Transparent. First. Introductions.

[wolven7]

A little under a year ago, I posted this: http://wolven.livejournal.com/1268710.html

So, inspired by moonandserpent's feelings on "internet identity"-- which, I should note, reflect my own, in many ways-- I felt I'd update it, and repost, for the new folks, in the audience.

I'm Damien, i'm 25, and will be 26 in four days. I've recently graduated the Master's Program for Philosophy and Religious Studies, at Georgia State University. I'm orginally from Washington, DC, and I still merge parts of DC with parts of Atlanta, in my dreams. I walk from one corner to the next, and the cities are one place. I think that says quite a bit about my psychology.

I like psychology.

My high school principal was a psychologist, and she taught me a lot about the kinds of wonderful things you can learn from observing the behaviours of individual and group dynamics. I know why people do the things they do, but I don't necessarily meta-understand. I understand their motivations, but I don't know why they think they're so important. It gets confusing, and maybe I'm just asking a question with no meaningful (to me) answer. I'm a Jungian as concerns my psychological approach, meaning that I think that everything's real, in terms of the effective experience it gives to the experiencer. If you see a ghost, I don't ask you why you believe in unreal things, I ask you about what the ghost was wearing, what you were doing, and if you pissed it off. An experience cannot be "real" or "unreal." It is merely an experience, which, in its turn, can teach us something about ourselves, and how we engage the world.

I think that metaphysics, in general, and magical practices ("occult studies" as it were) in particular, have a lot to say to quantum mechanics, and vice versa, and that there is nothing unnatural, or supernatural that Exists. That is to say, if it exists, then it is, by definition natural. If your definition, approaching that fact, is too narrow, then let's have a conversation about that, and I'll see what I can do.

I believe in magic. Actual, action-at-a-distance, sympathy-and-contagion, spells (and that's a fun conversation, about "spelling"), rituals, et cetera Magic. Neurolinguistic Programming. Active Attention. Lots of things, there, for conversation.

My mother's a minister and a lawyer, my father's a system's engineer for the DoD. My mother was in undergrad, when she had me, and she taught me how to fight in my dreams. My father helped design the cooling system for a plasma cannon.

When I was eight, I looked at the shiny metal rivet on the shiny blue enamel back on the chair in which I was sitting, and I saw the infinite curvature of reflection, and I posited that in each of those reflections was another world, another me, all doing me-things, but different.

I've done questionable things (who hasn't) that would make many of you not want to know me, if you knew the details, and I've wanted to take back most of them, at some past time (who doesn't), but right now, I appreciate where they've brought me, and am more than glad to have done them.

This is basic, 1010-level me. It gets more complicated, from here.

Questions?

I'm glad to be here. Glad to meet you.

Comments

[davidsfoley.livejournal.com]

2010 level then? I know I'll need it before I hit the other ones.

Perhaps next week I'll get something equivalent to a 2000/3000 level down for me and my endeavors.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

2010 is Great Questions, you know? So...