Preparing offerings for my first tribal workshops at school tomorrow, I read a short book this afternoon that someone gave me years ago, in the form of a dozen photocopied pages stapled together. I had never read it before, but for some reason it has been on my mind and I felt the need to read it today. Sure enough, it was the perfect intro to action hero training-- providing insights on discovering one's totem, developing a persona, keeping a journal, seeing through illusion, and creating reality.

Below are my notes, which do not follow exactly how it is actually written, but are a short summery of what I gathered.

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To be a Vagabond
by Ed Buryn (And/or Pres, Inc. Berekeley, CA)

If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own.
- Scoop Niskar

Your brain creates your own reality.
- Tim Leary

What you see is what you get. Create your reality. Transform visions into reality. Connect with your world. Live in the present. Believe. Trust yourself, trust the world. Actualize your potential. If you can't feel your own miraculousness, you are missing the quintessential experience of life.

Love/hate is a basic dualism-- that of invisible but powerful forces equally opposed: love saves the world every day, hate daily destroys it.

Expand your views. The most powerful force in your life is your perspective. The direction you look is the way you are going.

Create a personal myth. Persona is defined as a "role that a person assumes in order to display his conscious intent to himself and others." A persona is not a substitute for, nor an imposter of yourself; rather, it is an extension that allows you to go beyond what you presently know about yourself. It's good advice to consciously visualize and project an image of yourself. Do not confuse yourself with your persona. The role is only one of the endless extensions of yourself. Refine and redefine yourself. A well-chosen persona (which is a kind of personal myth) effectively generates energy because it automatically introduces us to other varieties of reality. Putting on the mask makes us want to dance; so off we go, and the rest is reality.

You are your own expert. I can't be your expert, only your advisor; and I advise you to go out and become your own expert. You can choose to figure it out for yourself, suffering and rejoicing in it as you will. Your life is all for you, uniquely styled in your own vision; and like it or not, nothing can take away your right and duty to live it as fully as you can. You have the power to do this. The only limitations are those you choose, and those imposed by your conditioning, which masks your real freedom. As Tim Leary said, "You can be anything you want this time around."

Discover your Totem. Normally we are wrapped in routines, unconscious of the cosmic news and views being broadcast on some other channels. We need a tuning device, and personal "totem" can be such a device. A totem is some natural entity or form, usually an animal or plant species, that is psychically related to you, and which usually represents or symbolizes yourself. A totem is thus a type of omen with personal significance, a personal symbol that directs your attention alone to its meaning. You do not choose your totem; it chooses you. If you don't know your totem, pay more attention to the phenomena of the natural world and try to discover which of them have an affinity or special connection to you. Often you already have a totem but aren't aware of it, even though you collect or employ images of it in your work or play, or attach significance to it in dreams or fantasies.

Pay attention to everyone you meet. When you meet someone on your psychic wavelength, the power in that connection has no bounds. People do not appear in your life entirely by chance; anyone can be a psychic messenger or energy-bearer with hot news from the frontlines of your consciousness and your cosmic condition.

Energy always manifests in either the physical or metaphysical form. Everything in the world has form--a shape if it’s a physical structure or a symbolical pattern if it’s a metaphysical structure. Routines and habits are examples of metaphysical forms extending through time. They are the Known, protecting us from the Unknown.

Habits are also called home. Habits tame the raw wilderness of existence into the civilized comforts of everyday life. Unfortunately, as we all know, habits gradually domesticate all the wildness and energy out of life. So much energy gets bound up in the routines and habituated patterns, keeping them alive, that your life goes dead instead. Thus, if you want to discover again the wild side of life, you have to leave your comfort zone; you have to break or dissolve your habits in order to release the energy locked up inside of them. Break a habit for freedom!


Books that come into your life at the right time are also omens and indicators of energy directions. Books themselves are vehicles for energy transfer-- artifacts from magic distilled from the miracle of mind, and can easily reshape or direct your ideas and hence change your life.

Dreams are another metaphysical information source. The energizing takes place in all planes of consciousness. Writing down your dreams in a journal reinforces and strengthens the channel, and records this delicate and transitory information for later study before it slips back into the magical realm.

Keep a journal that records your metaphysical reality: omens, intuitions, emotions, dreams, drawings, doodles, coincidences, marvel, mysteries, names, and numbers. It will sharpen your perception of holistic reality, and therefore, of magic. Anyplace can be magical. What matters most is not what happens, but how we respond to what happens.

The illusion was created out of fear and ignorance, by old imprints. From time immemorial, mankind has chosen a view of reality that it could control in order to escape feeling helpless in a seemingly unpredictable universe. Language and culture were creatively invented to capture and shape the raw energy of life into something we could relate to, a set of black/white boxes containing absolutely everything. Meanwhile, energy itself goes rolling formlessly along, endlessly unable to be contained in those tiny boxes. You get what you've been set up for (your imprints) and what you've set yourself up for (your choices).

More than anything else, fear holds us back from knowing ourselves, and thus the Gestapo of consciousness, the internal secret-police force that tries to keep us locked up in the concentration camp of our minds.

Living in the present moment is to be new always, reborn endlessly. It is to recapture the innocence and trust of childhood, of a time before the phantoms of the past and future weighed us down with anxiety, guilt and resentment. We were all born without fear, with no thought of life as a hostile experience. We intuitively knew we belonged here in this world, with no need to fear anything in it.

Your so-called reality is just a taste of pie in an endless bakery, an appetizer in one plane to interest you in some of the endless others, depending on how much reality you want and can deal with.