When I was a young and zealous Nietzschean...

...It was clear that we were not born with instruction manuals for the self. The limits of how far the self could be induced to reach were therefore only to be determined by experience and experiment - and likewise so for the validity or usefulness of instruction manuals from sources external to the self, whether the Diamond Sutra or How to Make Friends and Influence People. Neither of which I believe I have read.

Driven to overcome what I saw as the limitations of self, I experimented mercilessly on myself and struggled to formulate principles to guide the onward course of this quest. "Find the fear, explore it, destroy it" was a typical formulation, meaning that in order to further this overcoming, a good clue of what to work on next would be to discover what frightens you, expose yourself to the fear, and discover a way to defeat it and swallow it and feed on it - integrate it, if you will.

I forced myself to stay awake for extended periods of time and observed how my performance and mental states were affected. I practised diverse forms of yoga and meditation, breath control and sex magic. I studied languages and martial arts and new skills eclectically. I took "strange drugs and wines that foam", in Crowley's words, and noted "what forms of drunkeness assail thee". I searched out situations that my early conditioning had left me perceiving as intimidating, and then dealt with it from there... I called my programme "VFEC", for "Valid Fucking Experiment in Consciousness".

Years passed - not that many - but they were years and they passed nonetheless. My thinking lurched - if lurch is the right word where years are involved - to an opposite extreme...

*the self is something
we create* [if we know how...
if we have the will for the work...]
<<=========================

=========================>>
*the self is something
we discover* [and learn to
accept... if we want to stay sane...]

At first, I felt some measure of remorse, discomfort and dissatisfaction that I had abandoned what some have characterised as the "Great Work". It was probably after reading John Gray's Straw Dogs (an utterly brilliant book, may I say) that I finally fully relaxed into my comfortable determinism or fatalism, or whatever the right word may be. And for a time, my mind rested.

It becomes obvious now that it quite simply isn't working. There is nothing left to stop me quite simply drinking myself to death, and even soaking my cells in alcohol is doing nothing to stop the rising murmur of returning dissatisfaction, now growing into a scream.

I propose, therefore, to reinstitute VFEC. The first time around, I kept copious notes of the pen-and-notebook variety. Parts of it still make interesting reading.

Having taken up blogging in the meantime, the newest instalment of the VFEC documents will quite naturally take the form of a blog, a notebook open to the world - share your thoughts, and the world becomes your notebook, as someone I still reluctantly admire once said to me.