"We're the composite of the books we read and the people we associate with." ~ Earl Nightingale
When you hear the word 'alchemy', your mind first goes to scientists like Albert Einstein.
So, where does fiction come in?
The kind of alchemy I'm driven to study is mental. Mental alchemy is transmuting negative thought forms. patterns and habits into positive ones. This is an oversimplification because the metal-based alchemy was working toward the philosopher's stone. My purpose is to work towards full self-actualization.
Fiction is key to that goal.
What is Fiction Alchemy?
Every aspect of a story can be alchemized to create the reality you desire. I classify fiction as books, comics/manga, video games, film/TV, and social media content.
My name is CeeCee Jones. I'm a pen & ink artist, writer, and social media manager. Now, a comic book creator. When I started studying storytelling, I found that it's deeper than cute little pictures with words that make you feel things.
Successful fiction is a story that connects on a physical, mental, and spiritual level through a single conduit (person). Anything that can leave an impression on all three of those levels will have lingering effects in other areas of life.
The first rule of alchemy is understanding the compounds of what you’re working with. So I started with meaning, what does fiction and alchemy mean?
When you put it all together,
"To form in the land of black earth that which is poured out."
We can remix this in modern terms.
"To create in the subconscious, which is manifested in the outer earth."
When you engage with a story, you are put in a trancelike state. By the end of it, you are emotional in some regard. A trance state that induces an emotion equals an altered state of consciousness.
If you mindfully choose to experience a story most aligned with your desire, your body will naturally be tuned to that frequency. Leading to a swift physical manifestation on some level. But stories only last for a definite amount of time. A movie might be an hour or two. A manga could be a couple of hours longer if you binge it. What do you do the rest of the day?
The Art of Being vs. Observing
To manifest anything, you have to become that thing. Being is thinking from instead of thinking of. When you watch a movie or read a manga, for that interval of time, you are thinking from that world, the characters, and especially the main character.
A good example of this is visualization. Right now, imagine taking a sip from a hot cup of coffee. Feel the warmth of the cup, the bitter-to-sweet ratio, and see the steam rise. This is thinking from the coffee cup. Now, imagine someone you've seen drink a cup of coffee before. You know the steps, but you don't feel them. This would be thinking of the coffee cup.
You can't be your desire once and won't know an anime well enough to debate about it after a single watch. Repetition is the art of being that will trump all observation. This is how your personal life looks the way it does.
It took me a long time to realize this. When I see other people talk about "living in the end" in the self-help space, it is always unclear. Until it hit me. Fiction naturally has you 'be' versus 'see' what happens in a story. This caused me to go deeper and analyze how people talk about fiction.
They can't be unbiased. It's always personal at some point. Anything that is a pattern, like the 3 act story structure, will surely show up (cue when you see the same talking point about a specific piece of media).
What I wish I knew before was that we all had the answers to all our problems in the first story. To further expand on this, I started with the simplest yet most important aspect of the subconscious mind.
Thoughts
Thoughts work horizontally.
For example:
"I can't get much reach on IG." > "No one will read my manga." > "My manga sucks." > "I'm a terrible artist and writer."> "I was stupid to think I could make a great story."> "I can never win in life."> so on and so forth.
It's a domino effect with no end in sight, just a new direction. Those thoughts compound and turn into emotions. Emotions always lead to action. The consequences of those actions are your reality for better or for worse. I used to think this only related to big actions with clear major consequences, but I was wrong.
After a negative thought loop about the car you drive, or lack thereof, can lead to you arriving at work always in a lower vibrational state. You might not hate the job, your coworkers, or your boss, but that state of being can cause the action of being short with them. Let's say it takes you the next 4 months to get a new vehicle. That's 4 months of being short-tempered with people. This can lead to workplace gossip, a lower bonus, or missing a promotion. You're not bad at your job, and the job isn't the problem, but our brains need stories to comprehend things. The story of bad workplace culture or not getting along with people will run your life, and then your career. All of this is because of a negative thought loop about something unrelated.
Thoughts are powerful. It's been said we have over 60,000 thoughts a day, and half of them are what we thought yesterday. That's how we end up feeling stuck in our lives.
The way to bypass this is to change to a new frequency so your horizontal thinking leads to greatness instead of destruction and stagnancy.
To do that, you need to break up the line of thinking.
I created a thought rewiring technique called " The Inner Speech Bubble Method" to do this using the natural programming that happens with fiction. You can get it here and take control of your thoughts and your life now.
To find me in other places:
Other Ways to Support My Art Ninja Way
The Vibes of Fiction Podcast: where I analyze and alchemize fiction in real time (also available on YouTube)