When I awaken, my experience resolves into three selves: firstself as the timeless, spaceless origin of awareness; secondself as the internal narrative world of thought, memory, and imagination; and thirdself as my physical presence in space. All entities I experience in my awakening appear in these selves. What I once called “supernatural” collapses into narrative-only entities within secondself. No beings exist outside these modes, only entities differentiated by how they appear in my moment.
When I awaken, my experience unfolds across three levels I call my “selves.” Within each of these selves are “entities”; animated beings or characters that range from people and animals I physically interact with in the earth self, to fanciful beings I know will never manifest physically and live only in my mind, such as historical characters or even supernatural beings such as angels and demons.
My firstself is my core, unmoving being. It is that part of me that exists before and outside time and space. It is omnipresent because no matter where I am, physically or mentally, it never moves. It is timeless because time does not apply to it. Though my lesser selves seem to displace it, it is spaceless because it is everywhere at once. It is the origin point of everything else I experience. Nothing precedes it. It simply is. There is no distance in my firstself.
My secondself emerges next in the unfolding process. This is the domain of my internal world. It contains my thoughts, sensations, desires, memories, fears, narratives, and imaginings. It is where language appears. It is where people continue to exist even when they are not physically present. It is where I rehearse conversations, anticipate outcomes, replay the past, and construct meaning. This self does not exist in space the way bodies do, but it is vividly populated. It is crowded, alive, and active. Time is the distance of my secondself.
My thirdself manifests last. This is the earth, the world, the outside, and my physical presence as its origin. It is my body, my voice, my movements, and my direct, physically-experienced interactions with other bodies in space, projected forward. It is what the people casually refer to as “reality,” even though it is the lesser of all selves; the one that I will extinguish first. It is the one that is the easiest to change because I project it. It is less foundational than my secondself, which is less foundational than firstself. Space is the distance of my thirdself.
Together, these three selves and how I understand them form my moment, which is the totality of my experience. Though space is a feature of thirdself, and time is a feature of secondself, my awareness and interpretation of them and how they are fused together in these layers decides how I experience my moment. When I do not distinguish these layers clearly, they blend together. Secondself entities are misinterpreted as coming from somewhere else. Entities from the thirdself are assumed to be “more real” simply because they were visible and shared, even though thirdself is the most impotent of my three selves. Awakening, for me, has been the slow clarification of these layers and the relationships between them.
As this clarification deepens, the entire category of the “supernatural” has collapsed. I know now that every “entity” in my awakening fits cleanly into a simple structure based not on the mode of their appearance. There are four categories of entities in my awakening:
- Category 1: Active Dual-mode entities – Entities that can appear in both secondself (mentally) and thirdself (physically). They are physically encounterable and also persist internally through memory, anticipation, and narrative. Examples include family, friends, coworkers, and anyone I can meet in person under ordinary conditions.
- Category 2: Possible Dual-mode entities (secondself-only but physically plausible) – Entities that currently appear only in secondself, but which I believe could appear in thirdself under different circumstances. These include remote employees, public figures, politicians, and living people known through media or reputation. They are people whose physical presence is unrealized, not impossible.
- Category 3: Impossible Dual-mode entities (secondself-only, temporally physical) – Entities that appear only in secondself because I believe they are no longer living or not yet born, but which I still experience as people through narrative. This includes deceased individuals, historical figures, ancestors, and imagined future people. I treat these as entities I could have encountered physically under different temporal conditions, even though that encounter is no longer possible.
- Category 4: Narrative entities (secondself-only, physically impossible) – Entities that can only ever appear in secondself and have no conceivable thirdself encounter. This is the category I have historically mislabeled as “supernatural”, including angels, demons, spirit guides, gods, aliens, and similar entities. This category collapses once I recognized them as narratively present without a physical referent, not a different order of being.
Category 1 entities appear in both secondself and thirdself. These are what I call people. My mother, my friends, my coworkers. They appear physically in the world (aka, thirdself), and they also persist internally when they are absent (aka, secondself). I can think about them, imagine them, hear their voices in memory, and anticipate their reactions. Their secondself presence is continuous, but their thirdself presence is, at least in principle, accessible.
From that point forward everything recedes to purely narrative entities which exist only in my imagination and which are not physically possible to manifest unless I map their being onto other entities. For example, a “dragon” is a type of entity that I will never encounter in thirdself unless I redefine a dragon as an individual person or type of person that does exist as a Category 1.
So Category 4 entities appear only in secondself and can never appear in thirdself. These characters have no conceivable physical encounter. They exist entirely as narrative presences, experienced internally and often with great emotional intensity. I mislabeled this category as “supernatural.” I assumed that these entities belonged to a different order of reality, when in fact they belong to the same order as every other secondself entity. They are characters, often people-shaped, with imagined intentions, voices, values, moods, and moral positions because they are constructed from the relational patterns I have imbued into all other entities.
Once I see it this way, the supernatural category dissolves. There is no hidden realm, no external intelligence intervening. There is no metaphysical population beyond my experiential field. There are only entities as they appear to me, either physically in thirdself, internally in secondself, or both. Every entity exists in one of these categories.
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