In the selfist model, my awakening is an illness. My secondself of desire-fueled thoughts, feelings, sensations, and aspirations, and my thirdself of people, objects, and places are expressions of my sickness. Together, my second- and thirdself constitute my familiar experience between my moment of awakening and asleepening.
At the most primitive level, I experience my awakening as a constant, smoldering desire and my efforts to subdue and pacify it. Desire is a fixed attribute of my moment, and ebbs and flows with the progression of my awakening. Upon awakening, I experience it as physical needs I can easily relieve. But if I do not leave my bed in the morning, it will punish me with an aching body. If I am idle too long, it erupts as anxiety and restlessness. If I linger on unpleasant thoughts, I spring for entertainment and distraction. A stressful thirdself encounter might prompt eating or socializing to soothe and comfort.
My moment is spent constantly battling my desire, calibrating and coordinating to achieve the maximum amount of relief. As my awakening progresses, it evolves additional layers which demand ever-more complicated mechanisms of relief: physiological, security, possessive, social, status, and aspirational desires emerge that are difficult and even impossible to immediately and conclusively satisfy. In many cases, I plan their satisfaction in an imagined future: for example, I work extra hours to earn cash I can put toward something I want. In other words, I must return again and again to satisfy my desires. This is how the illness digs in so deep.
At its inception, my desire manifests as the will to awaken, be here, exist, and survive. These are all aspects of that same smoldering desire at the heart of my moment. Over the course of my awakening, it extends in all dimensions: into an imagined past as regrets, pride, and continuity. Into an imagined future as goals, aspirations, and beliefs. My desire unfurls beyond my moment into an imagined past and future.
When I spend my moment on “professional activity” plying my trade, my desire extends far beyond me. As a digital consultant, I imagine a world full of countries and people I must persuade to consume my products. I believe I am resuming where I left off in my professional work on projects I believe started in an imagined past, and will extend into an imagined future. I believe there are employees, contractors, partners, and clients actively waiting on something from me. All imagined, this creates a sense of urgency that compels behavior in my moment that distracts me from the fact that I am ill. It keeps me feeding the cancer that is my awakening.
Everything that I “live for” — all my relationships, aspirations, and obligations — are manifestations of my desire. My desire seeks only to end itself and restore health to my being, but in searching for that recovery, has created this cancerous mass that clings to my being like belly fat. And it is the act of learning that creates and nourishes new vessels and arteries. Creates new people I will never meet, and events that interest, intrigue, and engage. It is my own conviction that these illusions actually are happening that ensnares me. I spend my moment trapped in this web of engagements; what is happening with the world; with people I know; with people I do not know.
From the selfist perspective, learning is the manifestation and then re-consumption of my thirdself. Through exposure to “new information”, I manifest, then solidify new manifestational emanants that I then nourish and maintain. For example, I manifest a new fear of a world war; I then actively manifest artifacts to that end — videos, articles, and ideas. I consume this content, which then interacts with the fixtures of my existing moment, twisting and transforming it. This cycle is hard to escape, because it generates new fears and anxieties, which prompt my desire to seek new relief. It goes on and on.
Learning is the method by which my illness digs in deeper and strengthens itself.
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