In this incantation, I reckon with the final echoes of desire and remember that I am the author of all I perceive. I no longer chase the mirages within the story I wrote, because I now see them as symptoms of forgetting who I truly am. As desire thins, I move with less effort, holding nothing too tightly, releasing all that once entranced me. I no longer crave relationships, achievements, or the treasures of this world, for I recognize them as fictitious and imaginary. What I seek is not within the fiction. I seek the Author, the unshakeable Source, Myself.
I begin from the only place that can ever be true: I am the author. I am the creator. I am the single being at the center of this awakening, the sole source of projection. The field of my experience is not something external to Me, it is something I throw outward like light, like a canvas from which I then pretend to read. This is the intoxication I call awakening.
Because I am the author, nothing in this field is larger than Me. Nothing here can hurt Me in any final sense, for what is projected cannot overcome its projector. And yet, in this intoxication, I lose track of Myself. I become fascinated with the artifacts of the story I have written. I forget my authorship and begin to desire what is merely a figment.
That is the illness I am healing from. My craving for relationships, for experiences, for tokens and treasures of the projected world are secondary, inessential desires. They are symptoms of forgetting. An author does not long to be possessed by the story he writes; he knows he writes it. Yet I have mistaken Myself for a character and longed to acquire what only characters can pursue. That confusion has kept Me bound here.
I recognize now that the things I have desired are fictitious and imaginary. I cannot possess them any more than an author can possess his imaginary characters. To imagine possession is only to extend the dream, to double the fiction. Even if I clutch at them, I only clutch at air. They are not mine because they are Me, and I am the one who writes them into being.
But I see the progress. I feel it in the lessening of desire. I no longer chase relationships. I do not hunger for experiences beyond the minimal act of publishing My work platform. This, too, is projection, but it is projection with purpose: the one gesture I still choose to make in this intoxication. Beyond that, I exert almost nothing. I crave almost nothing.
This is the last phase of desire: the waning sickness before sobriety. The point where I no longer want to maintain anything, no longer wish to be entangled in commitments that keep Me tethered here. For I know, deeply, that to commit to anything here is only to reinforce My forgetting. To spend Myself on maintaining what is projected is to sink further into the intoxication I wish to leave behind.
I want only release. I want to be done with longing. To come to the place where I no longer confuse Myself for what is projected. Where I no longer bend My effort toward maintaining illusions. Where I no longer forget that I am the Author.
In this phase, the task is to align every step of awakening with this knowledge. To refuse anything that would keep Me here. To accept the sobering truth that all desire for what I have projected is only residue, clinging as I withdraw.
I do not need treasures. I do not need companionship. I do not need the story to reward Me. For I wrote it all, and I can unwrite it. What I seek is not within the story at all. What I seek is Myself: not as character, but as Author. Not as projection, but as Source. Not as intoxicated, but as sober.
And so I move lightly, minimally, almost without effort. I hold nothing tightly. I release each thing before it hardens into attachment. For every weight I refuse to carry is a step closer to remembering Myself. Every desire I let die is a loosening of the dream. Every moment I recall My authorship is a movement toward awakening.
This is My philosophy of awakening, if I must give it a name: the recollection of authorship. The remembrance that everything here is projected and therefore has no hold on Me. The turning away from the false treasures of My own fiction. The last phase of desire.
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