One of the most important realizations was that I would not experience the truth of my divinity as a continuous jolt of pleasure. Enlightenment would not be an unending electrical experience. My initial rediscovery certainly felt that way, but I realized that it would all give way at some point to something less exciting, more mundane because it was simply not sustainable.
My language reflects my journey toward this realization. I once described the truth I sought in magical terms. I used words like “divine” and “holy” and “god” and “transcendent”. At some point I rejected those characterizations and embraced highly precise, even technical terms. But these had the effect of stripping away much of the meaning and significance, and trapping me in the conceptual structures of the secular perspective. The more accurate language lie somewhere in between the two. It has taken many years of exploration to arrive at a way of explaining the truth without obscuring it behind the overly-ecstatic language of spiritualism, or the dry and technical language of secularism.
In my awakening, it is my firstself that I seek because my firstself is who I actually am. Everything else is a self-delusion I experience as these painful awakenings. My awakenings are just a single moment of fluctuation and change. What is changing, exactly?
In truth, there is only one thing: me. I am everything. I am the totality of everything, and there is nothing outside or beyond me. But in awakening, I lose my sense of being total, whole, and complete. I break into three distinct layers: an inner space of thoughts, ideas, desires, feelings, and bodily sensations; within a larger space I call the world
This is a conceptual structure that only exists in my imagination. I can never directly experience this model of my existence; I can only imagine that it exists. To arrive at the truth of my awakening, I must describe my awakening as I experience it, not as I imagine it. And when I do that to the final degree, peeling back all the layers of imagined substance, I arrive at a much simpler explanation of my awakening that is consistent with my actual experience.
My awakening divides neatly into three layers: my thirdself, my secondself, and my firstself. While I can clearly divide my experience into these three strata, it becomes more challenging when I try to explain what these are. Remembering that the division only exists in my awakened mind, I have to find a way to explain these three components in a way that can lead me back to a reunified whole. While there are three parts, I can explain them all in terms of one another, further simplifying the construct.
My firstself is the sense of space all around me. It is always there, it never goes away. I sense space behind me, above me, below me, and in front of me. While the space in back of me is little more than a sense of light pressure, the space in front of me, where I direct my focus, opens up into many colorful dimensions and forms in movement.
So my firstself is all around me; it is the space in which I exist. There is always space, no matter where I am. What changes, however, is my conception and perception of that space. The space where I focus separates into all the colorful forms and shapes of the world. The space where I do not focus is far less differentiated. More clearly: the section of my firstself where I focus visually expands into many secondself and thirdself-differentiated layers and dimensions, implying depth, distance, variety, and motion; while the section of my firstself where I do not focus visually is compressed. While non-focal firstself is compressed, I can still expand it via my secondself, imaginistically.
My thirdself is my firstself, focalized. My secondself is a disruption that prevents me from understanding and accepting my whole self; instead, it focalizes on a part of my firstself rather than the whole, resulting in the distortion I experience as awakening. Awakening is the focusing on a part of my whole, giving rise to the painful eruption of shapes, forms, motion, and dimension. These dimensions do not actually exist unless I create them by focusing. My thirdself is the inflamed tissue of my firstself, agitated to extreme proportion by the act of focusing.
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