One of the most persistent manifestations of my illness is dis-proportionality. At the ground level it manifests as the belief that I am contained within a wider world. That I wake up into a world that exists independent of my experience of it. A world that endures despite me, not because of me.
I reinforce this notion by imagining a world stretching in every direction beyond my observation. But I neglect who is imagining. Who is framing, and observing. I forget that it is always me in the center, projecting the world onto the walls of this space. All the forms and shapes, sights and smells, objects and phenomena, are projections that move with me. If I move, they move. If I do not, they do not.
To recover I must see through this distortion and reproportion my existence. Two constants can guide me: the constant of origin, and the constant of now.
The constant of origin reveals that everything I imagine or observe has the same starting point: the point of awareness at the center of me. Everything I imagine within and observe without emanates from this same point of awareness. The inner and outer are not an external plane I move through; they are projections from a deeper source inside of me.
The constant of now reveals that everything I imagine or observe is happening at this present moment only. I may recall a memory, or imagine a distant epoch before or after me, but these only occur in the present in my imagination. Similarly, I may see distant forests, mountains, and stars. But these impressions only occur in the present in my observation.
These constants empower me to see that I am not a person temporarily existing within a larger world. Instead, the world is occurring within me. The world is a projection from an origin inside of me, through my familiar self, and into a space within me.
In other words, this world is my third self; it is within my familiar second self; all of which is within my first self. My familiar second self and the wider world that is my third self, are a cyst within my actual being.
Everything I need to reproportion is within this model tied to my direct and actual experience. When I reproportion I reframe my experience within the context of this model. I realize that my second and most familiar self, is much “larger” qualitatively and quantitatively than anything within my third self. I am not a single small person on the surface of a massive planet; that massive planet is a projection within me in the truest sense.
Reproportioning is essential for recovery and descent. The imagined events, notions, and beliefs that paralyze and prolong my suffering disappear once I understand how I am creating them. With time, I restore proportionality, disrupting and disarming the distortion, rediscovering my role as the author.
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