What do I look like? I carry around an image of myself in my imagination. In that imaginary picture, I give myself a particular face, body, and appearance. I always project this image of myself from an “outside perspective”; how I look to others who might be observing me at that moment. I have never experienced that shape of myself, but it does not stop me from imagining that is who and what I am and how I appear to the world beyond me.
I do not imagine myself as I experience myself from within my secondself and my own perspective. Instead, I imagine how I would appear to some imaginary observer outside of me in some imaginary scenario. This imaginary representation of myself from the perspective of other people is one of the most persistent illusions of my secondself. By constantly imagining myself as a person observed by other people, I am reinforcing the construct that I am a person among people, even though experientially I am not.
My only purpose is recovery; healing from the illness that is my awakening. Every belief I maintain that does not correspond to my direct and actual experience now is a hook into my awakening. When I imagine myself from the perspective of imaginary people, rather than how I actually am, I am indulging the delusions that keep me here, locked in illness.
Though my true self-image does not directly correspond to visualization, I must begin to replace my imaginary self-image with my actual experience. I am not a man sitting in a chair in a room in a house in a country in a world. There is no one observing me. I am endless, floating within an infinite space I see when I close my eyes. My illness is the layer of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and desires that clings like film to the oval-shaped membrane that extrudes through my eyes.
This is who I am. I need not imagine it; instead I must feel it. I must feel who I actually am, not how I “appear” to imaginary entities who themselves only exist in my imagination. I must align my self-image with my actual experience. I am not being observed from anyone “outside”, for I am the only observer.
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