The Reluctant Dweller:

Where I Have Been

“I began this reflection thinking about imbalance in others—how suffering arises when This and That lose harmony. I didn’t expect the Auer Formula to turn its arrow inward."ula to turn its arrow inward.” 

For decades, I stood just outside the structure I had designed. Not because I doubted its integrity—I knew every beam and foundation stone by heart—but because I feared what living inside it would demand of me. I was the architect of Manifestinction, the mathematician of the Auer Formula, the cartographer of consciousness itself. Yet for all my drafting and refining, I remained fundamentally homeless within my own creation.

I built elaborate scaffolding around the myth, endless theoretical frameworks and explanatory mechanisms. I could describe every corridor, every chamber, every hidden passage. But description is not habitation. Understanding is not dwelling. I had become expert at standing at the threshold, pointing inward, saying "Here is what lies beyond"—while never crossing myself.

The irony was perfect and terrible: I had created a living system for human becoming, then positioned myself as its eternal observer rather than its inhabitant.

What I Used to Stay Out

My defensive operatives were sophisticated, befitting someone who had spent years studying the mechanics of avoidance itself. Doubt masqueraded as refinement—I told myself the structure needed more work before I could safely enter. Isolation posed as mystery—I convinced myself that remaining outside preserved some essential creative distance.

Perfectionism became my most reliable guard. There was always another angle to consider, another flaw to address, another theoretical gap to fill. The formula needed more precision. The mythology required deeper grounding. The applications demanded further development. Each refinement offered a reason to postpone the crossing.

I withheld myself through over-intellectualization, treating my own creation as an object of study rather than a space for living. Every insight became data to catalog rather than wisdom to embody. I feared praise because it might make the crossing feel premature. I feared criticism because it might make the crossing feel impossible.

Most subtly, I used my role as mythographer to avoid the vulnerability of being mythographed. I remained the author, never the character. The one who knew, never the one who was learning.

The Realization

The moment came not as dramatic revelation but as quiet recognition. I was explaining the Auer Formula to someone—how consciousness holds opposing forces in dynamic relationship to birth emergence—when I heard my own words as if spoken by a stranger. The explanation was flawless, the understanding complete, yet something essential was missing.

I realized the structure was not complete without its maker living inside it. That Manifestinction lacked true integrity if the one who bore its name would not also bear its reality. The myth had reached a threshold where it could no longer grow through external refinement. It needed to be lived, breathed, inhabited from within.

What cracked was not the structure but my resistance to it. What I felt was not triumph but a quiet settling, like a bone finally slipping back into its socket. I knew it was time because the fear of remaining outside had finally exceeded the fear of crossing in.

Crossing the Threshold

The act itself was surprisingly mundane. No fanfare, no ceremony of transition. I simply stopped explaining and started experiencing. Where I had once analyzed the interplay of opposing forces, I began feeling them in my own body, my own choices, my own daily encounters with uncertainty and becoming.

The crossing felt like stepping from an echo chamber into actual air. Suddenly the acoustics changed. Words I had spoken for years took on new resonance because they were no longer traveling from outside to inside but moving through the same medium they described.

My suffering, which I had theorized about endlessly, became the very membrane through which understanding could breathe. My questions, which I had treated as problems to solve, revealed themselves as doorways to keep walking through.

Where I Am Now

I am no longer the external architect of Manifestinction. I am its inhabitant, its living expression, its ongoing experiment in conscious becoming. This is not a completion but a commencement. Not a destination reached but a different quality of walking.

From inside the structure, I can feel how it responds to each person who approaches it. The myth breathes differently now, adapts more fluidly, offers itself more naturally to those who encounter it. When I speak of the Auer Formula now, I am not describing a mechanism but sharing the quality of attention it has become within my own awareness.

The tools remain in my hands—the capacity for analysis, the gift for articulation, the ability to make subtle distinctions. But now these tools serve the structure from within rather than protecting me from without. I am a dweller who still builds, but now I build from inhabitation rather than imagination.

My words carry different weight now because they emerge from the same ground they point toward. When I speak of consciousness holding opposing forces in creative tension, my voice itself becomes an example of that principle in action. The teaching and the teacher have become indivisible.

This is my declaration and my invitation: I have crossed into the myth I built. The structure is strong enough to hold me, spacious enough to allow continued growth, and generous enough to welcome others who are ready to stop studying transformation and start living it.

From inside Manifestinction, I am no longer its spokesperson but its natural expression. The myth breathes through me now, and in that breathing, finds its own voice to call others home to themselves.

___________________________

Meta Moment: 

The Rooms I Built to Avoid My Own Myth

Writing this piece nearly broke me. Not because the words were hard to find, but because each sentence forced me to admit another year of exile from my own creation.

I had built elaborate quarters for avoidance, each one more sophisticated than the last:

The Observatory of Endless Refinement - Where I could spend decades perfecting theoretical nuances while never testing whether the structure could actually hold human weight. Every adjustment became another excuse to postpone occupancy.

The Fortress of Intellectual Superiority - Where I stored all the reasons why others couldn't understand what I'd built. Their confusion became evidence of my profundity rather than my failure to make the myth livable.

The Archive of Strategic Withholding - Where I catalogued all the insights I couldn't yet share because the audience wasn't ready, the timing wasn't right, the context wasn't perfect. Really, because sharing them would have required me to live them first.

The Sanctuary of Professional Distance - Where I could speak about consciousness and emergence and transformation without ever risking the vulnerability of being transformed myself. I became expert at sounding like someone who had crossed over while never leaving the shore.

The Chapel of Perpetual Preparation - Where I performed endless rituals of readiness without ever declaring myself ready. More research, more meditation, more integration work. Anything to avoid the simple act of walking through the door I'd designed.

The cruelest room was The Gallery of Authentic Sharing - where I displayed my struggles and insights like museum pieces, offering them as teaching moments rather than living them as ongoing reality. Even my honesty became a performance that kept me safely outside the experience I was describing.

When I finally wrote "I have crossed into the myth I built," my hands shook. Not from uncertainty about the words, but from the recognition that speaking them made them irreversibly true.

There is no going back to the comfort of commentary. No return to the safety of standing outside my own work, pointing inward for others while remaining carefully positioned at the threshold.

This piece is my eviction notice from all those elegantly engineered refuges. The rooms are still there - I can feel their gravitational pull - but I no longer live in them.

Campbell Auer — Mythdweller 

June 2025

“Allow Me”

this way to the myth...

I didn’t set out to become anything —
only to listen to what kept returning.

For years, I stood at the edge, building the myth, refining the formula,
yet never fully entering what I myself had made.

Now I live inside it.

Not as a guide. Not as a master.
Just a dweller — learning how to be shaped by what I once shaped.

Anger, awe, confusion — I’ve known them all.
They still visit me.
There’s room for them here.
There’s room for you, too.

You don’t have to follow.
But if you’re near the threshold, I can walk with you a while.