I am the totality of everything there is, and everything my moment contains is all there is. That means that my moment contains everything that exists. There is nothing other than or beyond what I experience. However I am so accustomed to thinking there is something beyond my direct experience that I find it challenging to re-conceptualize totality as being contained within it. I need an incantation that can reset my perspective to this essential truth.
There is a spectrum of potency to my existence. On one end is that which is most potent, and on the other the most impotent. The most potent is what I directly experience and I might call my own or myself. The least potent stretches to the edges of my imagination, and which I would call not me or not my own or indirect.
But if existence is constrained to my experience, then how can the impotent be true? I imagine that my mother — an impotent feature within my experience because she exists in my moment as a thought only — is actually somewhere other than here with me, existing as a full fleshy form. But that is not true. My mother exists exactly as I experience her: she exists as an incorporeal secondself feature in my present moment. I can transform her into a corporeal person with a lot of effort, but that potentiality does not impact her present form now as an idea.
How to think of this? I can think of my moment as the collection of all secondself and thirdself features in my awakening experience, projected on the insides of a spherical chamber. In my present moment (my moment is always present), my secondself is projecting a number of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Thoughts of my upcoming lunch, and a meeting I have before that. And my thirdself features are this laptop computer, my hands typing on it, and all the visual stimuli in the room I am in. Combined, these form the surface of my moment. They are the things that I experience as being here, now.
Below the surface, however, is the subsurface of my moment. These are the features that I believe in secondself are true and existent, but do not directly experience in thirdself. For example, if I look at a picture of a farm in South Dakota, the surface is the collection of shapes forming the image. The subsurface, however, is the collection if beliefs that there actually is such a place existing concurrently that I am not directly experiencing. The subsurface is what I assume to be existent outside of my direct experience. It is everything beyond the direct moment of my experience. If I am watching a movie, the surface is the shapes moving around on my screen; the subsurface is the meaning of those shapes and the beliefs I harbor that those shapes represent human beings that actually exist somewhere beyond my moment. The subsurface would also include my own self-identity as a human and member of the same class of beings as those people I imagine to exist.
In thirdself I can only experience the surface; but it is in secondself where I experience the subsurface. My subsurface thoughts, beliefs, and desires generate the sensation of depth, change, and movement within my thirdself. To destroy thirdself I must release the subsurface.
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