"Let your life be a friction against the machine" - Paradigm Prospector says "Heya Steemit-Family"

A somewhat intimate introduction to my unusual life. Will you join me on my journey through contradictory worldviews and the mining of probability?

_{Me after too little sleep ;)}

Early years

Ever since I can remember I lived in an environment of technology, friction and atypical circumstances. While I was crawling around on dog-hair-riddled floors, my dad was playing electric guitar with a bunch of sweaty, long-haired dudes in the basement of our house.

One of the guys was also a dad, living with his family on the second floor, and he had two boys, Mike and Andy. Mike and Andy were adolescent long before I even knew what that term meant and they were heavily into this one thing – a mysterious grey box connected to some sort of television screen that you could somehow interact with.

Being a single child I was drawn to them. And their grey magic box.

They were like the bigger brothers I never had. For years we lived in the house together, and the older I got the more I tried to evade bedtime by hanging around Mike and Andy's rooms on the other floor, watching them fiddle with this weird machine and eventually being totally captivated by it.

And... it had games!! Games on weird plastic squares.

_{source: geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Monkey-Island.jpg}

Mike and Andy were constantly working on that thing, and complaining about why this or that doesn't work, and why they would need a new, faster grey box soon!

Of course, I didn't understand any of it at the time, but now it's dawning on me that that's how my media-shamanism journey really started. With them.

When I was 6 or so, I got my first gameboy – and I was hopelessly lost. Playing that thing anywhere all the time, never before had anything captured my attention so heavily, not even saturday morning cartoons on TV.

_{source: publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=191203&picture=original-nintendo-game-boy}

THIS THING I could participate in, not merely watch.

My parents decided to get a divorce around that time time, pullling in two different directions and we eventually had to move out of the house. I went to live with my mom and had to swap schools which messed up everything for me. Or did it?

When I was 10, I got a little brother as my dad had decided to start another family – which made me very happy. My brother and me are a really good team today ;)

Here's me, shamelessly influencing him in his future musical direction when we were both a little older.

The next years I would eventually find my way into the more demanding types of schools within the German school system thanks to some dialogue of my parents with the teachers (in Germany, we have a three-tier school-system from grade 5 on, depending on 'skill' and 'intelligence' – diplomatically called aptitude – where kids are separated into three categories after the fourth grade, based on their 'performance' and teacher reommendations).

So now I was with the 'smart' kids. And school got worse and worse, the older I got.

_{A somewhat symbolic summer vacation photo in Denmark before the tough school time started: me by myself}

The content of the curriculum was demanding, to say the least, and more and more of my newfound friends would eventually have to drop down a tier and change schools, due to the sheer pressure on and performance demanded of us as students.

But I pulled through. Somehow.

I started my first band when I was 14, having finally asked my dad if he could show me how to play that guitar thingy, and I recognized then that music was already everything to me. It had started early on, with wanting to get onto the 'mini playback show' when I had been a kid, to eventually discovering MTV and being absolutely stunned by the effect it had on me.

Guess the gang got to me early ;)

_{The beginnings of my own musical journey, posing with my dad's Les Paul}

I quickly became good friends with a guy at school who wanted to play the drums, and our first band "Victim of the Squirrels" - with a rather inappropriate German abbreviation we found hilarious - was born.

And though it would never make half as much progress as I wanted it to, I had some new crew, my band.

It was a godsend, because I never really fit in with any of the cliques at school. Everyone was sort of 'neutral' to me which helped me out years later when the cliques would start to hate on each other. But I never quite felt at home with either of them during most of my time in school.

Always the guy between the fronts...
But I had my music, and my bandmates. I thought 'this is it' - we would just have to practice hard, make our first album, and tour the world. Easy peasy.

Well, needless to say that eventually broke apart because I wanted more and got impatient, and my drummer (my best friend at the time) wanted to be a damn kid ;) immature, non-serious and not really taking the band-thing seriously except having it as a gimmick. Or that's what it felt like to me anyway.

You see I guess I had always placed this demand on myself to be mature. And more mature. I couldn't wait to grow up and take things into my own hands. Whatever that meant.

And so eventually I formed another band. And another. Swapping players and eventually growing a friend circle of our own, spanning multiple schools in the area.

Music continued to guide my way.

I can't quite believe it, but the website of... I THINK our third band, yup, is still online today, due to the generosity and eventual forgetfulness of a friend's dad who worked at an internet hosting company and generously sponsored some webspace for us ;) Maybe I ought to track him down and let him know that this project is no longer active, but then I couldn't present it to you here right now, could I?

It was my first major success in terms of media-shamanism (a concept which I will greatly elaborate on, i.e. showcase in my first actual post). I built that website on my own computer, with an unearthly amount of perfectionism and ambition, having no prior knowledge except for a few tips by my dad, using a flash-based system ("Swishmax", for the nerds among you).

I give high-fives to the universe for the fact that you and me can still enjoy that website today, ahahaha:

www.5minuteslate.com

Oh yes!

The flash version is ancient, but it did work for me in MS edge after approving Flash. Our music is still on there as well. Just look at how immature and adolescent everything is!

I am surprised that I still feel proud of it today. But I do. Awesome. <3
I'd like to believe I always had a thing for good bandnames, "5 Minutes Late" came naturally.

We got better. We played band contests. We had our first underage groupies - needless to say we were underage ourselves, but damn did we feel like rockstars for a few weeks having chicks around that wanted to talk to us when we smoked our first cigarettes after a show ;)

_{Me and my bandmates from "5 Minutes Late", out drinking beer and living the life}

"What're you sayin', German boy?! You're 'n 'MURICA now!"

While all of this was happening, I began to recognize my affinity for the USA that had become quite strong over the years. The music from there, McDonalds as a kid, colory-shiny new technologies, shamelessly-exaggerated alien invasion movies and this odd blue statue in New York...

I got interested in an exchange program one of our teachers was promoting at our school.

Nobody wanted to go though. Everybody was bored with the very IDEA! It must have been one of the first times that it really hit me – "Why are you all so NOT INTERESTED IN THIS?! Really??? BACON BURGER AND HOLLYWOOD, COME ON!!! Are you people crazy? It's amazing!!"

But no. They didn't care.

And so I didn't care that they didn't care. I wanted this.
I told my mom that I wanted to go, and I told my dad when I went to visit him on the weekends and they made it possible for me, for which I will forever be grateful.

And to cut a long story slightly shorter, I went. 17 years old, flying a ridiculous distance, and walking through the airport gates into the arms of some smiling, totally unfamiliar family.

A really odd moment.

Especially because it took me well over a month to catch up on slang terms, and finding out that my A-level British school English didn't help me here at all. I would have to learn the majority of the language anew and endure all sorts of mockery due to mistranslations and due to being the only German among Americans with largely German roots. Good times!

I quickly grew really really FOND of the USA, the spirit of its people and much too many things to list here right now...

...as one could also tell by simply loooking at this picture.

No, this was not Cambridge. This was Saginaw, Michigan.
And it was a total blast, well beyond anything I had ever expected.

I discovered so much about myself, about different ways of doing things, the CAN-DO attitude that I had NEVER encountered to any comparable degree in Germany, as well as all the things that are totally messed up about America from a European's perspective – even back then in 2004.

And I made friends for life. Possibly for longer.

_{Playing with my American band "Batteries not included" at the Skyroom - Bay City, MI.}

"Wait... is this really my home? REALLY?!"

When I came back after ten months, everything was different. I started to notice the heavy cage of seemingly arbitrary dictates with no good reason to them. The stiffness. Pointless rules that had no effect other than to demoralize students and to keep them in line. That was what I observed anyway. And everybody nodded and shut their face, while I was shaking in confusion, still having the spirit and can-do attitude in my heart from the US and not willing to bow my head to these insane cultural norms and customs I had never quite noticed before - at least as long as noone could give me a sound and logical reason to do so.

And noone could.
Everything came full circle eventually.

As my motivation to keep up with the demands of this cold-hearted 'elite school' faded, I began to scour the internet on my own, looking for answers to my questions outside of the curriculum.

Language barrier: non-existent.

It had been blasted to shreds after ten months of ordering school lunch, talking to salesmen at guitar center about tremolos and arguing about logical discrepancies in "Back to the Future" with my American bro from another mo, David.

Here's us on a trip to DC, being totally serious - a few months before I came back to Germany

Back home I realized I was in a position to suddenly learn about anything now, anything I wanted to. I could glimpse and understand things, none of my friends would ever hear on German TV, and I had also been lovingly nudged to try on green goggles for the first time in my life during my time in the US.

The foreshadowing of my later journeys into the mind.

Never had I touched it before that, never had I been interested.
Until that point it had always been beer, wine and the occasional shot(s) at a party. Now I was starting to explore my own headspace more and more. And boy, what a maze!

And then, the pieces fell into place. It all catapulted.

I questioned everything, and began to question myself and my own questioning of it all. Most stoners I have met in my life can testify to that effect, you start to see the world a different way and you stop believing everything you think. You kinda start watching the chatter in your mind, instead of automatically (mis)taking it for what is. The combination of plant-gateway and unlimited English access to information, coupled with my experiences from both sides of the Atlantic really propelled me forward, in any way I can think of.

It's like:

"The informational daybreak..."

... and the actual quantum leap of understanding came shortly thereafter - I stumbled upon a movie that would change my life forever. It was the beginning of a long and strange journey, the 'ends' of that whole chapter coming together in what I came to do here on Steemit – to sort and systemize it all, and to relay as much of it as possible for your discernment, in a challenging fashion. Among new chapters of the journey, of course.

This movie... It's called Zeitgeist: Addendum, many of you might have heard of it by now - in good or bad terms - it's been out for nearly ten years. If you haven't, I suggest right here to not go see that stupid Hollywood movie on Friday, but instead suspend judgment and sit through this one. You might learn something. You might learn a lot of things. And it will challenge you - that I can pretty much guarantee.

I find it's still the best showcase of the flawed mechanisms fundamental to our progress-obsessed societies, and I have seen a lot of videos in the last ten years. Though from my perspective today I really have to ask you to not just run with it - it's not the answer per se, just a major step towards the answer as far as i'm concerned.

I will explain my reasons for saying so in due time on this channel.

_{Intro screen of Z: Addendum}

Here was this American guy telling me how money worked, and he made a damn good case. Not even the economics teacher in our alleged smart-ass school had ever come close to scratching that surface. And it also dawned on me why that might be.

I learned about the 'economy' that all grown-ups seemed to be so interested in but seemed to know next to nothing about when I asked them questions spawned by the movie. I learned good reasons why our system wasn't actually an economy at all but a slavery-cage painted in shiny colors so noone would notice or dare question it.

A structure bent on scarcity and denying life-affirmation, despite all the propaganda to the contrary I had heard during my time in both societies. An anti-economy, if you dare look at the actual meaning of the term.

Nothing about our 'economy' was economic at all. And a skyline of lightbulbs went off in my mind that I will never ever forget.

The case was too good.
And I questioned it. All of it.

For a year I tried to find the catch but couldn't find it until much later. I slowly got accustomed to a new way of seeing the world and its norms consciously - approaching seemingly unrectifiable perspectives at the same time, hoping they would eventually paint the bigger picture. Noone around me seemed able or interested to help me figure this out, so I reached out to find others who would.

The official upload clocks in at about 6.3 mio views these days, wow!
Being a quality nerd I wanted to link an HD version for the community though.

Here's some great advice I picked up from another activist over the years:
"Believe nothing, but understand as much as you can."

That mindset has always served me well, and I can wholeheartedly recommend using it for all areas of inquiry as a general starting point in attitude.

_{Zeitgeist: Addendum - HD}

I had never been political before, in my life. Yes, I went to that Iraq-invasion demonstration to impress this politically-minded girl in my class I was so stoked on. But that's about it.

But here, after digging for a year I had the whole explanation all laid-out - the economic root - of WHY money is such a problem for most people, why rent continues to rise constantly, poverty continues to spread, why the world is in so much debt to itself, why wars are fought with underdeveloped 'countries', and why world peace and mass-cooperation simply aren't sustainable nor logical aims from our current economic framework's point of view.

No matter how loud we scream about it in the streets or call "our" representatives, nothing will change fundamentally, and sheer pessimism has nothing to do with it.

These noble goals of a sustainable and peaceful coexistence on Earth are mathematically unattainable within the current system.

And - remember the motto above: Don't believe a word of what I say here! There's too much to be understood and I'm not sure you have that luxury here to simply agree and believe me.

I found out why most of us are just being stupid in periodically voting for this guy or the other guy, hoping they could or would be able to do anything about it. Instead we could try to address society's maladies at the core. Solutions to these issues can and should be argued over, but identifying the causes should be fairly obvious and straight-forward once enough information is available.

At least that's how I saw it at the time. My understanding has evolved much since then. Another reason for me joining steemit was to gently move this whole debate along vs. getting stuck in this or that ideological prison (more about this in future posts).

A lot has changed in the last decade, we have crypto currencies today, Russia has gotten stronger economically if that means anything at all. But fundamentally, the world is still running on Fiat, and the FED is probably still calling the shots within the larger context of their cartel.

I had to do something. So I decided to enter activism for a moneyless society.

I volunteered for becoming a Zeitgeist movement team coordinator, eventually helping to manage and direct the chapters for the whole of Germany as well as in my home town. It consumed me, and I finally found like-minded people who were just as critical towards the system as I had become. Smart people that passed all the 'tests' I threw their way.

They knew their stuff, had ambitions and a genuine love for humanity which was more than good enough for me at the time.

Here's some friends and I doing some ZM activism in my hometown, including free hugs of course:

I started to get into the linguistic team, translating and eventually dubbing some of the material into German language space.

Meanwhile, I barely made graduation - despite a maximum score in English which my teacher had never given to any student before as she noted "you more than earned it", and which counted double because students were able to pick their own emphasis of specialization at that time.

I say "barely made graduation", because by the time I had tortured myself all the way through 13th grade, I had learnt so much about the system everybody around me simply accepted, that I felt I was betraying myself continuing to act as if I didn't know anything about it.

I was a full blown atheist at the time but even then I said that if there ever was a hell or something to that effect, I would rightly enter there one day if I sold myself to this anti-human machine voluntarily, despite having acquired all this contrary knowledge beforehand.

Everybody could see something wasn't quite right with the contemporary myths we were taught, everybody hated something about the established structure for some reason, but all people around me eventually shut up and seemed to be accepting it (except for Lis, that lovely politics-minded goth girl, and me).

Both of us became outcasts, in a certain sense.

From then on I vowed to keep learning as much as I could about the structures everybody seemed to deem unchangeable, and find my way in all of this as best I can without letting that revoluzzer-light go out completely, as long as I live. Or until I find a very good case for the madness, anyway.

I vowed to never stop my understanding from growing, even if that meant ditching the Zeitgeist ideas eventually, once I had disproven them in some way.

And I did quit my participation in the movement years later for very good reasons that would be too elaborate to name here, suffice it to say they are probably different reasons than you might think of right now if you are new to the movie. I will name them all, in a series I will be doing on the subject.

Nevertheless, every human being should have watched this movie, plain and simple.
And I don't often say things like that.

_{source: public domain}

"So now what?!"

I moved out into my first rental apartment with one of my few remaining friends from school and started to work in a youth hostel - washing dishes, preparing breakfast and doing the nightshifts when the Swedish female handball team would be in town for a tournament.

Good times ;)

But hollow.
Superficial.

After I left the youth hostel I started to work for my dad's company full time for many years of my life, using my self-taught media skills to write article descriptions and improve the online shop, develop the brands and marketing concepts, design flyers and logos, chat with English-speaking customers and help out in the workshop, packaging rather awesome boat-trolleys my dad had invented as an entrepreneur during my childhood.

_{The baltic sea, where I grew up}

But all of that was failing for me, it was eating me up slowly because I knew too much. I wanted more, no, not more. I wanted less!

Less time doing the grind, no matter how well rationalized the grind was, and how high-quality the products we offered... I needed more time to study, building something meaningful for those after us, from the heart - only I had no idea what that could be at the time. Something to be proud of when my kids would ask me one day about my choices in these times today.

I had 'too much money' (if there ever is such a thing in a scarcity-driven system).
And too little time.

When my friends went off to university I saw that I had to make a fundamental choice for myself.
I would study as well, yes, but I wouldn't study something, I would study ANYTHING!
Anything that was able to capture my interest long enough. I had to. I owed that to myself now. This was all connected and specializing in one field seemed foolish to me, and it still does.

Also I couldn't possibly let the 'government' decide what the curriculum was going to be again, and where the limits of inquiry would be drawn. No more fences in inquiry, screw all that! They had lied to me too drastically already, that much I had learnt in the Zeitgeist movement, proven through ample evidence and confirmed through a myriad of sources across both language spaces.

None of my remaining friends understood half the stuff I told them about fiat money, about scarcity-driven profit mechanisms, the eventual pressures of automation on the job market, problem-maintaining business strategies and the myth of the invisible hand in a system of high level manipulation and debt-based privately-generated currencies with compound interest.

My friends were interested in other things. And though they loved me, they would roll their eyes whenever I went off on a rant. And I couldn't blame them I guess. Smartasses can be quite annoying.

Seemed like this was it for now then - I needed a new crew.
I knew that much.

For the third Zeitgeist movie, Zeitgeist Moving Forward, I volunteered to be the translation coordinator for German, and we translated the whole movie with about a dozen people within a week, much to the amazement of the other international language teams and to ourselves. The team was amazing!

I would eventually succeed in setting up a screening of that movie in my hometown, which I was very proud of and which taught me a lot about ideology and 'do-gooders' who are simply barking up the wrong tree and not getting it.

_{Me, holding a small welcoming speech to the crowd for the free screening of ZMF in a movie theatre of my hometown}

Needless to say it all got deeper and deeper.

I eventually dared to... research the areas that are very closely guarded. It's amazing what you can find outside of your own language space about your language space.
And... I came to understand the official need for ideological firewalls of all sorts. Let's keep it at that for now.

I felt as if I saw myself in the devil's playhouse about to sign a contract of silence and consent for life, OR walk out the door and find my own way in this tornado of life, experience and informational paradigms of probability, and accept all the hurt that would surely come with it.

I chose the latter.

During the last years at my dad's company I would go back to the USA on holidays to visit my American friends every other summer, which meant a lot to me during that time of my life.

_{Back in good old USA with my brotha', eating unnecessary amounts junk food on a road trip}

At the same time I discovered (my love for) Psychedelic Trance, which downright saved my ass! It was most unexpected. I had always been a rock guy, only to discover that psychedelic trance was exactly what I had been looking for all this time. It had everything I wanted out of my own music, it had everything I missed in rock and it could dwarf metal and most other styles in any way I found relevant.

I was stunned!

Kind of a cosmic joke, being electronic in nature and not 'handmade' in a classical sense ;)
I had always bitched about electronic music being fake. And here I was getting into it.

Yay for being able to change! Change is fundamental to everything.

But I don't have many problems with changing fundamental assumptions, in case you hadn't noticed. I had to get quite used to it, just to be able to compute it all in my mind without losing coherence of thought completely.

I had just never stumbled upon this type of music before due to my own narrow-mindedness in music. Self-imposed limits of inquiry, I had caught myself again doing it! A good lesson. Especially to a music fanatic such as myself.

The people on psy dancefloors were the most open-minded I had ever met, and I cried for hours on the last day of my first Ozora festival because I had never been so happy in my whole life - I cannot even remember having cried in front of 'strangers' EVER before.

If there was a path cut out for me, this had to be it! My heart was ordering me to follow that lead - my mind was puzzled at what that meant and what would come of it.

I will devote a multitude of series to this and to my experiences connected with psy, here on steemit. It is still the major source of my life energy to this very day and it is the same for many others I have met.

So, fair to say: I had heard my call. And I answered it.

I started getting into psytrance production after my first psy festival experiences, such as

_{source: https://www.facebook.com/truehumanityproject/}

or...

_{Ozora 2012 recap - original source by MagicM}

...and soon I gave up trying to find a new drummer for my gazillion'th band.
That ship had sailed! And I was kinda glad it had.

After discovering psy and the people around it, the rock scene suddenly seemed stale to me, and lifeless. A corpse that is being paraded around for oldtimers to get excited about, but nobody really cheering in ernest. I still love rock music, but I can't quite seem to go back to it for long without missing something.

I also had to change my views about the Zeitgeist movement drastically through the first real psy festival experience - long before I found 'the catch' years later on, on an 'intellectual, logical level'.

We were running around in cities with printed flyers, trying to convince everyone to be cooperative, compassionate and open minded. Kinda 'forcing them' to see it our way, which took years for me to actually acknowledge - that that was what I was doing. Converting. Like the church converts the 'ignorant'. A twisted sense of good-willed elitism. Or something like that.

And suddenly here I was among 20,000 people who were already living and practicing what most people in the movement had 'only mastered in theory'

No reasons were needed. No debate about ideology was needed. Nada. We could just work with that! Right here, right now! Everybody came to learn, anybody could be your teacher. There was no "one way" anymore. It was powerful, it was more fitting to human beings. It felt divine. It felt right, because there was no longer anyone claiming to have the answer. Instead you met people with lots of information relevant to your question - all the time.

Needless to say it changed all my priorities within a single week of experience.

But I will get to all of that.
Some other time.

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end"

I finally left my job and I moved to a different town with a friend that I vibed with like noone before. We had met years prior, through our Zeitgeist activism and are still a tag team on Earth to this day - not sure what we would have done if we hadn't met. Both of us fell in love with psytrance around the same time and both of us heeded the call.

We were gonna find our way in this madhouse of "civilized society" and devote our energy finding solutions and creating new pathways, no matter how tough it got or how weird it would seem to others. So we made our new shared apartment into a fortress of learning and self-development, a place of invention and collaboration, among other things.

This awesome video materialized at the Occupy Hamburg event, where we took part with our Zeitgeist chapter, a short while before we ditched the movement altogether and never really returned.

It's still very moving, give it a try and take a break from reading if you are still here ;)
You are awesome by the way <3
Welcome to my life.

Revolution 2011 - Occupy Hamburg - United for global changehttp://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlrszl

In the new town - before I knew it - I 'coincidentally' (if you believe such hocus pocus^^) met a guy whose grandma was the neighbor of a rather notorious author in Germany who needed someone to help him out with his media presence, and I came at the perfect time. Other opportunities also emerged - all of it came down to choice again, trusting the cosmic flow of things vs. falling into head-based fear patterns of scarcity and lack.

And, we had each other to mutually hold us up and stay on course. Like brothers really.

I continued my self-studies while helping the author gentleman (which shall remain nameless for now) with his website administration, with recording and producing videos of and interviews for him, SEO'ing, and eventually building a successful youtube channel that has helped to shake up Germany considerably. Of which I am very proud.

I had built two other channels over the years and the numbers and comments testify that the work has been very helpful in the process of awakening the mainstream—consuming masses, if I may refer to our human brothers and sisters that way.

_{source: public domain}

The videos mostly consisted of dubs I did from English to German, as none of these essential important topics that I had stumbled upon during recent years were on youtube at the time. Not in spoken German anyway – all of it was subtitles-only, which turns Germans off massively, and I saw that big hole on youtube and aimed to fill it.

And so, I set out to dub my favorite groundbreaking lectures from English language space into German. The ones I felt were most paradigm-shattering of all, which I will also share on this channel in some smart fashion in the future.

Boy, I have a long to-do list I guess. But this needs to spread.
This is an English-language project and shall remain so.
English has become my prime language and I simply enjoy it a lot.

At the time though, I saw the potential healing effect this work would have in the long-term for German society overall. And that, I figured, would be time well-spent.

I also continued to learn how to make psytrance, which turned out a lot harder than I had expected.

Meanwhile the plant had become one of my most trusted teachers and allies on this unlikely journey. I came to learn about its function in my life and its eventual downsides, about the barriers I had put up to my own progress by abusing it massively, which taught me moderation and the great importance of it for life on Earth as a human being. At the same time, it literally got me out of a few dead ends more than once when I had no idea how to proceed.

When the time is right I will tackle that series here in more detail as well, it is an important part of my journey ;)

Speaking of time...

_{source: minds.com/media/781261835704737793}

We started containering (Americans call it dumpster-diving) which was a good option in the new town we were in. Not only did it cut our expenses for food all but completely, it also made us feel good to not generate that extra demand for food that is already being thrown away by the semi-loads.

It was the ultimate hippie-maneuver and I can recommend trying it to everyone who likes to eats food.^^

I have scouted my hard drives and mailboxes for an hour and a half here, but I can't find the picture of our first containering-success again, I'm sorry. Since I will be featuring more of his amazing photos on this channel anyway, go with this picture for now - shot by an amazing photographer and good friend of mine - a picture of very similar booty, from the same year.

You don't have to be poor to save food from mindless destruction but if you are, it sure helps going to the grocery store after midnight^^. It feels really good after getting over that conditioned first reaction when you open a garbage bin to take food out of there instead of throwing stuff in. Having little money was just the initiator to go try it. Same with hitchhiking. You don't do that if you can afford a plane ticket to the other end of Europe.

And I rank hitchhiking among the best teachers I had.

These are all examples of cosmic flow. The universe will always provide.
It's just that nobody has really told us, that that is an option...

_{source: http://www.facebook.com/gunnar.eichweber}

Seriously!

As he put it:
"One backpack full of chilled free food - takes me less time to 'hunt' and clean it than running through the inside of the supermarket!"

And I met lots and lots of amazing people like that on my journeys to psychedelic festivals over the years, and they became true friends - spread out all over Europe and the Earth in fact. Canada to South Africa. Poland to Australia.

We see each other maybe once a year now - MAX. And we always pick up right where we left off. No guilt tripping, no blame, no small talk. Deep and meaningful exchange. I discovered I was more of a quality-lover and less of a quantity-lover.

I began to live it more. And it became the main focus of everything I hold dear to this day.
Until I find something even more resonant of course. Never stop growing.

Instead of telling you all about it here, I will just leave you with the thank-you's I crafted after returning from my 2013 summer tour, via a 3-day hitchhiking trip through Europe with 2 € left in my pocket - this introductory post is way too long already.

I will tell you the whole adventure on this channel, which is much more important than most of the things I have bored you with above. And it is an epic adventure, be certain of that ;)

But you asked for my story, and that's as short as I can get it without leaving out too many relevant steps and details - things that are somewhat necessary to understand where I'm coming from with my work and my perspective(s) on life. And what I can offer here on steemit.

As for manners:

I stumbled upon Steemit, thanks to Jerry, so let me say: THANK YOU @jerrybanfield for your videos and your tutorials, my friend. I could not have wrapped my head around steemit in such a short time without all of your help.
You have opened a most resonant door for me, and the vibe of the people that already greeted me is proof of the Steem-Tribe's qualities.

As social media user since day two, I am absolutely thrilled with the idea of steemit, as living breathing network.

On Paradigm Prospector:

I want to give back to the world the fruits of my study, my love to music, art and media technology, my cosmic travel stories of love and unlikeliness, and most of all offer a bridge to people.

I came here to share what I know, experience and understand, and all of these are in constant flux. I know I have a lot to offer and I feel people on steemit will be more interested in these sort of things, than on most other platforms I have been to in the last years. I feel I have been getting really good in presenting perspectives that will often be mutually exclusive (seemingly) and downright challenging to your ears, and I feel the time is right to release them in a more thought-out manner here, on my own terms, calibration and priority.

I will also talk about methodologies, techniques, dogmas, and reflections on 'super-certain' knowledge we all are taught in school and in our societies. Knowledge that literally falls apart the moment you put any reasonable amount of scientific inquiry and intellectual honesty to it.

I found out for myself that the most certain things.... are seldom certain.
This should aggravate some of ya in a loving way ;)

I ask you not to hold back your views when you disagree with what I write, but rather to stay factual and true to your own understanding, always. We can talk about it, there is no need to agree to respect each other.

I am merely offering perspectives here - I have no idea what the truth is ultimately

I find, everybody has a piece of the puzzle.
Possibly, as it was intended!

I would also love to help you out if you need one of my skills in particular for anything you are working on, if I can find the time - a dub, a translation, a track, a paradigm you think is probably BS but your aunt keeps talking about it at the dinner table - anything, just let me know and I'll try my best if I have competencies in the area you are looking for.

Though I will post all of my good material here eventually – and much more, as Steemit will be my main media focus from now on - you may check out my other media channels for this most recent project, Paradigm Prospector, if you wish to do so.

Minds: https://www.minds.com/ParadigmProspector
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmDO4UDfbgwwkMtnw_-6rlA
Facebook: Are you kidding?^^

Psychedelics have been a godsend for me, and I feel the time is right to share these stories (and the experiments I made) with other people on the search. It will be a main drive of this project in the long run to help establish new patterns for others to follow up on and hopefully to disprove or develop them further.

If I had to break it down here into its essence, it would be about finding a way to trust the universe.

As Terence McKenna once put it:
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”

When I dared to trust it and went off to Hungary by myself, I ended up meeting these people.

And a year later these people:



And the year after that - these people:

See?

It does work... But I find, the mind often needs to be satisfied with data first, to allow intuition to take the reigns. If you have collected enough 'impossible' evidence your mind will step back. If you feel you need more evidence, collect it now - opportunities abound!

No matter your metaphysics, you are part of this 'happening' on Earth, and you can trust this thing we are experiencing, because... here is a good mind-reason: what else are you gonna do?

In short:
I am eternally grateful to have found ya steemit, and to be part of this magical community that has already welcomed me like Grandma on Christmas.

I came to deliver what all my life has been building up to.
And that means the world to me. <3

Thank you for all of your time and attention, reading about my journey's beginnings.
Let's move on now, SHALL WE!

It will be a magical ride.
Maybe a priceless one.

We're all in this together.

Much love