Reality

To begin with I will be going off Thomas Nagel's book What Does it All Mean? and now and then a couple of other books. I did this to have a reference point in the discussion and to allow the reader to get a general introduction to philosophy if they so choose. From the starting point of Nagel, I will then go deeper into the magical view of philosophy and through my lens of magical work and experiences give my views. To reiterate a point I cannot over emphasize, my opinion means next to nothing compared to your own personal experience and experiments with reality. Your reality is your own and you have your own spiritual and magical development to work with, not mine! Think of my work as one of many sign posts for your own working validity along with many other spiritual seekers. Use my words as inspiration to do your own work and to test my thinking with your own; my thoughts do not supersede yours in anyway. Experience is all that counts. Also, the fact that I may write something or suggest something may or may not suggest I myself believe the thing written, it may be there just to prompt you to think about it and come up with your own reaction.Existence outside your own mindDo things exist beyond your own mind? How do you know this to be true? Consider the following: You have never experienced any stimuli that was not directly experienced and filtered through your own nervous system and brain. Every conception you have of reality, your personal history and your own experience is nothing more than some electrical signals passing through a bunch of meat; which in truth you have never seen, felt or experienced. How do you know any of what you think is real is in fact so? Any arguments you make about the supposed realness of your self or anything else is-again-simply a matter of your perception, which cannot be proven to exist, because it takes place in your own mind! You (and maybe me, how do you know I exist? I could be a hallucination.) are stuck in your own perceptions of what the universe seems to be to you. How do we know anything at all, has or will ever exist?You may think that a universe that does not exist save in your own hallucination of it is meaningless, but why does anything have to mean anything. It may not at all, other than to provide entertainment to you.So, what now? Where do we go from here? If the above is all true, and your mind is the only that exists (and in my case my mind is the only one that exists, but you can't prove it) then we are left with two options from what I can see. First, that nothing matters. Nothing at all. Pretty depressing I say! Second option is that even if it is all a hallucination, you are experiencing it and should for whatever reason value the experience. Why go through the trouble of making a complicated, internal, seemingly real universe if at the very least it would be worthwhile to do so? If it all is a hallucination then you might as well make the most of it and maybe learn something valuable from it.So, what is the magical perspective? The fact is, magically speaking the entire universe is the hallucination of one mind. This entire thing has been created and is being experienced by a singular consciousness in order to experience and learn more about itself, to grow, to become complete within itself. Your consciousness is an aspect of the total; your thoughts are the thoughts of the total. I have experienced this in meditation many times, the realization that there is just one overarching thought stream that is filtered down into countless variations and ideas based upon the genetic, social and developmental attributes of the receiver. Your perception of solipsism is in fact true in some sense, as above so below. Your mind is in fact a receiver and broadcaster for the universal unity of mind. The more perceptive of this concept you become the closer you become to absolute divinity. Some magicians argue back and forth whether the spirits evoked in rituals have their own objective reality or are they all aspects of our own mind. The fact is, there is no difference. There is nothing that is not an aspect of your own mind, the words you are reading only exist because there is a mind perceiving them at this very instant, that is capable of interpreting bits of lights passed through a medium of meat by electrical impulses, having had the cultural experience of learning a particular language which this information was typed in, and finally a certain mental development in order to process those signals into something meaningful. All of that is going on right now in your own mind and if you happen to evoke a spirit a similar situation will occur but through different means.