NitN 35 - Death (Ottomic Wakes up to Freewheelin’ Love)

It would be impossible to have a bad podcast episode with the font of knowledge, wisdom, love and synchronicity that is Ottomic! After pulling the Death card from Geoff’s RWS deck Otto dives into a scintillating, poetic discourse on awakening!

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Intro!

They’ve done studies that demonstrate that studying for a test in the future results in better scores in the present.

These are highly controversial studies, granted, but line them up for a family photo alongside all the other psy research that Mitch Horowitz lays out in his 2022 book, Daydream Believer. You’ll have to allow for at least a “maybe” on the question of whether there’s an extraphysical dimension to consciousness. Consciousness might be more than an emergent property of our brains; it might be detached from matter entirely—detached from time.

Grant the premise—your future self can reach back in time and affect your memory in the present—what does that say about the sporadic efficacy of magick? Many people are absolutely certain that their sigils and spells have concrete, irrefutable results. Many practitioners of New Thought are beyond doubt that they are able to effectively select the reality they want via visualization.

The default explanation for their experience is confirmation bias. These practitioners must be ignoring evidence their magick doesn’t work. They must be deceived by intense emotional reactions to its success that make those instances stand out in memory.

I don’t intend to invalidate the lived experience of believers and or alienate myself from the straightlaced, but here’s another explanation for magick working for others and not for me:

The steadfast certainty of belief that seems to be a prerequisite to magick’s success is actually derived from memories of the future.

Unfortunately, this hypothesis supports the conclusion that Free Will is an illusion, a theory that’s been plaguing me for years. More recently, my plaintive discussions of determinism have caused my friends and loved ones to throw their hands up in apparent despair of ever getting me to change my mind.

Their argument is the classic: “We can’t convince each other, but if I’m wrong that free will exists, nothing matters anyway.” I wish I could choose to believe in my own agency as they seem able to, but I just don’t have the will for it.

I’ve resorted to woo-woo petitions for prophecy that free will exists and that I have the capacity to escape the karmic loops and bipolar rhythms that have engendered the misery of my adult life. I’ve developed a method of looking for signs. With a journaling exercise and a walk, I prime my perception to be open to potential metaphors.

Even engaged in what might be called make-believe, the signs I get from the universe all declare, “nothing is going to convince you and you just have to deal with it.”

Still.

I do believe it's possible I could expand that metaphor-perceiving disposition across longer stretches of my day. Maybe that’s the only place free will exists. Interpretation.