Although awareness is unitary we often place virtual centers in order to organize our experience. One location for virtual center is self, others could be service to others or fear of others. There are many possibilities, often unused, to relocate virtual centers. It is more or less necessary that a beginner learns to locate his or her preset virtual centers. It is a great liberation. Once the concept of virtual center is achieved we can also conceive of abandoning it. We have illustrated unitary awareness with an example from perception, the blue in seeing a blue sky. This is placing a virtual center at instant (in a spatial and logical as well as temporal sense) of perception, at the central meeting place between observer and observed, between self and other. Although this virtual center of perception was a useful lever for prying open the concept of unitary awareness, we can also let the concept of unitary awareness flow more freely without necessarily focusing it at such a virtual center. We can even let unitary awareness be abroad without any virtual center.
Let us consider the sorts of virtual centers we have used upon awareness. We have the ancient distinctions of self and other, of observer and observed. We also have a more subtle duality of awareness and the content of awareness. We have also seen a single virtual center as providing the basis for a concept of unitary awareness. Lastly, we have engaged unitary awareness as floating free of any virtual center. But our abstraction, our conceptual creation of the idea of virtual center, has now freed us from the necessity of deriving virtual centers from historic common roots. We can also place, or at least conceive of placing, virtual centers wherever in awareness that we can or will imagine.
It does appear that many people live with a set of virtual centers, usually ranked in their inner valuation. Each of us have virtual centers through which we organize the content of our awareness. There are some virtual centers which are common, such as the self. And there are other virtual centers which appear to operate for either a majority or large minority of people; these would include God, love, the state, family, sports and money. And there are more specialized virtual centers, such as individual hobbies and forms of learning. New virtual centers arise on the Internet.
Anything that focuses attention or organizes awareness may be called a virtual center. Everyone has several, but many are unaware of the relativity, the virtuality, of these centers. That is not to say that virtual centers are unimportant or unnecessary, for their necessity is grounded in their existence. People grow up with their own particular, more or less accidental, collection of virtual centers. A significant step of understanding arises when we become able to view our own virtual centers and thereby become liberated from their automatic control. Seeing them as centers is one step; knowing them as virtual is another step; the next step involves the effort to transform, move or reify our virtual centers. Hence arises the deep procedure of liberating, each of us, ourselves and others, from the predetermined dominance of our aboriginal virtual centers. This is a fundamental theme of literary, moral and philosophical development, the exchange, movement or replacement of our personal virtual centers. This is not to say that we should violently discard them, but it is good to know that we have further possibilities, such as moving our virtual centers about, leaving some behind and finding others, changing the proportions of balance and weight of determination. Or perhaps even freeing ourselves from the focality of virtual centers altogether, flowing in universal awareness.