To complete my recovery I must reorient away from uniself and toward triself. Part of this reorientation is the narration of my experience from triself, as the author, rather than an observer. In doing so, I repossess and reproportion my experience, extricating myself from the vestigial remains of uniself. Though I have largely preferred to ignore thirdself events within my contemplations (e.g., political events, established philosophies, celebrity gossip, social and cultural shifts, etc), it is important I examine them in triself.
So, let this be my first effort toward reflecting on my thirdself movement from my triself perspective.
The outer world is my thirdself. My thirdself is the world. While I know this, I have a lifetime of seeing it as external to me. In uniself, I think that everything that is not “within” or “of” my physical body is not me. But I can overcome this conviction by admitting what I actually experience and observe:
- I cannot directly experience anything I see in the world beyond my senses and my inner conception. Because I know everything, and I can never know if other people are beings just like me, I must assume that what I cannot know is part of the distortion. So the people, places, and things in the environment I sense are only as deep as they appear. And whatever depth beyond what I perceive, is purely conceptual. Anything conceptual is acceptably “me”.
- In uniself, I have adopted a complex set of values that further distort both my conception and perception. I give weight to some people over others, some words over others, and some possessions over others. These values form strong bonds which anchor me to my thirdself. These values anchor me deeply into my awakening.
- To this end, the “depth” of my thirdself is little more than a distortion arising from imaginism. When I can see past the distortion, I will see my thirdself as a flat space within me, rather than a larger container of me.
I am still emanating deeply into my thirdself. When I emanate into my thirdself too deeply, I forget that I authored it and become immersed as an observer. In other words, I transform into a character in my story, and move around as if I am . To remind myself of who I am, I must incant from the author perspective to reproportion and repossess.
Covid is a good place to start. It is no coincidence that the pandemic began shortly after I discovered the question, “where am I?”. It happened quickly, almost immediately upon my first conception of the world as occurring within me, rather than me occurring within the world. The outside world got very noisy at the same time; politics, world events, and of course the pandemic coalesced into a mighty force in my awakening. In earlier times it would have been difficult to peel my eyes away from the media, but my perspective had shifted, and while I consumed the media, I did not become entangled in it as I had back in my early 20s when I first tried to leave.
The first time I challenged my thirdself was when I left America in my early 20s. I turned my back on everything I knew, and set out to live a different life, ultimately landing in India. Though internet was unreliable where I settled, it crept in and within a few years of living there, I was once again connected to the world I had left behind. I became a hyper-politicized observer, and ultimately abandoned my original mission to find and build a sanctuary. I returned to the world, and for the next two decades I was again trapped in my thirdself.
The first time it was the internet and politics, and this second time it was covid, then business, culture, and politics. My thirdself senses its own demise, and is actively working against my descent by trying to engross me. But instead of drawing me in this time as they did last time, I created the thirdself circumstances that have allowed me to convert my awakening into a sanctuary. I no longer feel compelled to physically move beyond my home, and the “remote work” culture has allowed me to ply my trade without the emanationary burden of physical interaction with people.
As I move deeper into triself awareness, my thirdself senses its own demise and is manifesting ever more ways to engage and entangle me.
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