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Sebastian:
Re: About end-chapter exercizes.
I personally do not like to read in books the "if you don't do the following exercises you'll remain the idiot you already are",
Well lets not be so condescending as to actually include something along those lines. Robert Anton Wilson may think that way but we don't have to.
mainly because I believe in the transformative power of reading
Well then what we should do is to try to make the actual text of our book as transforming as possible. The entire book can be considered a hyper-sigil, a spell on the reader to help them to blossom into a successfull urban mage. Very careful use of language would facilitate this.
and also because most book-related changes and transformations in my life came from reading either plain fiction or convoluted study text-books.
Then we should include a part in every section that is "fiction-like" an example from our lives that is in narrative form.
I would like however to keep at the end of each chapter here a section that would take the place of Wilson's exercizes, portraying paradigm-teasing questions, coloquially powerful comments, or single line proposals, in straight relation to the chapter's content, and directly addressed to the reader, that is, written in the second person. It would be rather an invitation the reader starts looking forward to at each chapter's end, a "just read-me" section -not a "condition-to-do" section-, because it would work by merely reading through it, just as the written word is precisey intended to do. Also, second person writing has an effect we could exploit on this closures, since it gets to develop a book-reader relation that is sometimes absent in straight first person books.
Perhaps it would benefit us to include the second person usage most of the way through? I would like to try setting the language in a unique way. "We have found that if you walk through the city by different routes than you normally take the cities {spirit, gestalt} can communicate more easily." With a short blurb at the beginning about our language usage. We could also try to use "sensory modalities" in our writing to make it more "evokative", a la NLP. Do you see what I mean or hear what I'm saying?
Examples for the chapter on totems would be: "Which animals or insects were precisely passing through your mind as you read the above chapter? Did you think of them or they just "came to your mind"? Which of them do you usually encounter in daily life or dream with? What would it mean for you, now, if you come across or dream with one of those, just after reading this chapter? Would it be magick or mere coincidence?"
Good Examples, now I see what you were getting at.
I am not particularly inspired, but the section could be titled sort of "What about you?", or "Think about it", "Magick and You", nah, that sounds terrible, we'll see...
"After-Thoughts of an Urban Mage"
We can nail down a title later.
The structure I have in my head at the moment:
The first part is a theoretical discussion
The second part is a more practical discussion with some exercises interspersed
The third part is a narrative from our experience that has more advanced experiments
The fourth part is a "What does the {reader, mage} think" direct address
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