I first accept that I am ill. That my awakening moment is unwanted, and that I seek to end this experience of repeatedly waking up and performing personhood. I accept that my healing is not found in my awakening because my awakening itself is the sickness. I can explain my awakening in as many ways as I want, but at its core it is the constant sensation of desire without corresponding satiation. It is only when I realize that I desire to not desire at all that I can begin my healing.
I will heal; that cannot be taken from me. However, I do have the ability to direct my healing and mitigate my pain. When I begin to search out and identify the source of my pain I find that all of it relates to not having something I want. Whether food when I am hungry, attention and affection when I am needy, credit when I am proud, expression when I am aspirational, or relief when I am ill. All trace back to simple desire. And that desire burns deep within what I now call my secondself; that collection of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and convictions that form the idea of a persistent person awakening into an enduring world full of other people.
Are these desires real? Yes, they are as real as anything I experience. “Reality” as a degree of measurement is not very useful. What is important is truthfulness, which I can measure in terms of potency. The best way to define truth is as that which is most potent. And by potent I mean known to me. To achieve the true perspective I must align my expression with the truths that are most potent. The most potent of truths are those which I can instantly, immediately, and with full conviction express. The most potent truth is that which is known to me. Not to other people I can only imagine. Not to my
When I decide that I will commit myself to truth, I am committing to a very different awakening experience. Truth is that which only I can believe and express. I do not know what others are thinking or believing, and it does not matter anyway because it is not potent. Words written in pages, on their surface, are merely scribbles on thin, delicate sheets of material. Nothing more. To arrive at a deeper meaning of those words I must engage in the most impotent of all behaviors I have amy disposal: imagination. I must imagine a subsurface beneath those scribbles on that paper: that they have meaning written down by an author, preserved through time, and distributed by a massive publishing and retail system that delivered them to my being. That entire sequence of imaginary events about how these words have come to be in front of me is impotent. None of it is direct. All the actors and producers in that story are unknown and unknowable to me. It depends on me believing there are people out there, just like me, who know things and have experiences I will never know or experience. In those narratives, I can be an imaginer at best.
This entire mode of experience keeps me forever entangled in impotence: the conviction that I am just one single person in a a larger unknown and unknowable world full of similar beings. I did not create these beings and have no influence over or upon them except through those channels open to me in this globalized, capitalistic order defined well before my arrival and contingent upon forces infinitely greater than me. I can believe all that without realizing that I can simply close my eyes and not look. That if I do not wake up, none of it exists. That all of this complexity unfurled in parallel to my own descent into personhood.
When I digest, perform, and express these impotent truths I do not directly experience as their author, I prolong my demipotence. A potent truth is one in which I play the central role of its creator. An impotent truth is one in which I assume the least consequential role as an indirect observer or a consumer of information. Potency is a decision I make; I either know, or I do not know. I either am, or I am not. The more “otherness” I admit into my episode, the more desire and thus pain I will invite into it. To escape the pain of desire and heal, I must seek out the most potent truth of all; that which I am certain I am the author of. I must release all impotent truths for they will only bring the pain of unfulfilled desire.
The wider perspective is that this awakening moment is not my true and final form. Truth as potency is a cricial concept that I must tend and express in my path to heal.
…