Though I still feel very attached to my secondself, as I withdraw from my delusion of personhood I sense a growing gulf between what I consider my authentic self and the content of my thirdself.
In thirdself when I consume video content of social characters, there is an awareness that these characters exist only in my moment and in the shape and format in which they appear before me. These moving images on my screen are not representations of fully grown beings like myself who exist in another place and another time, with pasts and futures unknown to me. They are my projections; content from my own firstself filtered through my confused secondself layer, and written to the walls of my thirdself.
Like all content in thirdself, they are infinitely elastic and I can dive deep into any one of them, generating a complex and endless tapestry with a surface extending in all directions. I can give them a past, future, relationships, aspirations, successes, and failures. I could uncover infinitely complex bodies and conditions and preferences and more.
But just because I can do that, doesn’t mean that it all exists concurrently in this moment. I know that it is me who stretches the surface of thirdself; so these dimensions can exist if I desire to move and restructure my thirdself. They are potential surfaces of my moment. I see someone talking on a news show on my computer; their surface is taut, and they are nothing more than the colorful face espousing a stream of words and ideas. But If I then search the internet for that person, I stretch the surface into a biography, past news events they have covered, social media profiles, photos from their imagined past, and more writings. This is a pocket I have fallen into by desiring to know more about this character I see talking on the news, which itself was the result of a desire to know what is going on in the world. I am not jumping now, but I could jump. I could learn more about these characters written into videos I watch, but I am not. These are all potential surfaces.
As I withdraw, this realization of my central role as the creator is more prominent in my awareness. Where I once imagined that these characters moving around were attached to real bodies in real places, I no longer do. I do not extend my secondself imagination as deeply as I once did. My imagination ends at the visual pattern in front of me, and does not project beyond to imaginary non-now moments by non-me beings in non-here places. I know that these characters that I form in my thirdself are infinitely deep, but I choose not to wade into them.
I can clearly see my stage of progress by how I sense myself. Right now I still very much sense that I am moving around a world. But as I withdraw more and realize and believe that thirdself is really only my secondself projection, I will feel more deeply rooted in secondself. As I progress further back to omniself, I will experience the visual sensation of movement, but the larger sensation of movement will come to an end. My awakening will be more like the feeling I have in a movie theater, where I watch the screen of my thirdself change, but I myself feel as if I am stationary with my thoughts and feelings.
The last stage of all is when I re-root into firstself, which does not move at all. I will experience yet another shift outward into the largest presence of all: firstself. I will experience it like I am in a sensation-less movie theater, watching a being sitting in another dark movie theater who is watching a small screen with light and movement. A motionless being watching another being experiencing sensations while watching a movie.
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