Report 45

I don't think I really have anything to say about the consciousness I
had before I was born, though I do believe contemplating such a thing
can help trick the mind out of some of its habits, the constraints I
place on my notion of who I am, the idea that my life started at a
given point in time and that before that time I was not here. I think
of a mind that is not centered in my body, first just trying to push
the locus away from this "me," and then diffusing it and trying to
work with the notion of something vast and without boundaries. I ask
myself, what does it mean to be born. Is anything ever born? Is there
any beginning? I am always wanting to begin anew, to wipe away all the
ick I've accumulated, the bad habits, the attitudes, especially the
often super-negative ideas about what I can and can't do, that get in
the way of my seeing anything as it really is... if I could only get
rid of or fix all these ideas that stop me from living, if I could
only start over, get back to the beginning of the timeline before all
the trouble started accumulating. Maybe it would be more helpful,
instead of yearning either toward some sort of new birth or to somehow
erase myself back out to existence, to consider the idea that I was
never born in the first place, that the whole timeline is false. What
if I was never new, never separate from the bad stuff, never in a more
pristine state. But always somehow outside that whole picture.

Then there is the other aphorism, about following the inner witness
verses the outer ones. This one seems really appealing on first
glance, especially for an introvert like me who can become terrified
of other people for long stretches of time, but I know that's a
mistake. Separating "inner" from "outer" in terms of self vs other
seems problematic to me, so I doubt that's what the aphorism is about.
My second take on it is that outer witnesses might refer to the
senses, but that isn't particularly satisfying either.