Truth Seeking, what is life, what is humanity, what is you Options

as the topic suggests.

Lately i am missing more occult discussions on these forums. altough i like talking about vegetarianism and drugs, i want to talk more about the nature of my beliefs and study.
namely the search for pure untainted truth. and the gathering of as much power as i can contain.
Those are my goals, towards enlightenment.

I was wondering how others view their search for whatever they are searching for.
perhaps some have found some form of truth they are content with, i wish to hear about these opinions in a respectable way.
no bashing others ideas, just sharing (IMG:style_emoticons/default/baby.gif)

I myself belief in non-existance. however i believe this truth has to be experienced in an enlightening experience, or more experiences.
at the moment i have experienced this at times. but i seem to keep forgetting it in the long run, and their seems to be a need for constant experiencing this non-existance. thus to live fully in this awarenes. This is hard to do, but rewarding as it makes life a peacefull experiences.

No-mind, the stopping of mind chatter is the primary practise of this belief, toghether with meditation.

this i try to combine with ceremonial magick, trying to get a taste and feeling of magickal essense and energys. i have found they have a distinct taste when working with them over the years. enlarging this taste and connection is one of my goals.

the increase in magickal potence gives me more control over things in life trough magick. this enables me to worry less about things not nesesary for the first goal of no mind. This way i can use magick to steer my life where i want it with little effort, so that i can practise no-mind and non-existance in an undisturbed way.

However, i have many questions still and many ways to go.

I hope this will get a possible discussion started, perhaps we can enlighten each other on various ways.
i would really like to learn more about the magickal side, sinse i consider myself still a child in learning at that side. The consepts of the spiritual side are easier.

so lets get started, anyone wanna share their core beliefs, mentalities conserning their practise. not really the tools of the trade, but really what goes on in the head while doing them. feelings tastes sensations that happen during practise.

my magick practise tastes verry purple. the nature of these energies tastes not evil or good, its a strange taste. a feeling of strength and energy without a connection to good or evil, a purple goo swirling around me. this is not something i visualise, its not important to me how you visualise your magick. its the feedback you get. no matter how i visualise my magick acts, it always tastes like this to me, wich is something i think more true than my visualisations.

I believe that by discussing these tactile connections we can learn from each other how to closer connect to these energies. in truth and not merely visualisation techniques. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

lets begin...

bb3, i think you have a good point.
I was also wondering, by listening, do you mean observing your thoughts but not interacting with them.
Or does listening mean actively thinking about stuff?

LitzB it must be a great feeling when your little grandchildren tell you that.
you also say "I used to think that black was black andwhite was white. Now I don't know"
But shouldn't it be, now i know it isn't so. i think there are many shades of grey in everything.

But it makes it harder these shades of grey, there is no clear cut easy truth then anymore.
How does that not knowing make you feel, and how does it connect to what your little grandchildren tell you.
Do you think perhaps, f%*! it all, as long as i can hear my loved ones say such things.
or...


darkgoddes.
I agree to most of what you said. As i believe more or less in the same things.
But the problem with such ideas, beliefs is. They are logical and rational things.

To me magick is emotion. How does it feel when you realise, really realise with all your being that all is just energy.
What is the nature of this energy, what texture does it have when it flows trough your fingers, and into your lungs.
What does it feel like to be just a part of this flow.

These are things that are really interesting and hold more knowledge.

I'm sure you have such feelings if you search for them, it adds color and texture to these words that i seek. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

You've started such an interesting topic of conversation, Smoking Fox. It really is a pleasant break from most of the mechanical discussions about technique and formality that normally reign. Kudos.

On the subject of dying, I had an curious insight during meditation tonight, told to me by one of my selves. He said, "To ascend, one must relieve oneself of the weight of knowledge and experience. it is that weight which, when at the moment of death we cling to it, drags us back down into the material incarnation."

I wondered what others' thoughts were on this idea. I get lots of insights from my various selves (inner, outer, higher, lower, etc., corresponding to various 'realms' of personality and consciousness within the total sphere of my context, it's something that developed over time during meditation) but they aren't always totally complete, sometimes they build on one another, and in some cases they are even false - those particular selves, I have found, will almost always lie to me, and so part of my work on that level is excising or possibly assimilating those aspects. Maybe they represent self-delusion or self-sabotage, I haven't decided yet. This particular self is always cryptic, and nothing ever means exactly what it seems to at first.

But, afterwards, I was thinking about the moment of death, something that occaisionally preoccupies my attention from the here-and-now, or the Living Force, as it were. I imagined the white-out, tunnel of light scenario talked about in many individuals' NDEs. I wandered through the process of feeling my body go 'dead' my senses withdrawing, and then found myself floating. I tried to feel the 'weight' of knowledge in my context from there, and didn't get much of a solid bead on anything I could identify as such. When I couldn't find a specific reference point for what this Self had communicated, I began to contemplate the symbolic meaning of the statement. Sometimes a simple phrase can mean dozens of different things, all relevant to a particular bit of wisdom, so 'wordmapping' is a sort of excercise i've started doing when i get some of these things.

Do we cling to continuity as we die? Do we struggle to hold on to our memories, our experiences, our lives, and because of this attachment, become pulled back into the cycle of life and death? Is this relinquishing of everything that classically defines oneself what is meant by the Buddhist concept of transcending the cycle of Karma? I have often imagined that I would like to, if it is not my lot to ascend at/before death, attempt to maintain my awareness, my distinct consciousness and continuity, into my next life. Probably it would not manifest as an infant who remembers litterally every skill from the previous incarnation, but rather, perhaps, a similar sense of 'lasting longer than my life' that I sometimes experience now. Stuff between incarnations is so hard to work out, sometimes, as though it's litterally kept from view. Normally my intuition can navigate towards just about any answer I've set it to finding so far, except those ones.

So, anyways, wondered about some thoughts on these ideas. As to the previous posts, I've enjoyed some of what's been said.

To me magick is emotion. How does it feel when you realise, really realise with all your being that all is just energy.
What is the nature of this energy, what texture does it have when it flows trough your fingers, and into your lungs.
What does it feel like to be just a part of this flow.

I think that this realization leads to union with the Force. But, i also feel that it happens in 'layers'. I found, when I was much younger, that by stilling my thoughts, placing my attention outwards on the world around me, and 'relaxing' my sense of absolute reality, that is, suspending my belief in a solid, material universe for a moment, I would momentarily lose a bit of distinctness. Rather than absolutely ending at my skin, I felt as though I was still individual, but somehow also 'embedded' in a larger field of energy.

Over time, my ability to suspend that belief, coupled with a greater control over my energy, lead me to a deeper level of union. After the third 'plateau' I managed to sacrifice a bit of ego - originally I thought the first 'level' was a sort of precursor to the second, but when there turned out to be a third, i finally accepted that there may be no limit, and no longer touted my ability to unify with the Force.

I have hit one more plateau after the third, culminating in four distinctly different levels of union. They have a strange sort of emotionlessness which increases each time, if that makes sense. that is, the first time, it was a euphoric, connected feeling. The second plateau was less euphoric, but still very calming. The third was almost on the border of 'blank', and then the fourth most recent feels even more empty all together. It leads me to wonder about the nature of emotion.

While I would agree that energy is information, i think it is only part of that equation all together. I think energy is Information and Consciousness, and i do not think that consciousness is composed of information inherently - I believe that consciousness accesses and manipulates energy/information. To my reckoning, it is the two parts together that constitute the Force, and I normally experience them unified, inseperable, and so talking about those aspects as seperate things may be pointless, but none the less I have observed and intuited very uniquely different sides of the Force, even as it is singularly unique as a whole.

As to the nature of emotion in all of that, I wonder if emotion is not a by product of our incarnation, our percieved illusion seperateness from the Force. Certainly emotion is power, and drives the most powerful magick - and certainly all energy will occur to us as emotion BEFORE we are able to percieve it by some conscious effort. for instance I no longer experience an energy affecting my system as an emotion, after I have identified it and begun working with it. The emotional dimension is gone, and I am working then with a subtle substance which is both part of me and not a part of me at the same time. Outside my context, within my sphere of experience. Hopefully that makes sense.

But, if energy doesn't have to be bound to emotion - and many will agree that it doesn't, especially us analyzing, logic-addicted would-be occult scientists - then what does that say about the relationship between energy and emotion? Emotions are instinctual, you don't have to be taught to have them, although we do learn to mimic emotional behaviour, for instance the child who learns the pattern of abuse from his anger ridden father and later grows up to express his anger in the same way. Both experience anger instinctually, but obviously how that anger manifests is a result of conditioning experiences.

Perhaps the division between energy and emotion is purely semanitic, a distinction amongst facets of a grain of sand in a beach. My general theory has long been that emotion is an instinctual reaction to energy. What say you all?

On the matter of listening to the inner self, or observing one's thoughts, I find that if i begin the topic, much like in this forum, I can allow my mind to go from there, letting the various pieces of my Self pitch in their various view points. On occaision, and you must pay close attention to what you are observing, those 'opinions' or sometimes Insights, will take on extra dimensions of meaning. if you focus on those highlighted notions, and 'reposition' your point of origin on that thought (its like starting over again), it will happen again and again in a chain of linked insights that often culminate in profound revelation. The trick is not to be attached to what thoughts occur, but to rather take part in a sort of conversation with the Psyche. I find that taking the role of the questioner, or student, there only to ask questions and listen to answers, without postulating my 'own' answers in the process, makes it easier to allow the thoughts to flow, and the questioning is, in its way, the navigation. Questions don't have to be asked 'aloud' as it were, so much as simply embodied or maybe just felt. And, they get more complicated as the answers get more complicated, taking on subtler dimensions as you descend into the psyche, to the point that some questions don't even make sense, and the answers are explorations into the complexity of the question itself and what that complexity represents about the nature of developement in one's waking consciousness. I sometimes find i've come 'all this way' just to realize that the lesson there for me was all about why I came that way, and had nothing to do with direct answers to the questions I had in mind at first - although I have to admit I usually find that I am no longer interested to the answers I originally sought. I guess the inner self does know best.

peace