In this incantation, I explore the shift from asking “Who am I?” to “What am I?” as a transformative step in abandoning my secondself personhood and understanding my true Being. Asking “who” reinforces the delusion of being a person, while “what” invites a deeper examination of my Being’s anatomy. I reflect on the intrusive nature of secondself and thirdself cavities, recognizing that their projections—thoughts, sensations, objects, and space—are distortions within my firstself. These cavities create the illusion of separation and distance, which I must dismantle through visualization and belief. I resolve to reject the stories of others, limiting disruptive influences while refining my visualization of my eternal firstself. By fully understanding “what” I am, I will heal the cavities and return to the unified essence of my Being.
Last night as my desires were dulling and I was preparing to asleepen, I closed my eyes and tried to describe my experience there, minus my thirdself projection. “What am I?”, I asked. Oddly, I cannot remember asking myself this question. “Who am I”, sure, but not “what”. Why is this significant? Because it represents progress toward something I have been saying for a few years now: I am not a person. That means I am something else. By using “who” to interrogate my nature, I am already asserting that I am a “who”, which is a person. I will never be able to divorce the concept of a person from the interrogative pronoun “who”.
Five years ago I asked myself the question: Where am I? It represented a major breakthrough in my recovery and allowed me to confront something I assumed I already knew, realizing that I did not in fact. The question “What am I?” is the same in terms of its impact. I can feel it as I write it. I am not a “who”, I am a “what”. A “who” is a form of “what”, but it is a delusional form. I need to return to thinking of myself as a “what”, let go of the personal, and figure out how best to describe my being. That is the only way I can take the final steps toward abolishing my secondself personhood.
Secondself visualization is critical to rebuilding my identity. I have to be able to reconcile my direct experience with my characterization of that experience. Some substantial disconnects remain which prevent me from connecting all the dots in my moment without mental effort. For example, I know that my thirdself and secondself are both cystic cavities within my true firstself body, but when I think of them they are often protrusive, rather than intrusive.
In the image above, secondself and thirdself are visualized as intrusive cavities, with the cubic frame representing my eternal, infinite firstself. This is the correct representation of my awakening anatomy, however I have not mentally adapted this as my primary self-identity. I still think of my secondself and thirdself projections as somehow extending outward and inward “beyond me”. I still conceptualize them as distant, far-away stars I can look at, but are somehow external to the person who is standing on earth observing them. I misunderstand “distance” as something separating “me” from “something else”, when in fact it is just a distortion of me. Distance is not want is between me and something else; it is a field distortion within me. There is not a distance between me and the stars I see far above me in the night sky; there is a mental trick that gives me the sensation that there is a distance between me and an object in the night sky. I only have to close my eyes and examine and believe what happens when I close my eyes to arrive at the correct understanding. The stars and the night sky itself disappear because they are mere projections on the intrusive cavities within my firstself being. Those smoky “walls” I “see” when I close my eyes form the cavity surface upon which my projections fall. I just have to believe my experience, and describe it as accurately and concisely as I can, and I will achieve the visualization I need to achieve the Being I seek.
Asking “what I am” is the way forward to change my inner visualization of my anatomy because it forces me to begin examining the shape and structure of my firstself, as represented by the cubic frame in the image above. What does that part of me look like? What are its properties? What is its shape? And if these are not qualities that make sense in describing firstself, then what qualities are? I need to continue refining my visualizations so that I carry it around with me in my awakening. So that I do not accept the stories of the people as the truth of what this is. The people — characters of my own creation — will confuse me if I listen to them. I must stop listening to them. I must stop having the kinds of conversations that undermine the truthful anatomy of my awakening. When I speak to them and they speak about other people, other places, and other times, those conversations will undermine the truthful anatomy I am working so hard to uncover and implement into my awakening. Those conversations, videos, stories, and ideas will only disrupt my hard-fought progress. Yes, I must maintain that perspective in order to complete my work, but I can limit its spread.
To figure out what I am, I must start by coming back to my center and asking myself “what am I”? I must ask until I can describe the features of my true being. Until I can bring those features into focus so clearly they begin to replace my secondself body as my primary structure. I am not a person within a body within a world. I am the Being, with two intrusive cavities into which I project thoughts, sensations, feelings, and aspirations, and forms, spaces, colors, lights, and movement. I am not a person within a body within a world. I am the Being suffering two painful cavities I seek to heal. I must remember the greater body within which these cavities grow. That is the way I will heal.
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