Meet Seán Ó Connor

We were lucky to catch up with Seán Ó Connor recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Seán , really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

The concept of purpose is a pretty facinating one, even if it is a struggle at times to identify it. Not only in terms of discovering what is behind the phenomena of Being- why am I here?- but on a very personal level what sort of collaboration with the universal order is available to us that brings out one’s talents into a greater sacred utility. I’ve lived a life where at times I’ve been aware of purpose as an intrinisic certainty, and at other moments been utterly confused and afraid of such realization and activity. .

I fancied myself as primarily a creative since I was a little one, and really organized my life so that I could develop as an artist and a storyteller. I was lucky to grow up in Los Angeles and Seattle in the 80’s and 90’s where there was an abundance of compelling inspiration and opportunity of expression to inform me of what I thought purpose ought to be. And to be true, purpose to me was primarly about my own satisfaction- however well-meaning and valuable my creative efforts were to others. But it wasn’t until my midlife years when I began to take my recovery from substance abuse seriously where I found astrology and psychic arts as a method of healing and introspection. There, I pivoted into the potential of service rather than my own subjective passions because I had to get well- or else make a bigger mess of my life! So I’d say finding purpose is between the intuitive sphere of accidental miracles and a long maleable hand of fate.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I’m a writer and director -primarly for cinema- but in the past five years or so I’ve been fully engaged as an astrology and psychic arts consultant and teacher. Over the last year I’ve really had the itch to get back to work as a creative, and I’ve been endeavoring to bridge this concept of ‘cosmic mediumship’ with the cinematic arts where my abstract knowledge and intuitive prowess comes through narrative film rather than being primarily expository through slideshow presentations or my writing.

I’m lucky to have a convergence of training in a mosaic of fields, probably just because I’ve been a Chironic collector of experiences and modalities as someone who is nearing fifty year old, so perhaps my purpose is telling me I better bring it all together! For example, I have a MFA in Screenwriting under my belt from the David Lynch School of Cinematic Arts at Maharishi University (which probably sounds more exotic than it actually is) and I’ve been pairing up that know-how with my Evolutionary Astrology and mediumship background into feature-length screenplays. I have few irons in the fire in terms of projects, but moviemaking is game of failures and fortunes and it costs a shit ton of money to make it happen. So in the meantime I stay productive with my readings, classes, and research.

I do have one feature film that I wrote and directed that is almost in the bag. The making of it is a whole saga unto itself, but god willing it should be out sometime in 2025.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Honestly, I think the most wonderous thing a human being can do is get so stoked on something that one has no idea how to pull off it at first. That’s a great underated skill if you ask me, having a curiosity that leads to a unique expression.

For example, when I was an early teen I was enamored with hardcore punk, and I didn’t know how to play a guitar other than a sad Louie Louie. But I saw some great bands that blew me away, and quickly all my free time was devoted to noodling around on the six string until I could harness the mysterious power of music and get on stage myself. Pure experimentation that took three of four years because I was passionately devoted to an art form I didn’t know how to break-down technically at first. But as soon I was exposed to it, I was certain that this type of creative activity spoke to and for me.

Even today if you were like, “Seán, play me a F# pentatonic scale or ‘Children of the Grave’ from ear,” you’d get nothing but rubbish out of me because I’m self-taught in my oown stubborn way. But I can still compose something accurately moody for myself according to my own adolescent mastery. What’s funny now is I’m a bit of an avant-garde jazz dad- which would be totally disturbing to my teenage self!- and I don’t play guitar much anymore (and certainly not the ‘chugga-chugga’ of my youth). But learning how to do something through the directive of what I was passionate about taught me how to create other ways of meaning in life, like writing or learning astrology or how to communicate with spirits. I come across a lot of folks in my work as a consultant that have a beautful and intrinsic creative potential to them, but for whatever reason have never felt entitled to pursue it. And I’m always like I don’t give a fuck if you’re ninety years old, you life will change if you dignify your curiousity with action. Just like a crazy anti-social kid in his bedroom learning bar chords., you can innocently start something at anytime and before long your spirit finds ways to talk to others in a language that you developed for youself.

There’s also this weird distinction most of us hold between spiritual arts and creative arts. I believe that whenever you can cross-pollinate your work as any sort of practioner with your artistic intelligence, your skills are going to go through the roof. To come back to this idea of purpose, my philosophy is that we’re endowed with this ability to create beauty in the world from this abstract and intuitive awareness. So if we’re a Reiki healer, maybe we can apply this extraordinary miracle of energy work to a painting and consecrate this gift for the senses to take in. Or let’s say we’re a trance medium, let’s colloborate on a track with our ‘control.” No one even has to see your work or know that you’re some weird spirit worker, although it might surprise you when folks feel into your authenticity. It’s all for the sake of the vitality of expression and the expansion of your sophisticated eternal state in this finite, relative world. , Especially when you exercise your art as a threshold between dimensional intrigues, you’re gonna excel in all that you do.

Lastly, be really comfortable with folks not ‘getting you’ at first. If you’re bringing in something for the first time on Earth, which again on a level of purpose is what we do as human beings, people will be unfamiliar with their own response to it at best, or intimidated and disparaging at worst. Take in the constructive criticism if you want, but stay weird because what is unique about you is compelling to the glory and diversity of the universe. Sometimes it takes developing a thick skin as sensitives to protect your miracle, and it may not sound too touchy-feely, but if people don’t get you, that’s their problem.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

I actually have two heavy books that have really informed me in last decade as a storyteller that I doubt you’ll ever see in film school (unless they ever put me on the faculty): Jodorowky and Costa’s The Way of the Tarot and Maurice Fernandez’s Astrology and the Evolutionary of Consciousness (Volume One).

Especially in narrative film, there’s this Campbell-esque template of the three-act hero’s journey that has become the vernacular backbone of most of the movies we all see. And that’s terrific, there’s a mythological contenance we can detect to most works, even if it’s Weekend at Bernie’s or Meatballs. But I like to think that there are interesting variations on our narrative assumptions that can be found in both arcanas of the Holy Tarot, and within the zodiacal development inherent in Evolutionary Astrology. And these Masters have a lot to say about the story of life.

WIthin these tomes, Fernandez and Jodorosky/Costa have inspired to me to look outside the box in terms of symbolic correlation and narrative sequencing with their commentary on how these great archetypes interact with one another. I always suggest to my dramatic art collegues that they take a psychic class like Tarot or an astrology course, not to fetishize mystical knowledge, but to deepen their mythological and archetypal intelligence.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kinofkins.com
• Instagram: aniarakasha, kinofkins
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• Youtube: kinofkins

Image Credits

Analog Photography and Design by Seán Ó Connor. All rights reserved.