation and mutual helping of each other.
My dream or vision is to be a part of a beehive, or to be a plant in a beautiful herb garden, an instrument in an orchestra.
I want to live in harmony, with a group of others who are like me.
“Like me” means we share some basic beliefs about the value of human life, cooperation, and interdependence.
Is it magical thinking to believe that this is possible–to live on some land with friends and comrades?
Maybe, but I’ve done it before, when I lived at a Sufi retreat center in Upstate NY.
I’m also talking to people who are either: a) successfully doing this, or b) share this dream.
I hear some form of, “I just want to go live in the woods with my friends” once or twice per week. I am meeting more and more people who are exploring ways to do this, or even, who are doing it, by doing things like buying land and building a cabin piece-by-piece, a weekend at a time.
But maybe I want more than just land with friends. That could fail. Most likely it would fail.
Living on land with people is hard. And I’m not willing to over-leverage my body and my finances to realize this dream. I’ve realized this is the wrong way to go about it.
What I want, is a karass. I want to find myself in a group of 5-10 people who are on a mission from God.
I’m do not practice a religion, but I do believe in, and often feel, the felt presence of God.
That’s what I want.
One thing about being in a karass: you don’t find the karass, the karass finds you.
I do believe you can influence, or move with intention towards finding yourself in a karass, and I think the way to do that is by reclaiming a sense of the sacred.
Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred
I’ve talked about this on TTSE a little bit, what “reclaiming a sense of the sacred” means and why it resonates with me.
TL;DR: there is a meaning crisis in the West. As Global capitalism commodifies literally everything, it has caused a crisis of meaning. When everything is for sale, the price we pay is steadily rising rates of depression, narcotics abuse, suicide, and so on.
Everyone is talking about buying a farm, or buying a tiny house, or a cabin, and I think what they’re sensing into is a collective desire to re-enchant our daily lives with a sense of the sacred.
You don’t necessarily need other people to re-enchant your life, but it certainly helps. Humans are social creatures. Loneliness kills.
I think this is the point where I’m at. I have some dear friends in my life. Thank God for them, not only for their camaraderie, and the shared joy of our friendships, but because they provide a mirror.
A Twitter mutual recently made the point that if you’re going to try to start an intentional community, you need to do the inner work first.
I came across this meme recently and I think it relates. Finding ways to practice truly loving yourself is good. And it feeds into building community more deeply, and effectively.
But joy is even better when it’s shared with friends.
Let’s Get Free and Goof Off Full-Time
I think I’ve written enough. Both this newsletter and my quest to find/build an intentional community are both experiments.
If you share this dream, give me a shout and we can talk!
dear alex,
this is the first really long response I’ve written on substack. Maybe in a way, it’s meant to be a reflecting thought jewel to your thought jewel: this post, which I’ve read twice and am still thinking about. Before getting to some hard emotional connections, there’s some maybe-interesting reflection on causes and magical thinking that might be interesting. According to the definition you site, magical thoughts involve the belief in a causal connection between so-called “unrelated events.”
So much hinges on what we mean by cause. For the writers of this definition, and for most “hard headed” people, most skeptics, cause only involves two of the four classical aspects - just material and efficient cause, but no formal or final causes. Because if you start to think about final causes -- about the direction where everything is heading -- then there are no unrelated events, because all events have some sort of hard to understand but real finality Teilhard De Chardin called this the omega point; when the spiritual evolution of reality, the noosphere, lead to the divination of reality itself.
And from this cosmic angle: everything is everything! But the limited/modern causality won out becuse it was so ruthlessly efficient. Everything becomes limited, clear, distinct, a billiard ball linked to another billiard ball, or better yet, linked via a charmingly complex series of bank shots and reversals...
so magical thinking means one thing to old materialists who believe in limited causation, and it means another thing to new materialists who admit formal and final causation. Once you have forms, you can do scientific astrology again, can do so much scientific work that’s forbidden by the current system....
but this is all still in the may-be interesting area. Now I want to talk about emotions and connections. I would like to live in your forest bolo for 2-3 months a year, and then 2-3 in another, maybe a city one, then 2-3 in a mountain hermetic bolo, then 2-3 in another city, with no rhythm, but just an onwards nomadic journey.
bolo - consensual communism - infinite politics: these are words that can connect what you are doing to what i am doing.
but there is one difference between what you’re doing and i’m doing that seems important to highlight, because it feels so urgent and annoying to me. This is the scapegoating of an oppressor entity, and the situating of politics along an axis of oppressor-oppressed, and more deeply, the utilization of a violent metaphysics. Such violence so so basically common and normal that it feels weird and nude to talk about, but there’s some spirit which calls me to speak about this.
Arnold Kling distinguished between three political vocabularies: conservative, libertarian, and progressive. Each is organized around a polarity favored/unfavored: for conservatives, ‘civilization/barbarism’ for libertarians, ‘freedom/coercion” for progresives, ‘oppressed/oppressor’ Each of these presumes some underlying violence being done, which is (a) factually true about the contemporary actual moment (b) but not true for all future moments - that is, it is very easy to imagine a completely consensual, mostly communist future social order.
But this order would arise not through an apocalypse, but a complexification; an increased diversification of forms available to people, more names, more identitifies, especially collective identities, corporate identities within corporate identities within corporate identities.
many felt similar in the 19th century and they went into the woods to form new communities. why did these new communities always lose to the life that city offered? Stadtluft macht frei: city air makes free. In the city, the city that once existed and still does, you loose essential attributes and gain performative ones; you become how you act, create new capacities, learn. This has many more possibilities than life in the Phalansterie.
But now the two can be one: life in the forest can be part of a life that can involve life in many cities, everywhere; again, not an apocalypse, but a great collective education and extremely well-designed re-configuration; wholly through consent, happening, somehow almost without notice, but with much exhalations.
-b’b’b’b