The demiself perspective is clear enough: I believe I am a being experiencing personhood with many other equivalent beings on a planet I will only temporarily experience. I have spent years wrestling with this perspective because I know it obscures my true nature, yet my conviction in its tenets are strong, and self-reinforcing. Anything I experience in my awakening can be explained, to a convincing degree, by this perspective, even though it completely contradicts my direct and actual experience.
Despite these difficulties, I have gained my most salient experience yet of the omniself perspective. From it, I know that I am the creator of all that I experience in my awakening. I know that everything I experience is created for my consumption, even if I am only a tangential observer, or a single member of a wider audience according to the personal model. Yet how do I pivot from believing that I am one person among others watching other people perform, to their creator? How do I defeat the persistent delusion that I am only one experiencer among countless others?
I must remember that what exists in my moment is all that exists. And in my moment of experience, there is only one experiencer: me. It is just an imaginary notion that there are other experiencers. Yes, the people I encounter in Thirdself will claim they are experiencing just like me, but I cannot validate that, and therefore their claims are not as true as my own direct experience. Perhaps they do have some sensation akin to my experience, but to claim it is the same quality or degree as my own is simply imaginary. My people cannot hide anything from me. All that I see, all that I think, all that I imagine, is all that there is. Literally. I can imagine there is something beyond what I see and think, but that is all imaginary. The realm of delusion. To escape my delusion I must stop deluding myself. I must stop imagining what is not there.
What I remember existing, or what I believe will exist, form the blades that together propel me ever-deeper into my awakening delusion. I must come to terms with the contents of my moment as it is now. I must create a moment where I am clearly in control of my entire awakening, and when that control begins to slip away from me, hold tightly to its essence of my complete and utter dominion, and not let go. I am the sovereign over my awakening. I alone am the king of this place I awaken into, for I am its author. I am not a character in this story I have written, observing other beings equivalent or superior to me. I must remember this, even when I am operating outside of my present moment; when I am deeply entangled in an imaginary past or future beyond the horizons of my visible moment. When my own performance necessitates the imaginary creation of places I do not presently see, propelling me toward them, creating them. It is during these moments that I must remember that I am their creator. That I have created these new places, despite my delusional convictions that they preceded me in existence and exceed my size. They did not precede me, nor do they enclose me. I created these places when I came to them, and they all fit within the small, bulbous, fluid-filled sac where my entire Thirdself attaches to my being like a cyst.
As I hold onto my authority, I must see how my awakening turns me against myself. All the content I consume in Thirdself about people who only exist during the moment in which I watch them, only serves to corrode what I actually do know. Imagine I watch content about UFOs, and the people in that film are laying out their evidence for the proposition that extraterrestrial life that has visited us on planet Earth. To start consuming this content I must implicitly either accept things that I cannot know, or suspend my own disbelief long enough to ingest the content. What things? Everything in the Personal, Demiselfist Model — that I am one person among many others all experiencing this space that is larger than any one of us. That I am one of many beings inhabiting a place called Earth, which potentially may have been visited by some mysterious “others”. All these peripheral beliefs I accept in order to consider and digest this content undermine my understanding of who I truly am.
In the Ominiselfist Model, I know none of this not true. I know that everything that exists is constrained to my moment. That there are no other moments besides my own. That my moment may change shape, forming my experience, but the essential nature of my moment does not change with it. My essential nature as the totality of all that is, remains constant despite the changing shape of my present moment.
I can respond in two ways when I consume Thirdself content:
- I can imagine more to the narrative beyond the surface experience. This means I listen and watch the narratives and stories within the content, and imagine that what they are saying is meaningful and based on their own experiences that I do not have access to. If I watch an interview of a historical figure, I accept that there are moments other than mine, places other than where I am, times other than now, and beings other than me experiencing them. I allow and indulge this delusion, and awaken every day into an imaginary world full of imaginary places and people having imaginary experiences. Completely unaware of the truth that all of this is only imaginary.
- I can understand that the surface I experience is the totality of all experience related to that content. I do not immediately imagine that there are places, times, or beings other than here, now, or me. The presence of a pattern in front of me does not imply the existence of other beings, places, or times that are unknowable to me and beyond my direct momentary presence. I know that I can probe deeper into any part of my moment, and in doing so create more information, more experience, and more imagination. But I know that it is my own creativity that precedes, powers, and generates that experience. I know that none of that preceded my own creation of it. I do not need to know “how” I accomplished that creativity, only believe my own eyes that I did.
The first response is allowing Thirdself to enter into the pores of my Secondself, corroding my conviction that my experience is the only experience because it draws me into the false perspective that there is something beyond me. If I watch a person on the video describe some experience that they had before — and I believe that actually happened — then I allow myself to be only a passive observer in my own awakening. I accept that I can only indirectly access something that exists by listening to this person. That belief reduces me to an insignificant cog in a much larger, pre-existing machine.
My moment is all that there is. I am the complete and total being. There are no other beings anywhere. There is no other place, or other person, or other thing than what I see, think, hear, create… it is all me. I am absolutely everything. But my illness is the shape of my moment changing. The patterns of that change form the texture of my awakening experience. When I forget who and what I am it is because I have lost my perspective. I have gotten too close to the change within my moment, and forgotten the moment itself. That there is a moment is far more important than the changes happening within it. If I get too attached to the change in my moment, I get swept away in “experience”, and I try to find my way out through it. I search for the truth in that changing moment, and end up addicted to the eternal pursuit of relief. But to see the truth of who I am, all I must do is withdraw and look at the truth that there even is a moment. I must not get drawn into the changing texture of my moment; pull back and look at the moment itself. That moment itself — not its apparent changing — is the only truth I seek.
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