May 30, 2022. Prior to this post, I have used the word “uniself” to refer to my state of identifying as a single person among others. In this post, I have officially replaced the word “uniself” with “demiself”, which is a more accurate description of the state.
Emanation is my inward projection of the second place upon awakening. The second place unfurls into my secondself and thirdself as I open my eyes and embrace my identity as a person in the world. The firstself, from where my second and thirdselves emanate, never moves or changes during this process.
I spend most of my awakening in demiself believing that I am one of the billions of individual people currently roaming a planet in the middle of a solar system in a single galaxy among billions of others. In demiself, I accept that my own direct experience is limited and that there are other experiences simultaneously happening that I cannot directly conceive or perceive.
In demiself, I can divide my experience into two parts:
- The sensational. The complete set of all my direct experiences in my moment, including my secondself sensations, as well as imaginary past and future impressions, as well as non-existent scenes.
- The imaginary. The subset of my experiential beliefs, suppositions, and convictions.
These two components of my experience divide cleanly along a line. For example, right now I can see my dog sitting at my feet. But I can remember and imagine him being outside an hour ago. My dog is simultaneously in all these “places”:
- He is a thirdself form at my feet.
- He is a collection of secondself forms as imagined past events, qualities, feelings, characteristics, and imagined future events.
The form of my dog is replicated across my second and thirdselves and there is an imagined continuity between all these forms. Formal continuity allows me to see beyond a structurally persistent form gliding through a linear timeline, and instead see forms as discrete shapes that bubble inward through my second and thirdselves.
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