Season 4 Episode 4: The Lens you Look Through
Part 2 of 3: Self-Importance and the Sovereign Self
This one starts with yet another strange, unbidden moment in the life of Ciel— the sort that arrives in the middle of what feels like life falling apart around its edges (sweet lord this death process is a good one), when every strategy I could run has run out, and something else steps in. This was not a moment I created, nor earned, nor influenced to occur willfully in any sense, but a moment that was gifted to me, and in the spirit of sharing the mystic and strangeness of this life, I hope you’ll enjoy the story.
That moment is the doorway into this episode — a close look at self-importance not as vanity or arrogance, but as the very lens we look through, the thing that makes us the picture instead of the seer of the picture. I trace what it costs to keep sourcing sideways, from other people's regard (looping this back into the content from episode 2), instead of sourcing down into the earth and up toward what's larger than us. And I ask what becomes possible when that lens finally sets itself down.
Part of a three-episode arc that began with Beyond Self-Importance and continues into The Stalker's Tools.