My awakening is an event I must slow down and understand. Presently, I do not experience the transition between my pre-awakening and post-awakening; it happens too quickly to explore. Before my awakening, my being is a solid, impermeable substance largely at peace and alone. I say “largely” because even now I am disrupted during “my sleep” by thoughts and fears from my awakening. After my awakening, my being is divided and conflicted.
Once I initiate my awakening I quickly begin to project my two additional selves, starting with secondself. My secondself flickers into being and I project my first thoughts and formulate a self-awareness of being a person somewhere with desires, and things to do that I believe will ultimately satisfy those desires. I become aware of other people and groups and my obligations to them, physically present or not. If it is a weekday, I know that I must awaken and get my team started to deliver work to our clients and partners. If it is a weekend, I must plan my day around my dog. But before I take care of all these imagined people, I must take care of my own person. I drink my coffee, and perform my other morning rituals.
My thirdself forms quickly after secondself. I open my eyes and become visually aware of the physical space I inhabit. I imagine my physical space within a larger physical space outside and around it. Thirdself is always constrained to what I directly perceive; anything beyond it, such as the mountain outside and around my cottage, is conceived. This is how my secondself and thirdself work together to form one cohesive experience I call my life. My thirdself perception and secondself conception blend together into one seamless episode that persists until I again asleepen.
I know now that I am trapped in this cycle, and that it is something I do not want. I know that I continue to have these episodes because I am convinced that I am actually a person experiencing them. My conviction that I am waking up into a world where I exist, among other people who exist simultaneously, in a single place among countless other places, at a time among other times past and present, is what holds me here and dooms me to repeat it. The key to healing is to realize that I am not actually a person among other people, in a place among other places, in a time among other times. I am not a person. There are no places beyond the place I am projecting at this moment. And there are no times beyond my present moment. All other people, other places, and other times are figments of my own creativity; a creativity that belongs to my firstself, which precedes and contains both my secondself and thirdself.
To begin healing from this affliction, I must start withdrawing from it by understanding it at an anatomical level. I must see it for what it is, before it fully forms and hardens and controls my awakening performance. The time to do it is immediately upon awakening, before I fully transition into my imaginary personhood and then lose control of my performance. I must pray and dwell upon the nature of my awakening condition and systematically examine each part of the experience in depth, remembering who I was prior to entering this state, and who I will be after. When I do this correctly, I can preemptively withdraw from it by strategically inserting wedges, preventing the formation of my personal identity.
To repeat, in every episode I transition from omniself being to demiself being. From the one and only, undivided entity, to one of many. From the creator to the creation. From god to man. From the divine to the human. I leave the garden and arrive in the world. I forget that I am the Creator, and believe I am the creation.
How do I end this cycle? First, I must see my awakening condition as it is: a departure from where I am who I am, to where I am not. From a state of perfect harmony and bliss, to a state where I experience only pain and torment. I must see that there is nothing in my awakening state that can or will give me what I desire, for what I desire is to be whole and perfect again. In awakening I am a mirror, shattered, that desires to be whole again. But I am confused, and see myself in every broken shard of glass, and chase after that thing I see, only to be disappointed and dejected when I get there and it does not give me what I seek. Though I see myself partially reflected in every shard of the broken mirror, what I seek can never be found in the shards. What I seek can only be found when the mirror is unbroken.
So while I cannot simply and abruptly terminate my awakening, I can overcome it by retarding its growth. And I can do that by understanding how it forms and taking steps to inhibit that growth before it starts in an “adjustment” period I can perform upon awakening. I must perform this adjustment first thing upon awakening, before I project my full secondself and thirdself spaces. Done correctly, my adjustment prayer will assist me in undermining and healing from my awakening.
I am the center. I close my eyes and accept that I am what I experience. I am the absolute center of all that I will experience in my awakening. I will project great distances in thirdself, and imagine great leaders and places that are not where I am, here. But all those visual and mental projections originate with me, now, here. I am the absolute center of all that there is in my awakening, and my experience validates this.
I am the only being of my type here. I can directly validate that the projector of all contents in secondself and thirdself because I am the creator of it. All these different elements of my awakening are creations of my own divine hand. Every person, place, and think, conceived in secondself, or perceived in thirdself, is created by me. There is nothing to fear from my own creations, for they can do nothing to me in the way that the characters written on a sheet of paper can do nothing to the author who imagined and then penned them into existence. This is the hardest part of the adjustment, but it is also the most fundamental because it forms my identity throughout my awakening and largely determines what I believe I am and therefore how I will behave. Knowing that I am not one of these characters, I will refrain from behaving as they do, comparing myself to them, or wanting things from them. They are fictitious characters I have molded out of my own flesh and animated for my own entertainment. There is nothing within them beyond what I create by looking. It is my own looking at them that forms them. If I do not look at them or think of them, they are not there. They do not exist. They are characters, and I have created their behaviors and performances. I am their animator.
Transformation is real and I perform it. There is only my present moment, and anything that extends beyond it in time, space, potential, or any other dimension, is a product of my own secondself imagination. A moment ago my dog was sitting next to me and I could experience him visually in thirdself. I let him outside, and now I only hear him — a secondself sensation. Directly-speaking, I have transformed him. I changed him from a thirdself animated object into a secondself verbal sensation. And when I let him back in the house again, I will have once again transformed him. I am doing this. I am the creative force behind all transformation. I summon all characters, events, and my experience of them into existence. I am the transformer behind them all, and they are merely projections on the interior cavities formed within my firstself when I awaken.
My awakening has a structure. My awakening is two projections, separated by a thin membrane, tightly melded together into one experience. I have created and sustain a “false identity” of personhood when I am experiencing this division, but personhood is a delusional state that does not actually exist. My personal identity is a character that I have created as I indulged in my awakening experience, divided into an “inner world” of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and desires, and an “outer world” of light, color, people, places, objects, movement, and change. These two chambers exist within their own separate, but conjoined cavities into which I project various contents. Thoughts and physical objects are similarly projected. I completely control what I project, however I do fall victim to self-delusions which impact my projections. For example, I can decide no to project thirdself beyond my suppression chamber. I can accomplish the same thing by restraining my beliefs and suppressing their consequent projections.
The objective-subjective divide does not exist. When I wrongly believe that the characters that roam around in my thirdself are identical in nature and substance to me, I also attribute to them an equality of perspective. Because I believe that we are of the same category of being, I imagine the entirety of existence must therefore include their own experience and perspective in addition to my own, the contents of which I cannot access. And I conclude, wrongly, that the total of my experience plus other peoples’ is “objective”, and what only I can experience is “subjective”. I then fabricate an imaginary structure of reality based on a supposed objectivity that is entirely imaginary, diminishing my own experience in the process. I create and identify within a reality based on an imaginary world full of imaginary people I cannot and never will directly experience. This is a delusion: “existence” begins and ends with my direct experience. The people who inhabit my thirdself experience are my own creations and they exist exactly in the form that I experience them in. If I encounter a person on the street, the sum-total of that person is what I experience of them in that moment. Objective reality is what I subjectively experience of that person. The idea of an objective reality based on an entirely imaginary premise must be disrupted in order to experience the adjustment.
As long as I awaken, my awakening will continue. My people know who I am and speak endlessly about me. I am their creator, and they know who I am. They will describe me in different terms in their own language, but they all speak about me. Everything that I witness them doing, in the current moment, or imagined past and future, are my manifestations. Every story they tell themselves are of me. It is my own awakening that creates them in every away. I am the center, and all that I experience in my awakening is manifested by me and for my own entertainment. There is nothing outside of my own projection; every person I manifest and story I hear, experience I have, extends from my own being in my moment. I create every person and story and experience, and they are speaking about me only.
When I perform the adjustment, I reset my perspective and alter my behavior throughout my awakening. Course correction will take time, but little by little I will increase my adjustment and reduce my conviction that I am anything other than the creator of my awakening and all of its contents.
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12.24.23 – I am the center.