There I was, zoning out of a boring lecture in a college auditorium, processing on the notion that I had just become aware of the most profound philosophical framework the world has ever seen.
With each duality I evaluated, I became more convinced that I was really on to something.
But when I came to mapping certain dualities, like Male/Female, even the IT IS model got a little confusing. Surely, I thought, the ultimate duality would map neatly to the male/female duality.
I found myself pondering on that one, and by the time the class was over, I wasn’t sure if this IT IS duality was as significant as I initially thought it was.
I left school for the day and I went to my job, then went home and had dinner, watched some TV, and life went on.
In the days that followed, I didn’t take any action based on my brief moment of clarity. But the seed had been planted.
It was as if a mental template had been applied to my view of the world — almost like augmented reality.
From that point on, everything I experienced was evaluated against this developing construct. I was constantly refining the philosophy. Like a mental rock polisher, the concepts constantly rolled around in the back of my mind as I went about my daily life.
Even though I believed I had tapped into profound wisdom, I did nothing about it for a very long time. Somehow, I knew there was so much more to it than I understood at the time.
So I simply continued to contemplate and tease apart the essential elements and interwoven concepts as the days turned into months and the months into years.
Over time, as a result of my persistent pondering, new levels of understanding emerged, as if from a fog.
The process seemed to me like the way physicists have unlocked the secrets of the universe by pulling on threads of patterns observed in the material world.
I was following divergent philosophical trains of thought to their logical conclusions in a quest to find where they all converged.
All this development was occuring only in my mind. I rarely wrote anything down. In addition to a harried lifestyle, I seemed to be suffering from a severe case of writer’s block. Even when I did make the time to try and present the entire system, I struggled to find the right approach, the right voice.
At one point I captured a great deal of the early concepts and principles in a cross-referenced wiki. I had perhaps a hundred pages of content with hundreds of images, all cross-linked. Then my server was hacked, and all that data was corrupted. I planned to recover the lost work when I could afford it, but never got around to it.
And life went on.
During another period, I wrote about half a book that took a very spiritual approach to the IT IS philosophy. My contemplation had led me to the pinnacle of awareness, where I was mapping the IT IS model to sacred numerology, sacred geometry, AIO and The Other.
I felt that I was approaching the ultimate secret of the Universe, but I had doubts about how to present these insights to the world. Something held me back, and I never finished that book.
I suppose one key thing that held me back is that the few people I told about it over the years for the most part didn’t seem to grasp the significance. I received virtually no validation from people I talked to about it, and I wondered if I was just mentally reinforcing a figment of my own imagination.
So I kept it to myself, and continued to ponder on the concepts and how to relate them to others. I believed that ISITism (as I began to refer to it for short) was far too important for me to risk bungling the introduction to the world.
The project continued to evolve, and I went through various names for it. For a long time I had just called it the IT IS Philosophy, but at some point I realized that the IS should precede the IT.
‘IS IT’ rolls off the tongue better than IT IS. But more importantly, I came to understand that IS precedes IT in the most essential sense of the words.
The ultimate sentence that describes the essential nature of Reality is a question — not an answer.
My Awareness was expanding, yet the more conceptual connections I made, the more I realized there was so much more to it.
So once again, amidst my various challenges, worries and doubts, I held off on sharing ISITism and it remained confined to the recesses of my mind.
So once again, amidst my various challenges, worries and doubts, I held off on sharing ISITism and it remained confined to the recesses of my mind, until I eventually came up with the breakthrough idea: The ISITometer.