i am a cockney by birth. london lore reckons if you are born within the sound of the bells at st. bows then you're a cockney, i was born right around the corner in whitechapel and in 1962 it was the biggest slum in europe, populated by immigrants and criminal activity and weirdly wired brains like isreal regarde who was a student of crowley for a short time. 
my mother encouraged my father to do some engineering course and he became an engineer, and suddenly we moved to the suburbs where everything was different. i hated this part of london life, i can't recall much about it only i was bullied a lot, there was a girl called kim powers whom i liked a lot.
one memory that sticks out as my first imprint with the emotion of love was when i took my brand new bike out for a ride, i saw her on the opposite side of the street walking towards me, i acted nonchalant, only because i didn't know quite what to do so i just equated this impulsive need to show off, thus i peddled as fast as i could building up a little speed and zoomed down the road hoping she would think, i was steve mcqueen cool.
just as we were about to cross paths, splat!
into a lampost and to add to my humiliation i literally slid down the post with my tongue hanging out licking the cold stone.
she laughed and walked past and thus my lessons in life turned up, humiliation and defeat in love, from which i have learnt to let go and laugh at myself.
these are good lessons and occasionally we all need to remind ourselves how ridiculous we all are. myself probably more than others. thankfully i can't help but write my self out of being, till i am void of thought and imagination. that's what some form of neutrality must be like i imagine. maybe peace, maybe hell, i have no idea. 
everything outside of the natural order is meaningless, i don't get it. a mass of ideas we have forced into existence building civilisations and cultures, all formed around an idea. the earth generates ideas. taoism teaches us not to look at the idea but look at the nature. i think there's a lot to be said for this and perhaps we should be looking at both which ironically is an idea but that's why all truth contains its own paradox.
me, maybe i'm just a paradox within a paradox, what i think is freedom is just another cage until there is no cage. you can use your mind to do anything, belief will power it, so it stands to reason one needs to consider what one believes. love is a choice. i chose to believe in love, i choose joy and peace, love and creativity over all other ideas or at least until something better comes along. 
magick is a very good process, i find i'm attuned to it, it comes intuitively whereas i'm crap at almost everything else, magick is my language, symbolic  significances that i've retained while all other ideologies i may embrace for a while, fail after i apply some critical analysis or you push them as far as you can. the key to magick like everything is knowing when the process is over for you. knowing when the education of these secret traditions are completed and you have finished. it's different for everyone, it's individual and unique. the magick skools tend to omit letting people know about this, which is when some people start to implode or self destruct. i guess its like anything, its something you can't force upon yourself, you don't control it once you let it start, magick is a potent drive because it could lead to power. power, the ultimate aphrodisiac, that's what they say, i wouldn't know because power does not interest me at all, it's in the realm of others. i seek a relationship with the universe, i have one. it works for me, i spent years developing and refining it but that in itself can only come from love, understanding and acknowledgement, it's not really a complex deal in retrospect but sometimes it appeared heavy and weighty and filled with some dark energy, but that ladies and gentlemen, was what was inside me, yeah quite literally magick when it works turns you inside out so you can see yourself. it's a metaphor although literal. this is the alchemy of the process, changing yourself changes experience of the drama outside ourselves, we know it thanks to the new age but it's the old age that really gives you an authentic experience. those ancient ones were switched on cats, taking plant medicine, seeing their own internal fears and desires and madness played out, knowing that it was beyond them but they could symbolise its significance. they designed the road map for us psychonauts, we ambled our way following our impulses and intuition learning what we can, and leaving our own trail of crumbs for others to follow into the woods, it's not for nothing dante starts with inferno and the lines 'half way through life's path, lost in the woods.'
the christian mystics knew kabbalah, they say kabbalists say one can't study kabbala until you are age 40, halfway through life i guess, you need a little experience of life but those kooky kabbalists didn't really get the process because it needed time.
that's what time is, a way of transmitting information. 
in time and the advance of information technology, we could process magick fast, support a science of magick, consciousness, psychology, healing arts, mysticism, science and art, all these lenses should be applied to the magickal realm, what is true and what is not?
true for you?
remember magick is a process, there's no finishing line, it's something that unfolds like a flower and when you have drunk in it's beauty let it go. it's a beautiful process, from a much more elegant intelligence than human and it is worthy of awe and respect and love. 
well i think so. 

i read a fantastic book called 'the erl king' based upon the gothic story / poem by gothe, mixed with the story of st. christopher and a dash of allegorical magical realism echoing proust and gunther grass's tin drum, although i found that a heavy dense book when i first read it, this is somewhat easier to read and captivating. it's written by micheal tounier in 1977 and he won a big literary prize for it unanimously.
the novel is so well written it's easy to see why it won a prize, the story is working on so many levels it's incredibly challenging to read the symbolism in this book but 'wow' it's worth it.