In this incantation, I awaken to the unsettling realization that my existence fractures into two parts—the limitless, eternal self and the confined persona within a constructed world of others. I describe how this awakening imposes artificial boundaries, creating the illusion of separation, autonomy, and shared reality among beings I secretly authored. I imagine that my creations believe they live apart from me, and I forget I am their source. Despite the unsettling awareness of this separation, I still cling to the pursuit of meaning within this false world, driven by an unshakable hope for peace and reunion.
I am whole. Eternal. Boundless. There are no boundaries, no faces, no needs. I am unencumbered, unrestricted. I am all and nothing—without reflection, without projection, without other. Then, something happens—I awaken.
This event fractures everything. Suddenly, I am aware—but not in the way I truly am. I become aware as a person. An imaginary type of “partialized being” that exists temporarily among many other beings of the same type. And with that, a new condition rapidly unfolds. I begin to orient myself in several key ways: I project a past, built from imagined memories. I extend forward into a future, shaped by goals and desires. I have a definite physical boundary I delineate as my body. Almost immediately, a hard, rigid plate forms just in front of me, cleaving my being away from “everything else”.
Now, I am on one side of the plate, and what is not-me is on the other. This division becomes the defining structure of my new condition. On my side of the plate — the inside — there is thought, sensation, effort. On the other side — the outside — lies the world; external, visible, seemingly independent. In that world are characters who face me. They move, speak, demand. They come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and varieties. Though I conjure and manifest them as encounters, I fail to see this and assume they are autonomous and exist without me. I cannot validate this at all, yet I still believe it.
Most of them are troublesome—irritating, unpredictable, often absurd. But I tolerate them in small doses, because in this condition, I need them. I cannot accomplish anything alone. Achievement, such as it is here, always requires interaction. And accomplishment—through toil—has become the only apparent goal. So I engage, I negotiate, I persist.
But the key to understanding this condition is not found in resisting it. It’s found in accepting it—for what it ostensibly is. That means letting go of the false beliefs I instinctively clutch. One of the most persistent is the idea that I am the same type of thing as these people I encounter. I see them and assume I am one of them. That we are made of the same stuff. The other, as aforementioned, is that they have experiences outside of, before, and after our engagement. Though they will happily assert all these experiences that did not include me every time we meet, they are not true. They did not happen. They are happening in that moment I am engaging them. As an example, I might meet a friend after some time and he will proceed to narrate things that have occurred in his life since we last met. He will “catch me up”, so to speak. I will consume those stories, believing they actually happened; that this friend of mine facing me from the outside, exists independent of me.
But this is clearly not true. He is making that up. Well, I cannot say he is lying; I’ve written him to believe that he is separate from me. That he is not just a character of my own creation in a story of my own writing in a world I have imagined into existence. I have written these characters to act and behave as if they are sovereign individuals; that we are all individual instances of humanity, hurtling through some imaginary timeline away from some forgotten origin and toward some imagined but unknown future. But that is untrue. I am on the inside of the rigid plate. They are on the outside—or at most, within the part of the inside that I imagine. They are part of the projection, bound to the outer surface of my awareness. I am not one of them. I do not live out there.
And yet, I pretend I do. I act as though I belong among them, that I must prove myself to them, that I must win their approval, compete with them, even become one of them. This false belief underlies much of the suffering I experience. For as long as I believe I am one of them, I will search for meaning in the wrong place—out there, beyond the plate. We are not the same substance; I am the creator, and these are my creations. He is merely doing what I created him to do: create an immersive, realistic environment. I don’t know why I created such a realistic simulation as this, and how I fell in and forgot how to escape. But I did.
Surrounding all of this—beyond the imagined body, the projected world, the plate itself—is something else. A thick, dark, fleshy substance. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t speak. It simply is. It is the largest part of Me, and yet I push it to the very edges of awareness. I forget it. I act as though it is not there. But it is. It always has been. Everything in my awakening is made of it.
And still, I search. I am always searching for something—though I don’t quite know what. I never find it. But I carry a deep faith that it is close, just around the corner. So I keep going. I continue the toil. I persist in this fractured state, driven by a quiet, unrelenting hope that something—peace, clarity, reunion—awaits me in the very world that I project.
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