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Your occult diary

01:20 / 26.02.04

Hi all.

My first post to BG. Ok, when I first began my career in mygick my mentor suggested something that made sense to me at the time in 1980. Still does. He said one of the first things a young magician should do before anything is prepare for you diary. I write every day in mine and over the last 23 years it's been very helpful and mine is a mix of occult/book of shadows/even a run down on the day. I like to write my diary out in long hand because it helps to release stress at the end of the day and helps me to remain focus.I get a flow for the words. If you can read my chicken scratch that is.

So what about the rest of you? Do you have an occult diary?

03:13 / 26.02.04

Absolutely! And welcome to Barbelith.

I've kept a magickal diary for the last 2 years or so. For the most part I'm pretty good about adding entries every day, though occasionaly I'll fall into a dry spell. All in all, as I start reporting on my own life, I start paying more attention to the details, so there's really been plenty to write about.

I usually record the weather, memes that have grabbed my attention throughout the day, synchronicities & unusual events, outings, parties, thoughts and theories. I create my sigils in there and occult drawings, and it's also used as a notebook for magickal studies and workings.

The focus is primarily magickal - pretty much everything I put in there has some bearing on my Soul's Journey. Lately there's been a lot of flow between that and my blogging, which I think can be another wonderful device for influencing the noosphere. The blog records more of the "mundane" events in the news that catch my attention and happen to fit into my magickal agenda. It also receives the distilled, packaged results of some of my personal wanderings. And I'm really into the idea of archiving my personal perception of reality. In the digital age it's possible to practically back up and remix your whole life on to cd.

03:32 / 26.02.04

Hi LVX >

This is what I like to hear. I know sometimes life can get in the way and interupt ones diary. I haven't tried Blogging yet. Do you get lots of response to your blog?

Thanks for the welcome by the way.

07:14 / 27.02.04

Hi there AQ, welcome aboard. I keep a a diary, well more like a variety of diaries for different projects all over the flat. I've gone through phases of keeping it religously, and not being bothered at all. I find swinging between the two like I do means I enjoy it more. I defintely find it really useful to refelct on and digest my experiences.

One question - do either of you find that you can "fix" and experience by writing it up, in a way that isn't totally "true to life"? I find I always have the urge to summarise hatever I've written up, perhaps with a pithy comment or viewing it as having had a certain outcome. I have wondered before if this summing up process ties things up a bit too much, or puts a certain slant on them that isn't totally true to life. Thoughts?

08:50 / 27.02.04

"possible to practically back up and remix your whole life on to cd"

wow, this really caught my attention.
What exactly do You mean as 'remixing' Your life on CD? This sounds like a really cool way to view writing in the digital domain, and I am always looking for new ways to incorporate my writing into digital-type magick. I play and record music digitally so I do a lot of 'remixing' w/ sound, even some with my words, but I often have trouble combining the two areas.
Always glad to see a new face thats a forward thinker in the world of words.
Cheers,
Neville

01:07 / 28.02.04

Hi Illmatic

Thanks for the welcome.

I've tried this as well but hard to keep focus with 2 diary projects. As for fixing experiences. I think once their done, they're done. You might be able to reconcile experiences of course the more you write about them. I don't know if that helps you at all.

Neville Barker>

I like writing long hand mainly I can connect more with my words. It's not that I'm against the digital age obviously.I plan on scanning my diary which gos back to May 1980. Some diaries have more then one month in them but since then over 275 diaries in lose leaf binder format. My wife says these things are almost taking over the apt.

05:18 / 28.02.04

Under the advice of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci (which is still the best self-transformation guide for your money in or out of the occult section of your local bookseller's), I have one notebook which contains everything. Standard-issue diary entries, lecture notes, to-do lists. Magick stuff goes in purple ink, but other than that everything is scattered willy-nilly so that I cannot avoid but put things into context. However, I don't re-read the suckers as much as I'd like to... I'm still kind of new to the idea of regularly free-writing whatever strikes my fancy.

22:17 / 05.03.04

My mentor has recommended me to have one, but I'm not quite sure about it. I have made some entries, but I really dislike to medialise my experiences. As soon as the subjective memory is distilled into words or images, only the words and images remain while the experience crumbles in my mind. It's like taking photos of a vacation and only remember the photos. The diary becomes a self-constructed simulacra, which I find scary. I don't know what to do about that, really. Is there a work-around?

07:04 / 07.03.04

My occult diary tends to be a little disorganized. When I don't keep a formal record, I end up scrawling random thoughts on napkins, stray scraps of paper, etc. Then after it clutters up a drawer for a few monthes, I throw it all away. Sometimes I'll start a diary and promise myself that it'll be linear and coherent but it invariably degenerates into a collection of rambling, half-entries and paranoic tirades against whatever I tend to be fixated on at the time.

Could obsessive-compulsive scribbling on napkins and scraps of paper be considered as a method of keeping a magickal log? Also, what's a Soul Journey? I thought Chaotes generally followed the Anatta mindset.

04:22 / 08.03.04

Frater, I've recently taken to pasting in my fragments, random scrawled sigils, as well as clipped or found notes and pics. It kinda gives the journal a mixed-media feel while keeping the errata together.

04:27 / 08.03.04

Neville wrote:
What exactly do You mean as 'remixing' Your life on CD?

Well, in the digital age all informations has become highly malleable. I can take a shamanic Drift on lunchbreak from work, use my camera phone & snap pics of the sigils and signs that tug at my subconscious as I walk, upload them to the web, add comments, hyperlinks, extensions, etc..., then save the html page to disk and burn it to CD as an archive. The more of my magickal life I've documented, the more paints there are in my digital palette, as it were. Someday I'll start hacking through them, grabbing bits and pieces here and there, add wav's and video, and remix it into some hypermedia project that, while composed of past fragments, informs and reflects my future present.