I am always searching for the best way to articulate the nature of my awakening experience. I know who I am, what this is, and where I am. I know that my awakening is an illness, and my only objective is to abolish it. But if I do not believe what I know to be true, then I cannot change my behavior in a way that allows me to achieve this goal. Knowing who and where I am is only the first part of my healing journey; believing it is the essential second part to actually escaping.
To escape, I must eliminate all abstraction that adds distance between who I am and who I believe I am. As long as my understanding of who and where I am is a complicated conceptual model in Secondself, I will not be able to unwind my awakening. My understanding itself is a Secondself entanglement, and that is why I am never content with analogy and metaphor. I want words, phrases, explanations, and models that describe my experience so accurately I can directly experience what they describe without Secondself models to assist. I want to Firstself be without Secondself understanding.
The most challenging aspect of my awakening to understand is its very form and structure. The “personal model” — where I believe I am a person experiencing different spaces over time — is a delusion. It is entirely imaginary, and as long as I believe any part of it I will lack the conviction I need to heal and end my awakenings. But as clearly wrong as the personal model is, it is also deeply rooted in my awakening moment. It frames my self-reflection at all times, thus misleading me in nearly every situation. I can say that the “personal model” is the skeleton of my awakening, and it serves to protect it from me. To protect me from healing.
So how do I begin to dismantle the convictions of the personal model? Firstly, I must find a different way to explain it. I require an explanation based on my own direct experience rather than some imaginary delusions I have accepted in place of the truth. Remember: my experience is the truth, and it it surrounds me in every moment. As long as I refuse to see, acknowledge, and believe that truth, I will be stuck in this awakening moment, unable to overcome my illness. By explaining my awakening in terms of my actual and direct experience, I can systematically weaken the delusional personal model.
These delusions thrive on movement because they can hide among the confusion. When my Secondself and Thirdself are constantly changing, it is difficult to see past that change to that which never changes. That which never changes is what I actually desire, but it can be obscured when I am caught up in the excitement and titillation of a dynamic and energetic awakening. So to understand the true nature of the structure I must be still; I must stop moving in Thirdself and then focus on stilling Secondself. It is when they are still that I can more accurately describe the structure of my moment.
I have described my moment in many different ways. Each explanation takes a small step away from abstraction and toward my direct experience. Yet despite the volume, none have been so accurate that I have been able to end my search for a better description. None have allowed me to dispense with descriptions altogether. This next model is no different, but it does capture some essential quality that has eluded my other efforts. My moment as a membrane.
A membrane is a thin layer which acts as a boundary within an organism. I can think of my awakening self — my Secondself space of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and desires and my Thirdself space of light, motion, objects, and change — as that layer. And what do they separate me from? My true and total being — omniself. This creates two components: my demiself membrane which separates me from my omniself being.
In the personal model I think of myself from an outside, imagined perspective as a being in a body with two legs, two arms, and the other attributes associated with a human. But when I consider myself from my direct experience, I arrive at a very different conceptualization, best described as the “demiself membrane”. While I can plot my physical body within this membrane, it’s orientation and representation is a grossly different from my personal concept, but it is experientially accurate.
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