RE: 20th March 2025 - Ain't Goin' Out Like A Punk Never
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Yes my friend.
I have a post pinned to my page called Gung Fu which encapsulates my life so far in a blog post.
Briefy:
Ran away from a very violent household at 15. But always ended coming back to my family, as i was young. But from 15 onwards i was never home or close to my blood.
From running away i learnt card tricks to soothe my pain. It was a pregnant lady on a swing who i performed the "Two Card Monte" to who encouraged me to pursue the life of a showman. For the next 18 years i travelled extensively, when i reached my late teens i travelled exclusively solo....hitchhiking style and often used helpx.net to "fund" my room and board, via hard labour on farms around Europe.
I grew up around Liu Ren Magicks that my family practiced. I desperately wanted to get away from that world of spirits, demons, exorcisms...and ended up with sleight of hand as my life. I would spend my reclusive seasons hidden in libraries, especially Kowloon's Buddhist Library, where i spent my 17th-22nd years of my life devoting my life then to Mahayana Buddhism.
I grew up around chefs. Takeaways, Restaurants and Temples were my young life. I picked up a lot of skills then. I applied these skills on my travels, finding work wherever i went as i sojourned England and Europe.
I did a lot of one man shows in this time...i was the first to debut my one man show in my city, the first Chinese to ever do so. This is a post i never uploaded to hive...https://beblurt.com/@brave-smoke/michael-vincent-life-philosophy-1743599551329
When i was 18 years old, i participated in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2008) and also the year after (2009), with my four friends then. We camped as we were broke; we busked alongside the street pros, watching the pros work the crowds and all. I never busked again in my life, i disdained it as it was not fitting for a Magician.
My life dream is to perform shows and travel. I really have no great aspirations because i have figured out what i needed in life. Life seems to over complicate things, or am i the one over complicating things? 2020 and the Agenda was the moment when everything from my old life fell away.
I no longer feel the want to do shows. I still practice my sleight of hand, but i do not have the same love for the Art of Prestidigitation now. In fact, i do not have the same love for my audiences, or for the people on this world at large as i did before. I lost a great piece of myself VC. I witnessed my heart die. Now i just live with no attachment to any outcome in my life; note, it does not give me a pass to live a life of hedonism or larceny...for which i have not an ounce in my soul.
But i know i am born with the need for artistry or some form of discipline. I don't speak on this often, nor do i make videos showcasing this, but i place a big portion of my daily time to Buddhism and my own spiritual practices, as well as Wing Chun and the Zhou Yi. These are the three things that have found a concrete place in my life now. At the end of the day...it isn't the legal system that fuels my want to exit the system....i will confess now in words for the first time...
...i would very much like to walk in the footsteps of Chuang Tzu, as he wrote in his "Carefree Wanderings". Aloof, free, simple, a life of artistry and spiritual wanderings. It's been an...aspiration of mine after living in those Kowloon Libraries all those years. I want to exit the system for moral reasons, and spiritual reasons too. I have long planned my life in my later stages of life as a reclusive artist of some sort. That's why i have always kept myself solo, never an aspiration to start a family, or be tied down to mundane life. That life is very easily achieved and will still be available to me even when the world goes to shit.
I am young still, so my time now is in learning, refining, and perfecting.
This is a devastating occurrence. I have never had a desire to be on stage. My experiences in music sometimes involved it, but I only endured it to play. I had to play to audiences to play in a band. Magic seems more focused personally on audiences than music, to bare your inmost nature to the people. I cannot imagine such a deep yearning to please an audience that it could result in such a terrible loss, but I do not doubt you did.
In the video with Michael Vincent (Youtoob would not let me watch the other) you seem an earnest sidekick. You must have greatly admired his work, and his person, to study with him so long and travel so far. I was sad to read you parted ways with finality, and sadder by far to read your heart died.
My eldest son had a passing interest in magic, but he was Captain of the football team, and involved in many organizations that kept him on stages, debate, Tai Kwon Do, and playing guitar in a popular band, that must have made his interest in the art of illusion less keenly experienced for him. That is as close to knowing much about magic as I ever got.
I can see how such a widely different dream put grubby farm work outside of your career plans. I have done things on farms that deeply challenged me, bucking hay until I puked, and cleaning calf pens. The potent anaerobic odor was like a physical blow to the face, something I would not eagerly repeat but dairy men face regularly. You were gallant to handle the manure there, revealing a facet of your character to me at odds with a career on stage. Such humility and public appearances are but rarely encountered in one man. Your childhood and youth are so starkly different than mine, your family completely outside my experience, your street smarts in legendary Kowloon, your struggle to escape, your refuge in Buddhism and books, eldritch. Wing Chun I know only that no teacher for my sons could be found here, and I don't even know what Zhou Yi is. My knowledge of Buddhism is limited to a single analogy a dead friend gave to me before he died, that life is a man dangling on a rope down a cliff, with rodents he could not see chewing on the rope above, and a bush with sweet berries he had opportunity to taste before the rope was severed. A great gift that taught me to savor the sweet berries in life. Young Moon died much too soon, and left a family with the house at the top of the hill I helped him build.
But you do keep it real. There isn't any sign of a veneer of braggadocio about you, and I have seen such peaceful mien from all the men I have known that had expertise in martial arts. They have nothing to prove, no need to test anyone, and disregard harsh words, attending to actions only as necessary. I do deeply relate to your love, and grief, for your dogs. I also lost Angel Baby Goldie Hawn, Angel, purebred pale yellow lab, and Ninja Storm Queen Latifa, Stormy, black as the darkest night, her daughter by Barnabas, the one eyed Weimeraner across the highway a kilometer away that sired 27 puppies by them, who smiled for me when my heart was lost, who loved me, and I them, to family twisting the knife in my back. My only solace is that they ended up with good people and not my ex.
I didn't mean to put you on the spot, and I hope you don't feel interrogated. I hadn't heard of the Belgian farm before, and your vivid description of the people and time there seemed like it had made quite an impression on you.
Hey VC.
Thank you for your kind words VC. And don't worry about my intention in sharing the Zottegem farm story with you. I felt that it was time to put it out here as i have been drafting a video on this in my mind. I wanted to do this talk on video once i moved out of the rat race here, but i guess you and @manclar the Charro get to hear it first.
I would like to share a magic show with you...Richard Turner...an American card mechanic (that means someone devoted to the study and applications of artifice at the card table). He developed an eye condition by the age of 9 i think which left him completely blind in the normal sense...yet his vision as he describes it in the long MIT interview is...strange.
He became the foremost expert on card cheating, and as a blind man who created his own card cheating techniques, without ever seeing any in life, only going by feeling, is amazing. His personal bottom deals, second deals, turn-over second deals, one hand second deals, his blind card stacking, blind card counting, dead cutting (that means cutting to a location of a deck of cards to a specific card, or a specific number of cards with zero margin of error; and the many other routines you shall enjoy on the interview) is simply amazing.
It was Canadian Dai Vernon, who immigrated to America and became very prolific in his work on prestidigitation (most honored at Hollywood's Magic Castle), once lied to a young Richard Turner, telling him that he saw an amazing display of card artifice at the table. Dai described techniques which had never been achieved but only in his mind's fantasy. Decades later Richard Turner, the man without eyes, achieved what Dai dreamt of...and what Dai dreamt of...you will enjoy in the video...
The Iching is known throughout the word as a book of wisdom and divination. But unbeknownst to people, there are 2 different types of this book. One is the original bronze age text from the Zhou dynasty, which was a book reserved only for the Royal families of the time. It was a book for diviners, passed down only from diviners to diviners. It was a book that held a system of codifying this world and all it's happenings, circumstances, the workings of Heaven and Earth, the myriad transformations of cause and effect; it was used in a time surrounded by undeveloped moral ethical concepts, a time of barbarity, of regular human sacrifice in a culture that believed these things pleased the spirits and ancestors; it was a book compiled in a time of heavy ancestral worship. It was a book that held a deep system of understanding and aligning with the world, through a series of 64 hexagrams, each with 6 lines. These hexagram symbols go way beyond the Zhou dynasty, according to excavation expeditions. It's a man made system of being very accurate clarity to the present, but it also has the capability, this man-made system of codifying this world, to bring clarity to the future and past. The ancient-ancients also new that mathematics was the language of the gods and blueprint of this world, and in development of mathematics during this Zhou dynasty time, it was a serious breakthrough for the consciousness of mankind. They basically found a way to read into the Universe, in a language of maths, symbols, omens, portents and lateral thinking, and codified all possibly happenings on this existence into 64 symbols that have such oracular power. It's the closest man has ever come to the Divine by intellectual means.
The Zhou Dynasty Iching (or Yi) was used later on by tacticians like Zhuge Liang to conduct military campaigns; he used it to create many battle-ground formations using the concept of the trigrams (aka the Bagua, the Eight Primordial symbols). The Yi was then later used in Feng Shui, in Daoist internal alchemical practices (like Chi practice, Dan Tian practices that lead to the Philosopher's Stone/Elixer of Immortality).
By the time the Han dynasty came about, the Zhou Dynasty Yi was transformed from a book of divination used in a time of war and bloodshed, to a book of Confucian wisdom. This rendition includes the core bronze age text alongside 10 Chapters written by Confucian scholars called the Ten Wings, all explaining the Yi from a Daoist/Confucian point of few. The Iching (Confucian-influenced revamp of the core bronze age text) is a different system of divination that the Zhou dynasty style.
As for Buddhism, in the greater Vehicle there's a Sutra called the Lotus Sutra. It's one of the most important Sutras. Can check it out here, skip to "main themese" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Sutra
At this current stage in life, all i can do is stop lamenting, let what needs drying dry, because things don't remain dry always. I still have life within me, so i continue my journey of learning, refining and perfecting.
Witnessing my heart die can be positive thing. My passion for the arts and my trust in people may have been stripped from me, but i'm sure a small part is in there somewhere. That's the backup harddrive partition. For now, i walk on.
If you wanted to know the history of the Yi, shedding light on what life in the Zhou dynasty period was like, here are a few short videos:
Very interesting videos, fabulous life on the farm, it would exchange mine without hesitation for living using that wooden bath, taking care of chickens and having breakfast yogurt in the mornings.
Unicorn meetings, infinitely long texts but my time does not reach me. However, I am not with a disposal of writing much, occupations that require generating the money that keeps me alive (Valued knows what I mean) they call me exactly at this time. Today I have worked 14 hours, zero of interweekment, and I have 2 more hours ahead of now spiritual work, I have not commented, but I was one of the strongest psychics/clairvoyants of this country, and I have currently decided to resume it and generate income with it. The next 2 hours will be attending online concerns and questions about the future of people and helping them to advance, or at least bring tranquility to their lives.
Anyway, I know Buddhism, I have gone through many religions, I have been even Satanist, Mormon, Evangelical, Protestant, etc ... a great baggage of experience but I will talk to them in fragments of that on other occasions.
Greetings for you, Hive Unicorns.
PS: I am not "charro", the charros are Mexican, I am from Venezuela, although it is fun to read that you consider me a charro 😀, I suppose you have that idea of the 3rd world, so do not worry, I do not offend myself.
I ment no offence at mentioning "Charro". I need to reeducate myself on cultural terms!
Wow...14 hours! I have never worked 14 hours in my life. The closest was 11 hours and that was about a month ago. You guys are tough man, you guys have the resolve and will to survive/succeed that we don't have here, that i don't have. That's your strength my friend, and being true to this is enough. We can be thorns of our enemy in many ways, and the best revenge is living well right @valued-customer ?
I have many spiritual stories to share. It's good to meet someone who has that gift.
I have seen many crazy things in my life since the age of 5. Most of my relatives are walkers of the inbetween worlds. They can speak, they can touch, they can commune, they can find spiritual union with spirits/dieties. My Parents, Uncles and Aunts, and even some cousins are in the "business" (i hate that word in this context) of Exorcism and Ghost Busting.
Me and a good man from @perceptualflaws were discussing this about a month ago on a post but dang i can't find it.
It would be my privilege to hear you speak a little on your experience as a remote viewer and mind penetrator.
Nice to read that!. Later on this week i will came with some free time to talk about spiritual stuff, and maybe about my life(but on private, i have a personal policy of dont post about personal affairs on hive) a bit. But mostly i can say that i had a very hard life, i know very close the death and the hunger, walking with the poverty. Many tails brave smoke. I take note of your email, later i will contact (on this week), now i am fucking really busy. Tuesdays are the most busy/hards days of week for me, so dont expect any comunication from me tomorrow, because i can hardly I can stand up, since I usually be very stressed, tired and busy.
Also i forget to mention that i am paranormal investigator and conferencist about UFO/OVNI phenomena from many years ago. I used to talk on online conferences on paltalk(an old like discord service of old times) where was with questions of 5000 persons at real time, but again, i will tell you about this on other ocassions.
we continue soon my friend.
I have heard of the I Ching. I did not know of the Zhou Yi.
My exposure to maths does not agree that they are a language of gods, but of men, and like all languages can be used to mislead. I am inherently skeptical of claims of divination, so please forgive my remaining skeptical. It is simply my nature.
I do appreciate the sincerity with which you have provided the information though, and while I may not fall in with believers of any philosophy or faith, that does not mean I do not marvel, and even respect, those that have devised them. Means of controlling the minds of man are intricate, powerful, and very valuable to those that can wield them with facility.