You have never once been outside your own experience. Wallace looked hard at what that does to a person, and said it in two sentences. Let’s take them slowly.
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
There is no experience you have had that you were not at the absolute center of.
Every experience you have ever had arrived with you in the middle of it. That is where the eyes are. The belief that you are the centre is held on complete evidence. Every instance agrees, with no exceptions anywhere in the record, and there is nothing left over to correct it with.
Take the view from the middle as simply the way things are, and every problem you name will be a true report of how that thing landed on you. It will not be a report of the thing. You go and solve the first one, competently, and the second stays exactly where it was.
Correct for it by discounting yourself, and the sum is still being done in the same seat. Someone who has decided in advance to weigh his own view at half is the one who set the rate. The self has not left the calculation. It has been given a job in it.
So what are we aiming at. We want the middle to be one of the things we know about the picture, the way you know a window frame is there.
We are not trying to get out of the middle. There is nowhere else to stand.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Someone at home says a thing is a mess, and you know straight away what they really mean by it.
- A morning gets rearranged by somebody else, and you know immediately which part of it has gone wrong.
- A few people are deciding something together, and you know which part is the real issue.
In all three the problem arrives already shaped. One thing to watch: whether the shape is made of what happened, or of where you were sitting when it happened.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to make the answer come out the second way. Watch what the shape is made of, and leave it as it is.