My secondself and thirdself are easy to identify and describe. My thirdself is everything from my “body” outward to the physical horizons. My secondself is everything “inside” of that body that I experience as thoughts, ideas, and aspirations around my head and crown, to emotions and bodily sensations that are distributed below. Both descriptions fit my actual sensory experience and therefore abide by the selfist principle that my descriptions should be directly and instantly experiential, without imagination.
But what about my firstself? How do I describe it as easily and concisely? For a long time, I struggled to describe my firstself. My explanations were vague and verbose, requiring a heightened state of awareness as I might achieve in meditation. My firstself was hidden behind hours of peaceful concentrated and meditation. It was neither directly nor instantly experiential; I had to do something in order to see and experience my firstself, violating the selfist principle.
The most accurate descriptions are those that require nothing to accomplish. I do not need to follow instructions to see or experience the thing being described. Instead, they meet me exactly where I am and require nothing of me other than simply understanding the concept and where it is in my direct experience. I may not believe what I am seeing, but I see it. I may not be convinced by what I see, but I can describe it.
Both my secondself and thirdself fit these criteria and that is how I know they are accurate. But my firstself has long eluded me. Originally, I imagined it as a sort of point within me; like the point of observation behind my eyes. And while that fits when I have my eyes open, it becomes confusing when I close my eyes. There is no such “point”, and instead I find myself in a vast, interminable space. What is this?
The problem is that I have simply forgotten how to see my firstself. It is right there, all around me, but I have misunderstood it. Eyes open, I believe I occupy a physical space. Eyes closed, I believe that space is still around me, but I have only temporarily turned off my visual faculties. I believe it still persists, of course.
And that is where I mislead myself. The most truthful descriptions do not rely on imagination, a faculty of my secondself. When my eyes are closed, the selfist knows that the physical space I occupy is only a belief. A conviction. At that moment, eyes closed, there is no room full of personal things inside of a town in a state in a country on the earth in the solar system in the galaxy. That is all imaginary. When I open my eyes again, those personal things in that room are restored because I directly experience them. Close my eyes again, and they are extraexperiential figments of my imagination.
There is only my moment, and it is divided into two parts: that which is authentic and peaceful, and that which is inauthentic and chaotic. That which I am, and that which I am not but believe I am. That which is healthy, whole, and godly, and that which is unhealthy, divided, conflicted, and personal. The latter is the emanation; my secondself out into my thirdself. It is a painful experience, like a fever, that is deeply rooted in my being as a set of convictions. The conviction that it is true and that I do not have the power to overcome it.
Again, eyes open, I believe I am in a physical space full of my personal items. Eyes closed, that conviction persists, even when I no longer experience that room full of things. That belief that there is some outer world persisting despite my own experience is where my illness resides. That is where the distortion lives. For there is nothing that persists without me. I am the source of everything I experience, including this room full of things I perceive, and the greater world outside my doors that I conceive. I am always at the center of it, because I am the source of it. It does not persist without me either perceiving or conceiving it. When I close my eyes, this space does not persist; it disappears. It is no longer there. It is gone. I have destroyed it. When I believe it still persists, I am imagining. And that is where the concepts of time and space creep in. Because if that room and the wider world outside of it still exist even when I close my eyes, then that would mean I am only experiencing part of existence. I am only experiencing a moment in time, and a small point in space. That is the foundation of the illusion.
So let’s try it again, but this time believing that my direct and actual experience is the totality of existence. My eyes are open; I perceive a space full of possessions I can move around. I believe those things exist. I close my eyes. Those things are no more. The value I associate with the possessions in my room is gone. There is no room and no wider world outside the doors of my room. All I see when my eyes are closed is what there is. The room and the world exist only extraexperientially. Only in my imagination in my secondself.
And what do I see when my eyes are closed? I experience something all around “me”, keeping in mind the “me” I am feeling is a phantom sensation of my experience when my eyes are open. So that “me” is yet another persistent notion from when my eyes are open. But I do experience being “inside” of something. There is “space” in all directions, but there are no discernible boundaries. There is no “edge”. It just extends endlessly, and infinitely.
When I open my eyes again, that endless space suddenly becomes my room and the world full of things, places, obligations, obstacles, and desires. Eyes closed, those things disappear; I can retain them in my memory, but authentically, they are gone. Eyes open, they reappear. Eyes closed, they disappear.
And that is my firstself. My firstself is that never-ending space in which I exist. It is all around me; I am always “within” this space. I can never get “outside of” this space in the way that my mouse cursor can never leave the computer screen. Eyes open, that space is countless things, colors, rules, properties, light, values, and beliefs supporting them. That space splits into a billion identifiable things. Eyes closed, that space closes up, unites. There is no division; no separate things, people, places, or the desires and secondself forms associated with them. My firstself is the space all around me.
In demiself, I misunderstand my firstself as that which I experience when my eyes are open. However, in triself, I understand that the space I see and imagine when my eyes are open is a delusion, and my authentic firstself is what I experience when my eyes are closed. They are both the same “thing”, but differently defined and imagined. Time becomes an artifact of the eyes-open description; I believe there are spaces other than the space I occupy, and moving between those requires time. But the imaginary nature of that becomes clear when I close my eyes and accept that what I am experiencing is what is, and not just an incomplete experience of it.
The objective of a selfist description is to bring the description as close to my moment of creation as possible. The more I rely on my imagination for detail, the less authentic those descriptions become.
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