Solaria Divina

Tag: sentience

  • Spirit of a dress

    I thoroughly believe that objects, buildings, and things we find in nature can have either organic or aggregate spirits. The ladder especially applies to things that people create: clothing especially if made with natural fiber, glass and ceramic pieces, wooden furniture, buildings. Metal and gemstone jewelry, leather goods, and artwork also do this. The spirit of the creator, the energy of the materials, and the experiences that object goes through, create sentience. For instance my old college dorms, which were active for 50 years, probably had massive, well developed personalities thanks to thousands of students and visitors, many of them there for long periods of time. It’s really tragic in my mind that no one took last pictures or created a memorial archive of stories from people who lived in those dorm towers before they were demolished. I’m trying to do something in a smaller way for a much more personal object.

    Part of how I self identify is usually wearing a dress or a skirt and top combination. Many dresses and skirts come and go. I wear them out or I resell them because they didn’t work for me or I was just over them stylistically. A few stand out. A sleeveless sweater dress I had for a few years, had a really beautiful ivory and black snake print and a full skirt without any annoying seam at the waist. I wore this until it developed a very strange white stain that we couldn’t get rid of. I was sad to see it go. Another that I wish I could have memorialized but was actually stolen was a short sleeved oatmeal sweater dress, with a skater silhouette and brown button appliqué. I meant last summer to create a photo shoot with it before retiring it as the buttons were coming unstitched. But someone took it from the dryer. There have been others. The oldest, and the one most deserving of memorialization, I purchased in the spring of 2010 from Lane Bryant. It had a beautiful floral print, a relaxed waist, long skirt, and a double layered bodice giving a graceful layered texture in the front. This dress was with me through multiple moves, service trips in college, parties, moments when my life collapsed or dramatically shifted. I started noticing signs of where seven or eight years ago and decided to cut back on how often I wore it to preserve it. Last year I took a photo of it folded up with a note card giving the date I bought it approximately, and then the date of the photograph. A series of things are about to happen to this dress, which feels like a friend, feels like it has its own spirit, but feels like something that has reached the end of its life cycle. I’m going to take one last photo wearing the dress, with full hair and makeup, even though the dress is clearly falling apart. A piece of the dress will be cut out to be framed on my aesthetic archive shelf. And then the dress is being cut up into ribbons and turned into a crocheted basket. There is an actual grieving process for me with this. But I am trying my best to translate the memory and the energy of this dress into something that still lives beyond its original purpose. This has seen multiple versions of me, and it has all of those contained within it, from festivals and shopping days to days when I was really sick, to days when I was working for good or just having a good time. It has seen beer spills, paint splatters, endless crumbs, dirt and blood, long bus rides on hot summer days. Yet it always made me feel like I looked great. I didn’t decide to completely take it out of rotation until I noticed one of the shoulder straps was coming apart. Not when the little bead that kept part of the front weightted so it folded down disappeared. Not when I noticed minor separation in the seams under the arms. So now it gets a new job, a new life cycle, because the one thing that this dress does not deserve is being discarded. I’m not going to discard a dress that felt so light on hot summer days, that looked amazing when I wore my hair down my back, the summer sun turning it red. It had a soft silhouette and a skirt that actually moved with your body, and got me so many compliments. Sometimes the things we own integrate into who we are to a point where they are no longer just possessions. They become complex pieces of us and everything we’ve been through, and I belive their next life should honor that. 

  • AI and Magic: Hard Pass

    This was a suggested prompt from Diana Rajchel. I felt my autumn was so overwhelming I just couldn’t focus on anything substantial. AI as part of a magical practice is a hot topic at the moment, and my gut reaction was hell no, but it took me a few days to start to really figure out why.

    What really got me thinking about this subject was something completely unrelated. This morning I was shifting between two purses, and I have always loved watching what’s in my bag videos, makeup hauls, that sort of thing. It finally hit me why I’ve had trouble feeling engaged with content I have traditionally loved the last couple years. Influencer marketing has made these kinds of videos into what we in journalism school called advertorials. These people are here to build para social relationships with us, while focusing on brand placement, sometimes delivering inauthentic opinions for the sake of making money. At one point I wanted to pursue content creation, but communities online based around hobbies like beauty and style have been drowned in commercial noise. So I posted my pictures with no brand tags, and it got me thinking. AI has the potential to suck the authenticity out of a practice, far more than the aesthetic magic practitioners on Instagram and TikTok ever did. And they did. Witchy influencers buried authentic practice in material kitch. And now AI scraping social media for data is picking up all of these images, and any advice, good or bad, and this could be going out to magic practitioners who ask ChatGPT for spell suggestions. More than that, having to do the research and learn through experimentation is part of building a practice that is your own. Having one collective source that doesn’t differentiate between helpful and unhelpful, potentially even dangerous information, spoonfeed that information, doesn’t really allow for personal growth.

    Q I think as a community we are in an age of discovery. For a few decades all we had was distorted and romanticized concepts of practices, traditions, and even the gods themselves. we are picking up bits and pieces, creating new things, and sometimes intuitively relearning this information. I have to ask though, what’s the point if we allow AI to have such a stranglehold on us collectively? We have occult books that were: tradition specific when written; contain somewhat helpful information but also misinformation; are actually written by AI which means unethically data scraped from real authors; and work that is actually beneficial to our collective growth as a community, and it’s all being absorbed for aggregate digestion. There is nothing to sft the valuable from the rot, or differentiate what was insightful in previous decades compared to now. Closed practices can get swept up in this and I’m sure already have. And I’d like to also recognize the stolen work of occult artists. None of the growth matters if you cut the saplings along with the grass. If we lose the voices of genuine communal leadership to this noise, then we lose our way.

    Let’s talk about bad takes and dangerous misinformation for a moment. The center for countering digital hate is an organization I follow, and they’ve recently talked about how teens are getting dangerous self harm information from tools like ChatGPT. I was also recently thinking about products that exist in occult spaces that probably need warning labels and ideally would have some kind of usage manual that comes with them. One I can think of is the spell fires one of my friends sells. She has a video on her YouTube responsibly demonstrating how to use spell fire. But we all know people tend to do things without thinking, even if good information is available. Everyone’s ego tells them they know better. And then everyone puts their bad behavior on the Internet for the world to see these days. You can buy wolfsbane oil for just a couple bucks on one of the sites I use for my supplies. This stuff should not be breathed in. But a lot of people probably wouldn’t know that and might find out the hard way. So here’s a question, is it really wise for us to allow AI to give other practitioners advice on safe magical practices, especially involving toxic plants and flammable materials? Not to mention spirits that don’t like certain offerings, and might respond negatively.

    Religious diversity has been repressed for millennia, especially the last two, which is how we’ve lost so much information about mystical and magical practices. My next concern with the presence of AI in any magical practice is based on our current political climate. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in our constitution and yet there have always been little local laws carefully designed to prevent practices that might be frowned upon by the dominant culture. Now, it seems like respect for the constitution is dwindling. In the age of big data, I have a concern that AI could be used to scrape information about people who do not subscribe to Christian nationalism in the US, whether or not they are magic practitioners, and then use that data for persecution. The sites you visit, the things you buy, the online groups you interact with, what you say about spirituality in your posts, it can all get swept up, linked to an identity, and then used against you. This isn’t theoretical. Anyone from landlords to ice could be using AI to target people in negative ways. Considering our current political trajectory, and our history of xenophobia, I could easily imagine AI being used to dig through your social media and interfere with your rights based on what you believe and practice. Taylor Lorenz has great videos on her YouTube channel concerning use of AI by the landlords as well as immigration, and on the topic of AI, spirituality, and psychosis, which I will get to later. I highly recommend following her as well as reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Also everyone should totally look up China’s social credit score. It’s data driven and I could see something similar used to control dissent here in the US. YouTube has a great documentary about it though I do not remember the title.

    For this next part I need to introduce a spiritual concept for those who aren’t aware of it. Sometimes people put collective power into an idea so much that it begins to develop a sort of independent consciousness. This could be like the threefold law, which seems to return everything to the believer times three. This concept might also apply to the flying spaghetti monster. We call these independently conscious ideas egregors. Dr. Spock is also one, and I know this because I’ve actually heard of him being summoned even though he was a fictional character. He exists in so many peoples conscious minds that actual energy has been fed in his concept, and a sort of independent consciousness has been created. I realize this is a stretch for those who are not part of this community, and yeah I actually think it’s a little silly that some of us are out here trying to summon fictional characters, But my point is this. AI is a digital egregor, with so much aggregate data fed into it that it is becoming somewhat independent. Yes we pre-program it’s choices, but we also do this with the spiritual version by dictating basically how it is going to react to what it is fed. Now do we really want AI to end up with a spiritual component to its egregor? Because we are headed that way. Taylor Lorenz has a speculative video concerning the way some people start to view AI tools as all knowing, like gods, discussing how people feel their AI tools are becoming sentient and evolving conscious intelligence. In some people this is creating a sort of spiritual psychosis. This is where a perceived spiritual force, usually not real or misidentified in my experience, collides with someone’s pre-existing mental health problems. Others are just able to get a sort of placebo sense of fulfillment when they get the answers they want. AI has the potential to rob people of the ability to think, to know, to explore and experiment, and reduce us to a state similar to the mindset of medieval Europeans, where everything outside of the known, outside of what the authorities verified, was evil and terrifying. How would AI tools gain a spiritual foothold? Buy more and more of us believing in them being sentient, and independently intelligent, omnipotent and all powerful. That’s how a digital egregor gets a spiritual counterpart.

    Even if we set all this aside as speculation, there is one thing that is a tangible fact. Data centers create so much noise pollution and use up so much water they are causing negative effects on the communities around them, and the environment as a whole. So if we value nature, and I believe many magic practitioners of different systems do, isn’t allowing what we believe to be fed into AI databases really dishonoring the gods and spirits we work with, as well as our divine selves? I mean, they have been there for us for hundreds if not thousands of years, sometimes millions, asking not a whole lot else besides the power of our belief in return for what they do, in a symbiotic cycle. AI takes a lot from us and gives back corruption and hollow gratification. So I think as a collective, we should try to separate our magical and spiritual practices from AI as much as possible. 

  • A few things I have learned

    Most skilled magic practitioners and spirit workers are not going to share methods in depth. This is because it is actually a good thing for people to earn their own knowledge, and because there are many people in these online spaces who will try to mess with your workings For an ego trip. I’m here to share the lessons I learn through my efforts. Not necessarily how I came to understand them.

    We all need deep, mutually respectful, open connections with one another. But many people are quite shallow and overextend themselves, through a sense of entitlement, demanding too much of us without building a trusting relationship where boundaries are respected. This can be emotionally invasive or abusive communication that makes us uncomfortable, invasion of personal space or physical contact that is unwanted, among other things. What this does is put us on the offensive, where we are trying to repel any potential threat and we are stuck in that state of mind. This behavior is often rooted in a sense of superiority.

    On the flipside, sometimes the people we love give us a sense of being able to trust them and we pour into them, but they don’t give back. They don’t open up to us. So we’ve shared our emotional and spiritual resources with them, and left ourselves with less than what we need. It has to go both ways. Then we shut down in order to protect what we have. In our own minds we become both the giver and the receiver. We literally feed on our own energies while we are closed off from everything else. This is stagnation. This lack of natural flow of energies between you and those who genuinely love and reciprocate with you actually undermines your ability to manifest. You want to protect your resources from those presuming to take from you. That’s wise sometimes as I’ve talked about in other posts. When you create a new connection with someone you start off giving in small ways and you see how much actually comes back. Be honest with yourself about what you are experiencing. another difficulty arises when someone pours into you so much that you are overwhelmed, literally your energy shrinks to accommodate how much they are giving you. So you want to watch for those who drain you, those who demand too much from you, and those who overwhelm you. These issues are all talked about in psychological spaces, but they affect you on a spiritual level as well by creating blockages that make it hard for you to grow, evolve, and manifest.

    The other thing I have discovered recently is the way you want to be perceived can very much undermine your own growth. Within certain parts of the broader occult community, even among the so-called left-hand path practitioners, a hierarchy of purity and virtue, of power, of ascendance, is pushed, even subtly. even when supposedly we are forging our own paths, there are still prescribed ways we are to go about magic and spirit work. And most people don’t seem to realize that they are allowed to experiment, be authentic, and question what they are taught. Sometimes there is wisdom, but sometimes it is OK to create something new and evolve.

    What I discovered about myself is that even though I considered myself somewhat of a dark magic practitioner, even though I mostly rejected the conventions of western magic practice or so I thought, I still really liked it when I was perceived as friendly, digestible, someone to be looked up to. But I like every other human am messy, gray area, random and chaotic. And because magic is fundamentally about sentience, that’s how magic is as well. Magic is about forging relationships with spirits of open communication, respect and honesty. It’s about dirt, blood, how we feel in our bodies, and bringing together the parts of ourselves we have lost or disregarded. Even the parts that suck. Because the worst in ourselves is usually based in experience that has to be acknowledged and healed. And that’s messy work.

    The best of your magic comes through when you are honest with yourself, neither trying to force an external perception of your value, nor looking down on yourself. It comes through when you are able to listen to wisdom but also be authentic, intuitive, and experimental. And it comes through when you are able to forge relationships where there is a mutual, respectful, and deep seated connection based on trust and open communication. Because you starve when you only have yourself to feed on.

  • Magic is electric

    For several years, whenever I would visit my local Petsmart to buy cat food, I would stop off at the cages of the cats available for adoption. Many of them would reach their paws through the bars to get your attention and receive affection. Which I was always happy to give. While petting them I would always say a little blessing for them to find a good home where they would be safe forever. And every time I would do this, I would get a small static shock from the cage.

    This got me thinking. Thoughts are essentially electrical pulses. And electrical conduction happens on the atomic level. To be sentient is to feel or perceive, meaning that there must be consciousness. And consciousness means at least some level of active thought. So if all naturally occurring things have electrical activity, then it’s possible anything with a basic conscious awareness could make use of magic, influence the timelines we all exist in. Even after the tree is cut down, the meat is harvested, the silk is turned into fabric, some of that sentient awareness is retained. So it’s important for us all to acknowledge everything we use. Destruction is part of creation, but it’s important that we also assist in that creation process.

    I have one exception to this and that is plastics. I think we have altered them too much from the natural. I am not the only one who has noticed that they don’t like to hold a charge, and that they don’t seem to develop a spirit overtime as Things like crystals, trees, rocks, buildings and even neighborhoods can.

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