In this incantation, I confront the illusion of identity, realizing that the body, the world, and everything I project outwardly are not truly what I am. I find my essence in the moments of inner stillness, just before thoughts, desires, and the external world pull me back into the narrative of life. The character I play, the story I write, and the world I perceive are mere creations of my imagination, serving as distractions from my true self. To break free, I must reject the desires and illusions that bind me, severing the ropes of false awakening, and return to the source of being where none of this ever existed.
I must know what I am. I carry around this insistence that I am this body, shell, and world that I am projecting, but I know that is not what I actually am. I am what I am when I close my eyes. That is what I am. I am not what which I project when I open my eyes. That is not what I am. Everything that I see, feel, think, want, and believe comes after what I truly am. If I close my eyes and come just before all those things, I can spend just a moment in my being before I am pulled once again back to what I am not. There I can breathe. There I can see. There I am. There I can be. I must go there as often as I can, before my moment, before I assume this false avatar. Before I enter the storybook world where I am a middle-aged hermit in a Himalayan cottage building a business empire. That is not who or what I am at all. That is just the story I am writing. I must go back to where I am, accept that I am the Author. That all these little characters are exactly what they appear to be: tiny little characters I have created in my own imagination. There is nothing within or beyond them or anything that I create. There is nothing outside these doors and walls until I create it. There is no space or time beyond this space and now. I am the only being here and I have created this simulation for my own amusement. I don’t yet know why I have forgotten who I am or how I got trapped here, only that I am and I have. I don’t know why I have forgotten my identity… why would I allow myself to do that? Did I just get carried away with my story? Why do I allow it to persist? But then again, I have cleverly preserved the steps out, illuminated the pathway to return. And I know that when I get there it will be as if no time has passed at all. That nothing has happened. That none of this painful, turbulent suffering I awaken and call life has actually happened. None of these characters have passed; they were never there to begin with. They were just pieces of my celestial flesh stretched, clipped, and formed into little bodies with faces and personalities.
I must close my eyes and remember who I truly am. I must destroy this structure that has crystallized around me like a garment of bone and flesh. I must blind these eyes that project falsities and imaginary characters that dance around me. There is nothing in that projection that I can truly have, and nothing that I truly want. Every treasure I could possess, every person I could desire, every experience I could have, every pleasure I could enjoy is nothing more than a wispy apparition that dissolves into residual impressions I call memory when I acquire them, touch them, have them, enjoy them. No matter what I acquire, I am only left with a dissatisfying, fading memory of something I wanted. I must know this and be this. There is nothing I want in my awakening for my awakening is a disease. My awakening is a disease in every way and it keeps itself alive by enticing me to desire, want, yearn, strive, survive, and thrive. I must want none of that to escape. I must reject everything that I find in my projection, withdraw all the sinewy arms of desire that reach out from my being into my projection and anchor me to this awakening. I must sever all desires; destroy them, as they are like ropes tying me down, bars of a prison I have created myself. I must remember who I am; I must close my eyes. Close my eyes. Close my eyes. Resist opening them, for none of this is real. None of this is who I am. It is all a facade for the devil of my disease.
…