As I’ve written before my interest in the occult started when I was about 14 and my prime interests was science fiction, fantasy, advanced physics and the occult. Summarized: anything that was filled with the promise of the fantastic. I read a few hundred science fiction and fantasy books, a few dozen occult and physics works. Not of the more speculative kind like ‘godel escher bach’ but genuine works of Einstein, Bohr and others. I think part of my motivation for that was to irritate my dad, because he was a physics teacher but his knowledge was limited to simple newton mechanics. I was proud I knew more than him about the subject at the age of 13 and kept bothering him with discussions he didn’t give a shit about.

At the age of 16 I bought some Crowley books, the first book I bought of him was ‘The book of Lies’ which is a collection of cryptical, kabbalistic writings ordered by numbers. The book starts with the observation that all thoughts, even this one, are lies because they are pictures of reality, subtracts rather than the real thing. That book rather fascinated me. It is not exactly an easy work but on the whole probably one of Crowley’s better attempts. What’s interesting about it is that he attempts to express truths as compact and abstract as possible without any rational makeup.

At 17 I began reading Carlos Casteneda. His works had an even deeper effect on me. Crowley was sort of interesting but I always felt he was somehow seriously lacking direction and oversight, partly because he had to build a system from scratch and partly because he had this rather irritating Libra personality which tends to wander off in any direction without much spine to see something through. Its beyond me how the guy could write such insane volumes of mediocre poetry without even once questioning his sources, methodologies or even the intent to ‘become the greatest poet in the world’ – I have noticed this allergy to criticism in many Libra people: they are in fact severely upset by even the most minute sort of critique. I find that mode of existence mindbogglingly dull but maybe its some sort of natural phase in natures grand cycle.

The yaqui system seemed far more subtle and advanced to me and I was completely fascinated by these works. I read all the casteneda books, 7 of them in that time, in a few months. Here I saw a vision of a reality completely different than the one we are brought up to believe in and it was a reality with a working system and sound philosophies behind it. I started to practice some of the techniques described in the books. The first one was the ‘right way of walking’.

By that time I had moved to a squatted school. I had a classroom as a room. It was a giant room and at first I was at loss as to what I should do with it. The previous guy had build a little room inside the classroom with foam bricks. I decided to make a forest in the room with that little room as some sort of oasis in the back. I carried shit loads of yellow sand upstairs in buckets and covered the whole floor with it. Then, it was just after Christmas time, I started collecting the Christmas trees people had put as garbage next to the street. At the end there it was: I had a forest of Christmas trees in my room and an shiny oasis in the back! It was magnificent. It was great to live in a room in the middle of the forest. Some people also thought it was way cool and some others thought I was seriously bonkers. The school was right in front of the Evoluon so when I looked outside of the window there was this giant UFO in front of it. My parents came to visit for the 2nd time since I had moved out but the forest was way to weird for them they thought I was even more nuts than they did already and moved in and out like they’d have seen the devil in person. Well I didn’t care. I had a great time in my forest. E. and me used to walk naked through it and she looked like an elf already. The room also had the only access to the roof and we used to sleep there in summer under the stars.

The school consisted of two buildings. Ours was the home of the group that came from the willemstraat squat. By now we were sort of a family, living together for 15 months and we were more creative sort of folks. The folks in the other building were more political. They used to have these board meetings that bore the shit out of me so I never went. At some point later a building came free in the tonglresestraat and 3 people would be able to move there. It was a real cool place and they offered me a room but at this time I was tired of moving and I told paul he could have my room so all the guys moved leaving me behind alone. This was the starting signal of a somewhat more darker time for me.

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