It started when I was traveling. I adored silver jewelery and eventually ‘that thing’ I was keen on, turned out to be an amulet! And I was off, from then on, wherever I went, I made sure to get an amulet. Protection, prosperity, long life, it didn’t matter one bit to me. Christian, Buddhist, Animist, again, not an issue.
This is how I came to find myself haunting the fetish market in La Paz, Bolivia!
I still wear them, one has even become the ‘going to the dentist’ amulet! I’m not sure I consciously believe they have power unto themselves so much as, whomever owned it before me imbued it with good vibes.
I don’t know if this counts as “woo,” but I am enamored of the myth that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife. The Dan Brown stuff, Tau Malachi’s books, I’ve got several novels that are written around that theme - I don’t know why, but that appeals to me.
And yes, I am aware that Dan Brown’s book contains almost no factual information whatsoever. It’s just a fun mythology that I dig.
I play with tarot cards somethings- I’ve got a few tarot apps on my iPhone. I figure the value in them is not what the cards say, but how you interpret and react to the cards. The very act of thinking “Okay, yeah, that’s it” or “no, that doesn’t seem right at all” can help you figure out what you really think of a subject.
I firmly believe that many psycho-active drugs are overprescribed and are not as effective as popularly believed.
I wouldn’t say that I believe, but I’m starting to opening up to the possibility of magick have some validity. The are two reasons why. One the author Daniel Quinn, a writer that I have a tremendous amount of respect for, said he had two experiences that made him think there’s more to the world that science can explain. One when he was a child he saw some kind of half man half beast thing looking at him through his window and that it wasn’t a hallucination. And the other was when he was a young man he saw, for about an hour, that everything had this sort of divine fire emanating from within. If it was anyone else I would think they were a nutcase but with him… I don’t know. It makes me think there’s something to it.
The other thing is the comic book writers Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Both are practicing magicians. Not illusionists. Full on occult magicians. I knew about this for a while but I just figured it was just eccentric writers who took too many drugs. Grant Morrison even said that he was abducted by a UFO. But recently I heard an interview that Alan Moore gave talking about magick. I’m paraphrasing, “Magick is absolutely real as long as you understand that it takes place entirely inside your own mind.” He went on to talk about some other writer who claimed to have literal magical powers and Alan Moore said how he didn’t see how that it was physically possible. Instead of turning water into wine why not just go to a liquor store? That interview made me think there might be something to the occult. I’m not sure what, and i’m sure 99.9% of what you’d find in the New Age section of a bookstore is bullshit.
I’ve even started fantasizing about being a magician myself. I never would. I’d be mortified to admit that I tried performing a spell but I have been thinking about it.
Reincarnation (sorta) – I can’t really say I believe in anything of the sort, but the question nags at me: If my consciousness arose once in this universe, might it rise again? I might not even be human, but an animal or even a being on another planet.
Another scary thought: What if there is only one true consciousness, it’s just being reincarnated for every living creature in the entire universe. Which would mean I’m you and you’re me, and we’re that beetle that’s feeding off a carcass somewhere in bangladesh. If our memory was lost from jump to jump, how could we ever know?
ALSO:
Space aliens. xtisme pretty much summed up my feelings and thoughts on this in post #5.
Also, not to hijack, but I think it’s in line with the OP.
When you see an odd, bright light in the sky, day or night, who’s with me that they secretly hope this is a true UFO, as in aliens (or even a meteorite)? That they’ve just spotted something extraordinary and are always secretly disappointed to realized almost instantly it’s just a plane or helicopter or venus reflecting the light of swamp gas off a weather balloon.
I just want SO BAD to confirm the existence of such highly advanced beings in my lifetime. To make first contact. It would change everything. And I’m not convinced they’d come all this way just to ruin our shit. But, yehhh, I know the chances are astronomical to nil. sigh
Even though I am a (non denominational) Christian I have seen karma at work too many times to not say there is something to it. Good or bad, it will grace or bite you eventually.
As an original Pacific North-westerner (recently returned to the home turf) I do believe in Sasquatch. I don’t know what it is for certain, but there are…things out in the deep woods.
I’ve seen this expressed as the Universe being sentient but not yet sapient and trying to understand itself. By living trillions of lives the Universe learns.
Tarot cards. I have a tarot-card-of-the-day site send me one every morning and I make of it what I will - it’s very general, and a lot of blather, really, but why not? If it’s a ‘good’ card, maybe that psychologically sets me up for the day to look for ‘good’ things. Even a ‘bad’ card has a silver lining. I own several sets, my favorite being the Aquarius deck (the Magician looks exactly like Jim Morrison). I don’t tell fortunes, I don’t read the cards unless someone asks me, even for myself. I just like looking at them!
When I’m not feeling well (flu, cold, etc) I have this weird belief that if I climb into bed & wrap myself up with a lot of blankets & quilts, to the point where I am Really Hot, that I will ‘sweat’ whatever is wrong with me out of me.
I know that this has no basis in fact and that its the rest & the sleep that helps me. But I do it anyway and I’ll kid myself when I feel better that it ‘worked’.
Along that same line, my mom used to pour hot olive oil into our (me and my siblings) ears when we had an ear ache, and my grandmother had us gargle with Clorox when we had sore throats. I still do the olive oil (and tequila on the gums of infants when they are teething, but I think this is actually reasonably sound), even though I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually do anything.
When I was a teenager I read a book about out-of-body experiences. There were actually instructions for how to will your “astral projection” out of your physical body and float around and stuff. It sounded cool, so I tried it.
Obviously, I never actually succeeded in doing this. But I found that after trying for a few minutes I could slip into a kind of fuzzy, dreamlike state, and I always feel very relaxed and peaceful afterward. I still do it every now and then.
My woo is also about aliens. I like to believe that there are actually plenty of alien civilizations out there fully aware of our existence and choose to leave us the fuck alone.
Even the Klingon version of alien is thinking: Hell no, those earth people are fucking nuts.
When I was young, there were Afrocentric books that talked about levitation and such, through meditation. I knew I wasn’t floating, but damn if I didn’t feel like I was!
