Double isms in this blog post title. What does that mean??
It means this blog post will be a little deeper than my other ones, depending on how much I can articulate.
First things first, What is Occultism?
To me, occultism is an umbrella term for the study of all things that fall into the occult category – astrology, magick, divination, and so much more.
Spiritual teachers encourage us to question everything, our intuition prompts us when something feels “off”.
I’ve been keeping this feeling of offness to myself for a while now because I didn’t want to make an issue out of it; it’s a sporadic feel that comes and goes and makes me doubt if it even exists. But at the same time, the awareness has come up for me a few times in my mind already that I’ve had to address it by searching online for an answer; apparently there are other people who feel the same way about it.
I personally haven’t experience racism directly but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it, rather a lot of the times it’s experienced indirectly through family, friends and acquaintances who were targeted. One time my old boss made a comment about Asians that wasn’t even directed towards me but still struck a nerve. I let it go and attributed it to him being old and out of touch with modern society. So whatever, I moved on.
Anyways, here are a couple of links to articles that I’ve stumbled upon recently that help me sort of articulate how I feel about it:
Racism and the Occult by Earth Energy Reader
To All My Fellow Wiccans…Getting Something Off My Chest – by Black Witch
I know there’s more, but I didn’t want to keep searching.
As one falls deeper into the rabbit hole as they call it, you become more immersed by buying books and researching topics that interest you.
And I have to say, most of the books I buy related to spirituality, metaphysics, occultism etcetera are penned by white authors. It can be difficult but I do try to keep in mind that people who wrote these books aren’t perfect either – they’re not any better than you or me just because they’re famous or they’ve written books. We are all imperfect beings with room to expand our knowledge. It just so happens that at the time these books were written, people weren’t fully exposed to other cultures.
I’m not offering a solution here, I actually still buy a lot of books because I’m really into those things. The reality for me is, if the content is exceptional, has great reviews AND is valuable to me then I don’t care. I’m just expressing an issue that tends to come up when you’re a person of color exploring these topics. I think everyone has a different experience and you will gravitate to whatever speaks to you, regardless of the skin color of the author/writer/teacher.
Luckily there are people out there creating new tools and writing new books for those of us who still feel [slightly] excluded. Human consciousness is constantly evolving and I am excited about that.
Anyways, the spiritual path is really not to find and settle for a group to belong to and attend meetings every week. Then it would start to feel like going to church wouldn’t it? Something you HAVE to do, and trust me – I’ve been to church and was made to participate. I don’t like the feeling of “HAVE TO”.
You have to explore what feels good and right to you. This is why I gravitate to spirituality and not to any religion in particular – I have the freedom to take only what resonates with me and not have to be forced to believe in something that doesn’t.
I hope to not get old and become racist and close minded. I hope to keep my mind and heart open to new ideas and new possibilites, even if I don’t agree (I sort of borrowed this from Henry Rollins saying this on LA Weekly about living in Redondo Beach and getting old).