In this post I will present you with a number of simple spells that lay the fundament of a good life.
What are spells?
Your life is essentially built on memes. Memes are easily repeatable phrases with a deep lore of meaning behind them. That is also what a spell is: You say it often enough and it actually starts forming your world.
Your thought machine is yapping all the time, whether you want it or not. There is a pyramid of spells in your brain/being and the largest, lowest building block is made of short spells it repeats aaaalllll the time. They better be damn good.
Over the years I’ve consciously loaded a bunch of spells into this lowest building block and I think it’s one of the highest impact things you can do to change your life significantly.
This is the soil in which the garden of your life grows. Better tend to it. Here is some fertilizer:
Kill Shoulds
Your life is full of should. Shoulds are externalities. To develop your agency, the first step is to silence external voices and develop access to the flaming core of your soul. That is a Want, a Need, a calling to heed, but never a Should.
There is a time later in the process where shoulds may be reintroduced further up in the memetic pyramid but you gotta get them out of the base layer.
How to:
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Listen to your inner narrative.
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When you make plans or write down a to-do, does your listing sound like “I should do this, I should do that”?
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Start from there: Split your list / note into two sections: Shoulds and Wants.
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Write down your shoulds as they come. Then also write down your wants.
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For the shoulds: ask yourself whether there is a want in them. If yes move them over.
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If not, slowly eliminate them from your list. [This might take a while if they’re bound to employment or other slow changing lifestyle factors.]
I did this over the course of about a year via weekly planning meetings with my friend.
Be honest. That’s how I did it. Also beware: You might be dominanted by shoulds and your wants might be sounding crazy and far away. You then have to slowly learn to sublimate your shoulds into wants. This can bring major changes.
But I can tell you this: Living truthfully is living from your wants, so you might as well start now.
I’m convinced that you can do only this once a week for 6-12 months and it will change your life significantly and sustainably.
Produce Meaning
I’ve got good news and good news. Which one do you wanna hear first?
The good news: Meaning gets people going like nothing else.
The good news: Meaning is not finite. We can assign meaning to things (almost) at will.
Important spells to integrate:
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There is meaning in the world
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There is more meaning than I can see
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Meaning is subjective
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Meaning turns objective when enough people agree
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I can assign meaning, disregard meaning, recognize meaning, respect meaning
If you don’t have power over meaning, you’re cooked. This is also a meta skill: Meaning assigning and producing is quite literally what spellcasting is.
“You put a spell on me” = You assigned meaning to me and I can feel it
Viktor Frankl’s thesis in Man’s Search for Meaning is, that it was possible for him and a few others to not give up on life, despite being imprisoned in Auschwitz and all the horrors that came with, because he had a dense sense of meaning in his life.
I have first recognized meaning as a web of nodes before my inner eye. The ring on my finger? Meaningful, because it’s my Mom’s. My friend sitting across from me? Meaningful, because we know each other. The cafe we’re sitting in? Meaningful, because I’m a regular here. But there are a lot of things here around me that are probably full of meaning for others or potentially for me, but I can’t see it.
What psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin do in my experience, is they heighten our awareness for meaning, suddenly making a lot of meaning legible. On my couple of mushroom trips I was like “oh wow, there is a web of meaning and it is wayyyyy denser in this state than normally”. Based on that I learned to construct my own meaning web.
Set times
What’s the difference between a deluded visionary and one who actually moves towards her goals?
She knows how long things take.
Important spells to integrate:
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I have enough time for everything
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I know how long things take
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I know what I need to do at which time