hi there :)
since you’re here reading this you’ve probably found interesting what we’re doing.
please send any material to:
since we’re embracing a strict no-template / no-machine policy, we’ll get back to everyone, if only in one line.
while some background in gnosticism is certainly helpful, doing actual cultivation is not necessarily required but of great value. as a general guideline of what we’re looking for and how we look at it, please take the ‘letters’ section in the MADE KNOWN issue as a funny reference …
London, Summer 2013
Reinhard, I’m so happy you’re still breathing – I mean it said ‘Autumn 2017’ on your parachute up there – so you made it past Christmas, I assume?
So, shall I download a copy of something? Yes, I think I will. What shall I send you, would you like some words or can I send you money? Obviously I have too much money, if only there were a secure way to post you my trust fund. By god, one day, I do hope so.
Yes, if you’re alive you might reply with one of your essays – and we might be friends? Would you like that, I’ll come to Vienna. Myself, I’m immersed sending bundles of my fantastic literature to American University publishers, and to the church of latter day saints, the usual, the whimsy, the cack and the dog.
See – my blog is mothballed, we reached a settlement agreement. I only live here [email protected] – please request a submission asap and I will consider everything. Do not be disappointed my standard rejection – strictly business, buddy.
Your admirer – you, grand surrealist you, Mat 🙂
hi mat, haha, thanks for this :) only saw today. can’t deal much with the online world although I probably should. all important matters have been discussed with my work, though and the rest is up to you. will still continue with any important news and updates, of course. thanks again and surely, getting involved with your insight and talent is a great gift. maybe make it a ‘reality’. am here in london most of the time and sometimes in vienna …
hi tony. found the time to read through and i really liked those pieces. the voice sounds pure and honest and genuine. so if you’re still up for it, we’re thinking of using some of them for the next issue …
if you are – mind you, haha, we’re still a persecuted magazine – i.e. ignored systematically by what is usually referred to as the ‘mainstream’, if not outright sabotaged and slandered. but as you know, cultivation of the great law happens in the background, and while on the one hand this is the main reason for this most unprecedented persecution throughout human history (not at all what on the surface seems to be the magazine’s impact from a sheer quality standard point of view amidst the instigated ‘verdraengungskampf’ paradigm compelling almost everyone to ‘fight’ us), the project itself is the cultivation path we’re walking forward on and as i’m sure you’ve come to see, we’re doing our utmost to be treading the straight path of the dao at that.
what we’re trying to say, the whole notion of what writing truly means has meanwhile reached a state where the window of availability that the magazine has offered has narrowed from free, unconditional availability of true content to extremely difficult availability of ‘truth’. yeah, shit happens. who is to blame, haha? while at the same time, as a consequence and in parallel, the state of our own writing work increasingly focuses on the writing of marketing strategies and advertising campaigns. quite crazy, isn’t it? this goes to show that the state so-called ‘writing’ has reached today, is to not only abandon all traditional knowledge and gnosis that used to be its core and foundation throughout most of its history, and to not only flood the entire landscape with peeps and twitters from entertainment and wannabe, vanity scribes (the actual diametrical opposites of true writers, no?), but to have an upper echelon arena of cutting edge writing that takes place meanwhile, around the highest paid strongholds of marketing and propaganda shops around the world (leaving the world-altering ‘drehbeucher’ of nazi and soviet bred secret services aside :).
so throughout the forthcoming months we’ll almost entirely work on those campaigns and their distribution and only towards september will we be able to compile the winter draft issue. actually, the putting together of all magazines so far has in fact happened at lightning speed. so fast, we’re oftentimes taken aback ourselves whenever we flick through them again. certainly a side effect that comes with the solemn tranquility arrived at through cultivation ….
one other thing. what else do you know about the queen of sheba apart from your little riddle, haha? if you do, maybe you’d like to share and contribute? the central ideas for the next issue revolve around the propagation of debt. for example, if eve comes out as originally a part of adam, he is in a way (even if unconsciously and unwantingly) already accountable for all her later wrongdoings. and so are all future generations. that’s why debt is said to be passed down through ancestors also, not just through past lives. another example, when cain slays abel, the lie (wickedness) that suppressed truth (goodness) at that given junction of history will have to pay for all ‘eternity’ (haha, or at least until all those debts are finally settled at the end of time) that which was originally bestowed upon (arranged for) abel and all future generations. same with jacob and esau, or jesus and barabbas, the examples could go on and on. on the surface (and from the viewpoint of psychology) what results are seemingly rewarded and therefore further bolstered warped notions. for that reason, religion talks about ‘original sin’ and the cultivation community would say that mankind is rolling in karma on top of karma. ‘paying back’ will deal with some of those ponderings …
hello mat :)
thanks for your sweet email. have read the piece you sent. well … i know quite well from my own experience what you mean about the ‘writers suck’ problem. i think, charles bukowski’s letters were the best ‘teachers’ to come to terms with this ugly phenomenon. “you really think you’re gonna be a fucking writer and shag all the girls while prying your way into history books through all sorts of back doors?” well, if your ass truly is on the line (not to speak of your ‘existence’) … but is it? haha, it really is amazing what some people would do for fame or anyway just to obtain a little bit of relevance in this world / life / reality with that teeny weeny little piece of more-than-average talent that they have (actually, that they’ve been ‘given’, but more on that see below) …
yet – in the end, it’s still actually not so funny since that whole cesspool demeanour permeating present day’s ‘intelligentia’ can be said to form some of the ‘core strategy’ of the ‘old forces’ setup that we’ve been talking about at length in the magazine. this is the very same setup that’s meant to ‘destroy’ most people who’re unaware of the TRADITION (or at least have been brainwashed to come round to believing they’ve left it behind or something, progressed, evolved, whatever – what an absurd and really quite cheap idea they’ve bought into – not only with a couple of pennies, no, in most cases with everything they’ve got, ‘mit haut und haar’ as they say in german …).
so – to sum the writer’s problem up with jonathan franzen’s words, “why bother?” ok, you’re finding yourself endowed with great talent. you’re effortless putting whatever shade of imagery into musical prose, ideas pour in from beatific universal sources without fondling underage floozie-muses or sucking off spliffs or boozes, your intellect is impeccable, your wisdom thousands of miles above the ground. perhaps you’re even the new shakespeare. and so – what? these days, with everybody wallowing in ignorance, mediocrity, self-pity and denial, set up to struggle against each other with the most underhanded and cunning means – who would listen to you? and why? for what reasons? well, as most of the really ‘good’ people who’ve ‘made it’ know firsthand – for all the ‘wrong’ ones. in the present setup, the ‘powers’ have left the ingorants free reign to head-slap each other as much as they please while the truly righteous and talented would end up with the most slaps unless they ‘learn’ to play by the ‘rules’ …. blablabla … you get the idea. you’ve been there, i can see that …
what draft magazine is doing (among lots of other things) is giving people, who truly feel that they still bother, some kind of ‘hope’ so as to not give in to the bullshit and the rat race that’s all around now. however, no matter how much they’ve suffered and yet were still steadfast in upholding true and genuine craft, obligation and confidence – chances are, they’ve still been almost entirely cut off from the true tradition of writing. how so? well, what were the so-called scribes of the past? people who cherished truth and tradition, no? people who humbly understood, from the bottom of their hearts, that they’ve been ‘chosen’ to simply do a ‘good job’ with the tremedous skills and wisdom they’ve been finding themselves endowed with. for this to truly happen, you’d have to have read the ‘real’ things – ie, not even only greek / pagan philosophy, although that’s a starting point. ancient scriptures and being taught some true oral traditions are probably higher levels of wisdom. what is reality? when someone of the scholarly calibre as vladimir nabokov says that you cannot write down this word without connotation marks, then what he of course means is that no matter how much has been written and read in this world – our mundane, mortal world – in the face of ‘ultimate reality’ everything becomes naught (or in the eyes of comedians laughable to the extreme). of course, everyone, from toilet cleaner to nobel prize winner, deep down – at their core – knows this.
however, the gnostic traditions (pagan, christian, jewish, etc) are discerning the laws ‘governing’ this reality – so what they eventually write down or pass down is utterly responsible to their genuine understanding, and whatever they contemplate is in accordance with what they truly grasped from real-life experience. nobody cultivating their character (or aristotelian ‘virtue’) would feel even the slightest need to be noticed or to become famous and what not, with their little bits and pieces of understanding. we mortals suffer regardless, don’t we?
knowing everything that i know now and starting off anew – would i still go out and bother writing myself? without this particular mission to carry through to the end – i’d probably say no. who deserves to know? daoist immortals chose their disciples very carefully and if they find three extremely talented students, their wisdom inherited from times immemorial is considered so precious that they’d still only choose one of them to actually transmit their highest secrets to. this is just to give you an example. once you do know the ‘truth’ – if you’re elevating your innermost and outermost being along the ‘way’, the ‘fa’ or the ‘dao’, unburdening your body with every passing day, raising your level with every passing hour, would you still bother? like lao tzu, you’d know how perilous the mortal world is and maybe, if you’ve been allowed to do so and fulfilling this particular part of your mission, after a lifetime of teaching, you’d probably leave 5.000 words for the next 2.500 years to enlighten those who’re worthy of understanding them and cherishing them accordingly.
on the other hand – in our present day-to-day ‘reality’ – what else would there be to do, if i still were immersed in the mud up to my neck? i’d presume, do any odd job to keep at bay all those bloodsucking, mindnumbing powers beyond comprehension, and in all my available spare-time, instead of ‘serfing the whore of the internet’ – why not play the piano a bit, practice some skill, or indeed, write a couple of pieces of kick-arse fiction (if nothing else, at least for myself, as you probably do when you’re still a ‘talented boy’). maybe also draw a couple of images to go along with it. (colours? probably wouldn’t bother unless i’m retired and as a bachelor or widower passionately allow myself to indulge in fatty oil or pastels :). and then maybe, should i eventually go through emboldened patches of pioneering spirit or happen to be under the persuasive influence of particularly ambitious bridal muses, compile all of this into polished, readily sellable products. why not? what is an entepreneur? blablbla …
having gone on a bit like this – don’t be misled, though :) all i’m trying to say is that i think you’ve got a nice talent there and you’ve got the heart to still bother and care. of course, i’m sure you’re aware that this sentence is said without any condescension: don’t get wasted on vanity portals (or vanity whatever) and slowly but surely start turning your brilliant humour into tongue-in-cheek self-deprication. if you feel that something is wrong with this world, then perhaps those feelings are truly righteous. what to do about it? to tell you the truth – there really is nothing you can do about it (anymore) unless you’re cultivating. yeah, i don’t want to say too much or talk about levels too high but when the greeks talked about the three fates deciding the mundane ‘trajectories’ of men, they really weren’t too far off. seen from a higher level, everything here runs like a swiss clockwork. (clockwork orange, as they call it in heaven :P) don’t think, for example, that draft magazine’s support comes down to a few large-hearted corporations and a bunch of guys from secret societies benevolently wanting to succeed someone’s angry fuck-all attitude or audacity. sure, chutzpeh is an element of righteousness. but the support comes from levels that are much much higher than this human plane and the purpose that this whole undertaking serves is obviously in accordance with this.
it’s not necessarily wrong to be admiring that which ‘the powers’ have decided to succeed. but isn’t there a problem with someone’s character if they only support something after higher powers have also openly revealed their support? do you still know many people whose conscience even remotely resembles the ‘salt of the earth’ that jesus used to talk about? could the ‘true state’ of a being be determined if they weren’t caught up in a realm of delusion?
hello martin :) i’ve read it. i like the way it’s written. you have that scathing humour going that i’m really into and obviously you hit a point with the brainwash and artist denigration …
like i said the other day to someone who’s sent us quite an interesting short story, if we were the average literature magazine, we would straight away run it. but we aren’t. i’m sure you can at the very least ‘sense’ this, but we’re ‘connected’ to something that’s really quite big, so enormous that most people who’re still stumbling along in lulling ignorance and petty denial would have no chance to contemplate (not to mention comprehend) – even if they had it spelled out for them in capital letters right in front of their faces :) is there anything more serious than cultivation of buddhahood or dao? could anything done in ordinary (secular) society compare?
just as an example, the music issue is just so much larger, if you look deeper into it. the pythagoreans knew quite a bit about it but hardly anything from those almost 3.000 years ago has been (or has been allowed to be) passed down ‘openly’. since cultivation was involved behind the scenes, the pythagoreans were essentially an esoteric, a secret, group (or ‘sect’, as some people would like to call them), cherishing an oral tradition that the hippies, in their heydays, probably quite innocently and superficially paraphrased. have you studied to play an instrument yourself? why do people listen to each other? big question, right?
that’s one angle. the other one is, the ‘arrangements’, as we generally refer to divine masterplans (‘conspiracy’ is wording for sweaty nerds, no?), needed for today’s world something called ‘market driven economy’ – giving the mortal morons what they want and this way let them bury their own graves while scooping off the millions of gold teeth that are by themselves eagerly plucked out along the way in exchange for such a life of ‘luxury’. spelled out, it means that an environment was to be created that would allow to on the one hand let loose the demonic nature in human beings to the fullest extent (according to the buddha school, humans have both a buddha and a demon nature inside), so that they can all add ‘knowingly’ and ‘willingly’ fuel to the fire of their own doom. (what do people know? they have absolutely no idea and massive powers at the top never took them to be anything else than dogs etc). on the other hand, to turn the endgame stage into the required cesspool, the powers would ‘elect’ adequately mediocre and petty fools and clowns among them as the golden calfs for dogged worship by their ‘losing’ peers and let, sacrificially, all those true prodigies who are, after many years of earnest and laborious artistic apprenticeship (like it used to be throughout all of mankind’s history), actual masters of their art, drop down to a status of student-loan-repaying, jobless and future-less no-bodies who’re maybe allowed to be orally satisfying multiple-millionaire bankers and otherwise to be tossed around and outcast by culturally revolting, jesus-cruycifying mobsters. haha, that’s just another way of looking at it. on a more mundane level, you do know how large the powers of multinationals are, don’t you? you do know how many countless suits in marketing, law and pr are attached to them and what knowledge, tested through the last 150 years of the most unspeakable – and top secret – investigative nature of psychology and mind manipulation, they have at their disposal? you do know that whenever you enter a supermarket you might as well wear a guinea pig costume so as to artistically accentuate the footage rendered that is to be used for ‘store improvement’ while face pattern technology and eye tracking technology matches data with nectar points and debit card records and shitloads of computers rattle along to compare their findings with washington’s central national insurance database blablabla. anyway, everybody knows this. this is nothing. one must be living behind the moon to not know. this is what draft magazine has left way behind. in other words, on the merely mundane plane, the extent of mankind’s fuckedness is so absolute, that this fact alone, if really, truly taken on board by poeple’s conscience, should make everyone hurry up and give draft millions to boost its capacity to spread among the masses and this way, rather than carry on digging their graves, actually ‘atone for their sins’, and ‘save’ many of their fellow millions who still haven’t got a clue. draft is, believe it or not, quite possibly the only ‘anchor’ that’s allowed and ‘officially’ left behind to still escape the net thrown over the waning, disintegrating old cosmos. seen from higher levels, time-spaces come and go and dimensions are seamlessly folded and interlinked. once you put your heart and mind into cultivation, reality is not at all what you believe it to be …
so back to us. it’s beautiful you got in touch and the way i see it, we’ll probably meet through our work, eventually. you’re obviously talented and one of the few people left who are concerned and not fearful of openly saying it. feel free to send us anything that you might feel could work in the future. or anyway, stay in touch, one way or the other …
ps: feedback on the piece itself: hm, it’s always difficult, i’m finding it very hard myself, to not sound ‘wank’ when opinionating ideas into essays. laying down lines there is quite precarious since there is the established academic ‘habit’ (group canon, if you will) of needing to appear really confident etc. theologians would always say, “how confident”– nietzsche, marx, darwin, etc. – “how confident. how do you know that’s really the case?” haha, for the forthcoming ‘survival’ issue, i prepared to run a little piece written back in 2008 and while its content is sound and still works really well as eye-opener and food-for-thought for people who haven’t completed all their homework quite yet, reading it five years later, it’s almost a bit embarassing. i’ll be commenting on this as an intro to the piece. that is to say, how hard it is to write good non-fiction. but yet, since it operates at a metalevel of philosphy and wisdom, how much harder is it to write good fiction? how hard is it to ultimately be a ‘good’ writer? how many pretentious reams of paper have been wasted to hold up against the odd great lines that truly have kept their relevance and meaning over the long drawn-out history of man?