VFEC was my personal project to explore evolution towards Nietschzean übermensch-hood. A side-effect of the programme are the detailed diaries I kept over the last five years, until very recently. I glance through and can usually identify what I was doing on any given date. It is like an Aleister Crowley style magickal diary.
It is almost eerie. These books, better or for worse, seem to have been written by another person entirely. It is like holding a body of work by a dead man.
So I used to do things like see how long I could keep functioning without sleep (and without cheating by taking wakey-uppy drugs). The answer is: about a week, comfortably, with only one- or two-hour naps. Can you see me doing that now? Or, how long I could stay on the edge of orgasm without actually coming (I never got any of that Tantric effects when I was consciously trying for them). Or, how long I could stare at the moon without my mind starting to produce hallucinations to make me look away (it’s true, it happens).
VFEC embodied certain principles that predate VFEC. The very first notebook I started keeping (it was torn apart by an incensed ex-girlfriend years ago) listed some (somewhat facetious) Rules of Engagement, created under a thrumming tropic sun, viz:
1. be aggressively friendly
2. be un-apologetically non-sensical
3. open fire on unarmed enemies: it’s their fault they’re unarmed
4. do not wear a shirt tied around your face, lest the non-believers strangle you with it: for is not the Lord good?
Later, these developed into several central principles which guided the whole VFEC programme. Some examples from memory:
1. Find the fear, explore the fear, destroy it. (This is to say: it is what you fear most where lies the direction of advancement. Find out what you fear, what your weakness is, and force yourself to experience and explore that fear – that is how you will learn most about yourself.)
2. Vary your habits. Do something you’ve never done before every day. (Take every opportunity you are given to try something new.)
corollary to VFEC are the dream notebooks, an archive of many fantastic and banal dreams, some of them lucid or premonitory and all of them a delight to re-encounter and not have forgotten, spanning some 7 or 8 years in total and therefore predating VFEC.
VFEC, by the way, stood for Valid Fucking Experiment in Consciousness. It is the result of one man’s manic need to write everything down. It distills the wisdom of 6 major religions, 212 self-improvement manuals, 3 Maharishis, 111 self-help books, 13 CDs of NLP self-confidence boosting affirmations, one and a half Robert Anton Wilson books and 500 microgrammes of acid.
This last comment was a cheap and cheapening joke at the expense of a strange and singular work (ie. the VFEC journals), purely to anticipate snide jokes at the pedantic New Age tone of the thing. This is why you should never immerse yourself in self-deprecating self-justifications, because in the end, there is no way out; the serpent eats its own tail. Indeed, never apologise. The modern cyber-age Magus’s magical diary is, of course, his blog.
I never took the programme far enough before running back to the safety of heroin or some woman’s bed.
Nor do I have anything to obsessively document, and there are loads of things that scare me, loads of places to start… an explosive combination of circumstances…
