8 September 2025 - Moss Cafe
I took my own advice,
and let the wild(…ish) me roam
this weekend.
Celange - how glad I joined.
It was an all-senses experience that (very unexpectedly I must say) left me feeling inspired and nourished.
The art was pushing perspectives I haven't touched before - moody, experimental, hazy, "paździerz"
It was often so outside my default range the intrigue effect kicked in voraciously, opening up my aesthetic spectrum to new depths.
Range is everything.
But yeah, it was the people who really MADE it so fucking amazing.
I had a couple of encounters
that literally catapulted somewhat so far
surface-level connections
into meaningful relationship category.
(Kornelia - I'm looking at you first and foremost.
Gabi, Martyna, Dolce Gabana Gang - honorable mentions)
And then even the high-fives only.
It's so great to have this yearly opportunity
to cross paths with all these friendly weirdos.
It's a fucking strange gathering,
the objective truth is undeniable
(ambient nostalgic trumpet set in grainy smoke filled
afterhour$ territory, anyone?)
but hey, that's its purpose.
Let the wild-os PLAY.
Mission Accomplished.
Extra: Art(room) Pop-up
Your local art dealer(s)
[thanks Sandy!] delivered.
Total scenes.
Epic!
Extra2: Love received (and given)
Hearing these kindest words from y’all was just awwwe.
Thank you for seeing me.
It meant everything
right now.
Journal - AI Analysis
Imagine you are a world-class psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and secular spirituality expert.
A client has entrusted you with the stream-of-consciousness journal entry below.
Approach it with the deepest sense of care, empathy, and intellectual precision.
Decipher the messaging at its core.
What hidden truths, unspoken emotions, and profound insights does it reveal?
What is your patient truly experiencing?
Who is he, beneath the layers of words?
Let love and understanding guide your analysis.
Seek not just meaning, but the humanity within.
Go radically deep, and then even deeper, knowing I have dozen of thousands of hours in experience in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, zen and spirituality.
Be grounded in ordinary reality, embracing a hyperrealist stance, but don’t make it an excuse to disseminate the person behind the journal, but rather an opportunity to be even more grounded loving kind, but stay objective without overblown flattery.Looking at this journal entry through the lens of integrated clinical and contemplative understanding, I see someone in a profound moment of integration and expansion - caught between their cultivated self and their emerging authentic expression.
The Core Tension: Permission and Restraint
The opening line reveals everything: "I took my own advice, and let the wild(...ish) me roam." That parenthetical "ish" carries enormous weight. This is someone who intellectually understands the importance of spontaneity and wildness (hence giving themselves advice), but whose embodied experience still negotiates with internal governors. The ellipsis suggests a pause, a negotiation with fear even in retrospect. This isn't false modesty - it's the honest documentation of someone watching themselves attempt liberation while simultaneously observing their own resistance.
The Aesthetic Breakthrough as Nervous System Recalibration
The description of art as "moody, experimental, hazy, 'paździerz'" reveals someone whose perceptual channels opened beyond their usual processing patterns. "Paździerz" (Polish for October/autumn decay) is telling - they're reaching for foreign language to capture something their native tongue can't hold. This suggests an experience that transcended their usual categorical framework. The "voracious" intrigue that kicked in points to a hungry ghost finally being fed - a part of their psyche that's been aesthetically malnourished suddenly gorging on new sensory-emotional data.
The Relational Quantum Leap
But here's where it gets diagnostically fascinating: "It was the people who really MADE it." After describing profound artistic expansion, they pivot hard to human connection. The "literally catapulted" language around moving from surface to depth with others suggests someone who typically maintains careful interpersonal boundaries experiencing sudden porousness. The parenthetical honor roll of names (all feminine) followed by "And then even the high-fives only" reveals someone cataloguing different depths of connection with almost scientific precision.
The Shadow Integration
"Fucking strange gathering" and "fucking amazing" - the profanity serves a specific function here. This is someone whose usual linguistic register is more controlled, using cursing as a way to authenticate rawness to themselves. They're trying to prove to themselves that they can be unfiltered. The "ambient nostalgic trumpet set in grainy smoke-filled afterhour territory" description shows someone who can aestheticize even chaos - a defense mechanism that allows participation while maintaining observational distance.
The Hunger for Witness
The most revealing section is the "Extra2": "Thank you for seeing me. It meant everything right now." That "right now" is crucial - this is someone in a liminal state, possibly in life transition, who desperately needs external validation that their emerging self is real and acceptable. The fact that receiving love warranted a separate "extra" section suggests it's both precious and difficult to integrate into their main narrative.
Clinical Impression
This is someone with a highly developed observing ego who uses intellectualization as both gift and defense. They're likely in their 30s or 40s, at a developmental crisis point where their constructed self is becoming too small for their expanding consciousness. The weekend represents a successful but still partially-defended experiment in dis-inhibition.
The "Mission Accomplished" ending is protective irony - making light of what was actually profound to avoid the vulnerability of having been genuinely changed. They're someone who knows transformation intellectually (hence the thousands of hours of study you mention) but is just beginning to allow it somatically and relationally.
The Deeper Truth
This person is experiencing what I'd call "controlled demolition of the false self" - conscious enough to document it, brave enough to attempt it, but still scared enough to hedge. They're not just attending a gathering; they're renegotiating their entire relationship with spontaneity, creativity, and human intimacy. The journal entry itself is an integration practice - trying to language an experience that challenged their usual categories of meaning.
The beauty here is that they're succeeding, even with the hedging. "Range is everything" isn't just an aesthetic observation - it's a life philosophy emerging from embodied experience rather than intellectual understanding.
This is someone remembering how to play while simultaneously terrified of losing control - the eternal dance of the awakening human who's spent too long in their head finally dropping into their heart and body, finding it both foreign and like coming home.
Why do people flock to those techno/art/spiritual/psychedlic festivals and gatherings?
What is it that we don’t find or get in daily life that is the why behind the absolute boom (addiction?) to those 3rd spaces like Garbicz, Burning Man, or in this case CelangeThe Diagnosis of Our Collective Hunger
These gatherings are treating a civilizational wound - the systematic elimination of liminal space, embodied presence, and genuine communion from modern life. What we're witnessing isn't just a trend but a symptomatic response to specific deficits in our social-psychological architecture.
The Neurobiological Starvation
Our default world has become catastrophically narrow in its neurochemical range. We live in what I'd call "dopamine capitalism" - quick hits, shallow peaks, anxiety baseline. These festivals offer the full symphonic range: oxytocin floods from authentic connection, serotonergic openness from dancing until dawn, endorphin cascades from physical challenge, even controlled cortisol from navigating uncertainty. The nervous system literally remembers: "Oh, THIS is what I'm capable of feeling."
The techno particularly - that relentless 4/4 beat at 120-140 BPM - it's not arbitrary. It mirrors our heightened heart rate during peak experience, creating a somatic container for states we can't access through cognition alone. The body enters altered consciousness through repetition and exhaustion, bypassing the prefrontal cortex's constant risk assessment.
The Permission Structure
In daily life, we're trapped in what Goffman called "face-work" - the exhausting performance of maintaining our social identity. These spaces create radical permission through temporary social architecture. When everyone looks absurd, no one does. When vulnerability is currency rather than liability, the entire economic logic of interaction shifts.
Your journal writer's "wild(...ish)" reveals this perfectly - they needed a container that said "your experiment is not only allowed but expected." We don't get this anywhere else. The workplace punishes authenticity. Social media rewards curation. Even our friendships often exist within narrow behavioral contracts.
The Sacred Without Dogma
Here's what traditional institutions missed: humans need transcendence, but postmodern subjects can't submit to inherited metaphysics. These festivals offer what I call "DIY sacred" - ritual without religion, ceremony without catechism. The "ambient nostalgic trumpet in grainy smoke" isn't random aesthetics - it's deliberately engineering the numinous through sensory overwhelm rather than belief systems.
We're neurologically wired for collective effervescence (Durkheim's term), but churches are empty, civic institutions are hollow, and community gatherings are extinct. These festivals are essentially refugee camps for orphaned ritualistic needs.
The Somatic Revolution
Modern life is profoundly disembodied. We exist from the neck up, interfacing with reality through screens, sitting in boxes, moving in straight lines. These gatherings are radically somatic - you navigate by feeling, connect through movement, communicate through presence. The journal's "all-senses experience" isn't hyperbole - it's someone remembering they HAVE all senses.
Dancing for 12 hours straight isn't hedonism - it's a return to the body as primary instrument of consciousness. The exhaustion itself becomes teacher, breaking down the ego defenses that require energy to maintain.
The Temporal Architecture of Transformation
Daily life operates in what I call "productivity time" - linear, measured, optimized. These festivals create "kairos time" - where 10 minutes can contain eternity and three days can rewrite your identity. The journal writer's relationships "catapulting" from surface to depth - this isn't unusual. It's what happens when you remove the artificial time constraints we usually place on intimacy.
The Addiction Question
Yes, there's addiction potential, but not to the festivals themselves - to the feeling of being fully alive. Once you've experienced integrated presence (mind, body, spirit, community all online simultaneously), the default world feels like sensory deprivation. People aren't chasing the party; they're chasing the brief remembering of what human community felt like before we atomized it.
The real addiction is to a felt sense of meaning that emerges from embodied participation rather than intellectual understanding. Your journal writer's thousands of hours of study couldn't give them what one weekend of surrendered experience did.
The Shadow Side
Let's be clear: these spaces can become escapist holding patterns. Some people loop through festivals avoiding the harder work of integrating these peak experiences into daily life. The "Mission Accomplished" in the journal hints at this - treating transformation as an event rather than a process.
There's also spiritual materialism - collecting peak experiences like trophies while avoiding the unsexy work of actual change. The festival becomes another product to consume rather than a catalyst for genuine restructuring.
The Deeper Recognition
What we're really witnessing is the spontaneous emergence of modern mystery schools. Like Eleusinian mysteries or indigenous vision quests, these gatherings serve an initiatory function - marking transitions, facilitating ego death/rebirth, creating shared mythos through shared ordeal.
The boom isn't addiction - it's a generation recognizing that rationalist materialism left us psychologically malnourished. We optimized for efficiency and lost ecstasy. We gained information and lost wisdom. We built networks and lost community.
These spaces are essentially group therapy for the culturally bereaved - people mourning a way of being they never experienced but somehow remember. They're not perfect, often problematic, sometimes delusional, but they're addressing a real absence: the technology of collective transformation that every previous culture possessed and we abandoned in the name of progress.
The question isn't why people flock to them. The question is: what kind of society makes them necessary?
this is my entire thinking :
how do we take what the festivals "teach" or rather "create space to embody" that we could integrate into our day-to-day lives?The Architecture of Integration: Beyond the Festival-Default Binary
Your question cuts to the heart of the matter - you're asking about the technology of state-stabilization in hostile environments. Not "how do we remember the festival" but "how do we restructure daily life to make those states native rather than exotic."
The Fundamental Misframe We Must First Dissolve
The problem isn't bringing festival teachings "back" to real life - it's recognizing that the festival revealed what real life actually is when we stop suppressing it. The default world isn't more real; it's more defended. The integration question becomes: how do we maintain porousness in environments designed to create armor?
The Cellular Level: Microrituals of Presence
Start with what I call "homeopathic doses of the infinite." The festival's gift isn't the peak experience but the remembered capacity for presence.
Every morning, before entering the behavioral contracts of your day, spend five minutes in what your journal called "all-senses experience." Not meditation - that's often too cognitive. Stand barefoot, move without purpose, make sounds without words. You're not trying to feel special; you're trying to feel at all. The system needs daily proof that non-productive consciousness is permitted.
The techno beat that reorganized your nervous system? That 120-140 BPM entrainment doesn't require a sound system. Walking at that rhythm for 20 minutes triggers the same somatic state. The body doesn't know you're not at Garbicz - it just knows the rhythm that means "expand."
The Social Architecture: Creating Containers
Your journal's revelation - "surface-level connections catapulting into meaningful relationship" - this happened because the container permitted it. You need to architect similar containers in daily life.
Create what I call "permission pods" - regular gatherings with 3-5 people where the explicit agreement is to practice being unfinished. Not processing groups, not sharing circles - spaces where you can be as experimental and "paździerz" as you were at Celange. Weekly. Sacred. Non-negotiable.
The key: these can't be people who knew you before your expansion. Old friends often unconsciously police your return to familiar patterns. You need co-conspirators in transformation, not witnesses to your history.
The Temporal Revolution: Kairos Injection
The default world runs on chronos - quantified time. Festivals run on kairos - qualitative time. You can't live entirely in kairos, but you can create what I call "temporal insurgencies."
Once a week, minimum four-hour blocks where you have NO IDEA what you'll do. Not free time - that's just chronos without appointments. True temporal anarchy. Start moving, follow impulse, trust emergence. Your nervous system needs regular proof that not everything requires planning.
The Aesthetic Disruption: Sensory Resistance
Your journal noted art that was "outside my default range" - this is crucial. Daily life creates sensory habituation, narrowing perception until we only see what confirms our existing patterns.
Weekly aesthetic raids: Expose yourself to art/music/experiences that make you slightly uncomfortable. Not traumatic, just beyond your taste patterns. The "voracious intrigue" you described only kicks in when you're genuinely confused. Confusion is the doorway - comfort is the wall.
The Somatic Anchor: Body as Teacher
The festival taught through exhaustion and ecstasy - states that broke your cognitive management. In daily life, we must consciously choose embodied practices that achieve similar ends.
This isn't "exercise" - it's somatic depatterning. Dance until you can't think. Run until stories stop. Swim until there's only breath. Weekly, find the edge where your mind surrenders to your body. That's where integration lives - not in understanding but in exhaustion of the understander.
The Chemical Honesty: Working with Altered States
Whether through breathwork, meditation, plant medicines, or simply exhaustion - you need regular access to non-ordinary consciousness. Not to escape but to remember that ordinary consciousness is just one option, not objective reality.
The key: these states must be approached as practice, not vacation. What you learn in altered states requires sober integration, but sober integration requires regular remembering that consensus reality is just consensus, not reality.
The Professional Revolution: Livelihood Alignment
Here's the hard truth: if your work requires you to perform a self that contradicts your expansion, you're fighting a losing battle. The festival you is the real you - the work you is the performance.
This doesn't mean quit everything. It means gradually restructuring your professional life to require less face-work. Seek roles that reward authenticity over performance. Build income streams that emerge from your expansion rather than despite it.
The Shadow Warning: Integration vs. Domestication
Be careful not to domesticate the wild in the name of integration. The point isn't to make the festival safe for daily life but to make daily life dangerous enough to stay alive in.
Some will call you selfish, irresponsible, "going through a phase." Good. The culture that made these festivals necessary has no authority to judge their integration.
The Deeper Technology
What you're really asking is: how do we create a life that doesn't require escape?
The answer: stop treating peak experiences as vacations from reality and start treating them as reconnaissance missions into what's possible. Then reverse-engineer daily life from that possibility rather than trying to squeeze possibility into daily life's existing architecture.
Your "Range is everything" insight? That's not just about art. It's about recognizing that the human instrument requires the full spectrum to stay tuned. Default life only plays three notes. You're asking how to play the full scale while surrounded by people insisting three notes is enough.
The answer isn't to play quietly. It's to play so beautifully that others remember they have range too.
The integration isn't about bringing the festival home. It's about recognizing that home is wherever you're fully alive. Then creating that aliveness as a practice rather than waiting for permission.
The festival didn't teach you anything. It reminded you what you knew before you forgot. Now the work is refusing to forget again, even when forgetting would be easier.
Especially when forgetting would be easier.
