post-esoteric luck medley
“You’re not crazy, Miguel. You must be dead.”1
Can Q follow P if P never existed?
To live in post-secular times is to realize that religion and belief in magic have never truly vanished. They have endured in their traditional, godly forms or evolved into a wealth of New Age expressions to choose from independently2. These expressions move in the same direction but with varying magnitudes. The progression is not natural but imposes a retroactive change in consciousness; magic remains sewn into the lining of everyday experience. Private esotericism is what post-secular thinking implies.
To live a privately esoteric life is to believe in secret knowledge that connects everyday experience to the great unknown. Esotericism is an aesthetic lesson about life conducted in solitude. “Spirituality” is an empty signifier. It is primarily an experience of beauty. The word "spiritual" is meaningless to me.
Esoteric belief is oriented outward to produce new realities inward. The endpoint of the esoteric journey is the arrival at a pragmatic truth, incorporated into a worldview through personal communion with knowledge. The post-secular condition replaces a tradition of choice with choices of traditions. The comic post-secular condition playfully embraces access to alternative knowledge. The tragic post-secular condition fears commitment when choosing among an excess of forking paths. It carries an allure to fall in love with the means to an end, coupled with the disquiet of missing out on the next secret thing.
This is based on a true story. Since I got my fancy lighter, I don’t even want to smoke cigarettes, I just smoke to have use of my fancy lighter. The cigarette is no longer the object of my desire. This is based on a true story.
Mysticism is the introspective experience of beauty within an esoteric belief3. To speak of mysticism is to speak in esoteric terms. An encounter with the Mystery - or the Real - by definition, is a precondition for a mystical experience. The suspension of libido sciendi is a precondition for faith.
To reflect on a mystical experience is to speak of the opposite of the esoteric: belief oriented inward, producing new realities outward. The same magnitude, yet of a different direction. The Mystery is experienced and found within, as the body becomes a sensory mirror of the outside world. The esoteric lust for knowledge is satiated with introspection.
The day one makes peace with the Mystery is a linguistic event. The absolute suspension of language does not rely on the supernatural but on the pure, raw experience of life, through which language becomes recognized as both medium and the message.
“For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”4
The gnostic belief in inner illumination through self-discovery is the closest esoteric framework to growing mature as a subject. It seeks liberation from the shackles of the animal mind and the impure reality of bodily needs, missing the fundamental fact of existence: that erasure of the mind-body link is not possible, as the distinction itself is nonexistent. Gnosis points to a glimmering light that deceives us into belief in an imprisoned soul. Yet the soul is an aesthetic construct detached from our experience, and any practice lacking tangible results is better viewed as a creative pursuit than a path to salvation.
Modern culture is gnostic in its pursuit of producing individual displays of niche consumption. It gathers the fruits of one’s labor and attempts to sell them back to the author herself, who, by then, can no longer afford them, as the mind is already set on the next thing. The resurgence of the word ‘lore’ is a gnostic symptom. Spontaneous acts of commitment to a tradition are episodic and feeble and reflect an anxious, scattered heart. I cannot trust in esoteric polyamory, because I cannot trust in spreading yourself too thin. There is good and bad confusion.
The letters squeeze, tighten, and elongate into cathedrals, becoming unreadable. Their shapes grow spiky, wispy and hostile. The image loses its boundaries and fixed space, layering itself into oblivion. Meaning becomes obscured. The process of inscription never ends; it loops endlessly in a psychotic cycle of answers without questions. Form stretches over substance, casting a somber shadow. The image is temporal, fading by design. The decision to abandon the process was made both too soon and it was made too late.
And yet, there is divine light and angel wings. Luminescence transforms the person into an entity. An ethereal presence washes away sins. The body becomes silky and pure. The entity is no longer a whore but a digital Madonna. She does not cry, for she does not know what she has lost.
The hallmarks of the post-secular age manifest themselves on the Internet, pointed out a few years ago as the new current thing5. It has not evolved much into devotional practice but rather funneled discourse icons and shitposters into conservatism. Living through times of ‘godposting,’ egregores, and grimoires, times praised for their ‘return to ambiguity’, raises doubts about the sincerity of spiritual exercises in style conducted outwardly. They form up in a spectral, digital shape and solidify as fashion accessories. If this truly is an approach at new sincerity, it lacks depth and commitment. An ambiguous display of belief, whether literal or associative, meets eyes and souls hungry for purpose but ultimately provides nothing.
To imagine post-esoteric times
To envision post-esoteric times is to see a change in consciousness, where multitudes of esoteric beliefs are seen as rooted in singular, secular wisdom.
The retroactive agency would lie in realizing that, for centuries, we have sought to access the same inner domain through esoteric paths—a domain that could also be understood and approached through secular means. A prerequisite is to trust in the universal, underlying Lack—an opening that we gradually attempt to bury with knowledge and beliefs focused on self-help, purpose, and the fulfillment of a subject inherently divided by default.
Thinking about post-esotericism makes me wonder whether this Lack can ever truly be filled, whether it’s possible to dissipate the cloud of unknowing within and understand God through personal experience. To access the Lack. Or to accept it, if one chooses to remain faithful to Lacan. The new quality wouldn’t come from confidence rooted in the aesthetics of a private landscape, but from the confidence of solving a Mystery through faith entrusted in oneself and formed outside of language. It would come from firsthand experience of the motor fuelling esoteric drives, a bridge between the esoteric and the mystical.
The hallmark of post-esoteric times would be a universal access. The accelerating circulation of knowledge makes the arrival at a shared, universal understanding seemingly inevitable. Science-based fiction turned reality. Maybe the new revelation will not come as a person, but as a consensus. Exercises in cultural clairvoyance open up hearts set on deciphering the present. I close my eyes and imagine forking paths converging into one passage of massive pilgrimage and my phone rings and I become distracted. This is based on a true story.
If post-esotericism ever comes, I believe it will come with a set of fixed instructions that lead to a shared lived experience. This fantasy is mathematical in nature. I trust it will point to a meditation-like practice, yet refined, simplified, and universalized, that can be taught hand in hand with reading, writing, and brushing your hair.
Journeys of personal fulfillment, trials and errors in reaching God, even finding God in your heart could coexist with post-esoteric times, yet they might render some of those practices obsolete, just as belief in the four elements has faded with time.
Until a collective shift in understanding oneself comes, only those lucky enough to stumble upon that path will undergo it. This journey is guided by luck, much like the birthright lottery we all take part in. Luck is a sword you must bear by its blade. If there is one God that we should fear, her eyes are blindfolded and she is covered in gold.
I look into the red, ominous eyes of a lucky Chinese frog and see a man with a fire gut, a man big and hungry enough to swallow a whole planet. The planet burns inside and turns into gas and the gas circulates and makes the man wobble and lose balance and stumble and fall, shattering his intestines into a million of pieces as his gut had already become glass.
I believe in change and I believe in luck, in the sense that I believe in placing bets on life unfolding itself.
May this frog bring you luck in the upcoming year
Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo
The Secular, the Post-Secular and the Esoteric in the Public Sphere, Kennet Branholm
New Age Religion And Western Culture Esotericism In The Mirror Of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaf
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Intimacy and The Machine: Godposting - or: New Internet Esotericism, Biz Sherbert