I have amassed a collection of depictions of myself from a perspective that is not my own. I might call them third-person images: photos, videos, and even memories seared into my secondself, taken from the perspective of another person. These “images” are poisonous because they misrepresent who and what I am. What is true is what remains without effort; and those images are perversions that require concentration and effort to maintain. They only exist because I allow them to. Because I value them fallaciously and preserve them. If I did not value them, they would not exist. They would cease to be.
Why are they toxic? Because they depict me as I am not and promote the delusion that I am a person who awakens into a world full of other people like me. That is the lie that keeps me here. That is the deception that misleads me into the false pursuit of people, experiences, and things that only lead me deeper into this forest of delusion and pain. I want nothing out here for this is a world of and for people, and I am not a person, so there is nothing for me. I create this thirdself world when I awaken; it is my own creativity that populates it with all manner of creatures. I created the snake as surely as I created my next-door neighbor. If I do not awaken — if I do not conjure up this fantasy — it does not happen in the way that the characters do not exist without their author.
I do not exist as something other than the being who is looking out now into thirdself, typing this incantation on my computer now, in my moment. There are no other moments, and there are no other manifestations of myself except those I carry with me as thoughts and photographs.
This is the only “me” there is. The only perspective. There is no other perspective unless I myself imagine and create it. There is no manifestation of these hands from the “third-person perspective” unless I manifest that image. It is only me here, looking out into my thirdself; no being like me as looking at me and experiencing another moment, for no other moment exists. The totality of all existence is my moment and my perspective.
Despite this, I maintain a massive collection of third-person depictions of myself in the secondplace. I value these images and I have thousands of them. I value them because I still value this actor I inflate upon awakening. I value my imaginary past performances; all the places I have gone, people I have met, things I have accomplished, and experiences I have had. Yet that is all little more than a temporary dream that will end the moment I let it go. And to get Home, what I truly seek, I need to let it all go. I need to let go of everything I value in my awakening, for as long as I value people, relationships, places, ideas, and possessions here, I will not be able to leave.
Images of myself from the outside looking at me are evil and toxic because they are lies. They are lies of who and what I am. I am not a person in a big world that surrounds me. I am not a young man in a river, or an old man on a big mountain. The mountain and the river are within my thirdself, which is in my secondself, which is in my firstself. These images are lies. They misrepresent who and where I am, and as long as I believe them I will believe I am in the secondplace when I never left the firstplace.
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