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Journal

…are occupied

Our minds are occupied. Invaded and colonized by media, advertising and brands like an enemy force. Our culture invaded by uniforming – same shops, same restaurants everywhere – and the real-estate in our minds forcibly rented out for the prize of small conveniences. We are marketplaces where battles are fought between giants that doesn’t even notice which head they are in or what mess they are creating. They leave the depleted resources behind without further considerations for our future when they eventually discard us and move on. Resist occupation – get occupied by yourself!

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Journal

Your thoughts…

People are never alone with their thoughts anymore. No wonder the world is what it is. I try to avoid having railway-thoughts as much as I can. All kinds of media hijacked our thoughts and that’s where most of our stress comes from. There is no time to understand or develop yourself, let alone comprehend your surroundings. And it’s impossible to see the big picture if you’re only staring at a few pixels. Your subconsciousness ends up running the show when your consciousness is not present. The monkeys are in charge while we are away inside screens. This is not a new insight but worth repeating, if only to myself. Turn everything off and be bored once in a while! Reclaim your thoughts!

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Mind & magic

Conglomerate personalities

The physical reality is not the only reality. There is another, less thought of, reality that is equally real. It is created by our culture, our social paradigms and it is as real as our physical existence. We all live in multiple realities. This non-physical reality exists in our collective minds, in our culture and makes manifest in action, words, writing and so on. Ideas are intangible but very much real things and they affect the physical world constantly.

The same way thoughts shape who we are. We are not merely biological lumps of flesh – we are the sum of both the physical and the extra physical realities that makes up our world. That is how we in our psyche can be another person than we are physically. And it is no less real just because the difference is not visible to the eye. You have to look deeper to see that dimension of someone. You have to gain insight into that person to see who they really are. And by who I mean that in plural.

Because no one is just one person. I am a conglomerate of several personalities, impulses, hidden feelings and hardwired responses. I got several creative strains, curious and bold bits and pieces as well as the bad sides, as doubt and spleen (in the sense poets used to use the word). Sometimes rambling, sometimes taciturn. Sometimes the wise man, sometimes the trickster.

And I’m fluctuating – both internally and in contact with others externally. For instance, I can’t easily explain who I am. My identity is diverse but singular at every moment. Mind you, this is no weakness, it gives me strength. But as I said, it’s fluctuating. It all depends on who I am with. This range of identities doesn’t show to people, they meet the same one, and I keep a solid facade, can’t break conventions, society wants labels, clear cut and unambiguous people that are easily understood. Gradients are effectively repressed so that there is only two official colors. Who’d want a complicated society where everyone is different?

So I act very differently towards different people. I also act different when alone depending on mood and I don’t know what – I’m fluid and unpredictable. The thing that is supposed to be me, my self, I, is in fact only a control center trying to make sense of all the parts conflicting and warring. I am not one person – I am many. As we all are.

Or are we all? I’ve met so many people that never seem to change. They are very solid and unmutable. One-dimensional. They oppose change, they get upset by non-binary possibilities. I have heard a person actually say that he had done what he wanted and now only wanted every day to be the same. Someone really said that. Yes, really. So maybe we are different. Maybe some people are just one person while others are an entire menagerie. Nothing wrong with that. Celebrate diversity! Life would be simpler but rather boring if my inner crowd dispersed.


Added later: Career-wise I am constantly moving through different expressions, albeit of the same core profession. I have successfully worked as film director, director of photography, editor, photographer, graphic designer, author and lately as copywriter. I’ve won awards for both writing and directing. And people have payed me good money to work with these different expressions. I enjoy it all but tend to drift between them which makes it difficult to convince people that I am rather good at all those things. Because you can apparently be good at only one thing, just look at mr DaVinci. Irony intended. In the end it all comes down to different aspects of storytelling for me. That is my core profession. I’ve thought about calling myself a pan-medial storyteller. But no one will understand what I mean by that so maybe multidisciplinary storyteller would be better. Except for the discipline part. I defy discipline but rather enjoy to enforce it in others. But that is another story.

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Journal

A little mishap

This morning I was trying to get into my sweater through the arm before I realized that it was not the right way in.

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Journal

Save Your Darlings!

You know, I’ve never liked the expression Kill your darlings. The thought of cutting out something you really like because it doesn’t fit in is entirely backwards to me. Now I’ve encountered this situation again while working on an old treatment for my next novel. And I’ve decided to cut everything else out and Save my darlings!

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Journal

The NAMJH-hippie

Last week a friend helped me to mend my old pentagram pendant. It has been broken since I was young and deep into studies of the occult mysteries. It broke late one night while I did an enthusiastic, and probably intoxicated, dance routine at a local metal/synth/goth club. I recently found it again and thought I’d revive it and wear it under my shirt. But somehow it snuck out at work and a co-worker happened to see it.

Co-worker: “I see you have a pentagon necklace. Do you know it’s a Jewish figure that in yoga-practice symbolizes union and inner balance…”

Me (saying): “Oh, is that so? Too bad I’m in a hurry and have to go now.”

Me (thinking): “GET THE FACTS RIGHT YOU CULTURELESS UNEDUCATED NEW AGE MUMBO-JUMBO HIPSTER HIPPIE!”

No offense to real hippies. Middleclass hipster hippies on the other hand… Next time she’ll probably say: “I listened to the singer Maradonna, who sang Like a Virgo some years ago, and she taught me, so now I am kabbalah. Which is a native North American religion that symbolizes our bond with dolphins.”

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Journal

A moment of angst

Relaxing with a glass of wine, the fantastic album Prey by Tiamat on my turntable and my cozy home-after-work-clothes. Suddenly I feel a horrible lump on my left boob. Fuuuck! How could I have missed this aggressive growth!? The horror! Death! Angst! Then I realize it’s just a popcorn that snuck in under my shirt.

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Journal

All pictures are manipulated

“The pictures lie about my age. But doesn’t pictures do that all the time?” I wrote in a comment recently, striking quote-worthy gold.

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Journal

Neuzodiac

My neurons are in a favorable alignment at the moment, according to my own neurological zodiac.

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Mind & magic

What is magic?

While I agree with the modern definition of magic as “to intentionally cause an effect” I would like to add my own statements about what magic is to me.

  • Magic is the effect/outcome/product of thinking.
  • Magic is the transference of thoughts.
  • Magic is metacognition. Getting aware of yourself and to some extent affect that self.
  • Magic is connection – to other minds, entities, currents, realities.
  • Magic is to shape and create layers of realities by changing your state of consciousness.
  • Magic is finding, unlocking and accessing previously unavailable unconscious parts of yourself.
  • Magic is to take control over your mind and not be controlled by urges or impulses, to make conscious choices. Doing things not because you have to, but because you want to.
  • Magic is reaching a higher vantage point; to observe our mundane selves, to understand, evolve, and appreciate those selves and their beauty.
  • Magic is taking part in the [entirety] before the wave breaks. To reach existence beyond actual reality, to take part of the world larger than physical life while still a human, before we die and become something else than the one we are in this waveform.
  • Magic is (or at least was) tuning in to patterns, currents, culture, collective subconscious, ideaspace, the zeitgeist, etc, to form a understanding of things to come (which looks similar to but is not the same as precognition).

So, just to be clear, there is nothing magical about magic – it’s all in our heads. However, it’s no less real, and things in our heads have a tendency to move out into reality. And when they do it is magic – manifest of thought, in action or artifact, or as another state of mind.

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On writing

Speaking of canon in fiction

I’m actually thinking about breaking canon within the novel I’m writing right now. Different chapters will state things that don’t match, on purpose of course. Subtle at first, then more and more. It’s crazy, I know, it shouldn’t be done, but my brain works this way… for some reason. What do you think, is it crazy, should I stop this idea right now? Or did someone say genius?

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Mind & magic

How to be a magician

Exercise your mind. Let it wander, let it wonder. Make it afraid, make it reel. Force it to work, make it relax. Excite it, please it, direct it, restrict it and rest it. Dissolve all borders. Focus and collapse, again and again!

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Mind & magic

Humor is the key

Love isn’t all you need; it’s laughter you need. Horrible things are made by lovers in the name of love (love of people and gods). But laughter disarms. Those who share a laugh also share common ground. It eases fear and creates meaning where there might be none. It strips power from unjust power. It enlightens a heavy world. Humor is the key.

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Mind & magic

The Value of Nothing

We get to borrow one life out of nothing. But then, after a limited time, we’ll have to hand it back and return to nothing.

While we are something we can use that existence as best as we can, by giving values to anything we feel should have value. To assign value to things and then appreciating that value may bring us comfort, happiness, motivation, etc. But as soon as we’re gone, that value we imbued in things is also gone.

Sometimes a value can be carried a bit further by those that are still alive. But that is only a postponing of the dissolving value. They will die too and as soon as no one cares or remember anymore, it is gone again.

This is because not only we, but also the value itself, is borrowed from nothing. However valuable to us – it is really nothing.

Even the entire Universe itself is energy borrowed out of the true vacuum of nothing. It is a Sea of Frequencies with rising and declining waves. Matter is rising from (sub-)quantum fields and from matter our cells, bacteria and bodies emerge as a chemical conglomerate of molecules.

In the end we are all but the aggregated coagulations of matter, of waves, of nothing.

To enjoy nothing, to give value to nothing, accepting that it is only temporary, is, at least to me, a kind of positive nihilism. It calms my chaotic self and gives me solace from the burden of imposed purpose. It truly liberates my will.

It’s an invaluable marvel – cherish it, value it, make the most of it while you are something.

There is no God, only The Sea.

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Mind & magic

The four basic forces

“Magic, art, language and consciousness are four facets of the same thing”, says Alan Moore. I think of these facets as the basic forces that shapes our realities. Our entire culture is built from these forces. How we interact is through these forces. The qualities of life is emerging from these forces.

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Mind & magic

Magical beings

Angels and demons, ghosts, beings, visions, burning bushes. They are real – but we project them all from ourselves. Alone or together. We are waves projecting waves. From inside we make them autonomous insofar as we cannot control it with our consciousness. They are feelings, emotions, memories, influences from the outside that get stuck inside us, events, words & spells, accidents, intense experiences. It coagulates and becomes something manifest inside. Angels and demons or cerebrions and mygdalons. We can conjure up, evoke, summon, them with our magic and will, but they are not obeying unless we follow our own believed or constructed set of rules on how to contain and control them. Uncontrolled and unrestricted they can be very dangerous. But all gods, demons and angels can be of service if humans harness their powers.

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Mind & magic

Doctrines are Alphabeths

Occult systems, religions, superstition, myths and stories, etcetera, are more or less intricate systems for describing the outer and inner worlds. They are alphabets which can be used to make abstract concepts, feelings and thoughts manifest in an objective way as words. Doctrine form a symbolic world of words which makes it easier to understand, discuss and remember. Unfortunately that alphabet often gets mistaken for the actual world and people start believing, or even worshiping, the words themselves.

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Mind & magic

The Veil of Coherence

Some things are made real only through agreement of many people and no one believes it can be changed. Those things are made up concepts that is considered unquestionable “normal” or “natural” and “how it has been and always should be”.

The positive effect of this is that it brings stability and trust in that these things, even if we can not see or touch them, will still exist. Ten dollars is ten dollars and never nine dollars whatever it’s exchange rate.

The negative is that it strongly inhibits change. Like Saturdays. They do not exist, there is really no such thing as Saturdays, it’s just another indistinguishable rotation of the Earth relative to the Sun. But even if everyone would want another Saturday in a week instead of, say, a Wednesday, it’s extremely difficult to change, though not impossible.

If enough people agree to lift The Veil of Coherence we could have two Saturdays every week.

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Mind & magic

Everything and its opposite is one

One important thing to understand is that magic is never an isolated event. It is always a relation, reaction or an effect or correlation of something. It’s like if I push down here, that other part will rise. And we can not have anything without its opposite. High ambition can bring contempt for those less ambitious, but neither is the only true way. You are the faults of your qualities. The vivid energy of Chokmah (the male, the pure energy, the symbolic lingam) need a receptor to not be wasted; and the latent energy of Binah (the female, the form and potential energy, the symbolic yoni) need a trigger to activate. One thing needs another to become, and another needs one that became.

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Journal

2018 – Predictions, not promises

  • I’m gonna focus on being a writer, a musician and a slut.
  • I’ll strive to be comfortable with my appearance, trade stress and worry for self assurance and acceptance, and to be way more uninhibited.
  • I won’t neglect myself – neither to please someone nor to not upset them.