There is a truth, and that truth is who I am. When I see it, I know it because I am it. I do not need to think about it, or reach for it, or calculate it, or understand it. I am it. I am the truth, and the truth is everything. But I have gotten lost, and I have forgotten how to see the truth of my being. Instead, I look outward and I see an explosion of kaleidoscopic confusion and I am drawn into the details before me. It extends in every direction in every dimension, and I marvel at the patterns.
Every awakening I find something new in the patterns around me. Like water, it reacts to my touch, to my thoughts, to my will, to my being. I run and jump around and watch the kaleidoscoping patterns respond and recoil and change. Like a child in water, I splash around and delight at the new patterns I create.
But something catches my eye, just under the kaleidoscopic surface, and I remember something important. I forget, and I go back to playing and creating. I am getting better at creating interesting shapes. I know which shapes I like, and which ones I do not. Then I see it again, but this time I do not forget. I want something. I want something more than I want any of this. A yearning develops as I play, and eventually it turns painful: I am missing something. Something is wrong. I am drowning, and I want out. I do not want to play here anymore.
I stop for the first time and look around. The kaleidoscopic pattern of the fluid is still as I am still, only slightly undulating, sliding downward like a honey on a wall. As it slides down, it reveals what I saw below the surface. I squint my eyes to see it, but it is always just out of focus. I go back to playing, but I am distracted by the thing I saw; I know I want it, so I stop playing. It all slows down again, honey on a wall. I see it, and I give chase. Slowly at first, then I pick up my pace and before I know it I am sprinting after it as fast as I can. It has a shape now; I can see it. It is always just ahead of me, just rounding the corner ahead, just out of my reach. I almost touch it. What is it I am chasing? What is always just turning the corner, disappearing out of sight. How many corners are there?
And then I turn yet another corner and it is not running anymore; it is facing me. I cannot stop, I do not want to stop, and I run into myself. When we collide – when I collide into myself – I know. I know who I am, and I know what this place of patterns, colors, and shapes is. I know I am lost. I know that it is me I seek. I am who I am chasing. The shape just turning the corner, hiding behind the endless corners of this place of patterns, is me. I want me. I am who I am looking for.
The truth of who I am is very different from the story I have told myself. I told myself until I believed that I am a person in a cycle of waking and sleeping. I believed that my personhood was an indisputable fact of my existence, and it formed the basis of my perspective. I looked around my kaleidoscopic thirdself, saw fleshy forms with arms, legs, heads, and personalities and decided that I was one of them. I told myself that I wanted a place among them; I wanted their recognition, approval, companionship, and affection. Yet even when I received it, I was left feeling unfulfilled, wanting more.
I explained away the difference between “me” and “them” as a matter of occupancy. I was the occupant of one of these bodies, and as such I experienced my personhood from within one body, while others experienced theirs from within other bodies. The world was a place of observers looking outward through bodies into the world. I was only one of them. I could never directly validate this, but I still believed it.
But the truth does not work like that. The truth is not something that can hide from me behind time and mystery. The truth is not something I cannot touch, or that I can only glean from an unknowable past. The truth is not locked away behind intellectual arguments and scientific inquiry. That the truth must be earned and achieved is the work of the devil, for I own the truth. The truth is absolutely mine, that I possess. That nothing can take away from me, because there is nothing that can take it away from me. For I am everything. I am the truth.
The truth is who I am in my moment. There is nothing other than truth. The only variable is my desire to see the truth and my conviction that I can. The truth is something that I can and will find. But only if I believe I can find it. If I do not believe I can know the truth, then I will not recognize it even when I see it. The truth is all around me; I see it every moment of my being. Every bend, curve, color, and feeling of this kaleidoscopic space I find myself is telling me the truth of who I am. I cannot see anything other than the truth; but I must know what I am seeing.
I must first believe that I can know the truth. That there is nothing other than the truth. Truth is being, and I get lost when I forget that and start becoming. I awaken into becoming, and I asleepen back to being. The size and shape of my moment transforms and distorts when I awaken. I forget that all is me; all is truth. People are the sediment of my Being, detached from their proper place within after having been vigorously shaken. They are detritus that I have given godhood to in return for personhood. I am not a person. I am the Being. Personhood is an illness.
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