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Readalong edition: YouTube, Instagram

Kevin Parry

I'm not ... me. And also I am, of course. I am Isaac, and I am outside of Isaac.

Maybe the single most helpful transition I've been through is this transconscious one: shifting the boundaries of the self that I consider to be associated with my consciousness. And, in doing so, allowing my consciousness to exist with fuzzy borders, allowing it to seep into whatever spaces it will, and to sense and engage with other forms of consciousness. Other "selves" of their own, I guess.

Isaac continues to be a character, absolutely. My physical presence here has that name. Isaac's a gay autistic white dude. He's great. :) I love being him. It is a weird as hell time to be a cis white he/him founder and CEO. The world needed another take on that particular configuration. I am one of those new takes.

I was so careful, so careful for so long about how I presented myself. It was an impossible job. I care so much about integrity of expression. It matters in a million ways, only some of which one can directly see. The ripple effects echo back, and I was so scared of sending out a ripple that would hurt me when I received its echo.

It was an impossible job, as I said. We are always expressing, as long as we exist as these forms of density. As long as there's something to point at, there is expression. My attempt to hold my expression back was its own expression. We are each in our own front row, and as the primary experiencer of my own restriction, it was terrible, lol. All the work I put into trying not to hurt anyone was hurting me, and it hurt other people to see it happen.

I hope you don't cry under the piano anymore.

That hurt my heart.

I don't anymore. :) Not like that. Absolutely possible that I will cry under a piano again, but it will be a passage, not a withdrawal and a restriction.

It helps that I don't need Isaac's expression to be a complete picture of me. I can't put all of me into a single expression — not even a single human. Sometimes I feel bigger than a man, sometimes I feel smaller. The borders of my me-ness hover near the borders of this man, we more or less line up, but it's more like a shadow. A human casts a shadow, and the shadow is a partial image of them — a silhouette of a certain angle, made by a certain light. You can get to know someone's shape by their shadow, sort of, but some things are impossible to know, and some things are massively misleading. A shadow can change completely, with every shift of angle and light. My human body, even the identity of Isaac, is a shadow of me. Accurate, but incomplete; liable to change in any way, and each change will tell you something about the me that casts it, but you could spend forever watching this shadow and never complete the picture of the object that casts it.

Hell, I can only see myself by reflection, and my observation of the reflection changes me! I will never know myself completely. Hi, I am the universe speaking. :)

The single most helpful transition was out of pinning my self-definition to my form, and into completely dropping the notion of self-definition. There is no knowable definition of self; there are only useful models, and the "most useful model" label is in constant rotation.

Integrating that perspective is a transconscious move. By erasing the borders, we merge with what is higher, the level just above this one, and we merge first with what is nearby the point of emergence at that level.

Since we're modeling this concept using time-based language, it's also useful to think about this in reverse. The truth is in both directions, simultaneously, and holding the time-bound version together with its opposite is a good way to produce or provoke understanding of the truth, koan-style.

I started by saying that,by integrating a perspective of transconsciousness, we rise to a higher level of consciousness, connecting first with what happens to be around — like climbing out of a manhole (lol gay) and shaking hands with the closest person. Or closest car, depending. But it's true the other way, too: I shook hands goodbye (or maybe got out of a car) and stepped down the ladder into that manhole. It's true that I am transconsciously emerging at a higher level, merging with what's there, but it's equally true that I transconsciously descended down to this one, splitting away to do something smaller, something distinct enough to feel kinda separate.

It's both. We're having a linear experience of time, but time is not directional. It's like how a river moves water in a (mostly) constant direction: you can tell someone which way the river's moving, but that doesn't mean that water itself has an intrinsic direction. That's not a thing.

Experience is like water. Time is like a river.

(Experience and consciousness are the same thing, for the record.)

I am well. I am insanely well, from a human perspective. Here's the thing: degrees of wellness (or integration) occur at every level. I am transconsciously connected to a higher level that is experiencing its own varying degrees of wellness. Relative to other areas of that level, the spots where I'm most focused could be doing really poorly! Who knows! But that's not relevant at all here, because that entire scale of wellness is still miles better than the human scale of wellness. My wellness isn't anchored and limited to my human self any longer. (Unless you're looking at time in the other direction, in which case it looks like I'm about to take a deep plunge in some very cold water!) Instead, my wellness at this level has continuity with my wellness at the higher level, and at levels higher than that. "Higher" and "lower", these are really directions on a spectrum as opposed to distinct enumerable levels, but the point is that the wellness I know and feel myself to have is broader than the wellness found in this specific, individual human. Excitingly, me being aware of this helps the human form experience wellness. It's a very cool system of experience. :)

This is good for now. :) This is an unending letter that I'm writing; notes to myself, some in a bottle for the ocean and some on a post-it note for my bathroom mirror. It will not, and cannot be complete. But, I feel complete, for now. :)

-Isaac