OK brace yourself, we are going for a little trip to into the strange land that is my personal mysticism...
For me, the key part of all magical success involves getting into the paradoxical place where I know the spell has worked, before it has. This is a rather peculiar emotional state because it requires knowing/feeling with certainty that something has happened when, apparently, it hasn't happened yet. Some call it faith, and that is one way of talking about it but what I don't like about the word 'faith' is that it implies the work is going to happen still - it rests all its hope on some future event. No, what I am talking about here should rather be described as an unmanifest fact. What exactly, I hear you ask, is an unmanifest fact? Well, very simply put - it is the unwavering knowledge inside, an indisputable fact - that states something has already happened but the outer stuff, you know what some folks call 'reality' is still, shall we say, catching up. And it catches up quickly too - sometimes so quickly that the gap is nearly unnoticeable.
Now, what's important about this is that once spawned an unmanifest fact invariably becomes a manifest fact. You see, they are both the same fact already - and the latter must necessarily proceed from the former just as the sun must rise in the east and set in the west. The question then becomes how to spawn an unmanifest fact in ones internal experience, which to say - the condition of knowing with absolute certainty something is true without having any evidence yet? What I am suggesting here is a kind of gravity defying mental/emotional contortion; a fabulously sparkly yet affordable form of non-dual awareness; a kind of inverse magical perception of reality; a radical point of view that sees things the way they are before they are the way they are.
A few important characteristics I've noticed about the Unmanifest Fact:
- The unmanifest fact is outside of time - it knows no future, or present - it just is.
- The unmanifest fact is real, perhaps more real than real stuff.
- The unmanifest fact is a feeling, a knowledge, an internal experience but its also the result of that feeling/knowledge/experience.
- The unmanifest fact is a fact just like all other facts except it appears to precede them. I say 'appears' here because something cannot precede something if it is that thing already, but we are using dualistic language here and I am doing my best to talk about something that annihilates all efforts to describe it.
That's right, true magic.
I know, I know - it sounds like I am teaching a kind of Neo-Advaitan New Thought seminar on acid.
Nonetheless. Perhaps you recognise what I am talking about, perhaps you think it's just some kind of pseudo magical babble I've made up - but in upcoming posts I will try to elaborate more on how this entirely paradoxical approach works for me.