The Way
of Woohoo
Some people treat the practice of magick as an end in itself, and there are systems of magick that support this idea. In the isolation of their inner sanctum, these practitioners delve into experiences of increasing complexity or intensity that hopefully lead to some ultimate knowledge or transformation. Who knows? Maybe they’ll get there. The Way of Woohoo, however, is about being in the world, in your body, and living your life. We perform experiments and explore consciousness so that we will know how to take our insights and create excitement, intensity, wonder, mystery, and beauty all around us, so that we can re-create our world and life as an ongoing work of art.
Our neurology, as we understand it now, is built to support social interaction, communication, friendships, relationships, and participation in families, organizations, and group minds of every kind. Participation in our world usually means working, playing, hating, loving, talking to, entertaining, and generally sharing our experience with others. While solitude can be enjoyable and useful, it only remains that way for most people relative to the times when we actively join in the world of human and memetic entities. Our mirror neurons unconsciously share information about states, so use the techniques in this book to make a friend feel wonderful, to blow someone’s mind, to turn a lover on mentally and physically, or to communicate your revelation about how the world has always been. It’s simple: take yourself there first. Create wonderfully exquisite states for yourself and become an exemplar to others. Light the darkness, bring peace to the strife-torn, offer love to the lonely, and recognize the wholeness, uniqueness, and divine nature of every human you meet.
Your body is your instrument and your world is your medium. Really, it’s all we have. So once again—how much do you want your own story to really rock? How exquisite, grand, powerful, intriguing, seductive, exciting, or mythic would you like your experience to be? What excites your neurons, strokes your sense of aesthetics, fulfills your philosophy, applies significance to your circumstance, or makes you scream and shout?
Invocation gives you the ability to draw qualities and skills into yourself, to think from different points of view and with the capabilities of different “minds” than the ones that you usually take for your own. Will you be fearless in the face of adversity? Strong when strength is required and comfortably flexible when it is time to yield? Will you become a great lover, a visionary artist, a world-changing scientist, a wonderful parent, a tireless athlete, an excellent student, a brilliant chess player, or the person who grows the biggest and tastiest tomatoes in the county? Whatever stories you create for your future, imagine them in whatever sensory detail you can, give them submodalities of amazing woohoo, and then leave them in your brain for your default network to process. As you think about your future, your default network can recall these imagined stories and details and reconsolidate them into the broader plot arc of your full-sensory creation, the story of your life.
The choices that you make will ultimately determine what kind of entity, inhabiting what kind of body, will be what others call your name and what you call “me.” Will that entity be a random collection of states and selves and impulses, or can it align itself and become a cohesive, integrated being? That entity and all the component minds that constitute it make the choices that determine what kind of story we star in and what kind of world provides the setting for that tale. Our reality may be a consensus between the whole imaginary crowd of us, little and big, from embodied metaphors to gods and goddesses, all the other humans we perceive, and all the greater, multiple-human minds in which we participate.
Maybe you’ll be able to bring woohoo into your life one decision at a time. Or maybe you’ll be able to step boldly into that alternate universe where every moment of your life is an adventure of new woohoo. Either way, now is the time to imagine that woohoo-filled future that can be yours. So … how much woohoo can you do now?
Exercise 14.1 Future Pacing
- In what ways can you use what you have learned and experienced by practicing these exercises—in all areas of your life—in the coming days, weeks, months, and years?
- If The Way of Woohoo were to become more widely understood, what various effects might it have on individuals, groups, and society?
- What new techniques, rituals, or creative works do you think you can develop in your future, and what will be the ramifications of those?
