I see the world through an oval window. No matter where I look, the world is constrained to the same fixed, ovular shape. My arms and legs reach like roots through the window and into the world I always see stretching before me.
I close my eyes and the world in the window disappears. I feel the window, sense its presence where it was. It stains the darkness of my inner world but dissolves away until the details of the world through my window are only a belief that it will still be there when I open my eyes again.
The world through the window is my thirdself. I create it every time I awaken and decide what shape it will take. I decide what I see, feel, and hear through the window. It is entirely my decision. When I close my eyes, it disappears in shape, though remains in essence as impressions, sensations, and feelings.
The world before the window is my secondself. It is a much larger space than my thirdself. It is a layer of thoughts, ideas, and conceptual constructs that descends into aspirations and feelings, coated by a layer of bodily sensations, all tightly woven together into a fabric that completely covers my thirdself like a blanket. The events of my secondself are far more potent than those in my thirdself.
I feel my secondself. I feel its thoughts and beliefs. I feel its emotions and its sensations of what is around but outside of it. My secondself is not the body I see when I open the window into my thirdself. My secondself is not cream-colored textured skin protecting my organs. My secondself is a realm of feelings, thoughts, desires, and sensations. I must abolish all notions of my secondself as what I see through my thirdself window to truly see it.
What begins as desire in my secondself, digs into my thirdself for its satisfaction. Through the window and into my thirdself, my roots push, pull, stretch, and move, molding my thirdself like clay into the thing I search for. But I am never satisfied; my thirdself never becomes what I seek. My thirdself is my creation, and cannot fulfill this yearning I have.
My eyes still closed, the space outside my secondself is the largest of all. It is infinite, stretching endlessly in every direction. This is my firstself, and my secondself is within it. This is who I truly am. My thirdself is gone, but my secondself is alive as pricks of sensations and disembodied thoughts without substance. When I quiet my secondself, the enormity of my firstself reveals itself to me. It is familiar because it is me.
I open my eyes and I once again see the world through the oval window. It is the most engaging screen of all, and I believe I am there, in that little space within secondself, which is in turn within the the larger space of my firstself. All of it is me. My thirdself in the window, my secondself stretched tightly over my thirdself, and my endless firstself in which it all happens.
As long as the concept of “truth” is useful, I will find it within my direct experience. It is not something contained in the scene out a window I can open or close at will. It is not found in the stories of the characters I create through that window. Truth, and whatever that means to me, is a by-product of these three interacting spaces which all converge and originate within me. If truth is what I seek, then my own experience is where I will find it.
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