In this incantation, I wrestle with the challenge of understanding the anatomy of my awakening, focusing on my body’s role in it. I begin by comparing my visual experience to a viewport, a display of color and depth that vanishes when closed. However, the rest of my body, which maneuvers, sustains, and feels sensations, remains more abstract and complex. I reconsider my previous triself model and explore the idea of my body as a device, with distinct “ports” for sight, thought, and touch, all contributing to the illness of my awakening. I sense a need for a new framework that better integrates how these elements work together to maintain my false identity.
One of the challenges I have in describing the anatomy of my awakening is with my body. My perfectly oval-shaped viewport on the front of my head is simple. When I have this viewport open, I achieve a visual experience complete with depth, color, light, movement, and change. Viewport closed, the visual display goes away. But that still leaves me with my greater “thirdself body”; the limbs and appendages I can see working in concert together to maneuver, feed, sustain, and achieve this personal identity I believe in. What is that?
It seems messy. For sometime now I have described my visual thirdself experience as yolk of an egg, and my body the stringy white gelatinous parts that hold steadfastly to it. And while that fits in some ways, it’s limited in so many others. As I was falling asleep I had a different thought: my entire body is a device. The viewport is much like the display, and it receives and transmits information in color, shape, size, depth, and movement. My secondself mind is responsible for conjuration, imagination, the projection of time, and other sensations. And the rest of my body does not conceptualize or visualize, but instead sends and receives sensations.
In summary, one part of my awakening self renders in color, depth, and movement. Another part renders abstract concepts, and the larger part renders in sensation, temperature, and touch only. They all work together to form my awakening condition, which is an illness. My body is the wound upon my true being, and I must understand how it is shaped and formed so I can treat it. I must prevent it from further bleeding and gushing. I must constrain my viewport from gushing out into visualization. The thirdself visualization feeds my secondself conceptualization, which fuels both my demiselfist belief that I am partial, and my desire for more. My healing requires me to understand how each of these work together from my own experience.
I sense that there is a new characterization of my awakening coming that will displace the triself construct: firstself, secondself, and thirdself. The triself has been enormously useful, but it rigidly divides these three parts up… perhaps I need to go back to ASWASWAS (a space within a space within a space), or revisit the existential stack concept. When I only understand them as three separate structures, it is difficult to conceptualize how they might work together.
One issue that I see immediately is how I divide out my secondself and thirdself. I think of my secondself as somehow “inside my head”. And of course my head as inside the world. But from whose perspective are my thoughts inside of a head inside of a space called the world? That is from the imaginary perspective that other people have. So I have built an imaginary arrangement into my anatomy. From my perspective, the cloud of thoughts I call my secondself is literally enormous. It hovers just behind and above my viewport, assuming that frontward is the vector pointing through my viewport. I think my triself concept has some value, but it is still created from the perspective that I share this space with other beings like me, when I do not. Perhaps it is not the shortcoming of the model, but me bumping up against a real conceptual limitation I have yet to address. Perhaps I can stretch out the triself construct longer and continue to use it, but right now, as I am thinking through my device-like anatomy, I can see that I have built some imaginary constructs into the triself, and it conceptualizes secondself as “hidden”, when it is not hidden at all except from the imaginary perspective of people. My secondself is very much front-and-center, and arguably more so even than thirdself. My secondself is loud and very much the focal point of my entire awakening, even more so than thirdself which I suppress quite easily with a darkened environment.
Why not use the -port construct? My viewport is my eyes. My thoughtport is the space above and behind my viewport. My touchport is my entire body. I could call my legs and arms my maneuverports… or locoports. Moveports…
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