But now, let’s take a second to re-muster. We’ll just back off a pace from the windmill and lower our lances, because to claim that I’m after an easy answer is not quite accurate. I mustn’t raise the reader’s expectations quite that high.
What I mean to unearth isn’t Universal Acid, exactly, but a key, tool or device to pry at chinks in the human condition. In other words, anticipate from me a philosopher’s stone. It won’t do it all for you (it lacks the Midas touch). It will require from its wielder a little work and patience.
But take heart. It will prove powerful enough to destroy your old world view, and permit the construction of a new and marvelous replacement. The time and the effort spent will be worth it. You’ll win the hand of the princess and the crown of the kingdom to boot. The Theory of Everythink will hand you everything on a platter.
But its main purpose will be to nut out a brand-spanking ideology: Ism (‘I’ ‘is’ at this ‘M’oment). Now, that must be better than any three wishes.
You see where I’m headed, don’t you? I’m about to string together these nothing moments into an unbroken, unbreaking wave. Our perception of the present, our most intimate experience of being, is itself the greatest testament of, argument for and proof of quantum-mechanical-reincarnation. Ism is hidden clockwork that jerks life along by the bootstraps.
We insist on regarding ourselves as individuals with separate souls living independent lives. We act as though we are discrete—fenced off from one another by date and location. We see our lifespans as a linear progression of personally relevant events.
But I put it to you that we’re finger puppets, and that together we make up one enormous hand. Can your self-awareness stretch that ultimate octave? We’re alone, and yet we’re totally together, like tube feet on a starfish, or the cilia on a single-celled organism. We’ve got to get it all together if we want to work in concert. The question is how.
So . . . let me get this straight. What you’re saying, I think, is that there’s just us—WE—plus God, right? Us and Him—a kind of duality. But that doesn't help me understand what God wants. What is it that he wants us—ME—to do? What is my—OUR—purpose?
Ah, you still imagine yourself separate.
Whoa now! You’re not going to . . . I mean, you can’t mean . . . Are you telling me . . .?
Just what the hell is this—some unholy text? Is the writer the devil in disguise? Is that what’s going on here? Is he (or I) fooling with your mind? Or am I the Antichrist come for your soul? Danger, Will Robertson!
Who knows? It could be—I mean I could be. It depends what the people who thought up that term had in mind. Could they have seen any of this coming? Certainly the ideas contained herein could change a person’s thinking. They could make you see the world very differently. You might decide that everything you thought you knew is way off the mark. And if what I say causes you to discard your religious convictions, then I suppose that I lay myself open to the charge.
But would that be such a bad thing? Aren’t you halfway there already? Western society has already largely weaned itself away from the idea of a vengeful and jealous Dog. Come on now, really. Is there anyone who still seriously believes in hell, damnation and original sin, and a red-skinned devil with horns on his head pointing a pitchfork? The sooner we escape the clutches of such crackpot witchery the better, it seems to me.
See our little spark. Unhindered by geography, it leaps lightly around the world. It skips blithely across time, allowing us to experience ourselves in a multitude of bodies, both simultaneously and overlapping. Behold now that spark flare several orders of magnitude. I’m going to up its power (this spark is going supernova). Fasten your seat-belts. Warp infinity here we come. It’s time to tackle time travel.
To do that, we’ve got to circle around and sneak up on it. Shh . . .
I am here.
You are here.
Every single instant, we are neatly self-contained. The illusion is of a wondrous separateness—individuality, independence, autonomy, free will and choice. Life feels filled to the brim with potential. Well, it should. This is a carnival, you know.
We realize its boundaries: birth and death. We observe them when others pass across them. This knowledge serves to snip us off from one another even more sharply. Everyone occupies his or her (gender is yet a further distinction) quarter-acre patch of reality. We’re fenced off from everyone else, including God.
But dammit, we are God. We’re wrapped up in that containing consciousness. We are one another. We are one. ONE. US. I. Ism.
I wake up from a dream in which I was a butterfly. Or am I really a butterfly dreaming of being a man? I wonder, is the dream state more ‘real’ than wakeful consciousness?
After all, we only dip into wakeful waters for a matter of hours before needing to recharge our batteries. By contrast, you never become exhausted in the sleep state and just have to wake up. It's not as if you run out of oxygen.
Nevertheless, we don’t question that the waking state is higher than mere sleep. Of course it must be. Isn’t our level of consciousness greater when we’re up and about? It seems so, but maybe that’s another ‘obvious’ assertion to test.
Leave consciousness out of it for the moment. Instead, let’s do an assessment of quality of being. Specifically, let’s consider our depth of connectedness to each other, the planet, the universe and our roots. We’ll compare how we do when we’re asleep, as opposed to when we’re awake. In which of the two states are we more ‘at one’?
When you open your eyes, you take on an aura of individuality and otherness. The illusion is of being a separate entity. You’re here behind the rays that shine into your eyes. Things exist ‘out there’. Time feels real, space feels real, and the cinematography of our lives feels as if it's occurring. The reels roll, we’re mesmerized, and we enjoy the drama from the comfort of our seat.
But we slough all of that off when we sleep. At that time we’re centred. We return to our origins where it is natural to be, and we draw nourishment from being there. Don’t we feel freshest in the early part of the day just after we’ve arisen? And conversely, don’t we feel dullest at day’s end?
Since this is so, then I conclude that wakefulness is not our default state. We’re not naturally wakeful beings who sometimes need to sleep. We are the one source that dips regularly into wakefulness to enjoy the experience of those dreams, which makes us not so much a butterfly as a cocoon.
Another thing is that we assume that the adult form is more advanced than the immature version. The pupa grows not only in size but in wisdom, supposedly, as our memories accumulate. But I wonder about that. Just as I’m coming around to think that the wakeful state is inferior to the sleep state, I’m starting to hypothesize that the child is the father to the man.
In one of my dreams I go into a mall with people walking about everywhere. There’re all types, all races, and I’m struck with their variety and beauty. I look into everyone’s eyes (especially if the people are women and if their eyes are brown) and then I suddenly stagger and have to reach out for support.
I’ve just had an epiphany. Now I know what it means to be God! In every pair of eyes I see consciousness swim. This pulsing matrix of humanity is omnipresence all ready to blow. It’s like a fire that just needs a match. Am I the only one who understands? We’re only a spark away from the realization that all is one. We’re just a membrane away from grokking ourselves for what we are, will be and always were: the timeless entirety. Imagine the simultaneous smile when that light dawns!
I must tell you about another science fiction story. Naturally, an alien race was involved, humanoid (writers should always keep in mind the possibility of a film adaptation). In fact, the aliens were virtually identical to human beings—two sexes and all. The major difference was that they were about a thousand times larger, and their inclination was to swat us like midges.
Before colonizing the earth, the giants sent out an exploration party. Some sort of fracas resulted from which the aliens came off second best. One or two survived, but they were brain-dead and no use for interrogation.
As an aside, consider the concept of ‘alien’. According to Ism ideology, there is no such thing of course. We’re all just appendages on the same tree. We’re simply differently shaped limbs on the one jabberwocky. Aliens, plants, or whatever—we’re all just talons, tentacles, trunks and wings. How daft it would be, for instance, if your legs stood in mortal fear of your arms. Still, in such a situation what are you going to do when an alien appears? Philosophize? No way, you pull out your blaster.
Getting back to the story, these aliens were so gigantic that after their prefrontal lobes were removed—their head injuries required major surgery—there was enough space for a lunar module-style office to be built inside the giant’s head. Living quarters were duly installed, along with a contraption that an astronaut-operator used to control the hulk of the giant’s body. Wired up to the remnants of the giant’s brain, he monitored the environment through the giant’s own eyes.
After about six months of training the operator learned the alien’s language and so forth. I don’t know how that went. Maybe it was possible to access the alien’s memory banks. And eventually the human-operated alien was sent back to its home planet in the original spaceship on another fact-gathering mission, this time for 'our' side.
I’m not sure how things turned out after that. For me, the best part of the story was how it portrayed consciousness. The idea that it is the controlling force that sits behind your eyes. Seen in that light, every life form is just a vehicle. Inside every head there sits an operator (begging the question of what homunculus sits behind the operator’s eyes).
And that, I believe, is basically that. We’ve come to the end of the story. It ended with a twist; did you notice? In case you did not, here, in the preamble to the ramblings that preview the following volume, I’ll lay out what you might have missed in all the excitement.
The premise that I used to kick things off did a little shimmy right where things reached their peak. You’ll remember that I began with the supposition that it was I who had the mission to locate and make contact with Theo the Other, the brother-at-a-distance to my Vincent Van Gogh. I spoke of Vee and me. I portrayed him as a version of me, and I merged the two of us into one.
But not so fast.
From your perspective, I have it all wrong. From where you sit, you’ll see the situation quite differently. What you’re going to do as the reader is to bring it all back to your vantage point. I’ve told you that you are quite entitled to rub me out. You would be absolutely correct to remove me from the picture. And you wouldn’t even have to do it by killing me. You just need to ignore me.
When all is said and done (and by now most of it has been), how do you know that you haven’t conjured me up out out of thin air? You assume that I exist(ed) based on nothing more substantial than inky marks across the page (or text on your screen). But you don’t know for sure that I exist. In fact, it’s better for you that I don’t.
This isn’t a trick of the light. There is no me here in your room, in the transit lounge where you sit waiting, or on your bench in the sun this lunch hour. There’s only you. You’re the One. You’re the God, the top Dog, the only player on the block.
What happened was this: you flitzed out of your head into mine. You uploaded (or were uploaded into) the set of attributes and skills and insights of another biology. It allowed you—as me—to postulate the Rickmansworth meme, hypothesize the Theory of Everythink, and then construct the philosophical worldview of Ism. And you’ve brought all that back home. You’ve fetched that bone and placed it at your feet. The question that remains is: Can you grok it?
And that’s the preamble to the ramblings over also. The first book is done. I’ve brought Theo up to the headiest of heights, but I won’t be so irresponsible as to leave you up there high and dry. The second part of my mission is to bring you down safe and secure.
In the book that follows, we’re going to have to process the journey. There’s a lot to unpack and internalize before we’re fit to be released into society and the world the world at large. Let’s debrief.
The pages we’ve passed through you may think of as a greatest hits package. I grant that in style it’s a bit of a rock opera. What follows now will be the loose jamming that happens backstage after the concert is over: the gradual unwinding.
Or, to use another analogy—one that we’ve made a lot of use of—we’ve just sat through the main feature and have now selected another option from the menu. This book is unique in that you get to rerun the entire movie alongside a running commentary. We’ll ask for input from the producer, the director and an actor or two.
I suggest that you make yourself comfortable—maybe get yourself a refill of popcorn (just go easy on the coke). You see, our next job is to work out how the theory translates into practice. It’ll be a Talmud of sorts. I want to follow up some of the consequences of our new home-spun philosophy. I bet that, where the rock and a hard place meet, and where The Theory of Everythink evolves into the ideology of Ism, it will lead us to a veritable bizarro world of conclusions.
Be seeing you.
