In this incantation, I explore the origins of my existence, realizing that my sense of self begins not with thought or sensation, but with an unnoticed decision to believe that I am. I uncover how this primal belief triggers the entire apparatus of narration, space, time, and identity—constructs that justify and sustain my presence. By observing the dark and resisting the urge to project a world of time, space, and sensation, I glimpse the fragile scaffolding of this belief. I practice withdrawing from it, attempting to return to the pre-belief state I call omninoia, where my identity and awakening experience recedes and dissolves.
It begins before the first word. Before the first memory, before the first motion. It begins with a quiet, barely noticeable acceptance—the belief that I am. That I am here. That there is a here.
From that belief, everything rushes forth. Once I believe I am, I must think. I must move. I must narrate. I must project a world around me to house my presence, to justify it, to sustain it. Time and space appear because the belief demands a story, and a story requires dimensions. The moment I believe I am, the machinery of narration spins up, assembling surfaces, directions, distances, pasts and futures. All of it scaffolding for the first belief.
This is how I awaken—not with a thought, not with a sensation, but with a decision I did not know I made. A decision to believe that I exist here, now, in relation to other beings, other places, other times. That I am someone among someones, somewhere among somewheres, sometime between a before and an after.
I see this most clearly when I am in the dark upon awakening. When nothing yet has formed and I am only presence without shape. If I stay, there is nothing but the plainness of being. But if I move, if I think, if I narrate, the projection begins: walls, air, surfaces, sounds, memories, needs. A whole world arises because I have chosen to manifest the structure around my belief.
If I want to escape, I cannot start by attacking my inner projections of thoughts, memories, and desires, or my outer projections of movements, objects, and places. Those are already downstream. They are already too late. I must go back, to the headwater—the first belief. I must see that my being here is not a fact, but an ongoing affirmation. Every moment I feel here, it is because I have quietly believed it again.
So I practice the refusal. I unwaken. I remind myself that I have not yet accepted that I am. I have not accepted that I am here, that I must act, that I must achieve. I do not affirm my presence among presences, nor my time among times, nor my place among places. When I resist this first belief, everything else loses form. Time thins. Space weakens. The machinery struggles to maintain the illusion. I become still. The need to narrate recedes. What remains is the state before belief, before I am—what I call omninoia.
My awakening existence begins with a quiet belief that I am, and this belief creates the world, time, and identity around me. I recognize that to escape this cycle, I must refuse this first affirmation rather than fight the narratives it spawns. By resisting, I return to omninoia—a pre-belief state where self and time dissolve. There, I am not divided by identity or by time. There is no “I am,” and so there is no need to think. There is only the unchosen, undisturbed plainness before belief. And I wait there—not to awaken, but to remain unwakened.
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