My Life as a Vagabond

From: The DruidCraft Tarot

In my Ebook, Karen Blixen – The Devil´s Mistress, I described how I began to use alcohol in order to calm down my kundalini symptoms. In Aalborg, in Denmark, and on vagabonding trips around the world, I actually lived more or less like a "Dharma Bum" for about 30 years (in a certain sense I still do, as this article will reveal). The period could be seen as starting in 1990, and ending in 2008, where I published my first book. But the period is actually longer. It started in London in 1985, and ended in 2016, where I was hospitalized with a liver disease. Here I had a near-death experience.

The whole thing was generated by my kundalini awakening, which happened in the start of 1990. In London I had started reading about spirituality (mostly new age and occultism), and I practiced yoga and meditation. I was also quite into the beat writers and the counterculture (especially Robert Anton Wilson - see my articles, Final Secret of the Illuminati and The Godgame). 

I became involved in the so-called Ong´s Hat project which is an internet-based secret history conspiracy theory, a piece of collaborative fiction, an alternate reality game, a work of transmedia storytelling, or a memetic experiment to see how far the meme could spread. The intial ground rules acknowledged the possibility that such an experiment could end up going down darker paths, and they specifically ruled out Ong´s Hat being used for cult-activity.

The characters were largely based in the ghost town of Ong's Hat, New Jersey, hence the name of the project.

The Ong's Hat narrative is told in the form of conspiracy theories surrounding a group of renegade Princeton professors who had conducted quantum physics and chaos theory experiments to discover a new theory for dimensional travel using a device called "the egg", and were camped out in a parallel world. Their story is introduced through two documents, Incunabula: A Catalog of Rare Books, Manuscripts & Curiosa, Conspiracy Theory, Frontier Science & Alternative Worlds and Ong's Hat: Gateway to the Dimensions.

The story is said to begin in 1978 when a man named Wali Ford bought over 200 acres of forested land and set up an ashram (the Moorish Science Ashram). This ashram was built for seekers of spirituality, politics, tantra, and psychopharmacology. The ashram was a place for Princeton physicists, among other accredited scientists, to perform experiments involving interdimensional travel. It was rumored that they were trying to train the human mind to manipulate quantum physics and reality itself.

A device called The Egg was developed in the late 1980s by these scientists and physicists. This device was created as a variation of a sensory deprivation chamber, and it was used to help them determine when a wave becomes a particle. However, during a test one day, something unexpected happened: it disappeared. A young man who was inside the Egg when it disappeared explained that in the seven minutes the Egg was gone, he had traveled to another alternate dimension of the Earth. This other Earth was exactly the same as our Earth, however, it did not contain human life.

Throughout the years, they continued their experiments. However, when military efforts threatened the research being done by these physicists and scientists, they had to move their site somewhere else. Piece by piece, they moved their ashram to the other Earth. They left behind only the house where the gateway between worlds is held. The only time the people who live in the ashram return is when they need to restock supplies.

One of the creators, Joseph Matheny, a multidisciplinary artist, mythological and liminal fiction author, creator of alternatice reality games and online legend trips, eventually concluded the project. If you read the book, Ong´s Hat - the Beginning (download for free), or Joseph Matheny´s website, you can see, that the project builds on a lot of the stuff I describe in my article: The Godgame. Two other important texts are:

1) False Documents, by Peter Lamborn Wilson (this book is called a series of "Borgesian" and "Nabokovian" fictions, and a lot of the Ong´s Hat material reminds in fact about the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges - read my article: The Strange World of Jorge Luis Borges).

2) Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong's Hat, by Michael Kinsella (also available for free downloading here). In this book Kinsella proposes that, by harnessing the interpretive frameworks (legends) that supernatural traditions provide, people can enter particular states of mind in which they become especially inclined to have actual supernatural experiences that may consist in anything from seeing visions or conversing with the dead to encounter otherworldly intelligences. Such experiences, once recounted as legends, then become assimilated into the very traditions that described them. Think of the Grail Quest! I have myself described the phenomenon of supernatural powers using the images we ourselves give them - see my article: The Connection between Shamanic Healing and Creative Unfoldment.

After my kundalini awakening, I started using alcohol to calm down the symptoms. This was somehow justified by the “counterculture philosophy”. And, with inspiration from the Ong´s Hat project, I considered myself as a chaos magician, or a “chaos navigator”. I was very much into the third virtue of critical thinking: flexible thinking, or looking at things from above. That is: a life of bohemianism, poetry and storytelling, combined with the use of drugs and alcohol. 

I vagabonded around the world in search of so-called Pirate utopias. Pirate utopias were defined by the above-mentioned anarchist writer Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), who coined the term in his 1995 book Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes as secret islands once used for supply purposes by pirates (Wilson is a central person in the creation of the Ong´s Hat project). 

His concept of Pirate Utopias concept is largely based on speculation, although he admits to adding a bit of fantasy to the idea. In Wilson's view, these pirate enclaves were early forms of autonomous proto-anarchist societies in that they operated beyond the reach of governments and embraced unrestricted freedom. 

More broadly, and in connection with Pirate Utopias, he has also coined the concepts of "Temporary Autonomous Zones", and "Permanent Autonomous Zones", both of which are communities that are autonomous from the generally recognized state or authority structure in which they are embedded (the latter link has a list of real existing zones).

Wilson is a practitioner of the so-called “Refusal of Work” movement. So was I. And I still am. But, today I see him as a “Gatekeeper” (again, see my article: The Godgame). I still recommend his book T.A.Z – The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, as a help of breaking up your negative thinking, and making your stagnated reality tunnels flower (download it for free). In my article, Peter Kingsley - Another Story Waiting to Pierce You, I have written a critique of Wilson, and his followers. More critique will follow. 

However, there is a similarity between nihilism and spiritual anarchism. On my philosophical counseling page I describe the third aspect of spiritual practice as spiritual anarchism, or, that to go beyond all ideas and images. But this nihilistic approach must be combined with a coherent metaphysics. I have offered a such in my ebook, Philosophical Counseling with Tolkien. You can namely see Rivendell, Lothlorien, Neverland, and the Orchid Pavilions, as precisely such Pirate Utopias, and autonomous zones.

And, I still recommend that the Grail seeker is seeking out places in the world, that reminds of such. Use Legend Tripping (link to Wikipedia). Or, as a life artist, includes pathfinders and trail markers in his or her art, that points towards such zones (for example in Graffiti). I believe Rold Forest to be one of them (see my article, Counseling in the Mythic Forest of Rold).

At the time where I was completely identified with Wilson´s teachings, I hadn´t incorporated the other aspects of critical thinking, and I was completely in the control of the irrational (see my page, Meditation as an Art of Life, about the other virtues of critical thinking).

However, when I started writing my first book, I had started becoming skeptical about the total irrational way of living. My kundalini awakening also turned into a top-down awakening, with extreme pressure and stress as a consequence. Therefore, despite my beginning skepticism (and discovery of Meditation as an Art of Life), I still used alcohol while writing my first books, ending with the Matrix Conspiracy books I-II in 2014. My books, Lucifer Morningstar – a Philosophical Love Story, and Sûnyatâ Sutras, were published in 2017, a year after my hospitalization (see my books for an overview of these “old writings”).

On my blog category, My Life as a Vagabond, I have started telling some of the strange stories of this wild period. I have referred to the period as: The Borgesian Nightmare.  A concept I first mentioned in my blog post: On the Nature of Dreams.  I talked about, when moving into The Godgame, that it is was if you moved into a madhouse, or, a Borgesian Nightmare. I also talked about that I today, as a kind of Sherlock Holmes figure, is ready to move into The Borgesian Nightmare again. I have been there before but not in a critical way. It is namely so, that The Godgame basically is about the Quest for the Holy Grail.

Therefore, I am in fact still living after some of the old principles, which I will give a view of below. They namely have, as indicated, an ability of, either breaking up thought patterns which make you live in a “reality tunnel”, or shifting between different reality tunnels in order not to be caught up in a stagnated way of life. But it must be balanced through rationality (elenchos, the art of refuting sophisms) and discrimination between subject (dream) and object (reality). The latter doesn´t hinder enchantment. On the contrary. If you take Tolkien´s and Plato´s objective idealism (instead of Leary´s, Wilson´s, or Jung´s subjective idealism), it namely means, that when reality (or the Wholeness) through spiritual practice begins to dream, then the flowering enchantment precisely is characterized by, that it is real and not a product of your own own fantasy. Tolkien always said that he didn´t construct Middle-earth, he discovered it.

In connection with my hospitalization I got a psychiatric diagnosis. In other words: you are free to call me a madman (or, The Fool, in the Tarot games). 

Spiritual crises are today accepted in the diagnostic system of psychiatry. You might think that it is absurd that a spiritual awakening is considered a mental illness in the modern society, but paradoxically enough, then such a diagnosis, actually can help you in a modern society. My diagnosis, for example, has helped me in my life as an idler and vagabond. Since 1994 a new section has been included in statistical diagnostic system called the DSM-IV. It authenticates religious and spiritual problems as a legitimate focus on medical attention. The section is called V62.89. The inclusion of this category in the DSM IV recognizes spiritual emergence as a legitimate focus for medical doctors. Medical doctors need to justify their time with a patient by treating an illness. An illness has to be reported on their forms in order for them to treat you. So if some awful sounding medical label arrives on your form, don´t worry; it doesn´t mean you have this condition, it mean it is the nearest “filing box” the DSM IV offers.

Right now, where I have moved to my sanctuary in Rold Forest, I´m in a process where my lower chakras are being processed.  This is reflected in my dreams, where I´m reliving the story of my life as a Dharma bum. But lately these dreams have attained a rather strange character. They have attained the color of icons. Something otherworldly is mixing in. I´m still experiencing life on the streets and on journeys, as well as my engagements with other bums, vagabonds, and travellers. But there is an extraordinary feeling of sacredness. Strange people are mixing in, people from traveling caravans, street entertainers, bohemians, vagabonds, and some more strange creatures, half animal and half human creatures, so-called shapeshifters.

"The stuff that dreams are made of" by John Anster Fitzgerald (1819-1906).

I´m also beginning to experience inner tantric phenomena. Some of the female street entertainers appear like dakinis. Tsultrim Allione describes the dakinis as “mystical female beings who may appear in dreams, visions, or human form.” They are primarily energy-beings, “the wisdom-energy of the five colors, which are the subtle luminous forms of the five elements.” In his book The Faerie Way, Hugh Mynne writes that there is a truly astounding point-to-point correspondence between British faerie beliefs and Tibetan teachings concerning dakinis (besides its New Age scent, Mynne´s book is quite good). In Scandinavia we have the Disir. These are the female spirits (goddesses) I´m interacting with in Rold Forest.

The Disir belongs to a group of gods called The Vanir. In ancient Celtic religion they are called The Sidhe. They are the Divine Ancestors. They are closely associated with poetry and music.

The Sidhe could be compared with Tolkien´s concept of elves and angels, and the relationship with them could be used in the same way as suggested throughout this book. See Philosophical Counseling with Tolkien, especially Chapter 3: Philosophical Angeology.

Art by Sulamith Wülfing

Dakinis, like The Sidhe (Scandinavia: Disir/Vanir), are particular associated with twilight; they frequently appear at twilight. They speak a mysterious non-rational “twilight language” (Sanscrit: sandhyabhasa) which can only be understood through the operation of another mode of knowing. Like the Sidhe, they are “between-creatures,” appearing and disappearing in the mysterious radiance of another world.

What I realized with these dreams was that I´m a vagabond by nature. I wanted to travel with the caravans. You could also use words such as pilgrim, bohemian, flaneur, idler, etc.

I have always felt like being a stranger in life, an Other, or simply an outsider. Therefore I also like the existentialists. But, in fact, if you go to Greco-Roman philosophy, then the philosophers also lived like bums, vagabonds, or cave-dwellers. Today existentialism is the only part of modern philosophy which reminds about the origins of philosophy.

I have also always been attracted to nature. And the more I´m working with Hara and the lower chakras, the more the Earth Chakra is opening me for Mother Earth elements and therefore shamanism. Personally, I sense a connection between shamanism and art.

Shamanic Art by Susan Seddon-Boulet 

In her article, On Artistic Inspiration, the author and folklorist, Terri Windling writes:

“In the mythic tradition, both artists and shamans walk perilously close to the realm of madness; indeed, in some cases, their gifts specifically come from journeying into madness, or Faerie, or the Realm of the Gods and then back again.”

This is also a central theme in her book, The Wood Wife. It begins with a Goethe quote:

Who wants to understand the poem

Must go to the land of poetry.

Pierre Hadot believes that Goethe considered true poetry as an exercise consisting in spiritually elevating oneself high above the earth. For Goethe, poetry (included storytelling) in the truest sense is a kind of physics, which consists in looking down at things from above, from the point of view of the nature of the all.

In his philosophical diary, Meditations, book 9, Marcus Aurelius says:

"You have the power to strip off many superfluous things that are obstacles to you, and that depend entirely upon your value-judgments; you will open up for yourself a vast space by embracing the whole universe in your thoughts, by considering unending eternity.”

In book 7, he admonishes himself as follows:

”Watch and see the courses of the stars as if you were running alongside them, and continually dwell in your mind upon the changes of the elements into one another; for these imaginations wash away the foulness of life on the earth. When you are reasoning about mankind, look upon earthly things below as if from some vantage point above them.”

There is a lot of shamanism in this. And Plato´s description of the philosopher directly sounds like a description of a shaman (which shows that philosophy and shamanism were connected at that time):

”In fact, it is only his body that lives and has its residence in the state; his soul, however, holds all this to be puny and meaningless, and contemptuously wanders all over the place, “under the earth,” as Pindar says, and measuring whatever is on its surface, and “above the heavens,” observing the stars, and in general thoroughly investigating the nature of everything that is, but without lowering itself to the level of any of the objects in its vicinity” (Theactetus, 173).

In popular thought, if not always in fact, shamanism is associated with altered states of consciousness and borderline madness, with shapechanging and otherworldly journeys, with creativity and genius. Windling’s novel The Wood Wife weaves these elements into the story of a woman who meets spirits of place when she travels to the Arizona desert. The artist figures in The Wood Wife are, like shamans, intermediaries between the spirits/nature and the human world. The artists speak to and for the spirits.

Karen Blixen, who claimed she was a witch, said that the human nature must be seen in the image of an artist. Personally, I have formulated this very broadly as a life artist. It is a life which must be a rebellion in relation to the established society, and which therefore often is associated with madness.

The figure of the shaman is also closely associated with madness. When an initiate becomes a shaman by Eliade’s first method, “spontaneous vocation,” he “takes the risk of being mistaken for a ‘madman’” (Myths 80). The behaviour of someone chosen in this way becomes more and more strange. Such a person “seeks solitude, becomes a dreamer, loves to wander in woods or desert places, has visions, sings in his sleep, etc.”

One shamanic method for changing shape is “undressing” down to the skeleton and “putting on” an animal form. This may be related to the dismemberment of the shaman initiate.

The life artist must re-structure the ego´s ownership to things, food, personal power, sexuality and emotions. Spiritual practice is in all simplicity about separating and dismantling the consciousness´ automatical identification with all this, in order to turn the consciousness in towards its source. First thereafter the mystical process can begin.

The magnet of attraction, which the ego is controlled by – (the ego´s identity with the material world: instincts, sexuality, emotions, desire, collective ideals, ownership, personal power; under one: the will to power) – will in a true spiritual practice lose its attraction. Investments in the material world´s ups and downs, its demands, temptations and dramas, become undramatized, uninteresting, even meaningsless, in relation to the consciousness´ opening direction in towards its spiritual essence: the Now, the Wholeness, life itself, and finally: the eternal Otherness, from where the good, the true and the beautiful are streaming as grace and forgiveness.

Such a detachment is seen in the unworried life of the bohemian. Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary or spiritual pursuits. In this context, Bohemians may or may not be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds.

Bohemian Grove (a Pirate Utopia) during the summer Hi-Jinks, circa 1911–1916

This use of the word bohemian first appeared in the English language in the 19th century to describe the non-traditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, writers, journalists, musicians, and actors in major European cities.

Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or anti-establishment political or social viewpoints, which often were expressed through free love, frugality, and—in some cases—simple living or voluntary poverty. A more economically privileged, wealthy, or even aristocratic bohemian circle is sometimes referred to as haute bohème (literally "high Bohemia").

Take for example the poet Lord Byron (1788 - 1824). 

Portrait of Byron by Thomas Phillips

Led by love for the local aristocratic, young, and newly married Teresa Guiccioli, Lord Byron lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821. Here he continued Don Juan and wrote the Ravenna Diary and My Dictionary and Recollections. Around this time he received visits from Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as from Thomas Moore, to whom he confided his autobiography or "life and adventures", which Moore, Hobhouse, and Byron's publisher, John Murray, burned in 1824, a month after Byron's death. Of Byron's lifestyle in Ravenna we know more from Shelley, who documented some of its more colourful aspects in a letter: 

"Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… . [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … . I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes."

In the 1980s, when I worked in Harrods in London, as a gentlemens´ outfitter, my life as a vagabond was already beginning to form. My time in London was a time of daydreaming. I was young, and dreamt about a life that would be different than the normal. In my lunch breaks I often walked over in Kensington Gardens and sat by the Serpentine Lake, a central place in J.M. Barrie´s books about Peter Pan.

"Peter Pan" by Charles Buchel. 

In the same way as Peter Pan, I wanted to escape from the normal life. Many years later I should realize how close to shamanism and Tibetan dream yoga, Peter Pan actually is. In his novel, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, J.M. Barrie writes:

If you think he [Peter Pan] was the only baby who ever wanted to escape, it shows how completely you have forgotten your own young days. When David heard this story first he was quite certain that he had never tried to escape, but I told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples, and when he had done this hard, and even harder, he distinctly remembered a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half-way up the chimney. All children could have such recollections if they would press their hands hard to their temples, for, having been birds before they were human, they are naturally a little wild during the first few weeks, and very itchy at the shoulders, where their wings used to be. So David tells me (page 20-21).

I began to study the wisdom of loafing. Chinese literary tradition is rife with the jottings of non-achievers – the cultured vagabond, the scholar recluse, the Taoist wanderer. Already in 500BC, the sage Lao Tzu recommended that one should “never be the first in the world”. Only he who is not wanted by the public can be a carefree individual, runs the Taoist adage. The importance of living is peopled with educated dropouts – for instance poets such as Su Tungpo and Tao Yüanming; Su, who sang about “the clear breeze over the river and the clear moon over the mountains”, and Tao, who sang about “the hen, which rested in the top of a mulberry tree”.

I was, as mentioned, also inspired by the beatwriters, as for example Jack Kerouac´s On the Road and The Dharma Bums. Also Allen Ginsberg´s shamanic poem Howl inspired me. But after my alcohol abuse I began to study the Chinese kinds of dropouts. They have become the new great source of inspiration in my life.

Like Lin Yutang I actually see the art of loafing as democratic in its nature. But, as Walt Whitman is pointing out in his Democratic Vistas – it is the ideal of free men and women in the Now, not the ideal of the democratic progress or improvement (today Consumer Capitalism and the growth fanatism of the self-help industry) - just look at Laurence Sterne on his “sensitive journey”, or at Wordsworth and Coleridge, wandering on foot through Europe, with a great sense of beauty in their hearts, but with a very few money.

The philosophical refined pleasure in the art of loafing is something, which costs much less than the lust for luxury. The only thing the pleasure of loafing requires is a creative emptiness, a life enjoyed as it is lived. Play without reason; travel to see nothing; a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner – these are the kind of activities that redeem the art of living from the business of living, which also Henry David Thoreau has shown in his Walden, where he describes his life in the woods, retired from the world´s ups and downs, from the magnet of attraction.

Look at nature! All nature loafs, while Man alone works for a living!

It is a return to childhood. My concept of The Peter Pan Project builds on this. And this is again connected to philosophy. Poetry, storytelling and philosophy melt together. If we take Wordsworth´s poem, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", we can see how deeply imbued it is with a kind of natural Platonism. The poem begins with the famous lines:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Shortly thereafter, we read:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come

The primary ideas here, so beautifully evoked, come from Plato, and although the speaker is chagrined about the loss of the “visionary gleam” available in childhood and in nature, where he is naturally “Nature´s Priest,” he also recognizes that nonetheless these riches remain accessible. The child is a “best philosopher…Haunted for ever by the eternal mind – “ And, Wordsworth writes, even though the weight of years bears down on us, to each of us is given “primal sympathy” and the consolation of “the philosophical mind.”

So, I´m all in for bohemianism. I consider myself as a drop-out hermit in Rold Forest, Denmark, where I, as Bruce Chatwin said: “have a place to hang my hat”. 

When not in Rold Forest, I spend my time vagabonding the world. As mentioned, see my blog category: My Life as a Vagabond. 

You can follow my vagabonding and photography on my Instagram profile.

I like to refer to myself as a Philosophical Globetrotter, Life Artist, and Idler (a Dharma Bum). I campaign against the work ethic (a religious, Protestant dogma, which capitalism is introducing worldwide, and which is making both people and environment sick) and promote liberty, autonomy and responsibility; in reality: the fine art of doing nothing. In this I take an anarchic approach to the everyday barriers that come between us and our dreams. So, I´m still in for spiritual anarchism, civil disobedience, and the right to be an idler.

Part two of this article:

Seiðr Shamanism and the Art of Song Healing

Other related posts: 

The Peter Pan Project (free booklet)

My Friend in the Woods (blog post, where inner tantra is described)

On Artistic Inspiration, by Terri windling

On the Nature of Dreams (article on Dream Yoga)

Links to Idlers and Drop-out Philosophies