If you are anything like me, you’re possessed with what I’ll call a certain sense of grandeur. Go on, admit it. Don’t be shy. There’s nothing wrong with having one. You are all gifted up, but with nowhere to go. Am I right?
Greatness lies within you, just as soon as you coax it out. You could save the world if you wished, if you only knew how. All your life you’ve racked your brain for the 'right' thing to do, the one cause to be involved with. Not this, not that—you’ve avoid everything that doesn’t completely fit the bill. You have an infinite number of options.
Checking through to choose the best has meant that you’ve had to reject most of them. Extraneous activity has felt like an indulgence. Deep down, listening to music or working on your fitness—even developing relationships—has most likely felt like a waste of time—not a good prescription for happiness. You bear a cross: the need to delve for deeper meaning.
You know in your bones that you’ve something to do, something unique, and you’re quite prepared to make the sacrifice required. You’ve lost patience with your peers and the fussy little hobgoblins of their existence. You’re after the bigger picture, and you can almost sense it. It’s out there on the edge of your periphery, at the tip of your tongue.
Go on, say it. Everyone loves a good conspiracy. The broader it reaches and the deeper it penetrates, the juicier is its taste. And the best one of all is the one that contains the total. It consumes us. It fools us. We cannot break free if we tried. It is an integral part of life’s fabric. Without it, life as we know it could not go on. If we were freed from it, we’d most likely be lost.
A good conspiracy quivers at the edge of belief. That is what makes it so tantalizing and titillating. Surely it could not be true, but it might be. It might just conceivably be true. I can almost allow myself to believe it. It intrigues us. It teases us. Oh, if only if it were true. Just imagine!
Just like having a good sneeze, it's an enjoyable act to entertain a conspiracy. Actually, it’s a form of thought experimentation. Here's a good one to try. Apparently it came from the French mathematician, Poincare. He wondered: what if one night while everyone was asleep the universe became a thousand times greater in size?
No one would be able to tell the difference, he surmised. People would wake up and blindly go about their business as usual. No one would know, because how could they? Their instruments and scales would have increased in size too. Well, that idea disturbed me when I read about it, because got me to conjure up a notion of my own.
What if every day we wake up as different person?
We touched on this earlier in this book where I invited you to step into my shoes. Just as you wouldn’t register a change in size, you wouldn’t know if you’d become another person, not if the procedure involved the complete deletion of your previous memories and the uploading of new ones. You’d wake up with your whole new history in mind, and this would be just another day of the person you now remember being. Oh my! The reason that this idea freaked me out was how could I be sure that it wasn’t already happening?
Consider: we awake into another body. We enter into another life by forgetting the old and assuming the new. We come to consciousness inside another life with its background intact, every episode of all previous seasons. The yesterdays that we recall are its yesterdays, its events and its birthday parties. What a conspiracy that would be, to be forever leaping into new continuums.
I guess you could call it quantum jumping. To all intents and purposes, you become another person with every leap. It stands to reason. That’s more or less how we define selfhood. If a person suddenly occupied another head with exactly the same genes, upbringing, environment, circumstances, knowledge, beliefs and attitudes as that entity—absolutely everything—then they would act and make the very same decisions and choices as he or she.
I’m talking exactly the same here. If you retained any inkling of your former self, would ruin the effect, but without such an inkling—if your brain was well and truly washed—then there’d be no way to tell you had changed hosts, now would there? You wouldn’t know that you were no longer ‘you’. How could you?
Your day would seamlessly ensue from the background of all that had gone before. In every respect you would be who you’d always been. Without the memories and self-awareness of a previous self, you would not miss your earlier existence. It would be like being born again in a sense. We’d be unaware of it having happened because all links would be lost. We’ve reincarnated. Incarcerated. At most there’s just the ghost of déjà vu.
Why could this not be true? It makes such sense that it must be true. This is how things work; that’s how the world is. I’m telling you . . .
No, I shouldn’t be telling you. No-one likes to be told what to think. Okay, please, bear with me. Hear me out. Po statements, remember? These are just fleeting butterflies. Don’t rip their wings off, weasels!
To make our conspiracy even more delicious, I’ll introduce another element to the above scenario by means of a riddle. What do you get when you cross E.T. and The Truman Show? What you get is a secret task.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to locate ‘The Other’. It’s to get back into touch with (or meet for the first time; it's a moot point) some really important individual. We share a very close tie of an unknown nature.
But I, or s/he, or even both of us have been brainwashed (as per the above). The knowledge of our relationship has been scrubbed. The grand conspiracy has worked to separate us. (By the way, I’ll use the name Theo from now on—from THE Other—and refer to Theo in the second person singular to avoid having to dither between ‘he’ and ‘she’.)
It has hidden Theo. Maybe you’ve morphed you into an unrecognizable form. I don’t know what you look like, or even if you’re human! I don’t know where you are, or when you live. But somehow through some means or another I must reach you and convince you of our plight.
How’s that for a premise? Rod Serling would have loved it!
I refer to this as a mission because Theo could be anywhere in the world. For all I know, you may be living in another time period also. I hope you don’t live in the past, because how could I you reach backwards in time? But if you occupy the future, then clearly the best way forward is to plant this book for you to find.
Another difficulty is that we wouldn’t necessarily recognize one another on sight. We’re both in mufti. How would we get around that one? I, at least, have the benefit of knowing that there is a person to be on the lookout for. I’ve got my eyes primed. But you don’t necessarily know that there’s even a game on. Your lenses—your overview of the situation—may not be so clear.
Still, I can make a stab at Theo’s characteristics, feelings, perceptions, attitudes and mental orientation. I must trust that you are fortunate enough to live in a relatively open society, one in which differences are at least tolerated, and where it is possible to harbor variant thoughts (as long as you keep them to yourself). Those around you probably follow a conventional religion, and you might also, in spite of the fact that you’re not one-hundred-percent convinced. But Theo is the type of person who goes along with the flow. I warrant that you’re not the sort of person who makes waves.
That being so, I figure my best course of action is to send Theo a message-in-a-bottle. Not only must I spell it out clearly, but I can’t waste any time. An added complication is that things are not static. As the search goes on (and as I write) Theo and I are moving around. Every day we wake up in different bodies.
What a predicament! Is our situation hopeless? Come back and find out—same time, same place, next week.
Disconnect.
Where am I?
I had everything clear in my head just now—wonderful lines that swept and swooped and slid across the page, but they’ve emerged chopped and broken. They clatter upon the page, clunkenly.
This damned conspiracy doesn’t want me to succeed. It resists and hinders me. It swivels my head towards the window and glazes my eyes over. Window-gazing. Windows glazing. I’m turning into a zombie. No, foul spot, no! I need to finish my story during the day before the clock strikes midnight and I turn into a vampire. Forgive me if I sound a little rushed (or stoned) but if you’ve accompanied me this far you’ll understand.
I scramble back to our original point of departure.
“This is not her story,” wrote Douglas Adams, alluding to the Rickmansworth girl. I’ve since revealed that her story is mine—and yours too if you want a slice of the action.
But if time and opportunity are so limited, why do I bother with stories at all? Why not tell it to you straight—do an article, write a thesis, or take out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times? Isn’t a narrative just a work of fiction? Why spend all that time, you ask, on something that isn’t even factual? A good read is all a work of fiction can aspire to, surely.
Not so. According to John Michael Greer, stories are extremely powerful. He claims that they’re the tools we use to understand the world. Not only do they contain lessons and morals, but as myths they shape the way that we relate to our environment and to life itself.
So don’t worry. This isn’t a narrative in the conventional sense. By attacking the larger philosophical questions, I’ll break down—seven with a single blow—the straw, stick and brick huts of our cosmology. And then, never fear, I’ll go on reconstruct the wreckage into a giant beanstalk that will win us the golden goose. How’s that for a Grimm day’s work?
But . . . is there a consciousness? I expect that you sometimes doubt it. I know that I do. We pay lip service to the idea that we’re all aware, and that each one of us personifies the centre of his or her universe, but that’s hard to reconcile with the way most peasants conduct their drudgery. When you look into their eyes, you can’t believe there’s someone at home. Is it any wonder that sometimes you feel as if you are an extra-terrestrial abandoned on an alien world?
You’ll recognize the spectre of a conspiracy starting to bestir itself (see how I came to dream it up?). But just hang fast, me hearties, onto the one fact that if anything at all exists, then, by definition, so does Dog. You’re sure that you at least exist, don’t you? Well, there you go then.
But to continue with my story—time’s a-ticking on that 24-hour dial—you have a problem when you want to be both Van Gogh and Einstein, namely that Einstein was born whilst Van Gogh was still living. Their lives overlap. Hm, bummer.
Not only that, Einstein was still alive when I was already a toddler (not really, but we’ll imagine that this is the case). Damn! Somehow there’s got to be a way. But how could a soul wangle it so as to be alive in two places simultaneously, which is the only way that I can see it working?
I see no obvious solution, but that’s no reason to give up. There has got to be a way—remember that Dog ought not to be restricted by time (or by anything). How might that mighty beast crack this particular bone?
What I’ll do is to recycle our conspiracy notion of being reborn into another body every day—that one awakes as someone new and comes to consciousness with all the memories, attributes and inclinations of an entirely different person.
As I’ve pointed out, there’d be no way to tell you’d changed hosts. You wouldn’t know that you were no longer ‘you’. Your day would seamlessly stream forth from the background of all that had gone before. To all intents and purposes, you would ‘be’ who you had always been. Without the memories and self-awareness of a previous self, you would not miss your earlier existence one little bit.
Now, that may sound depressing. It wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Most people clutch fast to individual identity—see how they cling to life at death—and they strongly resist the idea of a collective consciousness like the plague. Therefore, I can understand how the idea of giving up one’s ghost on a daily basis would be repellant.
But not so fast. Give that po statement a little time. Try to realize—you’re not losing a daughter, you’re gaining a son. Don’t worry, you’ll soon get to be ‘you’ again, and much sooner than you imagine.
The sense of self is relative. It relies on the fact that the external environment is not you. You can't be you unless there is something that you aren’t. There has to be that boundary.
The essence of the Rickmansworth meme is that there is only one being who experiences him-, her-, or itself (us-self) through every form of life. It’s all-inclusive. It includes all of those who are, as well as all of those who were or will be. If there are parallel universes then they are also in the mix.
And so, when the god boys say that it’s okay, it really is. Everything’s just fine and dandy with the universe. Whatever happens to you in life—whether you win the lottery, or whether you become confined to to a wheelchair, it doesn’t matter. Not ultimately.
Oh, it may hurt all right. The tooth may pain as it is pulled—I’m sure I’d fume and fuss along with the best of them. But that doesn’t change the fact that, although each of our stories seem so real, and our programming makes us cry, laugh or scream, it’s all but a technicolor dream.
The whole circus has been set up with just one purpose in mind: to provide everyone with entertainment. That’s why we’ve been compartmentalized. At heart we’re all essentially the same; we’re one. But that won’t do—you can’t put on a great performance with just a bunch of clones (witness synchronized swimming).
Some magic wand has conjured up the illusion that we’re all different and separate. We’re portals opening out into one another. We’re here for each other’s entertainment—hey, it's good to meet you! The circle game is how God passes away the time. That’s the grand conspiracy that we’re an unwitting part of. Think of it as a grand twiddling of thumbs.
