The Magician’s Road

[Victor Mgazi]

What is deemed magic is merely a consequence of ignorance being assumed as wisdom, otherwise there is only alchemy.

 

A journal of contemplation and introspection.

Edited October 24, 2020 by Victor Mgazi

[Victor Mgazi]

How it feels

I'm not sure what it is that I'm looking for, but nevertheless I know I'm looking for something. I know I must be looking because I'm not resting, I can't sit still, I don't know peace. I'm looking because I have nothing, I don't recognize anything, everything that I know is hollow. 

My life feels hollow. It feels intangible, impossible to pin down, phantomish. No ground is firm enough for me to walk on, no surface is stable enough for me to lean on, and no truth is constant enough for me to rely on. I can't even count on my own family to be the same people I said goodnight to the previous night, said see you soon to in the past week. Everyone and everything is always changing, and it doesn't seem like I'm in any way an exception. At this point, trying to grab ahold on life would be like trying to a get a handle on a hyper accelerating merry-go-round.. it's playing a losing a game. And that's why I can't rest, I'm not content, not satisfied at all with life.

I'm looking for a place that doesn't keep on demanding for my being adaptive. How many times do I have to be wrong before I'm finally right? How long do I have to learn before I can finally say I know something. When will I stop moving around and get to watch the show? When will I stop slipping and finally find balance? Haven't I been walking long enough to have mastered this walk? It was better when, in my ignorance, I believed that the darkness was only out there. Now, my life has become a road of inner warfare, knowing that the darkness comes forth from within. No one deserves to live an entire lifetime lost, no one. 

I can't say what it is that I'm looking for, but I understand that I'll know when I find it because it will be the only thing there, it will be the only real place to live from, where darkness won't have territory, no room for illusion. 

[Victor Mgazi]

The struggle

Is suffering an essential aspect of life, or is it completely subjective?

I have suffered in the past, have experienced both great (emotional and physical) pain, great anxiety and depression. But is it all essential? 

Fundamentally, there should be no such thing as suffering. I know this because I know the foundation of experience. And that is.. experience is singular. What is called life is a single phenomenon, a single stream or flow of moment after moment after moment. This flow cannot be struggle, for there are times where I'm not at all struggling and everything is seemingly effortless. See, in truth, the only thing recognized by awareness is this singularity called experience, nothing else is being observed other than this stream right here. 

So, if suffering is not an essential part of reality then how does it occur? It must be subjective, right? 

No, it's not subjective. There is no such thing as subjective or objective, these things are not in perception. There is only the single stream. So suffering is, in actuality, a feeling. Feelings are neither objective nor subjective, they just are. The question is then why do they arise, what's their nature? Why the feeling of suffering ?

During my time, doing consciousness work, I grew aware of an almost ever apparent dynamic within perception itself and that is conflict. This conflict, really, is the root of all suffering and mishaps.

See, the way experience unfolds and how life flows, it's designed in such a way that nothing ever means anything, so that when it flows.. it's all good. This is the design of the singularity, there's no identifying anything separate from the stream because everything is streaming - rising and falling, rising and falling, rising and falling.. until - one moment begins to rise more frequent than other moments fall, and although ultimately it's all just one moment, the feelings and thoughts are not.

This conflict within perception is conflict between the stream of consciousness and thought-feeling. The thought-feeling I has risen so often that, like a bucket in the rain, it has accumulated in content more so than the other buckets. 

So why the conflict, though? Origin wise, the conflict is purely accidental, kind of like the way one would wake up in the morning and then the first thing that one sees is the first thing that one sees. It's accidental. Because what are thoughts at the end of the day? Thoughts are, when refined, realisations. A thought is a realisation when looked at in its purest form. The first thought, I , is the first realisation. I is the first thing discovered before anything else, before anything can have any meaning whatsoever. That's the birth of the mind, the birth of self reflection or self awareness. 

Knowing this, realisation is merely a tool of creation really. Because everything already exists, it's only a matter of it getting realised or “thought”. There is no such thing as “thinking” really, because hey.. there is only one stream of consciousness. There is no the thinker and then the thought, there is only consciousness being aware or self realising/observing , it doesn't really matter how one puts it. But see the realisation of I didn't mean anything, it didn't simultaneously imply a other. This I didn't have a name, it wasn't a thing or an object. It was just a realisation, like opening your eyes for the first time and seeing whatever it is that you see. The first I is consciousness itself.

Thoughts, holistically, are realisations upon realisations upon realisations. Here's how this could be tested: through the attempt to think of something completely new, something one hasn't yet realised. This can't be done, because one can only realise what the stream realises/creates. The thinker which is a moment from the stream cannot create its own thoughts . It's all one thing. The problem is when the stream confuses itself for the creation, identifying itself with a selective of realisations and other realisations are made to appear added - post/later and therefore “another/other”. It's this displacement or non-alignment that causes conflict and thus suffering, otherwise everything would be accepted gracefully and lovingly.

This is why the suffering .. The attachment to one realisation over the next, and then when it's time to realise something else this threatens the face value of the previous realisation. The stream of consciousness is infinite, that means the intelligence that is yet and is being discovered is infinite. These thoughts are merely a form of self recognition, hence no one is thinking anything here, this is just a series of self discovery. 

So the struggle is due to the finite illusion trying to withstand the infinite reality/truth, that's all it is. The realisation, which is known as thought, will always be illusion because it's incomplete. Having a thought and then accepting it as the truth, this is like jumping off a moving train, and then not only do you get hurt but now you also get lost because you haven't reached the destination. There is no such thing as good or bad thoughts if you're not attached, there's only intelligence/being. 

Say yes to every thought, and life will feel good and effortless. Don't try to look away from some thoughts and then pay special attention to other thoughts, that's the foundation of conflict, don't turn intelligence against itself, just let it flow. 

[Victor Mgazi]

Mind as the ultimate magician

The greatest trick the mind accomplished was literally pulling something out of nothing, or rather making it so that something appears as nothing and nothing appears something. 

[Victor Mgazi]

Muscle spasms & Mood swings and possible Psychic attacks.

During or after meditation, my muscles would be twitching - I would be laying perfectly still, relaxed and not really thinking about anything, when suddenly something like.. my head turning over on its own or my hands contract by themselves.. happens. And then even after practicing stillness, these muscle spasms occur, like body is out of control.

This is usually accompanied by emotional instability where, laying perfectly still, I suddenly feel strong emotional shifts that I can't help. It's completely random when it happens, but I notice that there's some kind of connection between the two.

I've also had a psychic attack like experience where I'm half awake, eyes open but body paralyzed, and something across my room just sorta like charges at me and makes impact, but not with me.. it's like there's something like a force field in between us. The impact is very much loud and certainly feels physical, but then I quickly fully awaken and it's like nothing happened.

I'm not sure if the last experience is related to the meditation I'm practicing but I've never experienced anything like that before, not until I started having these muscle spasms and mood swings. 

So now, I'm planning to practice stillness consistently everyday in effort to enhance whatever is going on and see if that doesn't make anything clearer.

[Victor Mgazi]

The Pursuit of Peace and Happiness

The conflict is within me. The world is within me. A seemingly mechanised part of me is striving for survival, while a more subtle but very much observant part of me longs for something deeper and more fulfilling.

It is clear to me that whatever it is that I yearn must be a feeling, simply because I no longer want to feel the way I feel now. It's not emotional this feeling, I've tried using substances to rid myself of this feeling but even in my euphoria the longing is surprisingly piercing.

At this point it becomes obvious that although one may be able to trick the brain into feeling ecstatic using recreational drugs, the heart won't, in even the slightest bit, be fooled. I've always suspected that the heart isn't just biological in its nature, but that it's a spiritual organ as well. I think this is why people who resort to substance abuse can never satisfy the void that is in their hearts, and even in their extreme highs there remains the feeling of the deep soul piercing emptiness inside. The soul yearns for fulfillment.

The world is in me, or rather the world is me. I know that this is so because there has never been a moment where I am without the world and the world without me. All perception and experience is one, singular, being. But for the sake of my survival the mind makes it appear otherwise, so much so that what the observant part of me sees isn't what my biology and psychology believes. Or else I would be happy right now, but I'm not because I believe that I am lacking. This is very sad. Because this is not a problem of the world or reality, it is a problem of identity.

I know I can be happier than this and be at peace with everything, because I've experienced it before - once. A moment of bliss, purely, or at least seemingly, accidental. During that moment, even in my irritation I was happy, I believe that was a taste of Devine Love. And that happened before I even got into consciousness work. That is very significant to me because for most of my life, growing up in a society marked by and driven by consumerism, I was made to believe that a feeling like that can only be attained through wealth and romance. And now I now that that's not the case because on that day, in that moment I was blessed by something completely outside of my perception, and I got to experience utter bliss. I was somewhere in my mid teens when that happened.

This is very sad, but inspiring as well. I know that I don't have to accomplish anything to be that happy again, at least not in the conventional sense.