The Problem With Faith

A Magician's Musing

Faith to a magician is a very different thing than it is to the religious. It usually seems to fall within the confines of personal experience and the microcosm. We may have spirits who guide us, whose threads weave our life stories, and we may have a solid faith in that, but what of the world at large?

Those spirits with whom we are aligned are seen as individuals, within an animist context, and as such they aren’t exactly in charge of this realm but (much like ourselves) residents thereof. Even if our own life paths are guided by individual beings in whom we are fortunate enough to place our trust, this still affords us little in the way of a balm to greater, world-wide sorrows.

The fundamentally religious seem to almost have a leg up in this department over us magicians. They can potentially afford to place their trust in something ultimately all-encompassing, where for us the cosmic order may dissolve in a cloud of agency and logic within an ocean of probabilities. Who is running this show? Is it a committee? Are they on fucking holiday this century or something?

In most time periods throughout history, the magician’s faith would have been plenty. We would never have been made forcefully aware of the unique and horrific struggles which stretch the world over each morning when we offer our biometric data to the technogods to gain access to the feed. The trauma happening on the other side of the planet, and the digital free-range data-based prison system being erected around us as we speak, would not have been concerns with which we were forced to wrestle.

Technology has totally transformed the human experience in such a way as to spread awareness of trouble beyond its natural containment borders. We now must sit with all the trauma instead of the trauma localized and relevant to us and our Places. Additionally, every single thing you have ever done is being logged and filed and will probably be leveraged against you at some point in the future (Lifelog is Facebook, look it up). This is pretty grim. We are careening into a world where privacy is an historical myth (until AI re-writes history itself) and self-policing will become the norm to avoid technocratic punishments administered through bureaucratic AI-powered systems of control, much like in China today.

Even worse, it seems as though genocide and human trafficking won’t be stopped simply due to our awareness of them, nor will punishment reach those who coerced others to take experimental medicine (which turned out to be quite dangerous if you’re paying attention to the recent senate hearings) and what we are left with is a feeling of helplessness. Maybe even hopelessness. We take on the despair without having any recourse to rectify it. This is an unhealthy dynamic, especially if we have no model for higher powers having a plan for this mess.

But what if this mess is blessed?

Hear me out.

Sorrow without purpose is tragedy. Sorrow with purpose is growth.

The unhealed wounds of humanity at large could simply keep repeating forever, or until we extinguish our own species. We could simply never learn better ways to be in the world and with one another. This shit show could go on indefinitely, breeding more wounds and suffering without any hope of relief. If someone doesn’t intervene, if there is no greater plan, then we are quite fucked indeed.

But what if, just what if, we are all being inoculated against these terrible ways of being and treating one another? Most people have, in a very short time, gone from laughing at the idea of 9/11 being an inside job, elite pedophile trafficking rings, NASA as a Nazi cult, and Covid and the jabs being an orchestrated freedom-revoking operation (or ritual of compliance) to accepting at least a couple of these things as really how the world works. These crazy, pessimistic, neurotic views are being confirmed as reality through official sources on the regular and I think it is vital that we examine what this is actually doing to us on a grand scale.

Once we have seen the darkness and accepted that it is real, we will not forget again, won’t slide back into blind optimistic compliance to the power structures which have all but ruined the world. Little things like Afroman’s court victory and the ongoing saga of Bricks & Minifigs (please support Reckless Ben) are small but profound examples of people thirsting for justice on a smaller, actionable scale. The greater evils are causing us to recognize the patterns which led us to them in the first place. Whether we realize it or not, we are getting our vaccine.

There is a Youtube channel called Farsight. It is run by a guy who plans to live to be 150 years old by undertaking an extreme dietary regimen in which he ingests almost zero fat. This is apparently a very real thing a person can do, but there are costs. His face needed to be reconstructed because the loss of fat, remarking that he looked like a corpse. He runs a group of remote viewers who communicate with what they call ETs (spirits, obviously). Back in the fall of ‘25 I watched a video in which they said that the “good ETs” had delivered the message to them that they needed to get a few things done in a short time, all of which revelations. One was about the truth of Covid. Another was the truth about Jeffrey Epstein. The third was the truth about 9/11. They wanted to orchestrate these revealings within a certain time frame in order for the masses to be forced to acknowledge that things really are that bad in earth realm. That we have allowed things to get that out of control. These revelations, they said, would begin a domino effect which cascades throughout the human experience and shows us definitively what we do not want to be as a species, culture, society.

And I’ll be damned if that man with the plastic face who plans to live to 150 wasn’t making some kind of sense. This is the world we are in. Those claiming to be spiritual masters are a joke, and the plastic-faced immortal on youtube is a prophet. Upside down world. Kali yuga.

But the point is that yes, there are greater forces at work in all of this than the evils of men. And while our own blessed bleeding hearts would never approve of a genocide or a 9/11 or an Epstein as a form of medicine which eventually makes humanity as a whole less sickly and demented, we must acknowledge that we simply cannot see things from that vantage. We cannot pan out far enough on Google Earth to see what the great big spirits who are managing this species like loving (if not somewhat disappointed) parents have in store for our spiritual development as one human body.

Perhaps we won’t fully understand why we should not be cruel until we have had our fill of cruelty. Perhaps we cannot understand the gift of freedom until we all collectively face imprisonment. It is only through adversity that the shape of what is right can be fully articulated and set in stone. It is only now that the insidious technologies which have caused us so many problems and were literally invented with the forethought of control at the helm can be turned around and weaponized against the debased, the cruel, the oppressively selfish through a harmonization of basic, species-wide, essential morality.

The human spirit may be getting a tune up, and it may be an ugly thing to be a part of. But it also may result in a truly different world. One in which struggle and suffering take a back seat to exploration and the contrast between nice and not-nice have less of a gaping chasm between them.

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s creation myth which is essentially his own spirit-transmitted version of the book of Genesis, he observes that out of the beings who sang the world into existence all of them willingly harmonized with one another. All except one. Melkor chose to offer dissonance to the music, and all evils throughout every age of the world are a result of that dissonant voice. The question inevitably arises, at some point; Why would he be allowed to continue, if it caused such chaos and strife in the world?

For starters, because unconditional love is the freedom to choose. And, well, Eru did stop the music, but only for a moment, and only to tell Melkor that his chaos ultimately furthered the grand design. Eru really was that guy. Every attempt Melkor made to twist the world to his own will simply became a tool to devise things more beautiful and marvelous than what could have been without him.

These are the places I go when things feel overwhelmingly dark. May they bring you comfort. May they bring you an awareness that we are all in this together and that regardless of our relationship to beings at those heights, they do exists and we are not nothing to them. There are grand designs which cannot be sullied by the darkness, for the darkness (whether it knows it or not) is an integral part of the grand design.

Art by John Howe