what is creating?
an occultist guide to generating the new
i want my writing to do something to you. to make you into a vibrant builder of the future. an unreasonable experimenter. to resist nihilism and nirvana by becoming-creator. to be invigorated by a burning desire to shape reality, to invent new paths for humanity beyond the “human.” to become a participant in the making and affirmation of life, to transform the limits, demystify the social order and re-mystify new horizons.
in order to do that, you cannot, you must not be a passive consumer of my work. you must engage your cognitive faculties, your body, your intuition and impulses. your intelligence that is equal to mine. you must think, play, put into practice and make it act in your life. otherwise we are merely here replicating the mechanisms of all that;s mediocre and is in the service of the current social order and systemic opression.
you understand what i am saying here? you can’t read as a past time, you need to read to build something with the writers you love. to enter into a becoming in which both of you turn into something other than what you were.
but isn’t this a contradiction to everything we have explored here so far? We have seen how everything returns, there are no original ideas and that all intelligence is equal. We have seen how there’s no consistent subject or object beyond their representation. We have observed how everything we think we are is produced by material conditions.
where is these acts of creation? this becoming where something new is generated?
there are two questions than in the headline of this essay: what is creating? and, what is creating? we ask ourselves what is to create and what is it that does the creating?
here i think the paradoxical nature of our conversation comes in handy. when we think about agency, will, creativity, we often, due to the structure of language and our current world, think of a someone from which they emanate. we ask ourselves “do i choose what to do next?”, when we think about intelligence we think about the intellect of an individual. but once we discovered the illusory nature of the individual agent, something is liberated. all of a sudden to create might be a force that intact itself on and through an individual, perhaps a force(s) that is the individual itself.
there’s a saying of the old occultists:
we demystify only in order to mystify better
if we deconstruct (demystify) everything to sch granular details that we realize “we” do not exit as a consistent thing, that there’s only matter and nothing but matter and we are all products of out material conditions, that reason and good sense are the enforcers of a meaningless social order that makes up for its pointlessness by inventing arbitrary aims and goals and divine orders; than we do so only in order to construct (mystify) new goals and aims, new means.
seeing beyond all illusions, first exposes to us that 1. we are not free and 2. reality is meaningless.
as necessary as these conclusion are, they are only a step on the meandering journey of experimental exploration. staying here, as many thinkers, philosophers and cultures do is exactly the nihilism Nietzsche warned us about, an erosion of the will to affirm life, a death drive that devour everything that makes life worth living. when we continue instead of stopping there we discover a whole new universe full of vitality, new mystifications.
but we must first start by the deconstruction, by the realization we are not free, otherwise we keep producing the same, replicating the existing sameness of social order, of gregariousness as Nietzsche called it, that serves the few who control the many, the slave morality.
so in this sense, perhaps to create is to realize we are not free and that reality in meaningless which in itself, if we don’t fall to passive nihilism can start initiating a process of creation of new meanings, new art, new languages, new impulses, new subjectivities and becomings.
i detest the use of “creatives” and “creators” today. posting on social media is not inherently creating if what is being put out there merely replicates the same stuff that already exists. in the same way calling ad executives “creatives” is delirious when all they do is propagate Capital and its Consumption. not all art is creation, only revolutionary art. to create is to make something new that subverts or breaks out of the social order, of the normal and acceptable. to make new connections, to synthesis new worlds together, to build new collective stories that takes humanity beyond its prescribed reality.
perhaps, that which creates in not an individual but what becomes of an individual when they realize their un-individualness. that which starts emerging beyond the edge of the known, of reason, of the common sense.
so we have we have a point of departure: a great violence against existing order and the multiplicity of creation as a cosmic force.
all of this which sit very well with our notions of intelligence as an equal force. for intelligence is not reason, logic or the good and beautiful, all of which are meager interpretations and anthropomorphism of the Real. Intelligence moves by entirely different kind of non-sense, it is the very relational life force that moves it all, including you who is now reading this and thinking about this (hopefully) and by that becoming able to verify that this intelligence exists in you in an equal way to anyone or anything else.
it all sits wonderfully well with all of our observations about alive matter that produces the Real and the absence of the Subject-Object dichotomy. It even works with the notions of how everything returns for it is the very repetition of return, of this same Substance, Power, Desire, that keep producing difference.
and yet, and yet…unrelenting paradoxes all around remain. it is perhaps their very absurdity, not only as a they exist on their own but how these paradoxical absurdity is being experience in the heart of the thinking-living-creating creature; that is the point from which invigorating affirmation of life and the new starts emerging.
you see what we did here? we created something, better mystified. not another truth, higher truth, something more beautiful or good or reasonable. we have leaned into Unreason together and came out the other side with something, with a feeling, a new intensity, an invigoration, a thirst for more life, for new life.
i want you to judge all of this not by how closely in adheres to what you already know or to what’s acceptable but by what does it do. what does it generate when you put it into action and make it act in your life.
this journey takes the two of us.
i decided to stop for now the daily posting in favor of working on longer essays where i have space to create without immediately putting it in front of you and at the end of which having something you can enter and go on a journey, like the podcast episodes we used to release. i may still post short ones here and there when inspiration take a hold of me but i long for writing longer pieces and having space and many walks to merinate in them before putting them out there.
i hope you enjoyed this series so far! if you want to delve deeper into these themes of intellectual emancipation and come together as a group to construct methodologies and emergent principles that can guide your journey to building a new world beyond capitalism, than join us for a full day intensive at Sprawl. spots are limited and you choose what you pay so grab your seat early.
and if you want to help me build alternative solar punk infrastructure full time and coming here to document the process and synthesize the lesson for you, consider becoming a paid subscriber. a barely noticeable amount for you, a massive difference for you, for me and all the communities i am part of.
i hope i am living you today with something that makes your heart excited for possibility.
see you soon. i love you.
