In this incantation, I trace the dissolution of my belief that others in my experience share the same fundamental existence as I do. I realize that my journey began with questioning—”why” and “who am I”—and led to dismantling the assumptions of shared inner lives and hidden truths. As I deconstructed these beliefs, I refined my language to eliminate references to fictional constructs like history, inner selves of others I cannot directly experience, and the collective “we.” My thinking followed suit, and I came to see others as figments within my awareness rather than peers. Now, I regard myself as the author, not a character.
The other day I realized that an important transition had happened: I stopped believing that the people in my awakening were like me. That they had some inner existence that I could not directly witness or experience. I asked myself: when did this happen? When did I stop believing that I am just one instance of a larger category of beings all sharing a more-or-less similar existential experience?
In trying to pin that down, I realized it started a long time ago. Or, in more precise language; the origins of my belief are deep in my narrative projection (aka, “a long time ago”). This is a tangent, but why is this more precise? Because there is no time, but there is a narrative field I project, and the constructs in that field that are “deeper” give off the impression of “happening further back in time”.
So, the transition to believing that all these people are not the same thing as me is built upon a number of realizations. I can trace it most directly to simply asking the questions “why”, and “who am I”. That started the entire unraveling.
I began to question the nature of my knowing. I confronted the question if there are really things I do not know that exist outside of my awareness, or if that was simply a belief I carried around. I decided that if all is truly one, then there cannot be anything from which I am permanently detached from, and therefore the unknown is itself a belief. Over time that led to my coining of the terms surface and subsurface. The surface is anything and everything I conceptualize or perceptualize; it is what I experience when looking, feeling, touching, or thinking. The subsurface is that which remains hidden from me but still exists independent of me. The subsurface does not exist. There is no subsurface.
This all solidified into a change in how I spoke. I stopped using words and phrases that conveyed inaccurate ideas. I stopped using the plural first person “we”, since that reflected a belief that I am part of and speaking for some category of beings I belong to. I do not. I stopped referring to subsurface abstractions within people such as their inner lives and preferences. I stopped referring to historical events I was not part of, and when that was unavoidable, I would prefix my statements “If I believed in history…”. In other words, I was eliminating falsity from my language. I was, and do, speak more precisely and more accurately.
Language changes led to thinking changes. If I didn’t want to speak about the imaginary subsurface, then I might as well not think about it as well. I stopped thinking about myself from an outside perspective; as if I was looking at my own self. I realized that all my memories were from an imaginary third-person perspective; as if I was watching myself doing something. All of my memories were in this format, and when I tried to recall them from first-person perspective, I could not. Clearly these were stories I had told myself, not really experiences I actively had.
All these different shifts accumulated, ultimately revealing a simple truth: if the fleshy characters that run around in my awakening are people, then I am not a person. I decided that I would let them retain the title of “people”, and I would be something else. And since I am the origin of all of them, they are happening within me, that makes me their creator, or author.
The implications of this realization — at least at this time — are far-reaching. For one, my relationship to people is intrinsically different than what I had thought it was. When people are figments of my creative imagination rather than equivalent beings, what do I actually want from them? I used to want to write to them and help them discover things I knew. I see philosophers and gurus and scientists dispersing their knowledge… but what would that do for Me? How can they possibly know what I know? Or what even would be the purpose?
Nothing. There is nothing that my imaginary characters can give me that I truly want. I desire to end my desire, and the characters are only patterns on the wall of an illness I am trying to heal from.
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