I have been searching for what I now know as my firstself my entire life. I have called it God, the source, my soul, spirit, origin, and more. I always knew it was the ultimate reality I was searching for. And I knew that I knew it. I knew that I knew the truth, but I only had to remember to see it. I was never content with simply describing it; I wanted to experience it, and then move toward it. I knew it was a destination where I wanted to be. That I was somehow detached from it, floating aimlessly on an ocean of meaninglessness called life.
Years ago I began to explain it as a point within every person. I would often say that if you looked into someone’s eyes you would reach this point. And this point of god, the origin, was in each and every one of us. Eight billion faces and bodies were simply affixed to the perimeter of this source, like outward-looking faces glued to a tennis ball. That introduced conceptual and physical problems and I eventually abandoned parts of this idea.
I retained the idea that the origin was somehow behind my eyes. I knew that the sensation of God and my real being was something I could directly experience at any moment. I clung to the notion it was not intellectual, or trapped behind ritual and abstraction. I knew that I could directly experience the truth of my awakenings, I just had to remember how to recognize it.
So I began to challenge what I knew. Up to that point I had believed in things I did not actually know. For example, when I questioned where I was, my answer always relied on something or someone I did not actually directly experience myself. And if I could not directly experience it, then how could I know? For example, I thought I was in a community in a city in a country in the world. But I could not directly and immediately validate any of that. Yet it all factored into my self-identity.
It extended beyond supposed geographical location to everything I thought I knew. People, for example. I thought that all these people I had met and known, and read about but did not know, existed concurrently somewhere else in this massive world I could really only imagine. I began to see something important in all these assumptions I carried around with me but could never directly experience. If I was, in fact, in this community within this country within this world within the galaxy, I could only directly know and validate the small enclosure of my apartment at the moment. And if all these people did actually exist in the same way as me, then I could only ever know the goings-on of 1/8 billionth of what is known to all people at that time. And then factor in all other sentient beings and their experiences. Add on top of that all which supposedly exists without anyone experiencing it. And the totality of my direct experience wasn’t even a drop in the ocean. Add in time, and it was a temporary drop in the ocean.
So I mapped it all out. Before I could ascertain what I did know, I wanted to figure out what I could know.
It was not a lot. I could only perceive my present circumstances, and everything else was left to conceptualization, including my past. Essentially, in this diagram of existence, the range of my direct experience was practically nothing. This set of beliefs that I maintained — that there was a massive and ongoing world that existed beyond the horizons of my experience — served to render me perpetually ignorant because I readily accepted that there was existence of which I was not aware. There were things that had occurred and were occurring, that I could not experience.
I knew that I could know God and the truth of my life. But I also believed that there were things that I could never know because they existed beyond the horizons of my experience. This was a contradiction. I either could know everything, or I could not. If I could know everything, then I could see God and the truth of my life. But if this world I awakened into was as I assumed, then the vast amount of reality was presently and would always be unknown to me.
It occurred to me that this idea of a massive world full of people collectively experiencing life was the weakest part of my belief system. I had to make a decision: I could either believe that there was existence occurring beyond the horizons of my direct experience, or that my direct experience was the entirety of existence. This was the decision that would finally allow me to break through the barrier between me and what I would come to call my firstself.
I did not make the decision instantly. It took many years of probing and testing, but I knew that the truth of existence was that my direct experience was its totality. But I had built an entire identity upon a set of imaginary and abstract ideas I would never directly experience, and it was challenging to adapt to this new perspective. Every thought I had, or action I pursued, was infected with these artificial ideas and notions. And they were very difficult to purge. If I sat in a room, I was accustomed to imagining that there existed concurrently — whether I was experiencing it or not — an outdoor space. If I was not thinking about them, other people were thinking about me. These assumptions and beliefs attached themselves to every single thought and belief in my mind. Every decision I made was accompanied by ideas stemming from the perspective that I am just a temporary observer of a tiny fraction of reality. All my behaviors were tied to this belief. Realizing that I was not experiencing a fraction of reality, but instead creating its totality, massive shift that I am still working through at this very moment.
This shift in perspective gave me what I needed to reimagine God, soul, spirit, source, and the universe. I was right in sensing it behind my eyes, but I was wrong in conceptualizing its dimensions. I had imagined it was within me and everyone else. If my direct experience was the totality of existence, then anything I could not directly experience was wrong. And while I could very well see people and speak to them, I could never ascertain this universe source behind their eyes in the same way as I experienced it behind my own. In fact, people were little more than forms in motion around me. I could not experience them in the same way as I experienced myself. They were painted shapes that flitted in and out of my mind and field of vision, and nothing more. I could engage them through dialogue, but I never could experience them as potently as I could experience my own self.
That left me with one truth: people are exactly what I experience them as, and I am not one of them. As I began to pick at it, I began to see the truth I had always suspected was hidden just beneath the surface of my familiar life. With my newfound clarity that I was existence, I began to look for the layers and deconstruct it. I found there were three spaces to my existence: the third space of the “outside world”, the second space of my “inner world”, and the first space all around me. I labeled them thirdself, secondself, and firstself, respectively, to denote that they are all, in fact, me. And rather than God being a point within my head and behind my eyes, it is actually all around me at all times: my firstself.
My firstself is the largest container of all; I experience it as my constant presence, or being. I experience it as space all around my body. This sense of being never goes away; when my eyes are open, I sense it behind my head, on the top of my head, and all around my field of vision. When I close my eyes, it immediately fills in the space where my field of vision was. No matter what, I sense that I am. Within my firstself is my secondself. A chamber of thoughts, ideas, feelings and desires. And amid these internal manifestations is an oval-shaped panel within which my thirdself is continuously painted and refreshed, like a screen.
My firstself is vast and endless, and contains the entirety of the world I project, and the inner world I imagine. I can see my firstself at any moment by simply feeling the empty vastness behind my head and collecting just outside the periphery of my field of vision. When I close my eyes, this vastness fills in all the spaces and fully encloses me. I am not a person in a world holding a spark of God in my eyes; I am God experiencing an illness as personhood.
…