So my tooth was hurting again yesterday and I was using concentration and visualization to handle pain again. I noticed a few things. I noticed that I don’t have to do anything directly at the site of pain to affect it (although that is one avenue of intervention). I noticed that simply relaxing at the ground of being can instantly attenuate pain at least in the short term. This is different from me relaxing as a human being, it’s not an ordinary kind of relaxation, so don’t get confused here. Since I realize I am not actually a human being deep down, I have the ability to do things, including to relax, as a non-human something or other, and this has different effects. Relaxing as a human just relaxes my body and nothing else happens. Relaxing as that which is beyond human not only relaxes the body, it also weakens structure and brightens up manifested appearances. Such relaxation changes how the human body feels and it also changes how the world feels. I feel like if I keep it up, the body and the world will dissolve, and from there, if I had a commitment of that sort, I could possibly dream myself into a new type of realm.

What’s interesting is that pain seems to kick up a notch my ability to concentrate. I guess I still consider pain an emergency. So while I was taking a shower, I was doing the healing water visualization where I consider the shower water to be extraordinary as it runs over me. I was running it pretty hot, and then I started to focus on the idea that “all phenomena are peace.” And what’s interesting, when my mind fell into a concentrated state pretty easily and quickly thanks to my toothache, the water’s heat sensation disappeared. At one point it disappeared so thoroughly that I started having doubts about the entire experience! I thought, maybe this water was cold in the first place? Maybe I didn’t do anything at all. But when I stopped contemplating the peaceful nature of all phenomena, the heat sensation came back.

This kind of experience happened to me a number of times, usually when I play with the temperature sensations outside. When I get really successful it feels like I am actually not doing anything and it’s the street temp that changes and not anything say in my human body. So for example, if I am practicing cooling off in the summer heat, at first it may feel like the street is oppressively hot and there is a region of coolness that I am working on in my human body. As I concentrate on allowing the visualized coolness to flow into the manifest experience, sometimes it feels like the whole street is cool, and what used to look like hot summer sun begins to look like a bright but cold winter sun. In this state it’s very easy to think that I didn’t do anything again.

This happens because I wrongly associate intent with effort and struggle, still. Of course the truest and deepest intent is effortless. So when one succeeds in the best possible way it may deceptively feel like it’s always been that way, whatever you were trying to manifest. It definitely works that way for me.

This also brings up the ambiguous nature of experience. If I had a doubter in me, there’d be plenty of meat to chew. I could just easily disown all the effortless phenomena and consider that maybe the water in the shower, or the street just changed temperature for reasons beyond my intent. To really entertain such doubts seriously I would need to keep clinging to the idea that intent is always and only effort, however.

Back to pain. I notice that pain is a complex multi-factor phenomenon. It seems like lots of things affect it. Destroying the visualized image of humanity in myself alleviated pain, as well as imagining that I was the only being in existence, as well as relaxing at the mysterious base of experience beyond the human identity. It seems a huge component of pain is actually social. Pain hurts a lot more when I want to belong to a group. When I consider myself solitary, I get a lot more leeway in how to interpret the sensations and I also get more leeway to play with the sensations. In retrospect this isn’t surprising because the function of convention is to stabilize meanings. But just when I want to change an experience, that stability works against my interests. For most humans this is an acceptable trade off because they’d probably run to a doctor and use that experience of pain to feel love and attention from a doctor. For me such trade off is not a very good one, and seems less good by the day.

So if one were really really successful at a feat of magick, it may feel like nothing at all has been done thanks to effortlessness. In that state it would be trivial to forget the magical nature of phenomena and the relevance of intent. One can get caught in one’s own perfectly created dream, and the dream can begin to run away into random directions if one disowns it too much. I need to be careful not to be a victim of my own success.