"We become what we think about."

 

Reading - Fall 2018

A Case of Need by Michael Crichton

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday

The Carnivore Diet Handbook by K. Suzanne

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki

Hollywood Dead: A Sandman Slim Novel by Richard Kadrey

A Beautiful, Terrible Thing by Jen Waite

I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant

Follow You Home by Mark Edwards

Vanished by Joseph Finder

Buried Secrets by Joseph Finder

Guilty Minds by Joseph Finder

Levon Cade Series V1-5 by Chuck Dixon

The Total Money Makeover:  A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey

Past Tense: A Jack Reacher Nover by Lee Child

Mind's Eye by Douglas E. Richards

----

Secret Six Vol. 2: The Gauntlet by Gail Simone, Dale Eaglesham, Tom Derenick 

Wolverine by Daniel Way: The Complete Collection Vol. 2, 3 & 4 by Daniel Way, Jeph Loeb, Steve Dillon, Kaare Andrews, Simone Bianchi, Jon Proctor, Marjorie Liu, Doug Braithwaite, Scot Eaton, Will Conrad, Stephen Segovia, Antonio Fuso

Captain America: Operation Rebirth by Mark Waid and Ron Garney

Wolverine: Old Man Logan Vol. 6: Days of Anger by Ed Brisson and Mike Deodato

Jungle Girl Omnibus Paperback by Frank Cho, Doug Murray, Adriano Batista

Death of Wolverine: The Complete Collection Paperback by Charles Soule, Tim Seeley, Kyle Higgins, Marguerite Bennett, Steve McNiven, Salvador Larroca, Angel Unzueta, Iban Coello

Batman: The Dark Knight: Master Race Paperback by Frank Miller, Brian Azzarello, Andy Kubert, Klaus Janson

Deadpool Vs. Old Man Logan Paperback by Declan Shalvey, Mike Henderson

Wolverine: Old Man Logan Vol. 7: Scarlet Samurai by Ed Brisson, Mike Deodato

Wolverine: Old Man Logan Vol. 8: To Kill Forby Ed Brisson, Dalibor Talajic

Deadpool by Daniel Way: The Complete Collection - Volume 1
by Daniel Way, Andy Diggle, Steve Dillon, Paco Medina, Carlo Barberi, Bong Dazo

#TheStruggleIsReal

"Ignore that."

Oglaf Comics

Wait. What?

"See it from as many angles as possible and you might start to glimpse the actual shape of the thing..."

Grant Morrison interview: "Laughter can banish any and all demons" / Boing Boing: "Magick provides a powerful context and support system for even the darkest or most fucked-up times and experiences. Following in the footsteps of Harry Potter, every boy and girl, should familiarize themselves with the disciplines of magic even if only for shits and giggles. It's also engaging and absorbing and creative to make spells and do rituals and to form rewarding relationships with things that SHOULDN'T EXIST.

 Magic encourages you to take charge of your own life so it confers a sense of agency and self-control that can seem lacking at times like these when sort of epic, elemental forces seem to have us all at their mercy. Given the options, who wouldn't prefer to be rampaging around in higher planes, interacting with eternal archetypes and pop culture gods? Who wouldn't want to bring back ideas that could change the world? Things are malleable around the edges right now, which is good news for magicians...

The real world has been getting more like fiction while fiction has worked hard to become more realistic and plausible, as they attempt to meet in the middle. After 9/11 you had to explain the most ridiculous superheroes scientifically, like Iron man or Batman. We witnessed the rise of reality TV, scripted documentary, fake news, cognitive dissonance. We have the rising tide that is VR and AR tech which will shatter the last of the walls. So it's clear to see what an apocalypse of that nature might look like to us in the material world...

Robert Anton Wilson provided his readers with very direct and practical tools we could use to examine our own heads and change the often self-defeating negative narratives we feed ourselves. The exercises in Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology were as utilitarian as the Chaos Magic rituals and DIY shamanism I was practicing at the time and proved to me that real magic is very down-to-earth and pragmatic. They really worked. He also introduced me to the multi-reality-tunnel approach, where you make an effort to see beyond your own narrow view of the world by incorporating as many different viewpoints into your own as you can. 

Experience is prismatic, inconsistent – you know, the sun is a scientist's gravitational fusion process and a poet's host of radiant angels. Both descriptions of the sun are real descriptions made by real observers with different points of view, that when added together give us a more accurate, nuanced understanding of the nature of the sun. To understand any idea or a person or a thing you have to see it from multiple, contradictory angles. The right-wing view of things is justifiably true from a certain perspective. Justifiably untrue from others. And vice versa. The only way to understand this complex thing called reality is to understand it from all the available perspectives. See it from as many angles as possible and you might start to glimpse the actual shape of the thing...

Magic for me is all about maintaining a fluid and creative relationship with things as they are. Simple things, like adding time, or the 4th dimension to the picture can eliminate a lot of apparent psychic phenomena, like clairvoyance, action at a distance, ESP, reincarnation etc. When you add time, you realize fairly quickly that all living things are intrinsically connected as one singular organism. You wind back into your mother's womb, she winds back into hers, like branches retreating into buds on a tree and it all goes back in billions of unbroken lines to the first mitochondrial cell dividing in the pre-Cambrian ocean 3 and a half billion years ago. It's no surprise that sometimes people get a sense of other parts of the structure they belong to, or experience "past lives" – those lives are all still happening, all simultaneously...

And it all sort of came down to magic being this powerful, proven method for stimulating a range of very specific and directed states of consciousness. Using the techniques of magic, we can cure neuroses, increase creativity and imagination, expand our personal limits, you know, we can add more fun, purpose and fulfilment to Life. Firstly, magicians learn to pay really close attention to everything around them; they like to see how things fit together and work so that they can make things of their own, or make things work better. They get more information and inspiration out of every moment. Basically, the work of the Magician involves the skilled, meticulous application of Meaning or Significance to Life Experience. The more Meaning the Magician can add to Life, the more Magical and enchanted the world becomes. Over centuries, to make their lives easier, practitioners of magic have developed and refined actual repeatable, dependable formulae called spells or rituals that produce specific material effects on human consciousness...

You have to be careful with ideas. Magic teaches us respect for ideas and their volatile power. Maybe you simply want to meet someone – as a magician, your job is to wrangle that phantom notion into materiality using all the skills and sleight of mind at your disposal. If you act in certain ways, the universe will react. You can dress up as the lead singer in a band, and if you start to live and behave like the lead singer in a band, people will soon interact with you as if you're the lead singer in a band, a role which brings with it certain expectations, possibilities and responsibilities. You can dress up and go out and become anything you wish to be and the universe will respond to your act by applauding or booing."

"The Invisibles" is a 1500 page (59 issue) masterpiece of Occult Literature, written in comic book form."

Alan Moore and Grant Morrison Occult War for 25 Years | Break.com: "So here's where we get to the part that most articles on the Moore/Morrison feud have missed. I'm a comics reader but probably not expert enough to really detail the history or quality of work other than at the 'fan' level. But I am an expert on occultism. And I can say this: the war between Moore and Morrison isn't just a "writers' fight", it's a "wizards' feud." It is two very different views on magick using comics as a medium to fire salvos at each other....

Magically, the two believe in very different things. Neither of them are exactly orthodox, but Moore is a more traditionalist kind of wizard. He is an admirer of Aleister Crowley's "Thelemic" magick, and the philosophy in his Book of the Law. He appreciates the value of magick as a kind of art form, and in turn, considers art to be a kind of magick. Grant Morrison is from the school of "chaos magick", who practice magick that is less worried about rules and ritual and more about trying to get things done. Magick can be done from just about anything, as long as you have the right intention. Chaos magicians tend to like mixing up elements from a whole variety of different cultures and history, to reinvent it all to fit whatever they're in the mood for, and have no problem with doing magick for personal gain (or to change the world) rather than just for human transcendence. Moore's very loud statement of declaring himself a Magician in public may just have been a factor in motivating Morrison to go whole-hog with the 'occult comic book' thing, when he started on "The Invisibles" in 1994. "The Invisibles" is a 1500 page (59 issue) masterpiece of Occult Literature, written in comic book form. Its winding plotline tells a single long story (with various sub-plots) about a group of occult rebels using magick to try to liberate mankind, opposed by a cabal of black magicians in positions of power and authority trying to use sorcery to control and oppress humanity. It is, simply put, one of the greatest comic series of all time."

"Culture is a game."

Subversive Batman.

"The quote is derived from the 1938 novel Alamut by Vladimir Bartol, which tells a fictional account of Hassan-i Sabba, the leader of the Ismailis branch of Shia Islam and founder of the Hashashin order. In the novel, the maxim of the assassin group is written as “Nothing is an absolute reality, all is permitted.”"

The magic is not inside you.

"I seem to be a verb." - Buckminster Fuller

See also Grant Morrison, personality & fiction suits.  Conflict avoidance is not a core personality trait; it’s malleable according to circumstance « Random Xpat Rantings: "Many of the personality traits you describe are malleable. Operant conditioning can make dramatic personality changes, and people can find that they are not the same person they were five years ago. My personality routinely is dramatically different than five years ago. Avoidance of conflict is something I can point to in myself as something that has dramatically changed since I was in my twenties, and even thirties. It changed through having conflicts. I just got used to it, plus routinely found benefit in conflict. It’s still more pleasant not to have conflict, as I don’t have the pathology of having a high conflict personality, however I’m now very quick to initiate conflict – even extreme conflict – when I feel it required. And of course that’s a huge help."

That's what the voices in my head tell me.

"“Delete your ego” is, of course, a primary game played in cults... Corporate America studied this in detail and has applied similar techniques..."

Magick.Me Blog — Why You Should Have a Huge Ego: "Since I got into spirituality, people have been laying this “kill your ego” trip on me. 

The Ego is a concept created by Sigmund Freud to denote “the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions.

It was part of Freud’s unique internal cosmology and has no direct analogue in Vedanta or Buddhism, which have much more complex terminology for the self. The Buddha, of course, came to a realization that there is no actual individual self—the idea that you have a unique, core, true “self” is—according to the Buddha—actually a kind of cognitive illusion created by the interconnection of phenomena. 

Now… both of these concepts got mashed up by 1960s psychonauts who started taking really really fucking potent LSD, and entering states in which they momentarily perceived their selves as, well, cognitive illusions. Afterwards, they tried to explain their experience first in Freudian terms (“I realized the ego is a lie”), and then with a bit of Eastern mysticism (“The Buddha said the self isn’t real and that’s what I saw on LSD”). These then got mashed together as the general idea that you have an “ego” which is “bad” and that if you “delete” it, you get closer to “god.” (Because psychoanalysis and Buddhism aside, Western people are Christians deep down, and what we’re really looking for is a communion wafer and some penance and lashings to make us more “good.” Hence acid and “killing our egos.”) 

--

“You have a big ego” is a covert game by which spiritual, New Agey and occult people police each other’s actions. It actually means “you’re not doing what I think you should,” “your actions do not jibe with my ego,” or even “immediately cease thinking for yourself or questioning, and think and behave only as I or the group leader wish you to.” It means “you are not following my/the group’s script.” “Delete your ego” is, of course, a primary game played in cults, and a primary way in which compliance among cult members is achieved and enforced. Corporate America studied this in detail and has applied similar techniques to organizational psychology and human resources in order to control employee behavior. So let me say this again: “You have a big ego” means “you are not on script.” “Delete your ego” means “get in line.”

--

You’re goddamn right I have an “ego.” I have a right to have likes and dislikes, to be angry or “negative” when I want, to have lust, greed, pride, envy, sloth and the rest. These are part of what make me human. And to simply amputate my basic humanity doesn’t serve me at all: It only makes me compliant, docile, easy to manipulate by others.

--

So this is a key point: I have an ego. I have a right to my ego. I can turn off my ego if I like, or leave it on if I like, but what I do with my ego is fundamentally nobody’s business but my own. Spirituality need not and should not hang an “open season” sign on your sense of individuality and self-worth. Cherish your ego. Follow your own script."

"We get put on the straight and narrow path and told to be responsible."

"The Berenst#in Bears Problem" & the Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

I distinctly remember "Berenstein" as well.  How very odd.  The Berenst#in Bears Problem: Are We Living In An Alternate Worldline?: "A couple months ago, someone left an innocuous comment on my post 4 Weird “Clues” that Parallel Universes Exist. The comment was this: “You need to look up the Berenst#in Bears problem.” My response at first was probably what yours is now: The what? But after a quick Google search, I realized what this person was talking about. The Berenstein Bears. Now, if you don’t know about The Berenstein Bears, they were a series of children’s books, and eventually a cartoon, created by Stan and Jan Berenstein. They focused on a family of bears, and did the usual educational children’s book/tv series thing. Simple enough. I remember them, vaguely, and I believe I owned a book or two when I was a kid. It’s been a while. So what’s the problem? They’re not The Berenstein Bears. They’ve never been The Berenstein Bears. Despite the fact that many others remember them as The Berenstein Bears, and I myself still pronounce their name as The Berenstein Bears, this is false. This is wrong. They are The Berenstain Bears."

Also the Wood between Worlds: The Berenstein Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe & the Wood between Worlds: On the Berenstein Bears Switcheroo

"Connect back with the body. Fuck fate, fuck destiny and all that. This time we learn to control our happiness health and strength." - Wim Hof

"We do not not need psychotherapy.  Fuck off.  Just breathing.  Just bring back the control within yourself.  Connect back with the body.  Fuck fate, fuck destiny and all that.  This time we learn to control our happiness health and strength.  And that's not philosophical or sectarian, that's chemistry."

Documentary Explores the Possibility of Gaining 'Superpowers' Via Meditation and Focused Breathing | The Daily Grail: "Here's a fascinating Vice documentary on the possibility of much greater conscious control of our bodies, using meditation and focused breathing to allow direct modification of our autonomic nervous system, cardiovascular system, and immune system. Such abilities are of course part of a number of ancient Eastern traditions, but it was interesting to see it through the prism of a modern European practitioner:

 Wim Hof first caught the attention of scientists when he proved he was able to stay submerged in ice for one hour and 53 minutes without his core body temperature changing. Since then, he's climbed Mount Everest in his shorts, resisted altitude sickness, completed a marathon in the Namibian Desert with no water, and proven—under a laboratory setting—that he's able to influence his autonomic nervous system and immune system at will. Almost everything Wim has done was previously thought to be impossible, but he's not a freak of nature; he's a master of meditation. To demonstrate that any human can learn his methods, Wim offered to teach VICE hosts Matt Shea and Daisy-May Hudson how to climb a freezing cold mountain in their shorts without getting cold. But when Matt and Daisy signed up for the training, they had no idea that the so-called Iceman was planning to lead them on a psychedelic journey across Europe that circled the chasm between science and spirituality."

“Language is the software without which we wouldn’t be people.”

 "Language is an informational creature of some sort."

"There is a transcendental dimension beyond language..."

Makes sense, actually.

"Greetings. We are from the future. Everything is going to be alright. The future is a beautiful place. But you will need some training in order to get there..."

We're being invaded by fiction all the time.

Meeting Their Makers: The Strange Phenomenon of Fictional Characters Turning Up in Real Life | The Daily Grail: "Strangely, authors seeing their fictional creations 'in real life' seems to be a relatively common occurrence - especially in the worlds of science fiction and comic books. Alan Moore once mentioned in an interview that he once saw one of his creations, the mage John Constantine (from the Hellblazer series), in a sandwich bar in London. "All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine," Moore revealed. "He looked exactly like John Constantine. He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar." Moore contemplated whether he should go around the corner and double-check if it really was his own character that had walked into the bar, or whether he should just finish his sandwich and leave. "I opted for the latter; I thought it was the safest. I'm not making any claims to anything. I'm just saying that it happened. Strange little story."

 Another person intimately involved with the Hellblazer series, artist Dave McKean, has also recounted a 'meeting' with a comic book character: Neil Gaiman's 'Death', from the Sandman series (which McKean created covers for). During the process of travelling to San Diego, someone died on the plane, and as he was waiting to board the plane again McKean says a girl dressed as Death walked off the plane and past him..."