[Note, this text, atm.pdf converted to atm.txt,
as at yoga6d.org/library, is provided for those
who use Adobe Acrobat Reader in Edge in Windows,
and some similar approaches, where the apostroph
in PDF ' for some standard fonts is rendered 
into a copyright symbol; it shows up correct
eg in the Opera PDF reader and in the Chromium
PDF reader. But here the atm.txt anyway as it
should be readable in any browser. Note that
we changed avenuege.com/library into 
yoga6d.org/library when avenuege.com became
commercial, as a maker of our fashion scents.]












Aristo Tacoma



MAGIC OF TIME
A philosophy of beauty




Essay















MAGIC OF TIME



















MAGIC OF TIME

**************
Publication info:
MAGIC OF TIME: A Philosophy of Beauty is available, as
a pamphlet/booklet/essay at www.avenuege.com/library
Keywords: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Magic, Life style.
You can freely copy and distribute this text as long as
the text is whole and unedited and unshortened and
includes this notice and it is done in a respectful
manner. Text is copyright the author. Author's pen name
is: Aristo Tacoma. Publisher info: www.avenuege.com
Stein Henning Braten Reusch alias S.R. Weber asserts the
copyright for publications in his artist name Aristo
Tacoma. Yoga4d Avenuege Library, Yoga4d:VRGM, Oslo, 2018.
**************





























MAGIC OF TIME

Spelling takes are by the angels
--Anonymous

Note: some portions of this were never proof-read after
they were typed in: but the text as a whole should give
great meaning and "those in the know" consider idiotic
grammar/spelling issues to be part of the text's soul.

4

MAGIC OF TIME

Foreword
I've done my homework in physics and this language isn't
for physicists at all. Things are said here with superb
ease that, given the physics content of my Super-Model
Theory, could be expanded on in myriad ways. Unless you're
willing to be imprecise, you can't communicate at the
daily life level with people: this book is for young
people eager to live life.

5

MAGIC OF TIME

Introduction
If you bear over with a slight glimpse back in history
before we get on with what the title of the essay promises
you--with the magic of time--then we will have an idea of
why such an essay like this ought to be written.
The very, very simple story--and not speaking of all the
planet, and all cultures, but mostly technologically
developed ones--is this: in the twentieth century, it was
fashionable to say that 'time is an illusion'. Especially
spiritual people said it. 'Live in the now', they said--
and to me, it sounds like an excellent advise. But the way
they understood it was, put simply, don't be on time.
Because if you aren't on time you are as if proving that
you have an artistic nature, that you are spiritual and
that you 'take it easy'.
The non-spiritual people--those folks look to the clock,
they look at the calendar, they 'don't live in the now',
but for a future because they haven't yet figured out that
'time is an illusion'. That type of thinking--as outlined
just now--that spiritual people don't care about time and
that only superficial people without real insights do care
about time--has been dominant in the 20th century.
We can go into 'who started it', and what led up to it,
and all that. But regardless of causes, it shows why such
an essay like this has to be written: way too little has
been done to deal with the theme of time spiritually. Some
people have tried, and no doubt I should have read them
better and researched better for the glimpses here and
there put forth on what time is all about, what the clock
could mean if we wish to have some spiritual magic around
it. But finely little has been done so far. It's time to
set it right. We are going to set it right. With this
essay, you will have the rules of thumb to get going with
a spiritual take on time, and many other themes that all
sorts of tie together. And, the way I see it: there is a
bit of real magic in this. Not like Gandalf-with-his-staff
type of magic, but not like illusions, the illusions of
trickters, of illusionists, either. A real, but mild
magic, and it connects to time. So are you ready for it?
Of course you are. So let's get into it!

6

MAGIC OF TIME

PART A: LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS

7

MAGIC OF TIME

Part A, chapter 1: WHAT TYPE OF MAGIC?
Your first lesson in magic is.. No, I'm not going to take
that line. First of all, I don't believe in a series of
lessions in a strict sequence for everybody in something
which is a deep, living theme, a theme which is life
itself. When you learn a programming language, you can do
it step by step. But life isn't learned nor taught that
way. You are alive, you already know a bit of everything,
perhaps, in your awareness, your consciousness, your
instincts, your feelings, and you check things and, by
luck and fun and laughter--not in the least by laughter--
and also trials that don't work out, and getting into
various dances, various patterns of moving also together
with other people, you figure more and more out.
Nobody has the authority to stand up as a spiritual
teacher and tell you that the first lesson is life is
this, and the second lesson is that. And the way I treat
the word 'magic', it is simply life itself: but a bit
more deeply seen than perhaps what we come to if we just
float around on the surface.
One thing, though, as a rule of thumb: learn something,
experiment, explore something--connected to setting time,
clock-time, and also calendar-time, for some of your own
actions and for some of the activities you do together
with people. I don't mean force other people to accept
your timing. What I mean is that when you feel that it
makes sense, suggest a certain time. And then work to
stick to it. And compare that with not setting a certain
time, with letting things float, with using phrases like,
"alright, maybe I'll come around this afternoon", or, "go
at it for some hours or so", or, "surely within some
weeks".
The floating idea appeals a lot to those who like to
improvise. Yet: floating may be--not always--but can be--
8

MAGIC OF TIME

a leakage of energy. It floats out of the bucket, it's
hole in the bucket, it doesn't have a set time. Sometimes
it can be like that.
Now suppose what I say is right. It may be sounding a
bit silly--surely, there is nothing in particular about
sticking to a clock or calendar, that's just an invention,
a bit of human culture. But are you sure? Of course you
cannot be absolutely sure that there is nothing in
particular about it! How can anybody be absolutely sure
about anything which has to do with time? To be absolute
in your sureness, you have to know all there is to know
about the universe, at its deepest levels. Or multiverse.
Cosmos. Whatever we call it.
I'm saying that there is real magic in setting good
times, and sticking to them. Real, profound magic. Magic
that changes people's lives for the better. A magic that
creates new harmonies. Again, this is only when it makes
sense. So when does it make sense? And how do we do it
then? I cannot say that absolutely. Not because I don't
want to, but because there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut
cut'n'dried formula or recipe to answer such a question.
It makes sense when it makes sense--and you must sense
that! You must have a sort of lucky strike with this
timing thing, be in the dance, seize the energy of timing
when it's about you, when you smell it, like a whiff of
pleasant tobacco aroma.
What you can do, though, is to play with this theme, be
near to it, keep it near your heart, let your mind muse
about it,--read this essay, but also other texts, & write
notes to yourself to clarify your thoughts, think through
what you observe--without getting fanatical about what
you observe--and like a flower it will unfold. For time,
timing, those are themes of enormous worth. It is a life
meditation, a journey that can take you to the farthest
reaches.
And as Bilbo always sought to remind Frodo, in Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings--the very path that goes outside your
doorstep can take you anywhere. That may be hard to
believe, and not wise to test recklessly, but it is true.

9

MAGIC OF TIME

Part A, chapter 2: KEEPING TO ONE'S WORDS
In this universe, nothing is entirely closed and nothing
is entirely open. Nothing is entirely secret and nothing
is entirely public. If you have set the time for
something, you can't keep it so secret that you don't even
tell yourself about it. On the other extreme, you can't
tell absolutely everybody about it--that's physically
impossible.
So, just as we sense when it makes sense to set a time
for something, we sense when it makes sense to tell about
it. It is greatly significant to tell it when it makes
sense to tell it, and equally greatly significant to avoid
telling it when it makes sense to keep quiet about it. How
you deal with information is your private matter, and part
of the magic, and something you shouldn't entirely give
over to society.
Something not told wishes to expand, and be told.
Something that is told may want to dissipate, dissolve. It
doesn't have to dissipate. It doesn't have to dissolve,
even if it has been said a million times. But when we have
beginnings we need to protect, then both to set time and
not to tell any too much may be exactly right.
Information is alive, and machines aren't alive. The
information about the time is a live piece of information:
it has an energy. The information vibrates. Machines don't
know anything about vibrations. They can convey
information, spread it, duplicate it, but they can neither
originate any real information nor digest its significance
nor can you expect of a machine to be so senstiive that,
left to its own devices, just the right thing will happen
with the information.
So information must be restrained, protected, like the
little flowers before they grow up and become more
powerful and capable of defending themselves. Information
cannot be treated as just 'data'--there is no such thing
as 'just data'.
Keeping information in the right, lively way means that
we are read to vary the use of names; we are ready to
avoid telling and that we are suddenly ready to tell; it
10

MAGIC OF TIME

means that we don't deal with information as per routine,
but with the attentiveness of a gardener looking to live
things, questing their beauty, tending for their
individual needs.
Those who have a sense of the magic of time, then, are
neither dedicated to the lifeless principle of 'telling
all' nor dedicated to the equally lifeless principle of
'always lying'. To engage in some lying activity is part
of the oil of the machinery of society: but too much oil
of this sort makes an awful mess. Lies are easily caught
out: then, in catching out the lie, there is a sense of
pain--a disharmony--a stress--for a lie is just that: it
is a tension in between thought and reality. And so it
follows that anyone who catches anyone else in lying will
at once ask "why?"
And this question must have a ready, optimistic
answer: it must be obvious that such a statement, even if
not true, was called on in the situation. If it is not
obvious, it becomes a judgement over the person lying.
This judgement casts a shadow on future interactions with
this person. All statements will be filtered. Nothing will
be taken at face value. Evenetually the lie will be
forgotten, the person forgiven, but only if the lie isn't
followed up by other lies. If so, the person will become
circled in as a compulsory lier, someone who aren't
paying even lip-service to reality.
These things matters because magic is also about
trustworthiness. To touch on the magic of time requires a
voice that has a truth-resonance. That is to say, your
voice must be used in moderation, not always to fight wars
but to suggest what may be right and leave it at that.

11

MAGIC OF TIME

Part A, chapter 3: PLAYFUL PASSION AND LUCK
To become more adept at the magic of time,--and it's
always possible to learn more, no matter where you are in
this regard--I think it is of value to clearly distinguish
between what we can call "our passions" and plans that we
merely make, without calling them any such thing.
A passion adds to the magnetism of your personality: and
it is a magnetism that attracts events which suit that
passion. We're not talking of the magnetism of physical
magnets, but of a much more subtle magnetism. Call it
'spiritual' or 'synchronistic' or whatever you like. It is
really a whole specre of phenomena, some of them magical.
A passion cannot exist full-time, all day long, all
night long, in a sort of desperate manner, without eating
that person entirely up. The only way a passion can endure
in a healthy way is that it has a noticable element of
playfulness in it, and that the person doesn't identify
with a single passion absolutely.
For someone who doesn't, at present, have a passion, and
who meets somebdy else who does have a passion, it may
seem like that other person was 'born with' that passion.
While that sometimes may be correct enough, there is no
reason why passions can't come and go as the years go by.
First and foremost, a passion flows from a deep, strong
decision that this sort of activity or orientation is
worth having, it makes sense to have it, it is a goal that
one has a sense of joy and energetic activation about, and
one is willing to set aside many things and even accept
some pains, perhaps even some intense pains, to stay tuned
to this goal.
Initially, the decision doesn't need to be that strong:
at first, it may be a mere flimsy idea which feels
interesting and that then becomes a plan.
By writing about it, creating a memory structure in
oneself about it, thinking about it, talking also to some
others about it, the perhaps rather vague plan can grow
12

MAGIC OF TIME

and become a radiant 'motor' in one's mind and body. It
becomes a source of inspiration to get up early enough and
do extra exercise and all sorts of things that goes
together with this sort of goal. With playfulness in a
passion, and with other passions as well, it isn't
necessary to call it 'obsession'. One isn't desperate: not
any too strongly attached, but one knows that it makes
sense to work in a certain direction and one knows that,
in the midst of that work, one can at times, naturally yet
perhaps surprisingly, feel beyond all sorrows.
There are those who define a passion according to a
single experience they've had: they want it repeated, even
if it is unreleastic to get that sort of experience. They
focus on the feeling they got about the result, rather
the wide set of feelings they can get about an activity.
Those who set for themselves goals that are tied up to a
repetition of that which they can no longer easily get
aren't really passionate about life: they are merely
obsessed with some element of experience in memory--they
are, in fact, sentimental. And sentimentality isn't any
magnetic driving-force such as passion can be.
Passion, on the other hand, means that even one's dreams
may give ripe ideas as how to get meaningful results; it
means that one works--sometimes very intensely--at other
times merely playfully--but with what seems to the world
to involve 'great luck'. But passion always does this sort
of thing: luck is generated by its positive, playful
presence in a person.

13

MAGIC OF TIME

Part A, chapter 4: PLANNING FOR SIMPLICITY
Now this isn't an essay about any fancy, complicated word
like 'enlightenment', not at all. We are, in a way, taking
a much more simple line, which is--put bluntly--how can
you avoid screwing up your relationship to time, even if
you're a person who is artistic or musical or somehow
spiritual or what-we-call-it.
Also, this essay won't rate religions or spiritual
practises or philosophy according to any 'top ten list'
or the like.
Having said as much, the writer would be a fool not to
include quotes and references also to religions, when
they have the right quantity of playfulness and humour
in them. And I value what is sometimes called 'Zen' for
its capacity to call on humour in replies to questions
deserving a thousand or a million words as answer. The
wittiness and directness, the freshness in their socalled
'koans' can always contribute something, read in the right
(ie, careless) spirit. They probably were meant quite dead
seriously, but who cares?
Given a proper playful spirit, you can even make your
own: and, in seeking to touch at least a flimmer of a
great truth, you'll often find that you can turn a koan
around and it's pretty much a koan still.
Take this one, for example:
"If you can't find enlightenment where you are, where
do you expect to find it?"
And, let's blunder ahead and swing it perhaps neatly,
perhaps not so neatly, on its head:
"If you can't find enlightenment somewhere else, where
do you expect to find it? Here?!"
Time is often connected to moving about. You can meditate
in one timeless moment--which may be seconds, minutes, or
14

MAGIC OF TIME

even perhaps hours according to normal clock. And you can
sit fairly still and get a number of things done, again
according to a clock. But when you look at a calendar, you
can engage in putting one things after one another so that
you can travel. Speaking in strictly (narrow-mindedly)
narrow terms, why travel if you don't have to?
Because: it takes a super-human effort to perceive
reality and drink of its magic and move its magic around
if you try to do it all from one spot. Your mind gets
hooked up to a place, it starts identifying with it--and
to be free from any too much identification, travel is the
solution. If you cannot travel far as yet, travel as far
as you meaningfully can--and work to travel further, so
far away that the mind simply has got to do push on its
'reset' button and see all things anew. To see, perceive,
all reality, and its beauty, and its people, and yourself,
too, afresh,--get a move on.
Such is, though, the magic of time that it will only
give to you if you give to it by the quality called
'leisure'. A journey, even if to the other side of the
reachable universe in your world, isn't a mind-liberating
thing if it is stuffed full with purpose, with rush, with
deliberation according to a strict plan. The plan may seem
very clever when on paper, but if it doesn't have leisure
in it--and if all pathways are the fastest to the goal--
then what is the point? Then the living will be merely
'doing', rather than 'being'; your feelings will be tied
up to 'achieving' and 'becoming', rather than being the
flow of awareness, love, compassion, creativity and alive
attentiveness it can be.
Then, when you do travel to the other side of the
reachable universe, or multiverse, or what we call it,
there is another factor that comes in: with too little
planning, you may get another challenge to the luxury and
splendor of leisure, and that challenge is simply: how to
survive. When survival is at stake, it easily becomes the
by far most dominant concern of the mind, and it matters
little, then, that one has travelled far if one is such a
poor planner that mere survival takes up all the capacity
of your mind and feelings. (Of course, if you do survive
something that is challenging to survival, it may be good
material for meditation afterwards, and in that sense give
insights, but is it worth it? It can be.)
Planning, then, is part of what makes the type of travel
that has the sublime qualities of leisure in it, possible:
planning requires mindfulness. It requires the logic and
15

MAGIC OF TIME

the heart to set some times, set some places, put forward
this and that preparation--knowing that these things may
have to be re-planned as we go along--but also knowing
that some plan is better than no plan if we are serious
about doing complicated things. Planning can make the
complicated easy: and by nurturing the plan in the
sensitive way we suggest in this essay, events start to
come around to support you and even suggest new solutions.

16

MAGIC OF TIME

Part A, chapter 5: THE FOOD CHAPTER
Just as this isn't a essay about enlightenment, this isn't
a book about food either. But it is an essay about time,
& lots of time for most people goes into eating and trying
not to eat too much of the wrong food and trying to get on
a diet and trying to fast and worrying about having eaten
the wrong things and in fact eating so that their belly is
full when they are going to have those eight or ten or
twelve hours under the linens, which is supposed to give
that rosy-pink school-girl complexion, according to
doctors' advises.
I did say 'eight or ten or twelve' because in the main-
stream, teens are supposed to require endless amount of
sleep while adults are supposed to manage with eight or
even less, like six. Those who do manage with eight or
even less--well, I'm not going to condemn, but I think
they are withering away faster than those who are more
generous to themselves in quantity of hours. Alright, I
admit there may be a few, a very very few simple-minded
people who have so little to think about and worry about
and feel about that their brains are happy with just some
hours and then they are up and about, the brightest
morning birds you've ever seen. That may be. Those, in
case, are rare ones. Note that the sleep period is a
period in which the brain does excessively hard work in
order to clear up and bring wholeness, together with the
deeper, subtler levels of the mind. This requires some
good room temperature and suitable music and sensitive
intuitive people typically like high room temperatures.
Still, I don't think the 'quality of sleep' matters nearly
as much as the mere fact of giving oneself enough hours of
sleep-like rest.
Even if this essay is not about food, I'm going to say
that most people--in the mainstream--I mean the typical
societies, call them "Western" or not--have very peculiar
food habits. And they look on their body and they see
that their food habits are peculiar, then they open some
magazine or newspaper that claims that--more fat is good,
less fat is good, more protein is good, less protein is
good, more carbohydrates are good, or less carbohydrates
are good. Some say that healthy food makes vitamin
supplements rediculous, while others say that no food is
so healthy that one can do without such supplements. Some
say that the only thing that will 'take off those
kilograms' is such and such exercise, or avoid alcohol, or
17

MAGIC OF TIME

walking much, jogging much, doing yoga much, or some wild
indoor exercise. There are so many advises. And while
people seem to be eating up these advises, they seem to do
few any much good: people are growing as wide as they can,
put simply and bluntly. And that decreases their NFQ.
Their what? It's a joke. It's a joke I formed to counter
the idea that IQ--or 'intelligence quotient' is very
important. Give me the stupid blonde any day--she's way
better than high IQ. That is, apparently, a 'non-
feministic' thing to say, but I'm very pro the feminine
so I don't know. But NFQ?
Well, it's this: the 'nerve / fat quotient'. It is an
imagined measure of just much nerves (and bones and
muscles) you've got, divided on how much fat you've got.
And to run about and do meaningful things, the NFQ has
better be fairly high. For fat doesn't do anything: it
just sits there, as spare resources. Nerves and muscles
are pretty much one of a kind: those who studies the
nerves say that muscle fibers kind'a grow into nerve
fibers and vice versa. So to 'flex one's brain' consume
the same type of energy, at least more or less, than to
'flex one's muscles'.
A high NFQ means that you have the nerves to pick up
what goes on around you,--rather than just sit in a bubble
made of fat. It also means that your body has a shape, and
that the shape is in part a response of how your muscle
training goes, in part a response to how your genes are,
in part a response to how you are carrying yourself. To
have much fat is, in a way, to let something very inert
overtake your body. And the inert means that it gets
harder to respond to time.
Alright, those may be tough words for some. Now I'm
going to give my own advises as to food, and since this
isn't an essay about food, you may count on it that I only
say what I think is necessary to get said--because I know
that for many it does work--and I won't spend any much
time justifying it or persuading you. Take it or leave it,
as for food advices--the whole theme sort of bores me, if
we over-indulge in it.
First of all, no food--or practically no food--is so
chock-full of vitamins and minerals and such that
supplements won't do you good. But supplements do you
good mostly if you chew them--a ghastly thing, for they
may taste horrible--and do so in the middle of the main
meal of the day, so that the food helps their digestion.
Most need tons of B12, C, and related B-vitamins, as well
18

MAGIC OF TIME

as a good deal more of every standard vitamin and mineral
on the list than that which is 'daily recommended'. In
some cases, because of over-sensitives, allergies, or this
or that, one may have to consult experts as to what of
these one must limit so that they don't have counter-
effects.
Then, about what sort of food: every person needs to
train in-doors and every person needs to walk, and both
exercises must take place many times pr week. Jogging and
such is good but a very hard challenge for some parts of
the skin and some parts of the bones if done hard and
much. Dance, swimming, sex etc are excellent supplements.
Every person needs to train the so-and-so many muscles
all around in the body, and all the parts of the brain,
several times of the week. Not just some muscles. All of
them. Not just some part of the brain--not just intellect,
not just music, not just images, not just logic, not just
sexual fantasies and masturbation, but all of these things
and more such, several times pr week.
Bathing helps toning muscles and skin etc, clearly an
important thing, when one can--several times pr week. One
must learn what parts of the body can stand what forms of
cleansers and apply them quickly when the body indicates
it. Drink cold cooked water and ice green tea with added
chilli, ginger, etc, and with sugar, too, between meals.
Then, as for food: it's rediculous to wait with main
meal until end-of-a-long day. It should happen in the
middle or early middle of the day. It shouldn't be tasty:
it should taste awful, most of the time. Pleasure should
come from other things than the main meal. It should be
composed according to what your body wants. Proteins, such
as from egg white, lots of spices of the digestible kinds,
cultivated milk products, some yolk, some yellow cheese,
nuts, seeds, grains, bread. But all people deserve some
variation and some pleasures also to come around for the
main meal, so occasionally do vary both content and time.
Each week should have some variation as to methods of
frying/cooking/raw food preparation and vitamin pill
supplements.
A bit of of hot coffee with some milk and chilli spice
increases digestion, sharpens the mind, elevates mood, and
can have cookies of this and that kind--they can have fat,
carbohydrates, proteins, whatever, sugar and all, they
should taste good, they should give the pleasure that the
main meal (as a rule) cannot give.
And one can have these little coffee-with-snack breaks
19

MAGIC OF TIME

quite often during the day, but in the late afternoon,
early evening, one stops adding instant powder (which is
far more healthy as for cholestrol content than other
types of coffee) to the brew--it gradually becomes merely
a spice form of tea.
I would suggest the black type of tea is excellent for
cure of headache more than for daily use: so too with cola
drinks, which are capable of helping digestion and easing
stomach pain and contributing to curing colds and
elevating moods. But tea and cola in daily diet may be too
much. Coffee is generally very healthy for muscle and
brain activity.
As for alcohol: heavy drinking every day for a couple of
months can add 10 years to an adult's unwanted ageing
process. Even heavy drinking once a week can cause hang-
overs of a kind that makes intentions and plans and
priorities and feelings for endurance connected to
interesting developments to be suspended, and require a
lot of work to be 're-installed' in one's brain. The best
is to cut alcohol sharp and then invite some drops of
liquor or some more if it's wine and then only once or at
most twice a week and then again only in social company
where it becomes a mood of togetherness. After light
drinking, especially if there are just a few inhalations
of a pleasant tobacco smoke, you'll find the brain
bursting with creativity, but it comes--and even more so
with mood-stimulating drugs--at an expense in the form of
exhaustion and extra need for sleep and possibilities of
painful moods.
When one is sick, one must add chilli intensities, eat
more vitamins, bath longer, and so on--adjusted as to what
form of illness one has. One must never eat any form of
'anti-headache' tablets, never use any form of sleep
tablets, or anti-pain tablets--unless one is absolutely
and totally in a bodily state where things have gotten
fundamentally out of control and one needs some 'last
resort' measures like that. Healthy people mustn't even
think of chewing anti-pain or pro-stimuli tablets of any
kind no matter what pain one has. Pain nearly always has a
message, unless it's so severe it has taken over a person
completely. Only at screaming pain are 'pain-killers' more
meaningful than all the other things one can, such as
intense self-massage, with stones, at the right pressure
points in fingers and at the head and such.
So those are the advises, and they are rough and harsh
but not so rough and harsh as those typically given to
20

MAGIC OF TIME

such as munks and nuns living in cloistres dedicating
their lives to the holy. I consider these advises as
'operational'. They are meant to incite an impulse to get
real about what body you have, make the best of it and
make the most of it to get on with reaping what you can
and what you deserve as to the magic of time, with it.

21

MAGIC OF TIME

PART B: SHAPING YOUR MAGICAL PERSONALITY

22

MAGIC OF TIME

Part B, chapter 1: WHY WE NEED THE ART OF DECISION-MAKING
In taking a good look at what grounds we may have covered
in the first part, it strikes me that one of the themes
that at once deserves more attention is this one: how to
get to the best plans, the best decisions. A great deal
comes effortlessly if we form the right plans. But how do
we get to know what is 'right'? Right according to whom?
To start with, not everybody feels that all that many
options are open to them. They may feel that relatively
few decisions, if any, have to be made from one week to
the next. The very idea of 'making decisions' may seem to
these people to be a luxury they can't afford--perhaps
next life, but certainly not this.
And some may be rather right in viewing life like this:
I, for one, do not claim that earthian life is, for the
majority, particularly rich in options. But in the case
that a person has the leisure to at least indulge in
reading something like this, I assume that it makes sense
to say this: if you think about what you do from day to
day, certainly there are a number of small decisions--at
least--involved in how you do things. And this means,
then, going from doing mostly everything 'by habit' to
putting some conscious deliberation into how things are
done.
For instance, when you are out walking, you can choose
to watch how other people are walking or you can ignore
it. That's a decision. You can also decide to watch how
you yourself is walking, or ignore it. Have you noticed
how some may be walking, despite having nothing in their
hands, as though they are carrying a heavy load? Others
may be walking as if they were rank-and-file soldiers
exercising for a march: they cut vertical, peculiarly
machine-like figures in a scene where a more relaxed gait
would be the one called for.
So how symmetrical is your walk? How symmetrical is your
swim, when yo do swim? Do you use all the sides of your
body equally? And it may be hard to see that which you
have done for years and years without awareness.
23

MAGIC OF TIME

And how do you sit? There are a million ways to sit.
There is then, a big range of decisions just there. You
can sit as if it is a conscious effort, or as if to
signal to others that you are in strain, or that you are
constraining yourself, or that you are a careless type;
how do you sit if you want to just cut a good figure, and
not signal anything in particular?
Expanding the territory of decision very slightly, do
you ever have time to explore drawings, and to make
drawings, of face, beautiful faces, beautiful bodies,
beautiful feet? It's not that 'you cannot draw'. I'm not
talking of drawing so as to show others. I'm talking of
giving some minutes to teach yourself more about what
good looks are. And pick up hints from those who really
can draw. It only takes some minutes to draw a little and
then throw it away. Be critical, throw away a thousand
drawings, or ten thousands, before you show even a single
one to anyone else. But if you do decide to draw, having
not done so since perhaps you were a small child, you may
start thinking about style and attitudes and clothes and
shoes and so on in a totally new way.
As we expand the territory of decision-making still
further, it doesn't require all that much surplus money
to begin to get a sense of all day being superbly full of
potential decisions that have to be made. And the more
this sort of realisation dawns on you, gradually you begin
to see that the art and science of decision-making surely
is--for the sake of its sheer vastness--surely the
greatest domain of knowledge there is.

24

MAGIC OF TIME

Part B, chapter 2: INTO THE ART OF DECISION-MAKING
To have a conscious relationship to the magic of time we
need a conscious relationship to a great deal of things
that people who are less skilled in magic merely do 'by
routine'. And we have seen that the art and science of
decision-making is something we definitely need. Every act
of setting time to something is a decision. And magic is a
sort of dance: whatever you do, surprising or not, it is
judged by how much part of the dance it is.
Making a right decision is doing something fruitful. How
exactly it is fruitful depends on seen and unseen factors,
factors which you may feel to be there. When the right
decision has been made, a lot of things follows from it.
The decision isn't proven 'wrong' even if you then have to
change it, perhaps a long time before you put it into its
most concrete form as action.
Imagine that you are climbing up a complicated rock,
hanging over the ocean, and you don't know the shapes of
the rock. You may have been swimming for a while and
you're exploring. It's a rough climb, and above you, or
so it seems, is a vast plateau to the left. And it feels
right to form the decision to go for that plateau. Just as
you are climbing to the left, and go up, you realize that
the plateau was an illusion, created by the play of light:
but that, once on the left side of the rock, it's easy to
get on top of it and further on to the pathway you know is
there somehow in the background. As you go up, and stand
safe on top of the rock, a bit of the rock falls off and
tumbles down vertically. Now in this metaphor, the
decision to go for the 'plateau' was right, because it led
to fruitful actions--even if the 'plateau' was an
illusion. Had you been too much concerned with whether it
25

MAGIC OF TIME

was an illusion or not, you might have chosen a much more
dangerous path, with loose rocks about to tumble. But, as
soon as one illusion is dispelled, another solution, this
time not an illusion, presents itself--namely, that one
can get on top of this rock formation through the left.
The metaphor is perhaps a little complicated, but life
is yet far more complicated: and such is the maze of
decision-making, that we surely need the capacity for
forming decisions connected to things we don't know any
too much about; and then we re-make decisions, again
connected to things we can't know any too much about. You
might call this 'intuition'; you might call this 'extra-
sensory perception', or some other fancy expression like
that.
Whatever you call it, the art of decision-making is,
then, something we must call on to engage the magic of
time, and we must do so without living in the illusion
that we can have perfect or even approximate knowledge of
all that is involved in the future.
Without getting philosophically very deep about what, in
a sort of cosmic sense, a Right decision really is, I
think we can say of such decisions that, when they are
remembered, they look right also a long time later on;
and they don't depend on your ego or your ideology. They
are right simply because they have a sense of wind in
them, they are part of a dance of harmony--and they keep
on being right no matter shifting viewpoints about the
world and about yourself.
So that's how right decisions may appear a long time
afterwards. But how do we get at them right now?
If they're a dance later on,--these decisions--they're
a dance now. If they feel to be part of harmony later on,
they may feel to be part of harmony now--if you are free
from hang-ups in peculiar viewpoints, and have lived in a
healthy enough way to make you sensitive to harmony all
through your body.
And if the decisions, later on, don't connect any too
much to your ego then, they also don't connect any too
much to your ego now.
So to make a series of right decisions we need to
practise living 'on a musical wavelength', rather than
rule things according to an analytical rule-book. We must
trust that the body can be fantastically sensitive to both
the immediate and the long-term future.

26

MAGIC OF TIME

In short, anyone who comes with a recipe, a list, a set of
instructions as how to make right decisions ought to, as
Wodehouse could have said, put a sock in it. Life is too
lovely and too serious to admit to recipies. Keep that in
mind when we work to create magic and when we, as in the
next chapter, go through certain themes in a way that
makes it all appear fairly simple and straightforward.

Part B, chapter 3: ATTRACTING THE RIGHT EVENTS
A poet might remind you to be careful about using too
fancy words. An example of a word that may, to some, at
times seem somewhat fancy, but which to a serious
magician like yourself is merely an honest description of
a state of mind and body--a very important state, indeed--
is this word: vibration. Its verbal form, as we know, is:
"to vibrate". That's exactly what nonbelievers don't. To
practise your magic, to attract the best events and best
decisions, you must be a believer in your own magic. And
this belief exhibits itself in a radiance, an energy, an
intuitive flow, a capacity to synchronize yourself with
just what's right because of an invisible antenna that
shoots up when you're in the right vibrationary state. (Is
that a word, I wonder--'vibrationary'?--it has to be.)
Since you are such a subtle, refined, sensitive,
creative and intelligent being as having read and under-
stood every chapter in this essay up until here, you know
how complicated yet how important it is, to lay the
foundation for great magic, to make the right decisions,
and to equip them with the right measure of time, and tell
it to the right people, in the right way, at the right
time.
27

MAGIC OF TIME

Having thus decided the goals, we'll now supplement our
magical knowledge base by the following insight:
* vibrate with the goal, and that vibration makes you
vibrate towards the right means, and it makes the right
means vibrate towards you
This is an enormous statement--just so it is said--and it
is at the foundation of all sincere magic. It's a meta-
physical statement: it goes beyond mere physics, mere
cause and effect, and it connects directly to the syn-
chronistic nature of reality.
* As you vibrate with the goal, that vibration makes you
vibrate towards the right subgoals; and that vibration
reveals the subgoals to you, so that they become present
and available
Just think of the enormity of forming a right new grand
life decision--what it implies, the thousand things that
ought to be done to make it become fulfilled. So if magic
is going to connect to this world, it must connect also
goals to subgoals. And in so doing, it equips you with a
capacity to sense more as to what pathway you should take.
* As you vibrate with the goal (and with the goals),
that vibrationary state your body and mind comes into is
extraordinarily sensitive to the how the likely future,
given that you proceed on present planned course, matches
with that goal
This is a complicated statement. It says that your form of
sensing of upcoming events isn't entirely neutral: it is
tied up to what goals you have; and not merely have in a
neutral sense, but what goals you have made tangibly your
deepest own. Those goals act so as to tell you about what
you'll run into if you keep to your plans--through dreams,
events, feelings, even sometimes headaches or stomach
pains or the opposite, a hilarious sense of joyous things
coming up. A plan needn't be wrong altogether even if it
gives you a stomach pain to have it: but it may have to be
altered in subtle ways, at some points, perhaps some
essential points. And plans need replanning, it isn't any
point trying to know all, or 'control all'--but rather, at
each point a set of fruitful plans are entertained because
they resonate with the goals.

28

MAGIC OF TIME

* To resonate with a goal, one must neither be fully
conscious of it, nor fully forget it; one must neither
fully identify with it, nor keep it merely abstract; it
must be kept at a gut level, such as right beneath the
navel--part of your central nervous system--your sensory-
motoric centrum.

29

MAGIC OF TIME

Part B, chapter 4: DID YOU CHOOSE YOUR OWN LIFE-GOALS?
The magic of time connects to you through all the things
you do, and what you don't do, what you know and what you
don't know--and through what you intend and what you don't
intend. Is there a 'karmic value' in having the right
intentions? There is: but even people having the wrong
intentions may do right things and that, too, have the
beneficial 'karmic' or 'synchronistic' effects. Or, said
with other words: the magic of time is more open to one
who has generous goals, life-ambitions, life goals.
This theme is frightfully complicated and yet we have
got to think about, or else the magic of time will be too
much an abstract thing. Life goals: how do we know what
they are, and how do we change them, and what should we
change them into?
And who or what is the source of 'should', anyway?
This is not an essay that sets itself up as an authority
as to the highest questions: the appeal therefore is that
you, yourself, can be, ought to be, in dialogue with
yourself about these things so that you know that you are
acting consciously, with awareness, and that you know that
you have done decisions with all of yourself, heart and
head, and not merely run things by routine and through the
storehouse of the subconscious mind.
If you look around you, when you see enterprising adult
people,--they all have some life goals of some kind. Yet,
most of them may not be aware of just what they are. At
some time, earlier on,--years ago--they probably were
conscious about having to settle for some goals, and their
brains and minds were plastic, open, available, listening
in and participating to a kind of 'conversation with
oneself' as to what the point of existence is all about.
And so the life goals shaped themselves.
These life goals then created sub-goals. The right sub-
goals to serve these higher life goals. And the sub-goals
then created sub-sub-goals, and so on. This is, then, a
great part of the psyche of most adult people: they go
30

MAGIC OF TIME

around with a hierarchy of goals, of which they may not be
very conscious at all.
How can you tell what the life goals of a person is?
You look at the actions of the person without the
explanations of the person, over a long time if you can:
and you look at what these actions add up to, if
anything. From that you can deduce what the life goals of
this person is. Usually, quite often, it isn't a very
charming affair.
When you listen to what the person says about own goals,
then that is what the person has as a goal to portray to
others. It usually has something to do with what the
person has as goals, but rarely it touches on the top
goals, the life goals. More likely, the life goals are
quite unrelated to the means: at least when the person
isn't very enlightened.
In some societies, at some times, there may be a lot of
literal believers or 'fundamentalists' around: and they
scare others to become just as 'fundamentalist' anti-
believers in some way--and in such a society, there is
usually little real religion or spirituality and much
politics: not the politics as sense or care for the
living-together, or 'polis', but politics in the sense of
emotinonal groupism with cheap etiquettes.
Those who read, in a literal, literalist, fundamentalist
way one book over again and again typically wish to make
themselves cast in the mould of that book: they wish that
the life goals that the book talks about matches their own
life goals. And they hope that by repetition and endless
talk, talk that they feel sound convincing and persuasive,
they will sort of talk themselves into better people. And
while I don't doubt for a moment that the talk one engages
in can change a person for the better or the worse, it is
usually the case, I find, that fundamentalists have no
real idea as to who they are, at their core. Their minds,
their faces, their bodies, are wrapped up into a structure
that doesn't get engaged in dialogue--it's just a kind of
subconscious background for these fundamentalists,--and
they don't change, and when they have bad emotions, they
claim it comes from 'the devil' or some kind of entitity
that The Book declares is real and bad.
The older a person gets, the more buried may all the
life goals be, so that, eventually, there isn't more than
very rare glimpses in this person as to own life goals,
and the language, the talk, has no truth in it anymore:
and so a dialogue with such a person is practically
31

MAGIC OF TIME

impossible, because the person hasn't done 'homework' in
having some honest self-knowledge for many years.
Yet, since the life goals can be deduced by looking at
how a person acts--what a person reacts emotionally or
spontaneously positive to, and actually engages in doing,
and when a person doesn't respond, doesn't show compassion
or any real engagement--there is nothing secret to the
world about these life goals. And if the life-goals are
all self-centered, ego-glorifying, self-occupied, whereas
all the talk of the person is in the nature of caring for
the many and doing something good, it doesn't look very
nice--in fact it looks incoherent--and the person
obviously won't have any much capacity to relate magically
to time. Rather, the incoherence will tear on the person,
physically and inwardly--the conflict between the life
goals and what the expressed goals of this person is
becomes something that characterises all about the person.
On this background, the professional student of the
magic of time ought to realize the enormity of importance
of regularly being in dialogue with one's own life goals
and working on changing them to something that makes
intuitive as well as logical sense. This dialogue is the
groundwork for having real undestanding also of others,
because all humanity is more or less in the same boat
about the quest for self-knowledge.
To be able to modify one's own life goals, one must
spend time in putting into words that which one perhaps
haven't spoken about for a long, long time, and which is
'buried in the subconscious'. One must find words for all
the egotism, narrowness, selfishness that is within one-
self and not glorify, not come with the words that 'sound
right' when it comes to respectability.
This dialogue can use writing, images, long walks in
privacy and such as means for coming into contact with the
goals: and, when this has been done, in an as light mood
as possible, one can also begin looking for more meaning-
ful goals, and seek to recast one's life goals--as best
one can--towards this. And the most rewarding--magically
speaking--life goal one can have involves generosity.
So what is generosity, and why is it important? And how
come that we can consider generosity something magical?
The word 'generous', in English, is in itself
interesting: it suggests that the genrosity 'comes from
your genes'; it suggests also that it involves doing
something that 'generates', and more such.
32

MAGIC OF TIME

Generosity puts people into good mood: new ideas
suddenly come around, new energies, and these may work to
create also new possibilities of fulfilments of personal
goals. Generosity connects to the spontaniety of real,
analog communication and connection with people, not just
with the digital world--but it affects everything we do,
and it can also strongly affect how we do things in the
digital world.
Generosity is also attractive, or easily can be: you
associate generosity with someone who is so full of spunk
and liveliness and intelligence and creativity and energy
and interesting activities that this someone easily can
give this or that without thinking about 'getting
something back'. The person can give, because the person
has a lot to give. And that's attractive: indeed, it's
quite possible to look at much things, including health,
seen as attractive and beautiful about people, and discuss
it in terms of generosity. Pure skin here, or an extra
cultivated, elongated thigh muscle there: the energy
'bounces off' such coherence in the body, such wholeness,
--it's a wholeness that doesn't strictly speaking 'have to
be there'--but when it's there, it gives of itself to
whoever is looking at it. Generosity, in an elegant,
slender, intelligent sense, is deeply entwined with the
beauty concept.
So when you work to get generosity of this and that and
the other kind connected to your uppermost goals,--and no
doubt you can connect also this, if you're religious--to
generosity towards the source of life, which has been and
is generous towards you--then that generosity, eventually,
as the seasons go by, speaks through what types of things
you get done and what you avoid doing; it speaks through
when you laugh and when you don't laugh; it speaks through
your emotions, your enthusiasms, and it goes beyond the
need of explanation: it becomes a tale of radiant energy.
And that energy is tied up deeply to the energy we call on
when we set times for something, and announce it, and
change the times we set, and do all sorts of things like
that which involves calling on the magic of time.

33

MAGIC OF TIME

Part B, chapter 5: AND AT YOUR HEART
Again and again I have said that this essay is about
getting to grips with time for spiritual people and that
it isn't a book about religion. Getting to grips with
time involves the possibility of connecting to, and
employing 'the magic of time' in getting things done. This
isn't a book that tells you how the world in its essence
is constructed nor does it rate the religions, ancient or
modern, or compare their worldviews to the worldviews we
might find in philosophy or in philosophically inspired
physics thinking.
So in that sense, the theme's simple: yet the theme is a
tough one, because time is connected to goal-getting and
spirituality--a large part of it--has been connected to
giving up on desires and goals and letting one's life be
regulated by a higher authority than anything mere human.
At least, that's how it often has been presented, not just
in Buddhism or in Hinduism or Christianity or Islam but in
almost every one of the zillion available spiritual cults,
sects, groups, branches.
Yet again and again, in asking questions about the
magical, we are touching more than a little on what's
right and what's not so right, what's good and what's not
so good, and, to be fair, we're touching some of the
things that appear to set religions apart. But why are
they apart? Can we answer such a big question without
getting superficial, and without also setting forth any
kind of spiritual dogma in this essay? And then again,
only if it helps us to focus a main theme--the magic of
time.
34

MAGIC OF TIME

Alright, so in this chapter we'll touch on a question,
hopefully in a nondogmatic way, that might just be a
startling insight for some, or at least a fact, depending
on where you're coming from. It's a very simple
proposition, but in these days anything like it is hardly
ever heard--and that we'll set right. Now it will be
heard.
Before I say what I'm going to say about this theme, let
me clarify how we might use the words 'politics' and
'religion', so that it fits with what we'll say here.
Consider this idea: that there isn't any politics to
religion, ever: religion is about having a faith, politics
is about how we do things. At one level, this may sound
trivial and obvious, but as you'll soon see, I mean it in
a rather radical sense--and in a sense that possibly could
help you progress in your capabilities as an honest, good,
powerful magician in your own life.
So politics--and ethics--and morals--all that we put in
one 'bag', we group it together: these are all advises, or
rules, or suggestions, rules of thumb, however they are
classified--and they have nothign whatsoever to do with
religion. Now you see--this doesn't sound obvious. What's
left of a Buddhist religion, for instance, if you take
away the do's and the don't's? Nothing? Too bad.
So here's the main idea--and, unless you have a deep and
rich relationship to this idea already, I beg you to read
it and listen to it and not judge it as yet, just muse
over it--don't assume it is as easy as it sounds:
* a religious person is one who believes in something
beyond as source of all life--or has faith in something
beyond as source of all life. This belief or faith is
religion. All else--names, shapes, ideas, myths, tales,
rules, rituals--all other things are politics and have
nothing whatsoever to do directly with religion.
Do you see what's here said? That either there is a
faith in something--not a machine, not a mere principle or
energy, but in something, grander than life, as source of
the life we see, the life we are--or there isn't such a
faith. When that faith exists at the core of a person,
that person is religious. It doesn't matter what names the
faith is bundled with--not at all. The names and tales and
the behaviour rules and all that has nothing whatsoever to
do with religion.
Religion, according to this simple insight, is then the
quality of a mind that has a faith in something supreme,
beyond all humanity. This supreme isn't merely supreme in
35

MAGIC OF TIME

one way or in another way, but supreme in all ways that
matter,--as to intelligence, omnipotence, omnipresence,
love, compassion, beauty--supreme. In that sense 'beyond'.
You get it? Either you believe in the beyond, or you
don't. If you don't, you are in a different state of mind
than if you do. And that sets a religious person apart
from a nonreligious person. It doesn't matter one whit
what it is called or whether one is of such and such
'race' or group or creed or is 'initialized' or baptised
or 'saved' or entangled into a whole universe of stories
about 'we' and 'them' and 'our God' and all such.
The only thing that matters is whether there is a faith
or not--in the beyondness--the beyondness in the sense of
splendid beyondness, in all things that matter--beyond
the manifest human, beyond manifest humanity. With such a
belief, your mind is in one state; without such a belief,
your mind is in another state.
Now, take then this idea to such as Buddism: Buddhism
has many branches, true, but not nearly as many as such as
Hinduism. Whereas a clear majority of the branches of
Hinduism has a faith in something beyond human, something
divine, and divinely intelligent, as source of life, the
majority of the (much fewer) branches of Buddhism don't
have any such faith. Rather, there is, in several branches
of Buddhism, at most a faith in this or that principle--
the principle of 'no self', for instance; or the principle
of 'the fruits of action'; or the principle of things
being 'in flux', changing, without permanance. Though in
such branches of Buddhism there may be an assumption that
some 'masters' have 'seen all these things' more clearly
than others and possibly have reincarnated, that's not the
same as to say that there is a faith in a divine creator
in these branches of Buddhism.
So, in many branches (but not all--there are also many
individual mixings, such as between Christianity and
Buddhism) of Buddhism, there isn't faith in the sense we
have discussed it in this chapter. And in that sense,
Buddhism is a practise--full stop. It is a very beautiful
practise, and much beauty, also as art, has come of it.
But the advocate of Buddhism isn't an advocate of faith.
The same can be said, of course, for a number of
branches of Hinduism and for some branches of just about
every popular phenomenon that according to dictionaries
is called 'religion'. There are a number of branches even
of Christianity and Islam of a similar nature.
More importantly, perhaps: there is a number of
36

MAGIC OF TIME

individual forms of faith-in-the-beyond that hasn't got a
religious label to it and which, according to the way we
use words in this chapter, is absolutely a full-fledged
religion.
The state of having a faith is a vibration in the mind,
in the heart: and it is now my proposal, or the second
proposal in this chapter if we put it that way, that this
vibration is healthy, it touches on reality, and it makes
magic easier. (In case, therefore, you don't have any
faith of this nature, consider then to look at it all
through the approaches we indicated in the chapter just
before this--for it certainly can be related to the
questions of 'life goals'--in it being a still higher type
of idea or thought or impulse than even the highest 'life
goal': or what do you think?)

37

MAGIC OF TIME

Part B, chapter 6: PERSONALITY-SHAPING AND MAGIC DIALOGUE
If the world has many types of flowers, the types of
human personalities is far greater. The wide wilderness
of personality types is so huge that only a person who--
blissfully--claims ignorance of others has got a firm grip
on truth.
Yet we have got to engage in some understanding in order
to collaborate. And we have got to work on shaping our own
personalities so that we can make magic work together with
others. We cannot just demand the people behave according
to some script-book. We have to be realistic, and accept
that there's an infinite variation of human mentalities
and temperaments. And in understanding this diversity of
human personalities, we do jump too fast into a hard
condemnation of others. Condemnations have a role, but to
get rushed into them because of some kind of ill-tempered
mood or hysteria in people around oneself has no place at
all, if we wish to work out great results in our lives.
So with your deep and natural interest in magic, an
interest which has carried you thus far in the essay--or
you just happened to pop up just this paragraph on just
this page in your first look on this booklet--you want to
protect your words a little, so that they retain that
connection to reality that is such a key-mark of any
great wizard. A sorcerer, a magician, doesn't throw
around words any too easily: the words mustn't undergo a
sort of 'price inflation'. And so while we must engage in
as much tolerance of the personalities of others as we
think is right, in ourselves, as to how we develop, how we
shape ourselves from one week to the next, we must have a
measure of intolerance towards any tendency in ourselves
to chatter endlessly or to make stories out of everything,
as if reality was one single story and you were the
story-writer. Such 'story-weaving' individuals may be fun
and they may have, on rare occasions, a great grasp of
reality, but on the whole, they miss the mark because it's
just too complicated to fathom all the facts and their
38

MAGIC OF TIME

priorities and also make up a story that is communicable
in decent human conversation.
So those who chatter and chatter and 'make up stories'
usually are having a word-flow which only at rare spots
have anything to do with reality. Why and how they do
this sort of thing is another tale: but, as a magician,
fight any such tendency in yourself to over-storify, to
weave stories, and chatter in terms of stories and tales
all the time.
For what is reality? Reality is this fantastic
complexity of human beings and nature and how we interact
and how forces beyond human understanding are part of all
this,--in this amazing grand flow of events and feelings
and thoughts and ideas we pick up this bit here and that
bit there and this glimpse and have that intuition and we
have flimmers of contact with fact. In seeking a deep
contact with reality and with other people we must have a
silence relative to the stories, and allow the relatively
few facts we've got to get a far, far greater weigh in
our minds than the stories we might want to weave.
Now it is true that sometimes people are acting
according to a hidden plan, and that only by being very
imaginative can one detect that plan and articulate it and
understand it so as to place their actions in that plan.
So while stories as a rule don't have much to do with
reality, they may sometimes--on occasions--catch something
of people's plans and goals and motives. But how can we
be sure? And as magicians, as powerful wizards, we need to
make sure and not go around claiming things emptily. And
even if we make sure, it is far from certain we should
express anything of it. We must, we simply must, value
silence.
To collaborate with any number of people who have any
number of relationships to timing, to feelings, to art, to
clothing, to sex, to discussion, to use of technology, to
eating, to thinking abstractly,--and so on and so forth--
we must satisfy ourselves, first, that we have a good gut
feeling that some collaboration is possible. And then,
having that, we must suggest something that feels right,
and see what happens. Perhaps the person reacts quite
opposite to what you expected. Fine. So you update your
knowledge, change your expectations.
In some cases, sudden emotional outbursts may arise
where you least expected it. To protect the possibility of
a swift recovery of harmonious collaboration situations,
39

MAGIC OF TIME

you can then remind yourself that we do not know the depth
of anyone's personality fully, and that we also cannot
easily know the reasons for these outbursts fully--and so
confine ourselves to gentle suggestions that such-and-such
approach may be more fruitful in this situation, not using
words that further cause inflammatory emotions.
And then we must allow time to have its good say: the
time that allows good, wise words to sink in and have an
impact and that also can allow unnecessarily strong
emotions (perhaps connected to some story that the person
who has these emotions have, a story that is a bit out of
touch with reality) to calm themselves.
To collaborate, we have to remind ourselves to calm also
our own stories, our own plans, our own intentions and
also easen up on any tendency we may have to over-focus
and over-concentrate on concepts and structures. Instead,
there is the dance of contact, the dance of a relationship
or a dialogue, the dance of quality time between subjects
and in that sense there is an 'inter-subjectivity' that
has its own right, its own importance, in addition to the
selves which are in that contact.
Those who have particular technical or artistic skills
may have a capacity to hyper-focus on structure and
concepts; this is one 'mode of the mind'. The magical
approach requires that we aren't attached to any one set
focus of the mind. Those who are very concentrated on
technical things--we can call this the 'asberger mode',
named after the researcher Hans Asberger--do have to train
their capacity to switch between modes in a fluid and
seamless way. It's obviously a wonderful thing to be able
to focus on something but getting into the social wave-
length is another wonderful thing and neither must have
absolute dominance if we are to be whole human beings, in
touch with our magical capabilities.

40

MAGIC OF TIME

Part B, chapter 7: ENTHUSIASM AND SERIOUS COLLABORATION
If you dabble in looking up word-roots in dictionaries
you're no doubt aware that 'enthusiasm' vaguely means,
'God-within' (en-theos/en-deus/Zeus within).
There are any number of reasons why the theme of
enthusiasm is important to use as magicians. The
authentic presence and force of enthusiasm is practically
identical to that of love--at least in many respects--and
there is no greater background than this to evoke powers
that go beyond the ordinary.
And, then, when enthusiasm is shared, we're talking of
giant possibilities of good collaboration. Enthusiasm
isn't necessarily something that 'overflows' from one
person into another: it is, at least in many of the more
interesting cases, a question of something that is as it
were 'drawn out' by a sort of dance around the potentials
in a situation.
Authentic shared enthusiasm isn't all that common: all
the more important to study it. One of the chief reasons
it isn't common is that people instinctively tend to
suppress impulses of enthusiasm when they are uncertain
what it might lead to. It's easy to think of examples. In
many of these, there will be a degree of 'asymmetry' in
what people can offer relative to some goals that some
people might have. Ian Fleming, for instance, wrote (in
one or another of his famous James Bond books) of someone
having the 'politely negative' attitude which is 'typical
of a bank manager'). A bank manager has to be, to some
extent, a salesman: therefore polite. But a bank manager
is often exposed to people wanting to borrow something
of the bank's resources, without necessarily the means to
pay it back. So the politeness becomes tinged with a
negativity that in turn becomes a sort of stamp one can
associate with the title.
Similarly, in social gatherings, there may be occasions
for new beautiful companionships to be shaped, and
enthusiasm, when shared, to indeed signal the beginning of
this. But rarely are the goods equally distributed.
41

MAGIC OF TIME

Someone might be on the look of a new photogenic model, or
a clever genius to revamp the technology of a shop, and,
lo and behold!, over there is a great-looking potential
model and over there someone who has the 'tech nerd' stamp
written all over the person. So the goal-getter may find
enthusiasm boiling up inside,--if 'boiling up' is the
right phrase for this sort of feeling. But will the
enthusiasm be met when the person in need meets with the
person possessing the desired qualities in abundance? As
likely as not, the latter has, probably in more moderate
degrees, acquired at least something of the bank managers
attitude when meeting with eager seekers of certain types
of resources.
This sort of social 'calculation' has nothing inherently
unfair about it--it is just so natural and so instinctive,
so immediate and deep and also quick,--that it can be
hard to think clearly about it. In doing a bit of pre-
thinking and pre-meditation about such a theme, we can
understand the fullness of these processes better, and
prepare better so that the right types of collaboration
can arise--and, in turn, let the right type of magic
unfold itself there.
So, in getting a kind of grip on the situation in terms
of the intellect,--when does mutual enthusiasm arise
between two who didn't exactly expect it? And, let's add
this criterion: when does it arise in a situation in
which one of the people has a resource in abundance, as
seen from the other person's perspective--and the other
wants something of this resource? In looking at the
situation as a sort of equation to be solved, it seems
that the thing that can bring about mutual enthusiasm in
such a situation is some form of symmetry: A has something
that B has in abundance, and--for sake of mutuality--B has
something in abundance that A, in turn, wants. The clue to
a potential successful collaboration is, clearly, that, at
least in some ways, both of them are givers and both of
them are receivers and they are both geared up in advance
for just such exchanges.
A certain journalist whose capacity to expand her career
quickly wrote, in an article, that the surest way to get
on is 'to win over all constraints'. The phrase led me to
a dictionary, which explained to me that such a phrase
means, 'getting beyond all the things that could hold one
back'. I mused over the phrase--certainly an over-
statement--as if any one can win over 'all' limits. But,
intriguingly, the journalist kept on flying high, and just
42

MAGIC OF TIME

a few years later she became a minister--second to the
prime minister. Her career success indicated that she had
got at least something right. However, a year into the job
she gave the impression of not having slept for that whole
year. Very understandable and, in such jobs, very typical:
but it shows that one cannot really talk about 'winning
over all constraints'. One can win over many constraints,
but not all of them; and one has got to see which of those
are in fact ditched in the race to win over other
constraints.
This sort of thing we can see as a quite typical pattern
in many societies: many of the very career-successful
people look completely exhausted, worn-out and premuturely
aged, even as they harbour influences and resources which
may well be vast and oceanic compared to the young in the
same society. The youth factor they lack: and so they may
be willing to shed some of those resources on the young,
when the young are willing to give some youthful splendor
and radiance to some of the activities entertained by the
rich and influential. This is a general sociological
pattern, a sort of mutual asymmetry that can lead to a
shared enthusiasm between very different people. To some
extent, then, this is a kind of 'business sex': the career
person with wealth and power and social dominance may be
one sort of gender, and the young and, in terms of health
and clarity of eyes and pureness of skin can be considered
another 'gender',--and there is an attractiveness that to
some extent may be mutual and that to some extent may have
little to do with conventional 'male'/'female' attraction
patterns. The rich beast and the innocent tender may be
both female. On occasions, an apparently innocent tender
young may partake directly in wealth and affluence and in
some sense 'incorporate both genders' in one and the same
person--for a few years.
In questing more deeply for the right starts of fresh
forms of collaboration, we can form new questions:
* How does one prepare oneself, over time, for the right
fruitful meetings which can set up ripe new forms of
collaboration?
* What is the role of timing as for the initialisation
of such new collaboration?
* What is the role of written agreements in
collaborations, also such that speak about how to complete
collaboration when it's called for?

43

MAGIC OF TIME

Clearly, then, we see that while engaging in magic
intuitively so as to suggest times for things and work to
stick to them must go together with a broader and deeper
understanding of how successful activities take place, and
how relationships are formed and then dissolved.
To indicate some of the answers to such questions as
above--preparation. You may know you strengths and your
potential strengths well. If not, get to know them! And
then find out how you can further develop these strengths
towards not only what you yourself find to be interesting,
but what might possibly be sought-for amongst some of
those who have such resources as you yourself require in
order to get on with your own career and careers.
The next question, about timing: for authentic, shared,
mutual enthusiasm to arise, there is something about being
sensitive to the timing as to when to show it. This is
the timing 'inside the relationship'--or inside the
potential relationship. Two adults who relate to one
another without clinging are sensitive to when to connect
and when to gently avoid connection.
Timing also concerns the relationship to meetings,
agreements, arrangements. In some circles, in some
connections, it makes perfect sense to be perfectly on
time; in other connections, it may be part of some kind of
informal etiquette to be a little late. But if one mis-
calculates how much late and is much too late, that, in
turn, may be seen as a sign of untrustworthiness. So, it's
part of the magic of time to be knowledgeable about these
things and then to weigh it over intuitively and not just
go by habit or confusedly make too many appointments so
that there is no way one can keep them all.
When it comes to written agreements, these may be as
'unromantic' as they can get, and in coming with a badly
formulated agreement or at a bad time or in a bad manner
may lead to a disruption of the possibility of future
collaboration. However, when it is possible, an agreement
of a written kind can greatly clarify things when it comes
to finishing an activity in the future. The mere fact of
putting something in a verbal form may create new
questions that can fairly easily be clarified before the
collaboration becomes substantial, but which may be cause
of sore disagreements (such as over money) much later
unless given proper attention already in the beginning.

44

MAGIC OF TIME

PART C: THE TECHNOLOGY OF MAGICAL SEX

45

MAGIC OF TIME

Part C, chapter 1: A TOUCH OF MATURE NUMEROLOGY
This is an essay about reality, it isn't fiction, nor is i
wishful thinking. I write 'mature numerology' to distance
myself from the whimsical ideas, some good and many rather
hazy, mixed together and published under the slogan of
'numerology' in the past. The 'logic of numbers', in the
magical realm, is of course quite significant--but numbers
are subtle, living things. And we must always remember
that in most cases, there are several ways of counting,
and so the numbers aren't just 'out there'--they are also
subjective, sometimes very so.
Why numbers are significant in magic--when we speak of
real magic, not illusionist magic--is, obviously, a long
story. We will confine ourselves with noting that any good
magician has a sense of numerology, and outline some of
the main points in this regard, and not venture into
explanations of why it might be so (which no doubt is an
interesting theme and one worthy of plenty of other
studies).
Generally--though this tendency may be a little less
important in writing cultures that go from right to left--
increasing numbers, as looking from left to right,
signify optimism.
Some numbers indicate stability, others order or growth,
some, especially when grouped together, may appear vaguely
sinister, while yet others signify change--a change that,
given awareness, need not be any other than fortiduous and
46

MAGIC OF TIME

lucky and good--and yet other numbers signify completion
of a process. The smaller numbers, and the digits from 0
to 9 not in the least, are more easily associated with
such general functions; and while we might surmise that a
deeper study can indicate many interesting flavours of a
very wide range of numbers of several digits, I think it's
usually adequate to know only of this and that of the
larger numbers in the numerological sense.
Again, without explanations, I'll jump into what I
intuit to be right to say about some small numbers, and
what I find that experience tend to support: but beware
any over-interpretation or over-emphasis on these points.
A good numerologist is a relaxed numerologist.
Comments on small numbers and a few slightly larger
numbers in a numerological or synchronistic sense:
1: can signify unity, wholeness, mastery, being number one
--can also indicate, of course, 'just 1'.
2: can signify duality, which in some cases might be
polarising and lead to conflict--but can also indicate
relationship in a pair-sense, or a bridge-building.
3: one of the grand wholeness numbers, 'all good things
are three'. This sense is strengthened when the number is
together with another one of the grand wholeness numbers,
like 5.
4: transportation often involves four wheels, and so 4 may
be a number of change; it's also a number of a sort of
machine-like 2x2 symmetry, and we may easily associate the
four corners of a square--again, something machine-like--
with it. So in some contexts, where something more stable
or something more organic is sought, it may be a
challenging number.
5: like 3, one of the great wholeness and healing numbers,
the sense of organic structure, the five-pointed star
pointing up, the five fingers of a hand; with 3, the
relationship is that of the golden ratio (or near it).
With 8, we also have an indication towards the golden
ratio. The sum of 5 and 8 being 13 indicates then that one
should consult, to some extent, the additional properties
of 13. In comparison with 3, we may note that 5 has more
'balancing measures' than 3--we might think of 3 as having
one solid bridge or moderating influence between the 2
poles; in the case of 5, it's even more clear that we
don't have a polarity.
6: with 6 we are beginning to get enough roundedness, if
47

MAGIC OF TIME

we draw it up eg as a six-pointed star, that we are
beginning to sense a sort of 'wheel'--which is even more
noticable with the number 8. The feeling of 6 is often
dominated by the sense of it being composed of 3 twice,
which suggests that there could be some polarity inside
it but not necessarily in any very challenging way. Rather
it is an organic number.
Unlike the 5-pointed star, which so clearly does point,
either so that it 'stands on two legs' relative to the
gravitation of the planet--thus head up, signifying
wholeness--the 6-pointed star in a way seems to be equally
much pointing up and anywhere else no matter how it is
placed or rotated. This further indicates robustness. Yet
with a number as big as 6, we are getting towards the
possibility of complicated structures. The sense of some
kind of 'organic wheel' with possible intent--and intent
that one may have to watch a little--is further suggested
when we see three 6 in a row; however by adding yet one
more 6, the sense of it is somewhat diminished. In having
6 four times after one another one has a sense of the 24
hours divided into four natural parts, and so this
sequence is more indicating something powerful, and which
may last fairly long, and have capacities to affect the
whole day and night.
7: seven is in a way the biggest of the small numbers:
with eight, we are in a way getting beyond the absolute
smallest core group. 7 can be drawn up like a star, but it
isn't the most obvious star to draw or visualise. It is
more easily imagined as a hierarchy--that there is some-
thing dominant, a ruling point, and this ruling point or
line has three smaller lines on one side of it, and three
smaller lines on the other side of it. So 7 is easily
imagined to be a structure with a very pure organisation,
slightly machine-like, but not necessarily machine-like
(that depends on the context).
The digit 7 is also part of the organising principle of
our minds, as repeated studies have shown that the number
of things, groups, concepts most easily 'kept in mind' at
the same time is about 7, or 7 'plus minus two'. So when
you see seven of something, you see something that you can
comprehend as one group; you can remember the whole set of
it if you have a clear relationship to each element in
that group. 7 is also such a high number, after all, that
it suggests plentiful structure.
Let's also bear in mind that of the numbers we've looked
at so far, then, above 1 and 2, we find that 3, 5 and 7
48

MAGIC OF TIME

all count as prime numbers (ie, they don't allow other
numbers than 1 and themselves in 'clean divisions').
8: 8 is clearly not a prime number, it is 2x2x2, and
excitingly symmetrical but also somewhat 'fat' number: it
is, for a one-digit number, big and the circular-looking
shape one can make of a polygon with eight sides has the
'rounded' feel of fat. Together with 5, it is highly
exciting in that, in looking at the first decimals of the
divisions of 8 to 5, we are very near a good practical
approximation of the golden ratio. The golden ratio you
know perhaps already--written with just some digits a good
approximation of it is 1.618.
Yet add 5 to 8 we get to 13, so such a combination need
to look into the significance of that number also.
Because of the grand significance of any number that is
the power of 2--such as 2x2x2, or 8, and twice this for a
number of times--16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 4096,
up to 32768 and 65536 and at least up to 32 bits--we can
connect the number with the digital aspect of life to
some extent--yet this sense is perhaps more clearly coming
forth with the next in this series, namely 16.
Because of the roundedness of this number many have
associated it with endless ongoingness and even used a
somewhat similar symbol as the 8 digit, but horisontally,
to indicate infinity. This sense of it shouldn't be over-
stated, but in some contexts, 8 may indicate endurance, at
least.
9: this digit is an interesting transition number: seeing
it, one expects things to leap into two digits, as 10, and
getting on; and yet it is so completely a wholeness in
itself, lovingly created by 3x3. Only in some contexts
(such as fingers) would one associate with a lack of some
kind. In most cases, it's a number symbolising growth and
fun.
10: the first two-digit number in the very natural
10-digit number system, 10 indicates a wholeness and an
ease and a sure-footedness. It can be given other
interpretations in certain contexts--it can signify the
top score in a range going from 1..10; it can signify the
lower of ten top scores where the top is number 1; it can
signify one-tenth or, when speaking permille, 10 permille,
or one-hundreth; it can vaguely also indicate the digital
realm by its simple construction as the digit '1' followed
by the digit '0'. Yet normally it signifies wholeness,
also such as ten fingers, both hands, the whole person.

49

MAGIC OF TIME

Above 10 we will speak only of a few numbers and then only
in the sense of glimpses of their possible significance;
we have already, in connection to 8, talked about 16, 32,
and up, though.
12: whereas 10 signifies some sense of organic wholeness,
12 does so again, but perhaps more relative to the sense
of flowing time. Clearly, the clock concept with 12 and 24
hours does appeal to us in some innate way.
13: a number that indicates a transition, and this
transition may be strong and strongly lucky but it may
also be another kind of transition, one that one has to
pay attention to and look into so one steers away from
any possible bad aspects of it. Adding the digits of this
number gives us 4 which has something of the same sense
to it, but whereas 4 is more straightforward a change, 13
is easily associated with a stronger change. This is no
doubt connected to the sense that 12 is a form of rather
stable completeness, and adding one to that indicates a
'whole new' aspect. Note that it's great to couple 13 with
21, because the ratio of 21:13 is even nearer the golden
ratio than 8:5. In this series, let's note that, further
on, 34:21 is still nearer the golden ratio, and 55:34 is
excitingly perfect for all practical applications of the
golden ratio (which is a theme for other texts).
15: a beautiful number of dynamic and organic structure,
being 5 times 3 in its prime factors, thus suggestive of
the golden ratio but also suggestive of an organic
wholeness composed of organic wholenesses.
16: as said in connection to 8, the number 16, being 2 to
the power of 4, or 2x2x2x2, is intensely symmetrical and
also indicative of the digital aspect of life. But this
can in some contexts be 'too digital' and so 16 can
signify organic finishing sometimes.
24: as twice 12 it shares in the senses we've given to 12,
pretty much.
27: one above the number of letters in the English
alphabet, identical to the <ESC> button in the computer
list of socalled 'ascii' numbers, nearing the ending of
the gay 'twenties', and composed of an unruly 3x3x3--
unruly because there is nothing such as 5 to keep the 3's
together--this number signifies that something has been
completed and finished and perhaps done with.
28: technological expertise associated with the handling
of 4x7; a re-arisal after the ending of a '27'; etc.
37: a prime number--these are getting rarer and rarer the
50

MAGIC OF TIME

higher up we go in the number--with the fascinating
feature of composing the number 111 when multiplied by 3.
Looking at 37 in our natural 10-digit system, we see an
increase, from 3 to 7, and we see structure--such as with
3 and with 7. 37 is very much 'on the way', and in an
optimistic sense.
46: the number of healthy chromosones in healthy humans,
and divisible by two, when we get the other number, 23,
signifying the healthy number of chromosones in the sexual
cells, this is by Nature as it were one of the grand
wholeness numbers. It is also, when written in our
natural number system, optimistic in going from 4 to 6,
and in having the 4 plus 6 equals 10 sum (and similar we
can say about 23, to some extent).
47: a machine-like number, the numbers of robots--they
don't sexually multiply--they have the wheels of '4' and
the hierarchical structure of '7'.
48: above the 46 and the robotic 47 we reach the sense of
48 as perhaps a companionship, fruitfully, of healthy
humans with this number. This number is also fairly much
one of the digital numbers (16 plus 32).
69: the numbers showing through digits of 6 and 9 together
are easily associated with sexual attraction and
activities
96: associates to 69 but less dependent 'on each other',
the digits suggesting more freedom
97: bringing a new wholeness and structure also to such
sexual energies as associated with 69 and 96
501: one of the ways one can see some significance in this
number is that, when written in our ten-digit system, we
have a '5' firmly established--a wholeness, then--but the
number is not only a hundred times this whole '5', it is
also 'plus one', indicating that something is being
sketched. Clearly an number signifying art.

51

MAGIC OF TIME

Part C, chapter 2: TIME, MAGIC, TOOLS, MEMORY & SEXUALITY
By now--if you have read all the chapters up until here--
you will know that my approach to magic is such that it
involves absolutely all aspects of life--it is no mere
technique that can be "added" to just any lifestyle.
Some of the things we touch on in this chapter is obvious
for people who are more 'materialist' than 'spiritual'--
for instance the importance of personal memory. For those
inclined e.g. to a 'radical zen' approach of 'absolute
living in the Now', however, the comments in this chapter
--as given by someone who is profoundly oriented towards
spirituality--may be of value.
Magic is a deeper form of interaction or interplay or what
we can call it, than the usual cause-and-effect type.
Have you thought of the roots of the word 'control'? It
could be translated into 'contra' and 'roll'--in other
words, 'to roll against'. The idea of control is most
often used in cases where something or someone is doing
something against the natural inclinations or movements of
someone or something else. There is one particular way of
using the same word in which the meaning is entirely
different--and that is the sense of 'effortless overview
and sense of mastery'. Somebody describing a feeling of
relaxed driving of a car as a 'feeling of control' is
using the word in this particular sense. This is not the
way we use the word "control" in this chapter, though.
Control, then, typically involves some degree of
conflict. Is conflict wrong? Sometimes, conflict cannot be
avoided. But when it can be avoided, surely it is good if
things can be done more harmoniously as a rule--more
effortlessly, to put it that way. And in such cases we
need an approach of playing, dancing, interacting and
relating to one another more than taking the stiffer
52

MAGIC OF TIME

approach of control. Let us use the word "interplay" to
speak of this approach.
While control and conflict has a tendency to break up
finer connections, then, in contrast, interplay forms
finer connections. So interplay has a lot of good and
positive side-effects. We can say that interplay creates
resonance. So, in resonance there is a spontaneous and
enduring contact that can go beyond mere cause and
effect. This resonance can bring about an effortless
understanding of what is really going on, and by this
understanding comes capacities to introduce changes
perhaps without conflict, or at any rate with less
conflict.
The approach of avoiding conflict is simple: while we
constantly must have the capacity to undertake to handle
conflicts with strength and integrity--a conflict, if it
spins even slightly out of its original area, can destroy
many things and upset finer harmonies it have taken a
long time to build. Put in an economical sense--'it isn't
worth it'--to have conflicts any too often.
Interplay can start with a "beginner's mind", with
innocence, as when you naturally get into touch with
perfect strangers and all works out well. Then, in inter-
play, there is also the beauty and validity of memory.
The stability of memory in a person creates stability and
strength of character; the stability of a memory in a
person also makes memory in relationships possible. This
includes professional relationships, business activities.
So, in order to create conditions for love and business
with less conflict we need to have a relationship to time
also as memory. By a vast spectrum of memory processes of
all sorts, the personality of a person acquires a shape
and a presence and a magnetism. This is obviously some-
thing more than, and different from, the shape of the
body physically, and how attractive it may be.
And it is by memory processes that you come to know
somebody else's personality--this is obvious, perhaps,--
but it leads us to a point which isn't always handled
elegantly in spirituality: to what extent is the
understanding and the harmonious relating to another's
personality merely a catering to the other's ego? Isn't it
better just to have the memory processes one needs to
handle practical things, and to have an understanding of
how God (co-)created the world and so on--one might ask.
53

MAGIC OF TIME

But no, the relationship to the personality of each
individual is not identical to a catering or support of
their "egoes". It is more akin to the difference in
relationship that a gardener may have to the very
different flowers in the garden. A personality is a kind
of 'body in time', in contrast to the 'body in space'
that we photograph. Whatever there is of ego is something
that is best decided when the personality is known and one
has a vast knowledge and intuition of many other themes
simultaneously. The good contact that can be build between
personalities over time can allow one to point out how
this or that may be a 'hang-up' or attachment or a giving
in to unnecessary greed--and so, by knowing about the
personalities, one can in fact work to dismantle egotism.
Another challenge as regards memory processes in relation-
ship is to keep clearly in mind that one's experience of
another involves ideas and interpretations of what the
other is really thinking and this may be off the mark. The
understanding may be subjective. Also, a form of egotism
involves doling out 'blame' to other people and then
'forgiving' them, as if one is beyond making mistakes
oneself and has the right to condemn. Such condemnation
may take place via body language and what is not said
rather than what is said, but all the same it is an ego
process if it is overdone. This is one of the dangers of
having a good memory! So, one who has a good memory also
need to practise the art of forgetting (and forgiving).
The magician needs a certain harmonious order in daily
life and to achieve this, a lot of things must be figured
out and done right, and what it takes for instance of
tools and technology and expertise to support this
harmonious order depends on such things as what goals and
ambitious that person may have at any time.
For instance, if a business ambition involves the use of
some forms of technology in an efficient manner relative
to paying customers, it is necessary somehow to get a very
good grip on this technology. In magical terms, one must
build up a resonance with this technology--and not just
with the people one is collaborating with. In building up
this resonance, time and energy must be invested into
setting it up and learning it. And there may be a choice
of technology involved.
As technology changes, naturally, to some extent from
one time period to the next, the most general advise is:
54

MAGIC OF TIME

does the technology allow you the necessary degree of
interplay? I mean, can you engage in getting a sense not
only of control, but of interplay and interaction and
engagement when you use that which is critical to your
mission?
Given that there is a choice of technology, we may ask
questions such as: is the technology, if it doesn't give
you a sense of command and play and interplay at present,
capable of giving you it given a meaningfully short
enough period of learning for you? Or must you change the
technology type, because it is not having suitable
features to allow you to unfold yourself creatively and in
a meaningful way relative to the goals you have?
This goes all the way to such as programming. Some
programs may be made so that you can let yourself go, and
you can express yourself: and if running the program is
part of your business and it is part of your business to
put your soul into what you're doing, that may be a good
program. Other programs, on the other hand, may provide
few 'handles', and may be mostly running on their own
accord and only give you the possibility of slight
modifications here and there--unless perhaps with very
intense and long learning put in first. Such programs may
be right in many circumstances where we have only a
passing interest in interaction with the program. But it
isn't the type of program an artist with a passionate
interest in fulfilling certain ambitions would want to
call on as a main tool.
The feeling of overview and order and wholeness in life
is not only a pleasant feeling: it is an expression of
what you see that you plan and where you see that you're
standing at present and with whom and how and what you
think are the likely developments given the present plans
and intentions. To change plans means that your feeling of
your life at present changes, and that in turns changes
how you sleep and how you smile and how you dress and so
on. All these factors play together.
The calling on the right tools given your present plans
is then not a small theme. In order to have the strength
of mental energy to also do magic, you need to get the
physical and sociological aspects of your life sorted out
enough first.
So in this chapter we enquire more--for we are regularly
doing it in this essay--into the foundations of harmony. A
theme we cannot then avoid touching, at least, is to some
55

MAGIC OF TIME

pretty much "burning hot". It is not too much to say that
to many people, in good ways and in neurotic ways, this
burning theme--of sexuality, of course--is somehow tied up
with almost everything they do, think and say.
Obviously, anyone who is spiritual will no doubt have
spent a certain amount of time pondering on the theme of
sex. Most classical world religions--but not all branches
of them--have most tried to 'categorise away' sex. As a
result, most of society eg in the 20th century tended to
regard sex as merely a vehicle for (a) child production,
(b) personal pleasure, and (c) seductive attraction that
can be utilised eg in selling things. The strict religious
person, austere in attitude, would probably regard the
mere fact of (b) as reason enough to regard sex as
something 'bad' unless in some pleasure-less neutral way
necessary for the sake of (a)--and the same person would
regard the business of selling and buying, in (c), as
irrelevant for the spiritual life.
A more whole approach to spirituality, less impressed by
the arguments of denying life, and more in tune with
insights considering all life as a holy unfoldment, will
have totally different views of sexuality. But to continue
the list above, let us add that sex can also (d) enable
resonance, and (e) contribute to shaping wholeness.
The fact of (d) is obvious: sex, when good, involves
interplay in an intense degree. Even if it is sex of the
type that by mutual consent involves control and
domination, it is still a form of play and interplay. All
this creates a resonance that can act to stimulate forms
of collaboration between healthy attractive individuals
with their youth-hood intact.
This feature of sexuality means, in short, that since
resonance leads to intuition and increased capacity to
exert a magical influence, then sex can heighten the
capacity an individual have to get things done well, also
magically. And by the category of sex, we must include
masturbation--as self-sex--and within this category, the
happiness or stimulation that comes to a mind that is
exposed to sexually attractive beauty glimpses is part of
the foundations for a harmonious life.
A mind that is able to become peaceful by sexual
stimulation through healthy slender young beautiful
stimulation, both from real life experiences and from
experiences through art and digital media such as photos,
must be a mind that cultivates the idea of sexual beauty
56

MAGIC OF TIME

as infinitely more important than any tendency in oneself
for envy or jealousy.
So it is part of the wizard's 'mental hygienics' to work
to cleanse the mind of jealousy and envy and such things,
by suitable meditation and contemplation and by putting
things in a grander perspective. It is always good to
remind oneself, also, that beauty gives happiness to the
seer of the beauty, and this doesn't mean that one has to
own or possess that beauty.
The theme of how sex can, as said in point (e), can help
to 'shape wholeness' is a vast one. Once it is clear that
young sexually attractive features of human women
stimulates resonance, then it is clear that everything we
shape, in design, art, fashion, interior, meals, etc,--
going on to how we shape our words, how we give pet names
to things, how we arrange our relationship to technology,
how we do parties, how we lay out things at beach prior to
a swim--etc--can have a relationship to such sexually
attractive beauty. A logo for a business ought not to
cater to fat but to attractive elegant slenderness, for
instance, to be aligned to sexual magic. The examples here
are countless.
The theme is probably best understood by a study of how
the myths and theories of such as 'tantric cosmology' can
make sense; how sexuality in the human bodily manifest
form is an expression of archetypes of power and
polarities and interplay of much more subtle beings, such
as the plethora of beings under the arch-God Zevs.
In the 20th century, of course, the conflict between the
socalled 'darwinists' and 'the believers' set the tone for
many diverse developments, not all of the very holistic--
but many of these developments certainly creative compared
to the rather fundamentalist attitudes of believers of
many religions before the advent of darwinistically
inspired materialism. The ideas of Charles Darwin, with
their orientation towards a belief in mere 'randomness'
combined with causes and effects over a great deal of time
as suitable for the creation of everything and everyone,
with the associated theory of 'survival of the fittest',
isn't compatible with magic in its dry materialistic form.
To engage in magic, one must see the over-simple belief
in statistical randomness in darwinism as not adequate to
explain the vast complexity and beauty of such as human
beings; and one must also see the lack of deeper content
to the concept of 'randomness'.
57

MAGIC OF TIME

Once the notion of subtle orders, subtle energies and
subtle patterns imposing themselves on the fluctuations of
atomic and subatomic processes are comprehended, then one
can see that it is possible to pick up, electically, some
bits of darwinistic thinking into a kind of
'mini-darwinistic theory' that is in turn part of a
larger 'subtle energy theory' of creation. This subtle
energy theory of creation can in turn be meditated on as
part of yet larger theories, or even myths, of reality, in
which a creator and his beings have done the chief work.
In case of such a development of understanding, one will
perhaps see that the role of 'evil' isn't necessary; thus,
in going from materialism through a concept of subtle
forces to a God-inspired point of view, one sheds dualism.
Nevertheless, in leaving darwinism for such a grander
theory, one must appreciate that there are many 'clues' in
reality that points towards something like darwinism. In
assigning these clues not to a past of 'experiments of
Nature' but to the willful creation of subtle beings, we
can only say that reality is full of deliberate deception
and that we human beings are 'meant to' create wrong myths
of how it all came to be. And why? The answer should be
fairly obvious: a reality that is too obviously created
by divine beings will get a subserviant and uncreative
humanity compared to a reality full of interesting
delusions. The creativity that we saw in the 20th century
was often enthusiastically heralded by atheists, knowingly
clashing with 'believers'. As a result, humanity came into
its own right--but that doesn't mean that darwinism is to
be regarded as more than a stimulant.

58

MAGIC OF TIME

Part C, chapter 3: MAGICAL PRO ET CONTRA & REALITY READING
For every decision--and we have discussed the importance
of the art of decision-making earlier, in Part A--but
there's always more to this theme!--there are consequences
that run counter to some priorities we have. No decision
is free from counter-effects. We can call them
'unintended consequences'. But 'unintended' doesn't have
to mean 'unseen' or 'unforeseen'. They can indeed be
both 'fore-seen' and 'fore-felt'--and that is the task of
intuition, which is an essential component in magic.
A typical fatheaded approach to decision-making is about
'listing up the pro's and the contra's'--that is, make a
list of the advantages and the disadvantages of doing
something one way, as compared to another way. This is
indeed not so clever because such lists give emotional
weights to some of the points through the choice of words,
and the lists tend to conceal the vast complexities
involved, and the various networks and hierarchies of
mutual influences and consequences and deeper priorities.
So, after having made a 'list of pro's and contra's',
you may find that you will have to spend time actively
forgetting that list, ignoring it, discarding it, in order
for your mind and your feelings and your body to be able
to truly sense what is right to do. The confusion almost
always inherent in such list must be ended. The clarity
of mind must be re-evoked through silence and meditation,
beauty and movement and travel.
A plan that you make in a preliminary sense, a temporary
sense, can be considered in the nature of a question: it
is a question, as it were, to your reality, your life. You
may not actually equip anything in it with a question-
mark. But life will respond. Your mind, your body, will
guide you to get some experiences rather than other
experiences, quite spontaneously. In this process, you are
59

MAGIC OF TIME

'reading reality',--unconsciously if you're untrained, and
consciously if you are a sorcerer, a spiritually awakened
person.
To read reality must be done 'with a pinch of salt': when
overdone, it is madness; when underdone, it is a gross
materialism that enhances premature ageing and decay in a
person. When overdone, it is too much greed for life. When
underdone, it is too little passion for life. The passion
that the spiritual person has for life is greater than
mere desire, yet not so feverish as greed.
The plans and the questions we put to ourselves may change
our lives--and indeed we begun this essay by pointing out
that some forms of plans, by their relationship to time,
to clock, to calendars, have magical effects--so that by
enquiring into some plans, we may open up for new
enquiries, new plans. And this may take some time, of
course: and the more time we give it, while maintaining
good memory processes and not doing such as over-
indulgence in alcohol or drugs,--thus maintaining a
continuity--the more we can understand of the questions
and the world around us and of how things are likely to
evolve.
And by increased understanding, if we keep on orienting
ourselves to facts and not to mere story-telling with
heroes and heroines, and by putting any overdone self-pity
away (and any self-pity is almost always too much)--we are
laying the grounds for intuitions, and we are shaping
events.
In such a process, we can enter the magical way of doing
Pro et Contra--the latin expression for 'in favour and
against'. This magical way leads to sudden attractions.
When these attractions seem harmonious enough, and we
explore them, they will open up for understanding what is
right to do; and when we are led towards disharmony, we
interpret that disharmony and work to correct our plans.
In this, we are as if in a 'dialogue with experienced
reality'--and we are 'reading reality'.
For instance, if your plan involves too much second-handed
rather than first-handed approaches, you may find yourself
suddenly seeing many people who are too fat. For fat is a
human flesh symbol of second-handedness, fat isn't as
first-hand as muscles and nerves and bones. For fat merely
60

MAGIC OF TIME

packs in those other things, like bubbles without much
inner action or integrity or intelligence. Now this is an
example of 'reading reality'--it shows how the magician is
in a sense 'afloat in the magical decision landscape'.
After a while of this process of enquiry, a number of
insights will present themselves to the spiritual person.
These insights should, in the normal case, be given an
expression in the form of words, clearly written and
memorised. If such an expression presses itself onto the
magician from within, and is not given a meaningful form,
the magician will get headaches or even become ill: for
the magician is devoted to a life in truth, and not giving
expression, so as to encapsulate, insights granted in this
sublime way is a lack of functionality. So the physical as
well as the mental radiance and cheerfulness of a magician
is directly tied up to a constant expression process.
This expression process can take other forms than words,
sometimes, but words must remain primary, and the other
forms, visual, programming, shaping things, sex games,
travel methods, dance, singing, music and so on--these
forms must be brought in at the ripe times, and usually
after a process of clearly going through the new insights
by means of words.
But let us be clear that words are an expression of the
insights, while the source of insights is in quiet seeing,
quiet attention, the silent awareness--the quiet attention
of a sorcerer, which, in a way, embeds all reality.

61

MAGIC OF TIME

Part C, chapter 4: THE VALUE OF SCEPTICISM IN MAGIC
We briefly mentioned, in this part, that 'reading reality'
is 'madness' if overdone, and unhealthy lack of passion
for life if 'underdone'.
Scaptisism is a sort of heat in the frying pan for our
thoughts: apply too much of it, and no matter the
delicacy of what you put into the pan, become mere bits of
coal and not very edible at all. Over-applied scepticism
can wreck ambition, passion, love, and create a sense of
penetrating apathy almost identical with death.
When we apply too little scepticism, however, a person
will easily become maniac: all that counts is the
continuation of that person's dreams and stories and
forms of reasoning and the person don't want "reality" to
interfere--doubt becomes a dangerous thing--and this lack
of scepticism disconnects the person from society and
other people (except, perhaps, with a few who, in a
secterian manner, may happen to share just those stories
and forms of reasoning).
However scepticism can also be applied in a biased way,
--against things and people and processes where really it
is morein place to have some trust, and too little of it
may then be employed where it really matters--for instance
against one's own tendency perhaps to see conspiracies
where there are none.
But what is scepticism? As described by the late Arne
Naess, my friend the logician and philosopher, it is an
attitude more than a teaching or a worldview. And this
attitude goes back to ancient thinkers like Sextus
Empiricus. It is an attitude that regards nothing as
absolutely proven--nothing at all--and hence it is also
compatible with wonder, an attitude that, in some snese,
everything is possible (something he also expanded on
under the label of 'possibilism').
However, scepticism, like Naess himself, has a history
in the 20th century of being associated with a tendency in
academic philosophy that asserts of everything that is
62

MAGIC OF TIME

'metaphysical' that it is a 'mere speculation'--and that
the only good source of certainty is to stay as near as
possible to sensory experiences. It is then often also
associated with a worldview--even if Naess himself wanted
--and rightly, I think--to dis-associate scepticism from
any worldview--of materialistic atheism. This view claims
that since we have no grounds for certainty as for grand
metaphysical theoris and also that it may appear that we
"don't need such theories"--but rather that "it is enough"
with theories of "the observable", like atomic forces and
such, those metaphysical things are either incorrect or
worse, illusions or delusions.
However Naess argued--and we had many conversation about
this issue just before he was ninety, and still entirely
clear in his head--that each theory and also each world-
view consists of a long list of 'assumptions'--and that
these assumptions shouldn't be treated as a package but
that the healthy, sane, rational, logical approach is to
be able to divide these assumptions from one another, and
inspect each one of them.
As an example, he suggested that if you find that you
can describe a theory by means of ten sentences, then
you can automatically generate 1023 more theories just by
inserting a 'not' in each sentence (2 times 2 ten times is
1024, so it is 1023 more theories).
You would have thought, perhaps, that a person of such a
great rational approach would easily have discussed the
assumptions involved in quantum theory versus those
involved in other forms of physics. But here he shared
with many of the most ardent 'logical empiricists' the
attitude that quantum theory wasn't "near enough" the
phenomena to be a very interesting theory, and he rather
took to Einstein's attitudes to physics.
This prejudice I was not able to cure him of--and to me,
it shows that even if one advocates a scheme such as
'scepticism', it may be that one doesn't really apply it
on one's own prejudices and biases. I mention this
because of the tendency that some may have in trying to
find 'salvation' in a particular programme or worldview or
theory. It is great to explore programmes and worldviews
and theories, but they do not necessarily change the
personality nor provide deep insights that penetrate all
of the person.
Regardless, the attitude of scepticism seems to me to be
exactly what a good magician must be able to call on, and
that in a way that is greater than that which we have
63

MAGIC OF TIME

typically seen in spiritual traditions. Someone whose
worldview was more spiritual--and in his later years, also
involving an element of faith in a Creator Being (as it
seems)--and who yet called on a scepticist attitude was
the Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti (not in the least
in the recorded conversations between him and the famous
physicist David Bohm, the latter who have also had many
published conversations with leaders in tibetan buddhism.
So let us consider how scepticism works. First of all, it
means that when many things are said, these are recognised
as many and not just one thing. A socalled 'story', for
instance, usually contains a whole range of assumptions,
most of them not spoken but necessary in order to make
sense of the story.
This means that in order to put scepticism into
practise, we mustn't be so much in love with story-telling
that we can't stop up and do a bit of analysis of what is
assumed. This suggests also that we should consider a
real conversation more important than an imagined one, and
a text more important than a video with images flowing
into one another and essentially commanding attention to
go out instead of also going to the content. We can also
get pauses for insight with images in a way that videos
cannot give. (And something similar can be said about
programs or types of programs.)
Then, when it comes to conversations, and of one's own
private meditations, one must be able to go beyond the
story and get in touch with the individual assumptions,
the individual points. Each of the assumptions can be
questioned: but in society, to question must be done with
a natural caution because some assumptions cannot be
publically questioned without causing some people to react
with perhaps violent emotions.
But doubt is, we can say, a 'democratic right': each
person has the right to doubt whatever she pleases.
Society may have rules and regulations and attitudes and
morals that prohibit this or that doubt from being
expressed, but for that we also have art.
In his or her private work, the magician will then not
spend too much time getting 'full of stories' but will
quietly look at the assumptions involved and sort them
out. It is part of a natural mental ordering process to
figure out and feel and intuit, also with logical
activity and checking, where one can, relative to trust-
64

MAGIC OF TIME

worthy reports in experience, what is more correct and
what is more false or incorrect. One doesn't have to say
(except in casual talk) 'true' or 'truth': more or less
correct will do fine.
In sorting out these assumptions, the magician won't stop
at merely looking into things of experience, but will also
apply both scepticism and intuition as to metaphysics--or,
as it seems the classical hellene Aristotle formulated it,
"meta ta physica"--what comes "after" physics, or nature:
in other words, what we reflect on as grander themes after
we have reflected on what we experience at the sensory
level.
Ultimately, of course, many of the historical clashes in
the religious past of humanity connects to some people of
authority in some religions clamiming to have other
intuitions or, as they may have called it, "revelations",
than other authorities in the same or in different
religions. It is on the background of these fierce
conflicts that one can understand, emotionally, how the
impulse of 'logical empiricism' (also called, 'logical
positivism' or just 'positivism') came in as an attempt to
make, as it were, human beings rational once and for all.
In other words, logical empiricism may be seen to have
an emotional, rather than a rational, ground for its
dominance in the 20th century--despite its slogan of
being rational and applying doubt and regard nothing as
absolutely proven (the latter point has also been
eminently well discussed by Karl R Popper).
Even if we call into question the rationality of any
overdone 'logical empiricism' and put doubt on the whole
thesis of 'atheist materialism' we should however regard
the praxis of scepticism as an invaluable tool in magic.
By regarding it as a tool, we have grounds in ourselves
for coming to a greater humility--indeed, a much-called-
for humility, in all things metaphysical and grand and
religious and spiritual.
It is a consequence of realizing the importance of
having a healthy sense of doubt and rationally applied
scpeticism that one comes into an attitude of rejecting
guru-ism and priest-ism and iman-ism and rabbi-ism and
so on for each of the religions and outside of them, too.
Any prophet-ism is rejected by someone who has enough of
scepticism within. This rejection may be emotional but it
is more a perception that these people of power, to whom
65

MAGIC OF TIME

other people may cling, constitute something inherently
non-spiritual--it is rather a political affair dressed up
in religious terms. Faith is again beyond all questions of
scepticism about this or that: you can have faith in a
source, an origin, and yet be sceptical about every guru
in the world.

Part C, chapter 5: AFFIRMATIONS AND SEX
As "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment" (by Thaddeus
Golas", said: Fine if it happens, fine if it doesn't.
Quite apart from the fact that this essay does not
discuss enlightenment--such an attitude of flexibility in
the outlook on the world, such an attutude of flexibility
in expectations--is clearly something to aspire to. And,
at the same time, we must cultivate passion in ourselves,
passions for the things that make sense, for the goals to
which our hearts agree.
And when there is passion, there will be hope: and where
there is hope, there will be disappointment. But one who
knows that the fact of disappointmen comes from the
presence of goals can then act rationally, and ask: does
it still make sense to nurture this goal, even if in some
slightly modified form? For one who is in love with
reality--and love of reality is the source of intuition--
disappointments may come only occasionally, and even when
they come, the better part of them may turn out to be
hasty conclusions--in other words, that there weren't
reasons for disappointment after all.

66

MAGIC OF TIME

So instead of condemning how emotions connect to time, the
time-aware magician understands it and harnesses it.
The magician must have the generous personality--or
cultivate such a personality--that also has the strength
to avoid any needless accusation. Human communication is
full of potential confusions, and someone who is too
quick in condemning something or someone when things don't
work out as expected is merely giving an impression of
immaturity.
A sexual radiance goes together with faith in God and goes
together with what (in Tolkien's vocabulary) is 'white
magic'. (The arch-example in Tolkien's stories is the
blissful radiance of the elves, their dancing nature;
their love of music; their splendid spiritual qualities
that has nothing of the condemning attitude found in some
less worthy interpretations of Christianity than that
which Tolkien had).
In the presence of sexual energy, such as when walking
by oneself, or watching the waves, the possibility of
making affirmations obviously exist. Jesus would have
called this 'prayer'. The few examples he (reputedly) gave
had much in it of a sense of command. A simple affirmation
is: I want more money as income each month. A spiritual
person can say this and it is in every sense as much a
prayer to God as one of the famous bible quotations of
prayer: for it is obvious to the spiritual person that
the affirmation must have such qualities of truth and
importance and love and wholeness--given the magician's
worthy goals--that it is directed at the source.
An affirmation can be more specific, of course, than
merely being a statement of wanting 'more' of something.
But as long as it makes sense, and is attended to with
fresh sexual energy, spoken in thought, in the mind, when
such as walking--just two or tree or a handful of times--
then it becomes an expanding energy, a q-field (as we say
in super-model theory), that becomes part of that person's
aura and radiance.
As it expands, it connects naturally to the centre of
spiritual activity in the gut; and right after saying the
affirmation, and visualising the presence of the sexual
vivbration of the mentality thus set up, there may be
advises from the muses as what to do next. Just a few
hints, and one will do well to memorize them and quietly
see if one can meaningfully move towards getting them
67

MAGIC OF TIME

somehow done. In having this communication with the subtle
beings of reality (whom we may call 'the muses', using an
ancient word that has widened its meaning considerably
since its original uses)--we have a dialogue with reality.
This dialogue is likely to involve 'tests' of your
stamina, possible disappointments, etc, and only those who
have enough strength of character to go through the
entire mission while keeping on to the affirmations will
have a great chance in fulfilment.

Part C, chapter 6: POWER OF OCCASIONAL SLEEP-DEPRIVATATION
Just as New York--"The City that Never Sleeps"--has long
been famous for offering a combination of sleeplessness
and outstanding creativity, so has every great artist,
from Leonardo da Vinci through William Blake and up until
beatnik poets like Alan Ginsberg--known that occasional
moderate sleep deprivation can in a way, "switch off" the
world so to make one "tune in". Immense creativity comes
from well-managed bouts of sleep-deprivation. But over-
done, it leads to all the things we associate with over-
use of drugs. And one of the effects of over-use of drugs
may be a detoriated mind,--torn between its wild inner
activity and the pressures from the sensory organs, with
sensory impulses which may contradict one's intense ideas
about the world--intensified by sleeplessness.
As soon as you begin with sleep-deprivation, you'll find
that thoughts which before were 'simmering under the
68

MAGIC OF TIME

surface' become manifest and substantial and as if easy to
reach out for and hold and then make verbal. Perhaps you
know all these things already--if so, this chapter is not
for you. But if you are knew to the questions of how the
doors of perception can open up through certain forms of
sleep-deprivation, and you are wanting to get into the
magic of time for real, you have some interesting work
ahead. No matter what you do in this regard, you must do
it on your own responsibility: and if in the slightest
doubt, consult medicinal experts as to what they think
that your mind can stand. If your nerves are already
even slightly frayed at their ends, dimiss it until
another season--or, by the perspective of reincarnation,
until another body, another brain!
According to William Blake, who, in my opinion, shaped
(with Walt Whitman, too) a considerable portion of the
subcultures of the 20th century: when the doors of
perception (his expression) are opened, you see the world
as it is, "infinite". Blake was no fan of drugs but a
number of influential people in culture and philosophy
took in his understandings and mixed them with what they
thought was a rational approach to mood-modifying brain
chemicals like LSD, mushrooms, cannabis and what not. Had
it not been for Blake, 20th century would have been
boring in the extreme. He was no mere 'butterfly' and his
influence no mere 'butterfly effect': he was a giant in
his ability to brusquely put contemporary politics and
religious literalism aside and meditate afresh, whether or
not society cared for it.
Physicists deal with cause and effect: William Blake
called for an understanding of stuff that goes beyond
cause and effect. And, as he saw it, nothing could be
more simple--just open your eyes and see. That perception,
that seeing, when you allow the innocence of the child to
be part of it, is immediate--even transcendent. So seeing,
perception, listening, engaging with the world and its
people doesn't have to be a question of "signals" and
"information"--rather, it is a question of direct contact
beyond the cause-effect realm. The contact doesn't have to
do with the 'subject', the ego, the self: as Blake saw
it, it is humanely possible to cross all categories and
reach beyond boundaries and be absolutely immediately in
touch with the substance and essence and light of reality
and its beings. Reality, then, is pulsating with life, a
69

MAGIC OF TIME

flowing wholeness, that is as if a continous concert to
those whose mind-doors are not shut.
So how to open these doors? One of the key factors in
genuine perception is effortlessness: and this is mirrored
in the understanding that lying to oneself, or to others,
is associated with some level of strain or effort. So it's
about an exploration into effortlessness, really.
When you are aware while sleeping and dreaming you may
have noticed how the slighest sound can become a full-
fledged story inside your mind, triggering a wealth of
assocations. The same person, presented with the same type
of sensory input in the normal wakeful condition, may
hardly be aware of any associations at all. In that state
of mind, so typical for the unspiritual overly 'business'
minded person, what isn't "useful" doesn't quite exist.
Such associations may be highly subjective and personal:
but Blake insisted that there is a spiritually awakened
state in which seeing connects to a more subtle, and very
real world, and he went on to try and depict this in his
art.
Please only go on with reading this chapter if you are
extraordinarily stable at the mental level: if not, wait
until you are before practising the ideas here presented.
I remind you again that it's on your own responsibility,
not mine, if you follow any of the advises in this essay
and this apply doubly as for anything concerning sleep-
deprivation. You must be certain to do it right!
Let me also suggest that only people who have a very
deep-rooted sense of freedom from shame should do this:
those who suppress such as parts of their sexuality are
likely to experience things like 'personality splits' if
they do sleep-deprivation before a longish phase of
getting a full katharsis of all shame in the system.
The first thing to be certain of is that when you do a
bout of meditative sleep deprivation you have charged
yourself up in the days before with all great good and
energetic things--exercise, sleep, walk, reading,
writing, laughter, music, dance, you name it.
Then, when you do the sleep deprivation, you must
consider it likely that the body have to save in on how
it handles certain things it normally handles. So do such
as eat less, and shift clothes often and stay as clean as
70

MAGIC OF TIME

possible. (Needless to say, wait with such experiments if
you have anything serious in your body to heal.)
Then, the next phase is this: work, and work creatively,
for the love of it, and far more than you, quote-unquote,
"have ever done". Work with something that compells you to
be creative, but creative in such demanding ways that you
simply must call on new resources, new associations in
yourself. This work must aim at harmony and it must be
grounded in faith. It must have a component of reaching
for some ultimate beauty that is subtle and perhaps
forever beyond grasp yet we can get intimations of it.
Then, in that work, when the time comes that the brain
wants to sleep, and you won't let it, it will start
doing something that calls on its sleep-like dreamy super-
powers EVEN WHILE YOU'RE AWAKE. When this takes place, you
must "go with the flow" except when it's disharmonious:
don't over-control the thought but let thoughts speak to
you. That will bridge thought at the conscious level with
thought at the subconscious level and this will remain so
for as long as you're alive. Once the inner activity has
transcended the division between the manifest and the
sublime, it can hardly be undone. You will have, as it
were, an indelible tatoo on your brain after such hyper-
awake activity bouts while depriving yourself of sleep.
In the months after this, you will learn the necessity
of harmonious meditation, long walks, much sleep, so that
the harmonious activity of your spontaneous thought (no
need to use the pompous word "voices") makes more sense
rather than come with something nonsensical. Obviously,
while a person gets more psychically awakened and
sensitive, one must never give in to thinking that any
activity in one's mind has absolute rightness to it. Every
thought can be doubted; and in some states of mind, more
doubt makes much more sense than less doubt.
This will increase the need for sleep afterwards--also
in a non-reversible manner. It will increase a level of
exhaustion. But it will also immensely increase your
capacity to intuit ahead of time what's about to happen
given that you proceed according to intention. Your mind,
in a way, gets bridged to time.
Once you learn the ins and out of deep-rooted psychic
harmony, however, the body as a whole will get a healing
light to it, and sometimes offer more than normal
capacities and energies and radiances. This is the melting
71

MAGIC OF TIME

of the spiritual and the physical, and the starting-point
for all great art. It's also a highly sexualised state,
whether or not you practise a period of celibacy in
connection to it.
As with other things, celibacy, for any young, sexually
capable body, should have a time limit on it: so that the
body has sexual experiences to look forward to, even if
it is a questions of months rather than hours before next
time.
Celibacy phases can activate more of the meditative
energy and prepare for great tantric art and unfoldment--
and all this is natural after periods of well-controlled
sleep deprivation, so as to maximalize the creative and
healing effects of it.

Part C, chapter 7: BECOMING A PHILOSOPHER
As the philosopher and physicist David Bohm pointed out
(in his main philosophical work, Wholeness and the
Implicate Order, London, 1980), the theme of wholeness
is a complicated one.
On the face of it, wholeness doesn't seem to be any
complicated concept at all: it has a meaning that is
associated with 'unity' and poetically in such ideas as
'the world is one'. So wholeness means not to divide
(needlessly): and all complications arise when we
introduce a differentiation between this and that.
So wholeness--or, as Bohm would have it,--the idea of an
undivided universe is flowing movement or enfoldment-
unfoldment--is a sense of the fact that, in some deep
inner way, all is integrated with all, all is connected
72

MAGIC OF TIME

with all, and that we mustn't be misled by language to
believe that there is anywhere any deep division.
In a sense, this is what William Blake (whom we mentioned
earlier) meant when he said that when you open your eyes,
you see that the world is infinite. Add a lot of grand
concepts, and it is much the same poetic sentiment:
Open your eyes, and you see that the world is beautiful.
Open your eyes, and you see that the world is whole.
Open your eyes, and you see that the world is good, true
and divine.
In a very simplistic sense, it is something that tells the
person who feels lonely that lonliness is the result of
an illusory thought process--"me" versus "they", "I"
versus the "world", or "I" versus "you".
However, how the world is whole matters tremendously. It
may be whole in some sense, and in some other sense, but
not so much in yet another sense. A simple example: you
are watching the waves, they are in flowing movement--the
Sun is reflecting on the waves, there are golden shimmers,
a little wind, perhaps, is in the air. And you may feel at
ease and at one with this 'flowing movement'.
Yet, if you imagine that the water is completely still
and waveless, or if you imagine that a huge wave splashes
in on the beach, this imagination, though it may be strong
in the mind, is a mental process differentiated from the
real process of the water out there, which we objectively
see through our eyes. Had it been the same, the water
would have changed as quickly as things can change when we
dream. Though the mental is real, it is real in a
different way than the reality picked up through our
senses. In this light, we must explore the wholeness
concept further, and ask how it still can make sense.
Centuries before Bohm, a philosopher with roots in
christianity, George Berkeley, proposed that the world is
a form of dream--but not anyone's dream--but God's dream,
--it exists in God's mind. That is a very powerful meta-
physics that of course can never be disproved: for no
matter what experiments tell us about the world, it cannot
tell that God didn't visualize and by that visualization
in fact made it just so, and is even now, moment by
moment, uphelding the world and changing it in just that
way. (Berkeley's own language was somewhat different.)
What perhaps haven't been pointed out that clearly
73

MAGIC OF TIME

either by Bohm or by other writers about the undivided
processes of reality, such as A.N. Whitehead, is that
the metaphysics of Berkeley is compatible with also the
new branches in physics that developed in the beginning
of the twentieth century--at least given an emphasis more
on the data than on the specifics of what some physicsts
said about them. (For instance, Einstein's relativity
ideas around his equations may not stand up but his
equations around the data may still be relatively valid;
and the same--Niels Bohr's ideas about the equations of
the group of physicists initiating quantum physics may not
last up as long as the equations around these data.)
So this is what the sophisticated philosopher knows:
No matter empirical data we get about the world, there
may be any sorts of worlds beyond all this. and they MAY
all be sustained by God (in some sense--the concept of
God can be vague--"the creator"--concrete--as Zeus).
All this cannot be disproved: nor can it be called
"nonsense" for that reason. However, if it is true, it is
more than likely that we can intuit it to be so; and
indeed that seems to me to be a point to which genuine
philosphers (and, in our language, "magicians"), agree
fairly well.
So, even as we give in to the feeling that all is--in an
immediate sense (without mediation, without the need for
adding a bridge, such as a digital network)--in direct
contact, we must also ask why some waves don't change when
we change our thoughts about them, and provide an answer
that is just as rational as the thought of wholeness.
Suppose Berkeley is right, in some sense--perhaps in a
way that goes infinitely beyond, in terms of complexities,
levels, multi-universe/multiverse senses, etc etc--then if
God is imagining the waves, and he is imagining you as
well, then by virtue of the wholeness of God's imagination
then you and the waves and all there is constitute one
whole. And given some degree of 'independence', of some
sort, between the beings and so on imagined by God (this
is a rather cartoon-like presentation of how I think it
is)--independence, too, between beings and things like
waves--then it doesn't automatically follow that any being
can just like that change any wave. Right? So there is
wholeness but also some, if you like, "differentation".
Now, to be very precise--and we should, when doing grand
thinking, allow precision to come in where we can--we
can't be absolutely sure that eg seawaves aren't changing
74

MAGIC OF TIME

a minuscle way when we visualize that they change. In
other words, we cannot be sure that the rather randomish
fluctuations here and there in the flow of water in the
ocean aren't in some way 'picking up on' some thought
process of some people--and in that way possibly bringing
about a grand change of waves at some time--some minutes
or maybe hours or more later. We cannot be sure: and that
is underlined if you know anything about the type of
findings associated with atomic physics. It is probable,
given these findings, that any activity anywhere can in
some tiny but real way affect any activity anywhere else
in cosmos. This interpretation was not only suggested by
the renowned, famous physicist David Bohm, but by most of
the philosophically inclined quantum physicists who were
outspoken on the matter at the time quantum physics took
shape.
Later on, due to the technological success to which also
quantum physics contributed strongly, philosophy connected
to physics sort of seemed less important to the many
people working in the field and getting finances for
working on concrete applications of physics, rather than
on 'pure' physics. But it's fair to say that there has
been no counter-finding to the many holistic inspirations
that arose from quantum physics, at least not when these
took coherent form.
There are several ways to make sense of cosmos. Some of
these answers challenges to certain worldviews as involve
religion. For instance, "if God is kind he would have done
so and so?" A key task in human visualisation is to delve
into the metaphysics of how God can both be creating the
world moment by moment and at the same time be rather
distant (if that's the word I want) from any concrete
'meddling' with a number of events. And if you follow what
I say next, you'll also understand more of how magic works
and why, even if there is some invisible connection
between water waves and 'thought waves'--this is not,
under normal circumstances, strong enough to create
sensational magic.
Here is an easy take on it. There are other variations,
yet I intuit we can stick to this idea: that God is a bit
human-like and has both absolutely infinite capacity
and some Zeus-like direct interest in beauty in a sexual
sense; furthermore: that this capacity involves creating
the many beings to help him, and their many instruments of
a computer-like nature; and the many parallel universes so
as to figure out how things really will work out and where
75

MAGIC OF TIME

the right changes should be introduced; and that in fact,
the world unfolds as it does because it is a continually
changed-upon program (as it were) running on 'subtle
computers'. The gigantic quantities of elementary
particles doing their things with fantastic exactness is
an indication that it is likely that something computer-
like is involved in the flowing wholeness in undivided
movement that David Bohm talked about.
It is the computer-like nature of how events unfold that
means that many events seem remote from God: and it is the
on-going participation through God's visualisation that
allows these events to after all work out right as time
goes by; and it is the simiiarities between human minds
and the Creator's mind that allows magic to exist. The
magic is 'weak' when the aspects of the mind aren't
collected, but spread out like powder--a bit of thought
here, a bit of feeling there, a bit of consciousness
there, a bit of activity there--you follow?--that's the
type of mind whose thought has finely little effect on the
events of the world. And that's where meditation--the
gathering of coherence in the sorcerer's mind--comes in.
That's where we can make sense of bible quotations, such
as Jesus constantly telling his followers to come with him
to a quiet place; and his own explorations, in solitude,
of nature areas of silence. His profoundity is connected
to a gathering of the wholeness of his own mind even as he
exists in the world, a world which, through its huzzle and
buzzle may tear consciousness into many bits.
So, in other words, thought is not just thought. The world
may be whole but it is also powder. You can melt the ice
of your mind when you raise its meditative temperature;
you make it into plasma; that plasma radiates and connects
and can change things. To do all this requires that you
call on all of your powers for year after year, and stick
around with those who have already done so; and yet
remember that the powers given to mere humans are very
tiny compared to the powers of the more subtle beings, the
muses.