My true nature is hidden behind misunderstandings and false assumptions that collectively form my conviction. I can see the outlines of my true nature by re-examining some of the conditions of my existence when I awaken.
Everything I think I know is based on ideas I do not or cannot directly know. My traditional worldview is entirely based on a constellation of ideas and facts I will never be able to directly experience or validate.
I have been conditioned to disregard my own direct experience. I have accepted that my direct, personal experience is “subjective” and somehow “less real” than a consensus perspective that is entirely imagined.
I have been conditioned to seek validation where it can never be found. I was raised to seek validation externally, where my inner direct experience can never be understood by anyone else.
I actually have unconditional sovereignty over what I believe. I can believe whatever I want, indicating that my volition is a tool.
No one knows where we are, directly. No one can say where we are from direct experience. It is all based on received knowledge. This indicates that we are actually lost here.
My first and last desire every awakening are the same: to go to sleep. The very first urge I have every morning upon awakening is to sleep longer. I suppress this, awaken, but eventually yield to the same urge at the end of my day. My awakening is a just a temporary interruption of an irresistible urge to sleep.
In sleep, I am at peace. Sleep is complete and total peace. I am always reluctant to leave it, and always eager to return to it.
In waking, I seek peace but never find it. I spend my time pursuing various desires, but never find what it is I am looking for. The most I get is transitory relief.
I can only directly experience this moment. I can only conceptually and perceptually experience this one moment. I can imagine a past and a future, but I cannot experience it.
My center is always with me. There is a burning hot center within me that never changes position and is always present.
There are two categories of existence: actual, and imagined. There is what I exists right now in my direct experience, and there is everything that I can imagine. There is a difference between my actual and imagined experiences.
Everything is right now with me. The totality of existence is with me, right now, in this moment.
Existence emanates outward from the source within me. Everything I experience now and will experience ever, emanates outward from the fixed core I experience “within” my body, concentrated at a point of awareness behind my eyes. Existence originates at a fixed point within me and projects outward where the change I perceive and conceive increases with distance from my core.
All the people around me are imagined. I believe that all other people are just like me. But in accepting this notion I distort my actual experience: there is only one point of awareness that I know, and that is within me.
My birth is imagined. I can only imagine my birth event. My birth is a conviction.
My conviction is subject to change; my source is not. Everything I believe can change. But the origin of all experience does not change.
Aside from moments of relief, life is painful and undesirable. The best parts of life are when I am momentarily relieved from the pain of being here. But I experience the vast majority of my existence as low to moderate suffering, punctuated by moments of extreme pain.
Upon examining these conditions within the context of my direct experience rather than received wisdom, I see a very different outline of the nature of my existence. My second place experience can be defined in terms of a handful of primitive elements.
- Identity – Who, what, and where I am, and what I seek
- Awakening – The process during which I traumatically transition from a state of peaceful health into illness; my existence transforms from my first shape into my second– and third-shapes (i.e., waking up)
- Asleepening – The process during which I de-transition from my state of illness back to peaceful health (i.e., falling asleep)
- Pain – A spectrum of unwanted second- and third-shape experiences of varying intensities that begin with and coexist with my awakening, eventually disappearing when I asleepen
- Desire – A continuous spectrum of longing of varying intensities, coinciding with pain, that begins with and underpins my experience of my second- and third-shapes
- Peace – The disappearance of any pain or desire, achieved only with the return to my first shape
- Relief – A temporary, but addictive reduction of pain and desire achieved within the second place
- Distortion – A collection of inner and outer beliefs and experiences which trap me within an endless cycle of the pursuit of relief
- Distance – A difference I conceive and perceive within the second place
- Movement – The inner and outer experience of exerting effort to achieve something
- Change – The general sensation of inner and outer movement
- Time – An artifact of the sensation of inner and outer movement
- Conviction – The strength of my belief in my inessential identity, the release of which restores my essential identity
Between my existential conditions and primitives is the truth of my nature.
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