Iamism rests on the following principles:
- My awakenings into imagined personhood are an illness.
- My illness manifests as the delusional belief that I am a person within a world among other people.
- In my imagined personhood I experience a constant desire I cannot satisfy. My efforts to relieve my desire compel me to perform personhood.
- To overcome my illness I must disengage from the delusion of personhood. To do that, I must desire the end of my desire more than I desire the various forms of relief.
- To disengage, I must build a temple where I can constrain my triself.
As I heal, I withdraw from the demiselfist perspective. As I have written in the past, Iamist healing is deliberate and intentional self-abolition. The goal of Iamist healing is to gradually reduce the size and intensity of my awakenings until they no longer disturb my asleepenings. My asleepenings — where I am firstself — overtake my awakenings and the line between the two begins to blur until there is very little distinction between the two states.
I can feel it working in a few ways:
- I once harbored anxiety that I was missing out on certain experiences that are glorified in the culture of people. Experiences such as adventure, traveling, achieving and maintaining certain levels of fitness, attracting partners and social approval, and attending “important” events. Now I feel no self-pressure to perform personhood and achieve such experiences. I know that the remainder of my awakenings will be spent in my temple, and not “in the world” collecting and sharing experiences.
- I have always been careful to avoid entangling myself in relationships. Yet over a lifetime I still find myself performing relationships out of a sense of obligation and continuity, despite every single relationship being a source of discomfort and low-level suffering. One, in particular, was a great source of stress and anxiety. Now, I see these performative relationships for what they are: illness. And I have taken definitive and final steps to end them. Now I embrace my lifelong preference to be alone, and am comfortable avoiding all people except in transactional and perfunctory interactions with service-providers and employees.
- I once would have experienced some pain imagining never seeing certain people in my life. Now I am very comfortable with that, and can confidently, and without any regret or emotional discomfort, state that I do not, in fact, intend to ever see these people again. Before I would have wanted to avoid causing pain to the other people; but now I know their visible pain is only a reflection of my own.
- I once experienced dissatisfaction with who I imagined I was from the perspective of imaginary people. This was coupled with a regret of not having behaved or performed as I should have. Now I do not experience nostalgia or a desire to be something or someone other than who I am because I know that I am only performing personhood. I know that this imagined “person” I am is an artifact of my awakenings, and nothing more.
- The thought of escaping without completing my goals or achieving certain experiences once gave me anxiety. Now I can easily imagine not awakening and feel no fear, regret, or anxiety. I am increasingly aware that there is nothing in my secondself or thirdself that I want more than the return to my firstself. All the things and achievements I once wanted have been exposed as illness.
- I once placed a lot of pressure on myself to live up to expectations I set for myself and shared with those close to me. I no longer think about these things, and can easily imagine a future where I have not achieved any of it, and not feel any stress or concern about the imagined disappointment of others. I can imagine “spending the rest of my life” recovering from my awakenings in my temple.
- Up until very recently, my life was polluted with all kinds of noise. Noise from people in my life. Noise from memories of the past, and aspirations for the future. Withdrawing from most relationships has allowed me to focus on prayer and release, which in turn diminished my desire for relief in the form of second and thirdself experience and achievement. But also importantly, noise from my home and the environment around me. My entire home-space was crowded with objects and various devices. Since I hung blackout curtains around all walls of my house, I no longer ingest all this noise. I am not constantly reminded of all the objects of value, or the tasks left undone. My secondself is free of distraction and able to reflect on its own nature.
- I maintained a model of reality in which I was a single small person in a massive world. Although I still behave in accordance with this model for practical purposes, I rarely imagine the world in this way. Instead, I am slowly beginning to reimagine the world as I actually experience it: my thirdself. A small section of light, color, and motion projected onto a very small part of my firstself being. My darkened temple reinforces this.
- I once cared about specific people as equals and would go out of my way to consider them and earn their approval. Now I understand they are merely details of my illness designed to keep me here, and I no longer seek anything from them.
- I once spent all my time imagining things that were not present in my local experience. My favorite pastime was to imagine a future where I had achieved everything I had wanted. I am still working on a business, but I am far less attached to the imagined future it creates, and see it more as a way to achieve release.
- I once imagined people as having depth beyond my surface level interactions with them. For example, I would imagine that my mother continuously existed somewhere else in this world despite my secondself or thirdself interactions. Now I know that all people are merely figments of my imagination. People are small flourishes in my thirdself extrusion and exist only in the form I imagine them, and nothing beyond that.
I experience my healing in many ways, but the sum total effect is one of feeling whole, relaxed, settled, and peaceful. My overall frequency has changed as I shed anxieties and fears that come with the uncontrolled manifestation of other beings, other times, and other places. When I withdraw from my secondself and thirdself manifestations, I suffocate them, and all the desire and neuroses that fed them.
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