There is something I realized relatively recently. It happened after I joined /r/occult, which is a subreddit dedicated to practicing magick, among other topics. I’ve always been keen on the idea of magick, but I never really did much of anything with it for the most part. I just thought it was a cool idea, and I thought it’s definitely possible and it fits into my worldview. For a long time I didn’t go anywhere with it beyond that.

There was this really stunning thing that happened when I first attempted to manipulate my waking phenomenal reality. This really blew my mind. It was a realization of how much I don’t allow my intent to flow in that sort of direction! In other words, just one act of trying to tinker with something in my world highlighted how seriously I was relating to all the phenomena. I was such a bore! That one act of meddling highlighted the massive energy of non-meddling that completely dominated my inner life. I was faced with a thought that I had an option. I could have been relating to everything a lot more playfully and a lot less seriously, and I wasn’t doing it at all.

Around the same time, a little bit before, I also read a stunning post on /r/psychonaut by someone who seems not to post anything there. It was like this person just showed up, made this one post, and disappeared into the ether. But I never forgot it. The post was about playfully fooling around with the perceptions we experience in day to day life. At first I thought the post can’t be serious. Everything the post was talking about seemed so superficial, and also, so easy to do. And at the time I didn’t instantly understand the point of it. I knew it was important somehow and so I remembered the general idea. But then I started to appreciate how it’s this very playfulness that was important, and how it was actually a very good thing that the entry into playfulness was so easy and simple. The importance of all this dawned on me vividly when I tried to do some magick for the first time, after hanging out on /r/occult. It was when I realized I was such a fuddy duddy bore.

Imagine as you walk around, you touch trees with your imaginary hands. Imagine how you slightly change the tint of the colors of everything you see. Imagine a big giant bowl of colored popcorn spilling all over the street. Imagine yourself growing a bit taller, and then a bit shorter. Imagine smelling incense as you walk. Imagine hearing a rhythmical drum beat or a chant.

I realized I could enrich, bend, warp, and generally mess around with my experience at all times. I also realized it’s actually a very good thing to do repeatedly and often, to cultivate it as a kind of playful attitude toward one’s own experience. It’s a way to take the things one experiences during waking less seriously.

So as I walk around, I can sometimes see a giant eye looking at me from the center of the Earth. Or I may see infinitely long thick beams of light piercing everything and rotating. I’d imagine a swirling stream of As, like the letter “A”, lots of them, swirling around like bees, flying around, filling up my body, circling around, then flying out into the world and swarming there. I can imagine my feet stomping the ground like drum beats even though I don’t stomp and just walk normally.

It’s like suddenly my imagination is alive and active, and it’s present to my mind and is mixing with the “non-imaginary” scenery of the waking experience. It’s very interesting how it feels.

It’s possible to play with one’s experience in so many ways. One could try to stretch and compress time. It’s not necessary to do anything huge. In the beginning the tiniest alterations are enough. The whole point is to drop the serious attitude. The waking experience is just a plaything, and we can play with it.