creativity

Connection, Contemplation, and Useful Bullshit

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Connection, Contemplation, and Useful Bullshit

Remember when your spiritual interests led you to discover correspondence charts? The wild experience of associating flowers and planets and minerals and days of the week to gods or elemental powers?. The appreciation – if not admiration – for the effort that went into them? The sense that “yes, some of this seems weird, but . . .”?

Correspondences are a core part of a lot of occult, religious, and spiritual practices. From the Sephiroth to the Hexagrams of the I Ching to the Planets, it’s everywhere. Even when you don’t think it’s there, it may well be there just disguised a little bit. Humans like their correspondences, and I’m here to advocate that Correspondence Charts are pretty damn useful in our spiritual endeavors.

They can also be fun and not a little bit goofy, but I think there’s value there, so I will joyfully advocate for them.

Firrst, what do I call a “Correspondence Chart?” Pretty much anything that attempts to align some kind of “Power” to manifestations and parallels in our world. For instance my interest is in the I Ching, so the Trigram of Heaven relates to metal and to sun and circles. Planetary correspondences like the Ibis, the Hare, and Hazel being “Mercurian.” You’ve probably seen plenty of them, but I figure some examples can’t hurt.

Me I like to contemplate correspondence regularly. My preferred methods are to do so when walking, relating things I see to the I Ching. Sometimes it’s in quieter contemplation of symbols, meanings, and the changes of the world. It’s an erratic but regular part of my practices.

In time, I found the following values in Correspondence Charts.

First, when you contemplate these things, you may find actual powerful correspondence. You know the one where you suddenly realize there’s something there to, say, realizing just how appropriate it is to associate a certain god with a certain food. There’s that feeling, almost that synchronicity, of understanding something that seems to thrum beneath the skin of the world.

I can’t describe it perfectly but you probably know what I mean.

Secondly, as you contemplate correspondence, you also find associations that may not be “true” but are useful and interesting. Yes you didn’t have some deep sense of connection by, say, realizing what snack foods correspond to what Planets, but it was still interesting. It might not be deep or universal but you learned something and felt some inspiration and you see things differently.

Essentially you got creative and though you didn’t find a universal truth, you found a personal one. You also may have learned some things about yourself.

Third as you contemplate correspondences you’ll have ideas and intuitions that you realize are completely made up and probably total bullshit even if they seemed relevant for a while These bullshit ideas are also extremely useful as well. I consider them part of the value of Correspondence charts.

When you have some deep insight that turns out to be you having one over on yourself, you understand yourself a lot more – you know how you can make stuff up. In turn you also understand how people themselves can make stuff up. It may even give you a better bullshit detector over time. Plus even if it’s bullshit, maybe it’s interesting.

So yes, Correspondence Charts and contemplation of them has value. From deep insights to creative thought to utter bullshit you learn from, they’re valuable in many ways. You might be able to cast an I Ching better or realize you can think some incredibly wrong stuff in the right conditions. Either way you’re actively engaged with connecting to the Universe and yourself.

As a closing example, let me share an experience that was part of what shaped this essay. On one of my walks, I saw a flag, and thought how in my work with the I Ching it was Fire (visual) and Wind (blown by the wind, naturally). Suddenly I recalled how I considered books to be Fire and Wind (which is also Wood in the I Ching). A flag was a Book written on the wind!

Of course after that rush of thought I also realized some flags just hang, so some are written on gravity. In fact what had inspired my whole rush of insight was a flag that was just hanging there. So I guess that was the hexagrams of Fire and Mountain, or maybe Fire and Earth. I felt both very clever and also a bit of a doofus at the same time.

This cleverness and dofus-ness inspired me to write this essay. So something came out of my insights and my bullshit.

–Xenofact

Good for the Spirit, Good for the Mind

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As I write this there’s a huge, understandable panic that AI is being used by students so much they don’t know how to read and analyze it. If you are reading this in a future years removed from this essay, I hope you live in a world where AI isn’t such a concern, and you’reNOTin some post-apocalyptic disaster.

Anyway, whatever your chronological state, here in 2025 it’s been quite a concern. If you let AI write for you, analyze for you, etc. you are essentially outsourcing your thinking and your humanity. You will not develop skills you need to read books and understand things, and the skills you do have will decay.

This in turn made me think about spiritual and philosophical writing and how it trains you to read, analyze and understand. For the sake of brevity to encompass such things for self-development I shall call them spiritual works here.

When we sit down with a spiritual work we are attempting to contemplate, grow, and understand some very serious issues. We bring to it a desire to understand and grow, to engage with the work. The attitude of becoming involved in the work is there at the start.

In turn, the engagement is needed.

Spiritual works are about deep issues, and you will find yourself pausing to contemplate and analyze. We’ve all experienced moments where a paragraph or a page can hold our attention for a half hour. In spiritual works, you may find yourself going over something word by word just thinking what it means.

Spiritual works often use symbolism and metaphor as that may be easy to communicate complex truths, represent the otherwise indescribable, or lead you around a bit to help you learn. Symbolism also helps you think, how the symbols work together, what they really mean, and so on. Again, you are engaged with the work, connected to it.

Finally, many spiritual works are often grounded in a place, a person, an experience, a lineage, etc. To engage with spiritual work is to engage with much more than a book or a menial or a series of poems – it’s to learn about who produced it and the situation that led to it. One small book can lead you to a world of context – and a greater point of view.

Reading a good spiritual work teaches you to read, analyze, understand. A person with an interest about such issues can, in time, give themselves ersatz literary training. I once read a book called DIY MFA about how a person can read and write and analyze to gain similar experiences to getting an MFA – and that feels very familiar in spiritual writing.

So in a world of AI writing and AI reading, remember our spiritual pursuits. Sitting down with a book on philosophy or meditation or metaphysics isn’t just enriching morally or spiritually – it’s enriching literately. Your wrestling with ethics or breath meditation or divinities also helps you learn to read, analyze, and understand.

Just another reason to do it, I suppose.

-Xenofact

The Talent of Delusion

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I’ve been thinking about Conspiracy theories a lot. I mean as my regular readers I know I do that anyway, but as 2025 is the age Conspiracy Theories and reality collide at lightspeed, I’m thinking more. Mostly I’m asking how did we get here – not in the exact causal sense, but how the Conspiracy Theorist mind works.

Lately among my readings, viewings, and podcast-listening I realized that Conspiracy Theory Believing requires skill.

If you’ve ever listened to someone go on about Conspiracy Theories, you realize they are retaining a complex alternate world inside their head. They have a skill to retaining and organizing that information about things that are, let us be honest, not true, sometimes bonkers, and often very bigoted under the skin. Yet these folks can recall it.

More than that, they are constantly resolving conflicts in their theories. Conspiracy Theorists are having the world collide with their beliefs all the time. New facts come in, the apocalypse doesn’t come, the hated (often female and/or PoC) politician resigns, the space lasers don’t fire. Conspiracy Theorists have to re-spin their tales all the time or else they have to question them, and if they questioned them they wouldn’t be Conspiracy Theorists. They’re maintenance experts on believing an illusion.

But Conspiracy Theorists also collide, believers who believe vaguely different things come together – and they display a talent for taking new input and combining them. This is the infamous “yes, and” discussions you can see among True Believers, where a person states one belief, and a slightly different believer agrees, then adds onto it. If you’ve witnessed a Conspiracy Theorist get on a good rant going at an event or in a conversation, you can see this happen at amazing speed as people ask questions.

(The Knowledge Fight podcast focuses on Alex Jones, but has covered other subjects, and in almost all cases you can see their subjects build mythology in real time.)

Conspiracy Theory is a skill, skill is similar to if not exactly the same as the worldbuilding done by writers, gamers, game designers, and artists. They have an ability to create on the fly, to recall vast information, and to adsorb and polish information. The jaw-dropping connections of a Tonspiracy Theorist are all too close to the clever ideas of a good writer to act like they’re not two branches of the same tree.

Conspiracy Theorists are easier to understand if you realize they had a skill at such creations (that they misused) or that they have developed it. It also means the evil grifters are even worse because they have some skill here and use it to screw up the world.

This gives me pause to other ways we might use such an insight to help those lost in these conspiracy worlds to get out.

  • We can recognize this “talent at fabulation” by asking “does this person sound like they’re worldbuilding?” It’s a key to detection. Also if the theorist in question is some evil grifter, we can help people avoid them.
  • If we’re trying to help the Conspiracy Theorist, realizing a skill is being deployed will allow us to help them find their way back with the various oft-discussed techniques.
  • This skill they developed might be channeled elsewhere. As facetious as it sounds, I wonder how many people who have developed this creative skill might find outlets elsewhere. I’m not saying they should write fiction, but who knows?

It’s strange as I think over this insight. I realize some people I’ve seen, some I despise, really do have a skill. It’s just been used or developed in ways making the world worse.

-Xenofact