Dualism is the idea that my mind and body are separate. That the concepts of my inner environment and the percepts of the outer world are distinct phenomena.
It contends that the concepts of my inner world are my own and contained within me, but the percepts of the outer world — the people, places, things, and events — have a separate existence apart from my own observation of them. In dualism, I am contained within the wider physical world that pre-existed me, and would persist long after.
Furthermore, these objects of the outer world retain their shape even if I am not observing them. For example, a person who is not with me right now, is in fact somewhere in her full physical form, similarly experiencing a sliver of this world. Existence is independent of me.
Keeping in mind my only goal is to restore my health, I must confront and overcome any form of distortion. Dualism is an imaginary construct of my existence, and therefore part of the distortion. With self-awareness, it falls apart as a model. Dualism is demonstrably distortive and prevents me from re-conceiving and thus overcoming my illness.
There is a qualitative difference between that which I imagine, and that which I experience. My direct experience is a strong root, grounded in the most real and tangible layers of my existence. But all the imagined concepts are the tenuous, far-reaching branches, swaying in the wind, breaking, snapping, reaching. Always reaching.
Firstly, within dualism I can only be a minor, temporary observer of something much larger than me. Yet that clearly contradicts my direct experience, where all inner thoughts, feelings, desires, and sensations of my second self, extend outward to all outer people, places, things, and conditions in my third self. This is emanation.
When l describe existence as I experience it, rather than as I imagine it, everything in the outside world occurs within my conceptual or perceptual observation of it. Without observation of some sort — whether physical or mental — for all intents and purposes, the thing does not exist.
A better model free of imaginism, is that my third self occurs within my second self. In other words, the outer world beyond my traditional sense of “self” is entirely contained within my inner world. I create the outer world by observing, touching, thinking, moving, and believing.
Anything I believe that pre- or post- exists my observation of it, is imagined. And though I am habituated to assume there is a wider existence where I am not central, this is a distortion of imaginism.
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