My fucking god man. This dude is in my brain! Just the first chapter is making me feel so much validation! I have been sitting here wondering if I'm just making all this shit up to make myself feel better but no. This is actually it. Thank you so very much for this book!

The nature of I, experiencing and experiencer, connecting to myself by disconnecting from what isn't real, the nature of reality, the power of love that is under it all. It all really jives with me. Two minds that I call my thinking Self and the other I call my emotional Self. The emotional Self is where we are all connected. It's where beauty and joy and hope lives. It's why when I get close to it I want to connect with others. The thinking Self is isolation. It's where judgement and blame and hate lives. It's why when I get close to it I want to be alone.

The more I read this the more I start thinking there are multiple realities. Each moment, each experience, is composed of the reality of the thinking Self and the reality of the emotional Self. It seems like he managed to exist in the emotional reality by denying the thinking reality. I lived my life in the thinking reality by denying the emotional reality. The thinking reality was extremely logical, constant awareness of the outside, and full of hate. It was the epitome of control. The emotional reality denies logic, concentrates awareness on the inside, and is full of love. It is the epitome of surrender. Living competely in the thinking reality and suppressing my emotional Self I was depressed and suicidal. Right now I'm leaning heavily into the emotional reality and as a result I'm full of laughter and hope. I'm also intentionally suppressing my thinking Self so I'm naive and vulnerable. This shift is how I have experienced life over the past few weeks. It is a war between my thinking and emotional Self. I was fully on the thinking side and I'm now struggling to stay on the emotional side. I'm doing trauma therapy.

There is something above this though, another reality. The place where belief and doubt lie. Those beliefs determine the reality we experience. Beliefs are also changed through experience. Experiences that can come entirely from my Self. With sufficient connection to my Self I can experience whatever I want. If I can experience whatever I want then I can change my beliefs. If I can change my beliefs then I should be able to willingly believe anything. But if I can willingly believe anything that makes an infinite loop, or redundancy, idk the words to explain this. It immediately breaks down. I would experience everything and nothing. I would exist everywhere and nowhere. If this were possible it would have already happened and it would always be happening. I feel like that all describes a singularity. Ultimately that's what we all are. What he calls the shining light. The best way I can describe it is we are the ability to believe and doubt. That is the true nature of Self. We are an unimaginable being going through the belief sim.

You can have an emotion or thought, an experience, without understanding it so understanding is a component of all this too. You need knowledge to get to an understanding. Knowledge and understanding is somewhere between experience and belief. Experiences grant knowledge which becomes understanding and (with enough of them? sufficient strength of them? I feel like understanding is binary) eventually belief. So it's Experience -> Knowledge -> Understanding -> Belief. Which is painfully obvious when I write it out like that.

So to willfully change a belief you have to change the understandings that compose it. You need to experience to gain knowledge to change the understanding. Ultimately, specific experiences can result in a specific belief. But this new belief has to fight with all existing beliefs. So it takes a sufficiently powerful experience or a great many smaller ones to change a belief, all while knowing and understanding. Again, this seems pretty obvious.

It's like a stack. My thinking reality affects my emotional reality, and vice versa, and they both roll up to affect my belief reality. So by having control over my experience I should be able to control my beliefs. But then control is a thinking concept while surrender is an emotional concept. I have to control my thoughts while surrendering my emotions. That's how I connect to Self. With a pure connection to Self I have complete control over my experience and with complete control over my experience I can directly control my beliefs. With a strong enough belief I become the singularity. I become Self.

Now I understand how people can spend their lives in meditation.

I just had an epiphany. I am an Idea. Shaped by belief that is built from experience.