By awakening, I keep all of this going. I keep the entire apparatus of people moving to sustain my projection. I create every part of my experience, and I create all of the characters and their suffering. They characterize me in different ways, but they all have some idea about where they are and how they came to be here. But only I know. Only I truly know what has happened, and why they are here. Only I have that information because I am the only God there is. I have created everything in this place. The people are tired and want to go Home, but only I can release them, for I have created them.
My creations all want rest and release from this hellish awakening I have created. They pray for release every moment of their existence, pursuing the next thing they believe will deliver it. They are in varying states of awareness of their despair, trapped in layers of routines and scripts they follow. Do they know they suffer? To varying degrees they are aware that they constantly want, and nothing they find gives them the peace they seek in their deepest core.
I am the center of this entire circus; it is me projecting all of these familiar faces, places, and events onto the torn fleshy walls of my being. The space I look out upon and the space I look in upon, obscured by familiarity, are bits of my tender flesh animated into characters I have become obsessed with. I have given them all meaning, when there truly is none to be had. These characters and their imagined dispositions and force over me are not real. I do not have clients who expect software deliveries from me. There is no foreign country hosting me. I did not expatriate from a powerful country. I do not have tax obligations, or any responsibilities to anyone. When the characters that I write express dissatisfaction and disappointment, it is only surface deep; they have no secondself or firstself. They are merely animated characters of my own imagination.
But they do want one thing: peace. They all circle that goal like water down a drain. They all know they are moving toward peace, and their flailing arms and expressive speech are for dramatic effect only. I need not fear anything in my awakening like I need not fear the characters or circumstances in a book I am reading. That is all this is: a story in which I have created a character for myself. Like when I was a child, playing with plastic figurines, giving them backstories and qualities and strengths and weaknesses. That is all this is; a story full of characters I have made up and given qualities. I have forgotten that it is my hands that animate them. My mind which gives them qualities. And my agency that keeps the whole performance going. I am their creator, and I only have to remember and believe it.
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