One of the more challenging areas of my descent is in maintaining my focal awareness when I am around people. People are highly magnetic forms, drawing my attention into them, introducing new conceptual forms into my inner environment, and necessitating performances.
For example, when I encounter and engage a new person form, I conduct a coerced performance of exchanging pleasantries. I show interest in the person, then divert my focus to them in order to support that behavior. As I engage, I ingest new constructive forms in order to preserve and extend the performance.
Now that person form is known to me, I will adopt a number of obligatory performances. I am expected to retain that person’s form within my inner environment, and then perform within the context of that relationship. All are coercions that take me away from my focus on the essential.
Needless to say, every moment my focal awareness is directed toward inner or outer forms, is a moment it is not directed to the essential. The inner and outer projections seek to engage and then ensnare me, multiplying, then further bonding me to the second place.
If possible, I avoid interacting with people forms at all costs. If not possible, I limit my engagements to a transactional nature. I do not form thoughts of a future with people other than those I have extend transactional arrangements with. Nor do I ask questions, even out of courtesy, as that invites formal infection.
When I am in the company of people, I draw my attention inward, back into the timeless essential until my crown buzzes with the flow of energy. If the topic of our engagement is inessential, I will avert my eyes and attention away from the person unless and until required. If the topic of our engagement is essential, then I allow myself to fully engage, using whatever forms and performances I can in order to communicate.
When I consider my desire to descend above all else, I can clearly see that most, if not all interactions with people, are frivolous, unnecessary, and detrimental to my descent.
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Notes
Living in a foreign country where I am not fluent in the native tongue is an effective way of establishing and retaining a distance from people forms because there are real challenges obstructing the easy establishment of bonds.
An “ascentist relationship” is any relationship built on inessential forms and performances. Every relationship I have ever had has been ascentist in nature, and so all must be withdrawn from in order to descend. I have hypothesized a “descentist relationship”, which could only exist if both me and the other descentist had actively retreating inner and outer projections. We must both be essential-focused, so our inessential interactions would be limited to those which reinforce our mutual descent.
I have been led to believe that the formation of relationships is a necessary and standard part of life, and the inability or failure to do so is a handicap. But it is actually the opposite. Ascentist relationships tightly bond me to projected forms and performances, preventing me from remembering, understanding, and returning to the essential.