There is something I have come to recognise through years of practice, ritual, study, trance, teaching, and simple living.
My experience changes depending on where I am standing within myself.
Not externally. Internally.
There have been periods in my life when I was entirely identified with the surface layer of who I thought I was — my reactions, my roles, my successes, my frustrations, my ideas about myself. From there, life felt sharp and intensely personal. Every comment had weight. Every challenge felt like confrontation. Every success threatened to inflate me; every setback threatened to diminish me.
From that level, the world feels unstable because the self feels unstable.
Over time — through belief, through practice, through ritual, through repeated experience — I began to recognise another possibility. It was not a theory I adopted. It was something I could feel directly. I could stand somewhere deeper than the surface personality. I could feel anger arise without becoming anger. I could feel fear without it dictating my movement. I could experience joy without grasping at it.
The events themselves did not change. The quality of my participation did.
In ritual, this shift is tangible. When I operate from persona, the work feels effortful, almost theatrical. When I drop beneath that layer and stand in something quieter and less defended, the ritual becomes alive. The same words, the same gestures, yet the current runs differently. In trance and hypnosis, I have watched people discover that they are not the story running through them but the awareness in which it runs. When that shift happens, even briefly, the system reorganises. Space enters. Choice appears.
This is not escape. It is relocation.
There are levels of identification. When I am fused with thought and reaction, I am narrow. When awareness settles deeper, I am less brittle. The world does not soften, but I am not as easily broken by it.
Over the years, I have come to see this relocation as a quiet thread running through all traditions. The language differs. The cosmologies differ. The techniques differ. Yet again and again, the real movement is the same: a shift in where identity rests.
Where am I standing?
That question has become more alive to me than any doctrine.
Because once I began to see this, I could feel the moment identification tightened around an opinion. I could feel the contraction when I took a role too seriously. I could feel the widening when I allowed awareness to drop beneath the surface movement of personality.
From the surface, life feels like something happening to me. From depth, life feels like something moving through me.
When I stand deeper, intention carries differently. Words land differently. Silence has weight. I am less reactive and more precise. Action flows with less internal friction. What I once tried to force begins to unfold more cleanly.
Much of what I now recognise as real magic is simply this capacity: to stand in the deeper level and move from there. Not to deny emotion, not to transcend the human, but to inhabit it from a steadier ground.
I do not remain there permanently. I move between levels. Some days I am entirely entangled in reaction and story. Other days I remember the deeper footing without effort. The difference is unmistakable.
Where I stand changes what I see.
And more than that, it changes what I am able to bring into being.
Ancient Whispers 
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