I didn’t realize I was such a film girlie until I started writing here on Substack.
I knew I liked movies. But once I started trying to speak publicly on my own terms, I’ve notice how often I reach to film for the visceral feel of what I am trying to say.
When words just can’t do it justice, a good film will often get me there. This time it was Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film, One Battle After Another.
There’s a lot to say about this movie, and plenty of critiques already circulating. But what stayed with me wasn’t the plot or the action. It was the way the film handles authority.
Authority Is A Spell
The scene that keeps replaying in my mind is when Benicio del Toro’s character is pulled over by police.
He doesn’t escalate. He complies with instructions. But their authority doesn’t reorganize his body. The badge doesn’t land. The uniform doesn’t trigger fear or reverence. To him, the whole thing is a bit of a clown show.
The officers have authority in a narrow, material sense because, yes, they can kill him. But they don’t have his inner consent. That distinction—between cooperation and submission—is where power either consolidates or collapses.
Authority is symbolic before it is material. It lives in how we’ve been trained to register certain symbols in our bodies.
A uniform. A badge. A title. A corner office. A tone of voice that signals control without naming it. Long before we encounter real consequences, our nervous systems learn how to respond. The flinch comes first. Obedience follows.
Another scene approaches authority from the opposite direction. Sean Penn’s character Colonel LockJaw is ushered into what he’s told is the pinnacle of success. He’s ecstatic. He is lit-er-a-lly crying.
But he cannot see the truth of what’s in front of him because he’s enchanted by the meaning. Like the foolish hunter who cannot see the forest demon under the mirage of a beautiful woman, LockJaw is glamoured. He is under a spell.
[HERE IS THE ONLY CLIP I COULD FIND, BUT SPOILER ALERT]
Why Sigil Magic
Before I get to dharma, I want to talk about sigil magic.
This is one of the ways witchcraft has supported my dharma practice most deeply: by teaching me both how symbols work, and how impermanent, conditioned, and empty they are.
At its most basic, sigil magic is about how symbols bypass conscious analysis and go straight to the body. It asks how meaning gets compressed into form, and how that form trains response before thought ever enters the picture.
A sigil works not just because it’s “believed in.” But because it is believe in, it conditions attention, emotion, and behavior. It organizes perception. It shapes the nervous system. It teaches the body what to expect and how to react.
By that definition, modern authority is saturated with sigils. Badges. Flags. Logos. Seals. Uniforms. Architectural grandeur. Job titles.
These are not arguments. They are spells. They short-circuit deliberation. They trigger compliance, fear, aspiration, or awe before reason has time to intervene.
We’re trained to respond to these sigils early—and unevenly.
For some bodies, a police uniform signals inconvenience. For others, mortal danger. For some, a corporate office signals success. For others, humiliation or precarity. The spell is not universal. It is calibrated.
And it works because it lives in sensation, not just ideology.
Authority isn’t just enforced. It is enchanted. Which means it can also be disenchanted.
Buddhist Practice as Disenchantment
I in no way mean to suggest that the stakes are not real or high. I hope we have built enough trust by now that you know how seriously I take the stakes.
But the ancient pas de deux between Renee Good and Jonathan Ross is not new. It is an age-old confrontation between symbols that have been clashing since our prehistoric ancestors were first able to make meaning.
Ms. Good broke the spell of Mr. Ross’ symbolic power by refusing to acknowledge it. He responded not just with violence, but with meaning.
By shooting Renee Good in the face, Jonathan Ross wasn’t merely punishing defiance—that was his personal vendetta—he was also trying to recast the conditions that make his symbolic power effective.
If we are all afraid, then we are all captivated.
In a moment when so many collective spells are breaking, Ross tried to reconstitute fear as the fuel of ICE’s authority, and the MAGA ghouls rushed in to amplify his magic through spectacle, repetition, and menace.
This is where contemplative practice and sigil work converge toward liberation.
Buddhist practice, at its most functional, trains us to track how symbolism (and the karmic responses it generates) moves through the body.
It trains attention at the level where spells operate: how meaning rushes into sensation, how sensation hardens into reflex, how reflex becomes compliance.
We learn to notice conditioning not as abstraction, but as a lived loop between perception and reaction.
We can begin to see familiar patterns: how imagery, posture, or tone summons submission; how state power, institutional power, and social power feel differently in the body; how naming those distinctions prevents both denial and exaggeration.
This isn’t just intellectual labeling. It dissolves the trigger of automatic deference.
From there, the real work begins: separating symbol from capability.
A uniform is not the same thing as legal authority. A confident tone is not the same thing as consequence. A title is not the same thing as dominion.
Drawing these distinctions weakens the spell by exposing the mechanisms that generate it, rather than the shadows it casts.
In Buddhist terms, we’re not worshiping or condemning the symbol. We’re investigating how it arises and how it enforces itself in body and mind. And we are seeing all of this as inherently empty.
This is contemplative practice as disenchantment: noticing, naming, and disrupting the automatic allegiance that gives domination its power.
The Body Knows the Training
Next time an authority sigil appears, notice what your body is telling you. Does the throat constrict? Does the urge to apologize or over-explain kick in?
If so. Remember that these aren’t personal failures. They’re trained responses.
Different demographics carry different training because the risks (as well as their functions) are different. Any ethical practice has to account for that without pretending vulnerability is evenly distributed. The point isn’t sameness. It’s accuracy.
What mindfulness interrupts is the permission reflex—ie the learned urge to comply faster than necessary or to grant legitimacy before it is earned.
Often, a single breath before responding is enough to break the trance. Tone loses power when we treat it as stimulus rather than truth. This is the first act of resistance.
Counter-Sigils and Boring Power
Authority works on the body because we’re conditioned to invest meaning in symbols. But power can be worked on, too—turned inside out—when people stop responding with fear and start responding with joy, mockery, ritual inversion, and communal defiance.
What’s been happening in Minneapolis since Renee Good’s assasination is a perfect example of this. Yes, protestors are responding with more certainty than ever.
But there have also been moments that don’t just oppose power, they invert the spell Jonathan Ross tried to cast with those three bullets.
So crowds chanting “kiss, kiss, kiss” at ICE agents aren’t just being funny. They are breaking the spell in real time, reclaiming the body’s response from fear to laughter, disruption, and solidarity.
Video remixes of ICE agents slipping on ice matter. They aren’t just buffoonery. They are counter-sigils. They disrupt the visual logic that says authority is stable, composed, and in control.
They make the symbol contingent again. Fallible. Human. They retrain bodies not just to think differently, but to feel differently when confronted with a masked man in a bulletproof vest labeled POLICE.
This is sigil magic at the collective level: a perceptual intervention that shifts the affective economy of a situation. Laughter displaces fear. Mockery displaces awe. Presence displaces isolation.
Repeated enough, that shift weakens the automatic responses authoritarian power depends on.
We can extend this logic in our own practice, deliberately and without romance. We can cultivate symbols that train non-submission instead of obedience. A phrase that anchors procedural clarity. A gesture that cues steadiness. An image that decouples uniform from legitimacy.
We can also break dominant sigils in everyday life: silently naming “this is a symbol,” identifying actual consequence rather than imagined threat, shortening sentences, offering less of ourselves.
These are acts of somatic refusal. They drain authority of mystique and return enchantment to administration.
None of this is bravado. The most effective stance is often boringly procedural. Cooperate where required. Withhold reverence. Discharge the body afterward so fear doesn’t calcify.
We (especially us white folks) can oppose authoritarianism intellectually and still enact it somatically. But when we practice breaking the spell—collectively and personally—we weaken authority’s ability to enchant us.
That, in my view, is where liberation meets freedom. 🏀
In spiritual solidarity,
🧿Constant Craving ✨
most excellent! F12
it’s a challenge of the multicultural left to share rituals and symbols , to have shared meaning and not just opposition to the mainstream
whereas the empire and its nornativities point to their symbols with ease.
thanks for connecting the systemic social to Buddhist mindfulness
An exciting piece! Wow! Thank you. I'm considering cross-posting it sometime today. Would that be okay with you, Alexandra?