Despite all my progress toward understanding this awakening experience, I have maintained a critically detrimental delusion: the difference between secondself and thirdself. I could refer to my secondself as my internal world that is private to me, and my thirdself as an outer space that I share with all people and beings. The former as subjective, and the latter as objective.
But this assertion is inconsistent with the first principle: that nothing extends beyond the surface, and existence is constrained to my moment and awareness. If my experience is the sum total of all that exists, then there is no divide between my own perspective of my “inner world” and the imaginary perspectives of other people of the “outer world”. Since I am the only conceiver of my secondself and perceiver of my thirdself, there is no subjective-objective dichotomy.
To believe that people are similar to me, with their own pockets of experience hidden from me is to break the first principle. I can grant people experiential elasticity; if I engage and probe, they will give the appearance of depth beyond the surface of my moment. However, the moment I withdraw from the probe, that pocket will disappear as surely as if it was never there to begin with. There are no other beings like me with different perspectives of the same thing. In other words, the man in front of me in the airport is not experiencing the same environment from his perspective, for his perspective does not exist as a separate and distinct thing outside of my direct conceptual or perceptual experience.
Does his perspective exist? It can exist within my secondself imagination, or if I probe. Everything I need to manifest his perspective — either as an imaginary construct in my secondself, or as a thirdself construct if I were to coax it out of him — resides within the surface of my moment.
I can create subsurface depth by imagining it in secondself. In my moment I can see someone on the street and imagine they have a different slightly altered physical perspective of the street we both share. But to assume that perspective precedes and endures after my imagination of it violates the first principle. That person’s perspective exists only momentarily and within my secondself. It does not exist anywhere else.
There is no divide between secondself and thirdself. That one is internal and subjective to me while the other is objective and shared is a delusion for there are no other equivalent observers of thirdself. I can imagine depth within the people I experience in my awakening in the same way I can anthropomorphize a rock or a car. But there is only one observer, one projector, one creator, one author. That is me.
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