It’s surreal.
Someone asked me,
How do you become adept at sensing? I mean sensing/seeing entities around you. I can’t do it because my imagination is always playing tricks on me. Does it mean that I don’t fully achieve gnosis and should work harder on that?
There is a time and place for objectivity and trying to ensure that everything is “real,” but we have to take care not to drink too deeply from that, too. It is of course no good to just imagine up everything, but in the end that’s really all any of us are doing at all: every thought, belief, idea, concept, they’re all something we’ve imagined up. So don’t worry yourself too much about what you’re imagining – if it’s meaningful and persistent, then it’s worth working with.
“Reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it,” writes Philip K. Dick. So you can always apply that test. Importantly, what you choose to believe as real or not is only as important as you give it the ability to affect your life. If you are contacted or not contacted by spirits, that is a narrative, and if you imagine the contact, that too is the narrative.
One thing I might complain about contemporary fiction is that magic is always presented as this concrete thing, and simply just something some people have access to through their normal senses with their normal experiences, yeah? So we have this same expectation of what is “real.” Even our fictional characters experience magic in ways that are “real,” so we expect that for us to have a magical experience, it must be “real” as well, engaging and engrossing our senses, something we can interact with concretely. Look at how many people want PK or physical evocation or so on, because they feel a need to have something “real,” yeah? Or even constructs and scanning and this all. Okay! Those things are cool and good, but if they are your sole goal, you won’t get far, I think.
Magic isn’t real, it’s surreal. A magical life isn’t concrete, it’s abstract and bizarre. The gods don’t talk to us through messages left on our voicemail or Facebook chat – they talk through a dog barking when we see something out of place, through the old woman we noticed on our walk who wasn’t there when we looked back, through the cracks forming in the wall that seem to change every day.
How to increase your sensitivity? Be open to all those thoughts that pop into your head, the bizarre ones, the strange ones. They don’t come from nowhere. What’s the difference between a “real” thought and an “imagined” thought? Both just happen in your head. If you want magical experience, you have to throw yourself headlong into the void, let go of all these things we hold onto, and accept what things seem like. Living a magical life means banishing the monster from the closet, because you know it’s there even after you check and there’s nothing, then asking, “what does it mean, to have this monster in my closet?”
Everyone experiences these strange things now and then, the feeling of being watched, the feeling that someone is there, the feeling that something is wrong, or something is right. How we deal with that is the narrative of our life. Many people reject it, they look for the proof, they tell themselves “ghosts aren’t real” (but then they still leave the house anyways). How to increase your sensitivity? Just go with it. When you feel the ghost is there, talk to it! Don’t try to prove it real or fake. Don’t investigate it to see if it’s maybe just the wind. If it’s the wind or not the wind doesn’t matter, because that’s this funny world we live in. The wind and the ghost are not different. Magic isn’t real, it’s surreal.
That’s my piece, I’ve said too much I think already and lost the message, but there you are.
