Time remains a challenge to conceptualize because it is such a critical component of my awakening experience. Everything I do here in my awakening is built around my desire for things and experiences I do not presently have. Therefore I feel compelled to change secondself and thirdself to acquire and achieve those things, creating the sensation of movement. Movement disturbs my moment, and those disturbances remain as impressions I experience as memories.
But all those experiences that I remember — those happened, right? No, they did not. Nothing happened. Everything is happening now, in this one single moment. That memory of sitting in front of my cottage yesterday did not happen; however, my experience of it is happening right now. Yes, there is change happening, but no there is no linear timeline connecting these events to one another. How do I explain this?
Think of a flag whipping in the wind, firmly secured to a static, unbending flagpole. I am that flagpole. I do not move. More specifically, firstself is that flagpole. The part of the flag nearest to and attached to the flagpole is my secondself, and the part furthest away, moving around the most, is thirdself. As the flag of secondself and thirdself violently flutters and undulates, the flagpole of firstself remains unchanged.
I must imagine myself as the flagpole looking outward at the fluttering flag. Yes, the flag is moving; my secondself and thirdself move. But my core firstself does not move.
Another way to re-conceptualize the sensation of time and change is to imagine that I am physically spinning around in circles like a child in a park. I am disoriented, but I do not stop. I cannot stop. My spinning grows ever more energetic. I am sick and in pain. I am confused. But I do not stop.
This is what happens when I awaken. I awaken from a state of peace into a disorienting and largely uncontrollable, self-induced spin. Though I do not stop spinning, I do eventually find a balance by creating patterns and regularity. Morning gives way to daytime and eventually evening. Winter gives way to spring, then summer, fall, and returns to winter. Waking gives way to sleeping. Every single aspect of my awakening is an artifact of my spinning around in circles, from the feelings I experience, to the words I create and use, to the people and relationships I manifest.
I am literally spinning from the moment I awaken. Everything that I experience in secondself and thirdself is a blurred representation of my true self. Though I conceive of parts of my awakening as permanent and fixed, existing independently of me. They are not. For example, I imagine that my cottage exists in a fixed state independent of me. That it is a certain height, width, and shape regardless of whether I am perceiving it. I imagine that I move around a durable and permanent space perceiving a fixed form that retains its properties independent of my own perception. But that is not true. I do not move around space perceiving a fixed cottage; I move the cottage around me, distorting and shaping it in both secondself and thirdself. I am the flagpole, and the cottage is the flag.
To understand time, I must accept that the thirdself world moves around me; I do not move around it. When objects appear to change in shape and nature as I move or imagine from a new perspective, I am not moving around them in a fixed space; I am bending and distorting them. There is only one perspective: mine. I am the flagpole and everything in my awakening reality is the flag whipping around me. I only have to reimagine their nature in terms of how they are to me, not how I am relative to them. When I move around a room, it moves with me; I do not move within it.
Once I begin to conceive time in this way, I also begin to perceive myself spinning. I become that child spinning around in the park, and the constant change around me makes me dizzy and uncomfortable. I feel a headache and even nausea. I feel a slight pull to the right side of my head because that is the direction in which I spin. I have suddenly become aware of my own spinning action. I had forgotten that I was spinning and had found a balance that allowed me to stabilize my awakening, nullifying some of the more unpleasant effects of awakening. Once I regain awareness that I am not a temporary individual moving around a larger space full of static and fixed objects, but rather a being trapped in a painful spin, I can make sense of myself.
My memories are not impressions of a fixed space I move around, but rather their contortions and distortions as they move around me. My cottage changes shape not because I am moving around it, but because it is moving around me. My eyes are not openings into a larger space; they are the anchors that connect my secondself to my thirdself, and when I move them they move thirdself, like flag ties would move a flag. I am the fixed flagpole, and the world I gaze upon is actually my flag rippling and distorting in the wind I have created by my movements.
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