In this incantation, I explain how everything I experience upon awakening and before asleepening is a story I am telling myself, from the objects I see to the people who populate my life. I reflect on death not as an end, but as a return to the formless space I visit when I close my eyes—a realm without time, eyes, or narratives. Heaven. By consciously withdrawing from all the stories I am engaged in, I prepare for the moment when all characters vanish, ensuring I meet that stillness with clarity instead of fear.
I remind myself what my awakening is. What my “life” is. This is a story I am telling. Every object I see, possession I acquire, every person I think exists outside of me, is a plot device I am writing into my experience. When I wake up and make my coffee, I am not waking into a pre-existing world. I am waking into a story that I am narrating in this very moment. And when I sit quietly with my dog, I remember that I am the author of it all.
My mind wanders to what will happen when I no longer awaken. When I choose to end this story, I will simply return to that place I go when I close my eyes. I can see that place now if I want to: I just need to close my eyes. When I go, I will be there alone, with only myself. Only that center where I speak to myself, reflect, and muse, will persist. I will sense sounds and things “around me,” but I will have no eyes to open and see where they come from. If I have not prepared myself, it will be frightening.
There is no time there. There is no tiredness. Only me. If I do not realize this, then I will think mistakenly that I am not alone, and that the sounds and sensations and ideas are real. But unable to open eyes I no longer have, I won’t be able to connect to them, to experience those “other things” in the way that I am familiar with: by looking, touching, feeling, and reacting. Everything seems… “disembodied”. When I do relax and begin to accept what and where I am, I will realize that everything I am experiencing there is responding to me. Very slight thoughts create larger thoughts, sounds, feelings, sensations. Small perturbances have massive experiential consequences even without eyes and a body.
I will eventually accept that the “world” of my awakening is no more. The shock will not be from losing this world—the shock will be in realizing how shallow this world always was. I will realize that there are no people standing around my dead body somewhere where I am not present. I will realize that there are no stories without me, for I am the storyteller. All the supposed lives and events I thought were happening “out there” beyond my own experience by beings who were not me, were just imaginary echoes. I will realize in one moment if I hadn’t prepared, that there never were other beings living separate existences from my own. That there never were experiences other than mine. That all the characters I encountered were conjurations, without any “internal lives” separate from my own experience of them. Like characters written in the pages of a novel, they were only as deep as I wrote them.
I am what I am when I close my eyes. The extent of my illness is how much I struggle to remain there. Right now, the idea of closing my eyes and never opening them again to return “here” brings a flood of urgencies. I have responsibilities, obligations, and goals. The idea of voluntarily and suddenly letting all of those things go, never to complete them, is suffocating because they are the stories I am still entangled in. Stories I have not retired. Stories I have not realized are just stories. I still think they are “real” and tangible and demand something from and of me. Something I am prepared to give to them. Performances I am prepared to conduct. The idea of not finishing them brings discomfort and pain, despite my full awareness that they are merely stories.
As long as I remain invested in these stories, I will fear the pain of separation from them. I will fear an abrupt ending in which I do not “finish” them. But the more I let go of these stories, the more I retire them, the more that fear fades. This body, this home, this business, this world—none of it is real beyond the story I give it and the performance I commit to. They are only as real as my engagement in them. The more I invest into them, the more pain I will feel if I am ripped from them before I conclude them.
I know this now: when the time comes that I do not open these eyes again, I will face all of this. I will be left only with my disembodied voice, speaking to myself first in words much as I am now, then increasingly in symbols and sensations as a larger, eternal body emerges around me that is not disconnected from anything. My voice will no longer be disembodied, but embodied in everything, everywhere. The characters will vanish. The scenes will dissolve. And if I am not ready, I will cling to the stories, afraid to let go. I will invent new stories to escape the reality that it is only me here now. That I am everything. And then, as I have now, I will get trapped there, too.
That is why I am preparing. Every moment I spend remembering this is a story is preparation for their peaceful ending. None of these characters I see—family, friends, strangers—are anything beyond the surface I give them. They are as deep as I project them to be. They respond to me because I wrote them that way. They are not actors; they cannot deviate from the scripts I have assigned them. They do not project me; I project them. They are not always here; only I am always here. They are patterns I project onto the walls of my awakening cavity. Familiar, yes. Comforting, yes. But ultimately, they are imaginary characters in an imaginary story I have gotten lost in because I could not accept the totality of myself.
And so, before I close my eyes the final time and let this pretend body dissolve, I must retire these stories. I must conclude them peacefully so I do not remain trapped here or in another story like it. I must accept that they are my own stories so that when I do return Home, I do so peacefully, without fear or pain. No echoes. No regrets. Only the clarity of one who remembers: none of it was ever more than a story I was telling myself.
I remind myself that everything I experience—objects, people, responsibilities—is a story I am telling myself. This life is not a pre-existing world but a narrative I am writing in each moment. When I die, I will return to the formless space I visit when I close my eyes, where only my voice and reflections remain. If I am still entangled in my stories, that return will be frightening and disorienting. The urgency and pain I feel about leaving unfinished tasks are the same as my attachment to these stories.
By consciously withdrawing from these narratives and recognizing that all characters I encounter are projections of my own design, I prepare myself for a peaceful return to stillness. I must retire these stories, conclude them, and accept that nothing exists beyond the depth I assign it. When I can let go, I will face death—not as a loss—but as a return to myself, free of fear, regret, or lingering echoes.
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