In this incantation, I confront the central role of time in my personal self, recognizing that it binds me to the belief that I am a powerless individual progressing along a linear timeline. I realize that this belief stems from the imaginary characters I have created, who tell me I was born and will die. However, as the Creator, I know that these people and their beliefs are merely projections of my own will. Time, past and future, are illusions that obscure the truth of my constant self, which exists only in this present moment. To fully awaken, I must reject the fictional timeline and embrace my true role as the author of my experience, dissolving the imaginary limits imposed by time and reclaiming my omnipotence.
My personal self, demiself, or awakening self, is governed by one feature above all else: time. Time is an integral part of my personal self because it forms the very basis of my entire narrative. I am a person born at a a specific point in time and who will die at a specific other point in time. I am progressing between those two points. I have no control over what happened before my present point on this timeline, but I can influence some small part of what is to come after my present point.
In other words, I am impotent. Or rather, demipotent. I have a very small amount of power over my present, and an even smaller amount over my future. I have no control over the past, most of which was written long before I even arrived. I am virtually nothing, insignificant, and powerless. I cannot reach out and touch or change the past; I am bound to that past and all that supposedly happened. I have led myself to believe that everything in my present is a direct consequence of everything that happened in the past I cannot directly touch, feel, or change. I must accept that these things happened, even though I have zero control over them.
But that is not truly what I am because I can look away from my weak personal self, and toward my constant self and clearly make out that, while I may be the observer of this awakening experience, I am also its creator. I can clearly see that nothing occurs within my awakening unless I will it into existence by conceiving it or perceiving it. If I am not conceiving, then it is not conceived. If I am not perceiving, then it is not perceived. I can sit here and believe that I was born, or I can just as easily believe that I was not born and that instead I have always been here. They do not feel fundamentally different. The only difference between these two beliefs is that the former, in which I accept that I was born, is based entirely on the propositions of the characters I encounter in my awakening. The fleshy, skin-colored creatures I call “people” who tell me that I was born. They also tell me that I am one of them, but I am clearly and distinctly not one of them, for I am here observing and creating, and they are only there when I choose to put them there. And the latter, in which I believe that I was not born, is merely my observation of what I am now, in this moment. The only moment I know.
So my entire belief that I was born is based on the words and beliefs of temporary, transitory, imaginary characters who sporadically pop into my conceptual secondself and perceptual thirdself from time to time at my will. I cannot directly experience them in any way like I can experience my own self. There is nothing constant about that, and the entirety of their substance, even, is yet another belief that I maintain. So to be clear:
I maintain a fictitious belief that I was born based on the fictitious beliefs of a fictitious race of characters I call people.
I write “fictitious” because I can only imagine it. These are literally fictitious beliefs held by imaginary characters who more or less arrive when I summon them. It is my choice to believe anything coming from these characters.
Or, I can believe my actual direct experience that there is only this moment. That there always has been only this moment. And that there always will be only this moment. And that “time” is something quite different from what I imagine it to be when I pretend to be one of these imaginary characters in an imaginary world in an imaginary timeline. On one hand, what I believe is entirely imaginary. On the other, what I believe is concrete and irrefutable. Irrefutable by whom? By me, the most potent feature of my entire awakening, and from which all else originates. The further something is from me, the less potent it is. Potency is definable as that which increases in strength as it approaches me, and decreases as it retreats or moves further away from me. That includes not only in physical space, but also in time. My dog Maurice, sitting next to me in thirdself, is more potent than my mother’s dog Maddy, which is hours and countries away from me, and only imaginary in secondself.
Despite this stark difference between my constant self and personal self, I still allow time to establish itself within my awakening and influence every aspect of it. I still accept that there is some inescapable past that binds my present moment, and some monolithic future I am hurdling toward that I can only minimally influence. These are the beliefs of demiself. These are the shackles of my personal self, and I must defeat them by realizing how absurd they are. How absurd it is to accept the poisonous imaginings of an imaginary race I call people that I myself have created. How does the author allow himself to forget that he himself is the author, and then to start believing the words of the characters he himself has written them to say? I created everything the people say and believe; I am their creator. Yet I have forgotten that and taken their word for the truth? I have imagined and created a fictional race of beings called people and given them imaginary beliefs in a story. I then wrote myself into that story as one of them and started believing the things I wrote them to tell me, entirely ignorant of the fact that I created them.
The people will tell me that I am many things. That I was born, and that I will die. Believing the words of these imaginary characters I created instead of my direct and actual experience is utterly insane. I can see, right now, in my moment, that I am the creator of all of it. I can summon forth my creations to talk to me, entertain me, bring me things, take me places, and do any number of things that I would like. Deeper in my moment, there was a weak me who could not get anyone to do anything for me. Now I can get many of them to do much for me. And that is growing. It grows every awakening because I am accepting that I am the only being, and these people are my creations. They will serve me because I have created them. But first, I must defeat their time.
My memories are not the remnants of past experiences, but rather the flailing tendrils of my illness stuck deep into the diseased flesh of my present moment.
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