The Onion

tbh though the more I understand it the more I'm actually falling in love with it from a cognitive behavioral (and even moreso from a dialectal behavioral) standpoint. I've reached a point where I can recite the DBT manual back to front (300h of therapy) and I'm pretty in-tune with the science-based aspects of behaviorism, but I'm hitting a wall where there's only so much sterile data tracking I can keep doing in my personal life. Even with a lot of it automated through biometric monitoring (fitbit etc) I'm finding it difficult to truly engage with raw numbers on a day-to-day basis. The esoteric experience fits into dialectal behaviorism in a similar way that zen Buddhism does (and the syncretic aspect allows the zen buddhism to be simultaneously integrated) in that it accepts the organic way that the human brain most readily processes the continuous feedback loop between sensory input and behavioral output.

The human brain is much better designed (as much as you can call it designed anyway) on a very basic level to engage with singing and dancing and rhythm and story and shiny rocks. I'm finding a lot of joy (and mental / emotional peace) in looking at esoteric traditions and creating my own personal rituals that incorporate those concepts (like reframing negative thoughts but using concepts like you see with a rosary where it's both tactile and repetitive). And I come from a social / cultural milieu where those stories and that imagery are very ingrained (the "modern" meyers briggs personality typing system can be traced back to Galen's humoral theory, which is also where astrology and hogwarts houses come from; it's literally the exact same concepts just with more emphasis on self-determinism), yet I don't personally have any specific stigma OR trauma around them. I'm also largely agnostic anyway in that I think debates about whether or not god exists are pretty much moot in that if there is a god it's by definition beyond our comprehension anyway, and the more important discussion is what we do to theorize, act on, and evaluate the best ways to be kind to our fellow humans.

The two things I also have to keep in mind though are that

a) a lot of christians these days (particularly evangelicals) would consider this highly heretical (especially when it comes to trinitarianism, which when you look into the history is pretty much just an excuse to commit political and imperialist murder, and a big root of the long-running christian tradition of the same). This is especially darkly hilarious when you consider pentacostalism where a deep esoteric spiritual fervor is actually explicitly encouraged, but with very little mindfulness as to what specific behaviors you're actually trying to grow within yourself, which really just creates a malleable mob mentality for a capable enough cult leader.

b) on the other end, many people DO have specific traumas in relation to traditional christian imagery and concepts and aren't able to separate them in a healthy way. Not that I was particularly prone to evangelizing to begin with, but the specific nature of the esoteric experience is to also understand that it IS esoteric, that is, highly personal. I enjoy talking about it (especially when it comes to the history, anthropology, and even sociological context), but I'm also not going to tell people that my views or practice are necessarily the best, especially since the very thing that makes them so effective is that I've specifically tailored them to myself. The downside to this is that I'm still forgoing that community ritualism that gives adherents to mainstream religions that social reinforcement and feeling of community (which I think is a big part of the observed health benefits of religious practice).

TLDR; I'm forming a 1-person cult, and having an absolute BALL.

For people wondering, the things I've been learning from are:

• wikipedia binges / rabbit holes on hermeticism and other esoteric / mystery religions, especially starting from around the copts and tracing their influence to the modern day. This whole info binge actually started with a deep dive into the history of cartomancy and just steadily branched out into the history of astrology, tasseography, kabbalah, et. (the best part about kabbalah is that as far as I can tell, Christians use it waaay more than jews).
• That top-level comment is specifically referencing this wikipedia article on the SATOR square
• I also watched some stuff from Crash Course on youtube on general history and they even have a mythology course that helped give context, especially on the syncretic aspects (honestly a lot of what interested me was an early interest in greco-roman mythology and similar that they had mutal influence with such as the norse epics; I watched a lot of Stargate as a small child!)
• youtube lectures from people with doctorates or masters in divinity, especially from the presbyterian traditions since they seem to go the most in-depth into the archaeological / anthropological data. You just have to keep in mind that they are approaching the subject from a deistic lens (and they're trinitarians 😠). But you'll at least get a much less fire and brimstone / emotionally charged narrative and you'll get some subjects you can look up outside of that lens to compare and contrast.
• honestly a lot of personal websites of people who actually practice esoteric traditions such as tarot, especially the people that are associated with "schools" of hermeticism because similarly to the way that Presbyterianism values an almost academically structured passing-down of spiritual tradition there's almost a sort of smaller generational tranmission of traditions within that community.
• If I think of any specific books I will add them but the big one I read recently was literally just Ancient Christian Magic (you can see in my history some posts about some of the entries that really cracked me up). If nothing else, go through the glossary and read up more on the concepts it briefly explains (that's how I ended up reading about the SATOR square).
• I also recently really enjoyed Feng Shui Modern. You can see some of his shorts on Youtube under the account @dearmodern. He takes such a delightfully practical approach to describing why those concepts help create a space that people feel safer and more comfortable in, which I really love because like you see above I really like finding ways to incorporate those spiritual aspects into my life a way that's really mindful of what benefits I can actually gain from doing so. It also covers a lot of basic concepts of taoist spirituality which is both similar and probably shares a lot of the same roots.
• In a similar vein I've recently enjoyed this version of the i-ching because I started this whole thing by reading about cartomancy and the i-ching is a very similar concept where randomized imagery (but in this case textual vs literal images) is used to stimulate introspection and connections between the present, past, and possible future. The reason I liked this version is because I'm less familiar with the eastern cultural references and this has very clear-cut notes for stuff like "this is a cultural reference to when King Wen's son approached the Shang King to plead for his father's release and was tortured to death" etc.