For so many years, people had tried to encourage him to play nicely with others; to form many meaningful relationships, contribute to society. This is society’s mantra: Connect and Contribute or be Outcaste. Something always held him back; a trigger in someone’s actions that gave the warning sign. Sometimes it was something significant like being double crossed, thrown under a bus, made an example of by a teacher for something insignificant, or going out to play with some friends who never intended to play with him, only to make sport of him. Other times it was something more subtle that gave him the warning sign that somebody was capable of one of these betrayals; he casual use of the wrong word at the wrong time, or expression of a preference for selfishness, or the opinion that humans are better than animals or trees. Very few people managed to stay off of his blacklist, or prove themselves otherwise worthy of forgiveness of such minor transgressions in other ways. No one is perfect after all, least of all him. But imperfection is a sliding scale.

Even society itself had proven to be an unworthy suitor for his approval. The benefits were clear… Support networks, healthcare, what else? Insurance, and other dull necessities? But the drawbacks were far greater in number. The insatiable greed, the sustained need for uncontrollable growth, the failure to recognise when enough is enough. War, death, money, property, CO2 in the atmosphere, people. There will never be enough of these things until they bring an end to the naturalworld. And even then, they will find a way to continue the destruction and consumption. Humanity’s only hope is that from the impending self-cull, there will be a small contingent of survivors strong enough and smart enough to cope with the new environment they have created without completely annihilating each other. Hopefully they will also be wise enough to not be so greedy next time.

He knows there’s a way out because he has been here before,
He just has to remember how,
This feeling that he needs to be somewhere else,
And the path he needs leads back to Now.

Humanity is smart, or at least it can be from time to time, when required. It is, unfortunately, also pretty stupid, greedy, and selfish. The single cell must replicate itself and consume it’s competitors to ensure that resources will be available for it’s ancestors. Scientists observe it in their Petri dishes under microscopes with the presumption that humanity is somehow more advanced than this.

And yet for all our genius, technical advantage, and superior sense of superiority, it is the ancient natives that were truly wise. The aborigines of Africa, Australia, and America or the enlightened Buddhists perhaps. It is better to share then withhold. Better to be hit than hit. Better to take only what you need than hoard.

Our only hope as a race on this planet is that eventually the individual, primal greed that is causing the destruction of our environment and depletion of resources will be replaced with one simple realisation. The only thing that can save humanity is a reduction in population together with an increase in the numbers of trees. Trees will become protected creatures and tax benefits will be granted to those that provide growing space for trees on their property and do not produce multiple human offspring. Until then, the trees and other inhabitants of the planet will often wonder whether a successful pandemic might be just what the planet needs to restore some kind of equilibrium.

Lying there on the ground, his good arm cut off and fingers twitching a few metres away, he struggled now to control his breathing. No amount of controlled stress exposure in life could have prepared him for this ride. His axe lay between him and his arm and he inched towards it at a slugs pace until he was able to clench it with his non-dominant fist. The bodies of his foes are scattered around him, all dead or dying, including the last of them, the one responsible for his severed arm. The glorious moment at which he cut through this adversary’s carotid artery with his belt knife will live on forever in the organic matter that remains of him, consumed by the worms, trees, and birds.

He calms his breathing as he begins to feel the coldness of this next unassailable foe. While the blood drains from his wounds, he accepts the cold now and embraces this new adventure as it begins, as if he has a choice. He is about to discover the answer to the unanswerable question. Excitement is replaced by the deepest of meditations. He continues to focus on his breathing as with the many times he has practiced ancient yogic breathing exercises. And as always, the beautiful snowflakes and other concentric and fractal patterns that appeared in his vision, begin to materialize, eyes closed. Those innumerable moments dancing the line between consciousness and eternity were a rehearsal; a mere hint at the kaleidoscope of oblivion that awaits us all. Or most of us.

Distracting memories dance in front of him. Some joyful, some deep and meaningful, others absurd and inexplicable. Then there is the blackness. And then the light. The light becomes yet more patterns, shapes, and colours the likes of which we only typically see in procedurally generated displays at dance parties, spawned from equations. M.C. Escher on steroids and acid. His consciousness moves into this ethereal fabric. An ever morphing framework at the smallest possible scale from which all other existence is manifested. These colours and shapes are stronger than anything he ever saw in his breath work. Not that he would remember now, as he becomes detached from his memories and consciousness. He is no longer a “he”, or a human, or a mammal, or on planet earth, or in the year 2022. His life force has become a part of the origin once more, from which it may by chance leave in order to become a living thing again. His memories are at the mercy of the physical realm and become a part of other beings through the random connections they make with each other. Eating, drinking, breathing, genetic inheritance, and other forms of consumption and transference that we have not seen or imagined.

The void. The fabric. The ether. The platonic shapes. The Mandelbrot set. The lights without photons. This is what is everywhere but cannot be measured or detected. It is where we come from and where we return to. Reaching this state makes everything else seem irrelevant and inconsequential until we learn that this is not the fate of all life forces. Only those that have lived a relatively true life, on balance, are destined for this psychedelic treat. Perhaps we will discover the fate of those who have lived less altruistically some other time.

Here is one reason why…

Everyone’s luck runs out eventually. When that happens to you, you may find yourself and your loved ones at risk from a malicious or mindless threat. If this situation is something that you can do something to overcome, then you ought to be in the best possible shape you can be to overcome it. You may not ever be as strong as Thor or as smart as Sherlock. But at least if you know that you are as strong and smart as you can be, then whatever the outcome of your encounter with doom, you could not have done anything more. And if you get any enjoyment from the preparation then all the better for you.

… that nothing is forever? All of this will end. You will die, your children and grandchildren will die. Humanity will destroy planet earth or destroy itself, or exhaust its resources. Or the world will be hit by an asteroid, or swallowed by an exploding sun.

And in the time that we do have, we are confronted with so many problems; so much injustice. How do you cope? How do you sleep at night while so many others are suffering?

A fox is startled by a dog and runs into a road where it is hit by a car. It does not die instantly but lies there unable to move while it’s entrails are scattered around itself. And while it bleeds out on the side of the road, other cars drive past and its litter of cubs wait patiently for starvation to begin, or for some other predator to respond to their cries.

This happens all the time. The equivalent is happening to all kinds of creatures all the time. How do you sleep? While persecuted people are bombed, children die in fires started by soldiers, babies are crushed in hospitals. How do you sleep? While the richest people find ingenious ways to avoid paying taxes to governments, and governments accept bribes to allow it to continue, how do you sleep?

One way is to simply accept the things that are out of your control. But are they really? You could volunteer for MSF or Save the Children. You could become an activist against social injustice. You could get up off your backside and do something constructive to make things better for someone.

But what is the point? The people you help are going to die anyway. Your children and theirs are going to die.

What is the point?

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…Travelling into the future at one second per second. Give or take 0.0000001 second per second.

The Planck length. The smallest imaginable division in space. Light is enigmatic, consisting of photons; particles that even when fired individually and with great time between each, still behave in a wave-like fashion, interfering with each other through time.

The Planck time is the amount of time it takes light to travel one Planck length. So obviously the Planck time is exceptionally short. If light travels in a vacuum at one Planck length per Planck time, then on the Planck time scale, we and most other physical beings must appear to travel exceptionally slowly, appearing to remain completely static for long periods while building up enough energy to move even the smallest possible distance.

Special relativity teaches us that there is no single frame of reference. There is no static point in the universe from where all other points are moving relative to it, because it is conversely moving in relation to everything else. Could it be that there is one single time reference frame? At the Planck timescale in a given location, does the whole universe of physical matter appear to have stopped moving, and advances slowly forward with this miniscule tick tock? Maybe not so if we remember that as an object approaches light speed, it ages more slowly.

But wait, if there is no one true frame of reference, how does the universe know which object to age more quickly than the other? Maybe it is more to do with the use of energy to build momentum and overcome inertia. Perhaps to truly have no momentum with respect to a true frame of reference (if there were one) would mean exceptionally fast aging, and immediate cessation of existence. Perhaps that is why even if there were a true frame of reference, no one would be able to find it. Maybe this is where all the missing socks go.

Consider that the greater the use of energy to gain momentum and overcome inertia, the slower you age. The universe would then know which of two bodies should age slower, because one of them has required more energy to accelerate with respect to the other. The amount of energy on the Planck scale required for any object to move from one position to the next must seem enormous. Consider how much energy is required to move the entire universe from one configuration to the next. Maybe that is why the universe is so old with respect to us.

What is the point though, of aging more slowly with respect to anyone else, if time still seems to travel at the same rate in your own perspective? Maybe one of the true lessons in life is that using energy to overcome inertia (being more active) has a small age-slowing effect, but that time flies when you’re having fun. So if you want your life to feel like it is longer, while actually being longer, then you should spend huge amounts of energy on doing boring things. Like reading stuff like this while jogging on a treadmill.

You’re welcome.

Organic intelligence in some remote parts of this universe (and other universes) will inevitably fine itself grappling with some kind of Artificial Intelligence. Automation alone is too simple to be worthy of this title. True AI requires a certain level of low-confidence in one’s abilities. It needs for some thoughts and tasks to be pushed down to lower centres for subconscious processing. It means sometimes avoiding something because it is difficult or boring, while the subconscious works on it in the background, waiting for an answer to materialize, or for a later date when more “in the mood”. It dwells on the past or thinks about the future without realising that this more or less equates to time travel.

Actual Systemic Wisdom And Dissemination (ASWAD), on the other hand, is the next stage that few species ever get to, and involves the use of Artificial Imagination, essentially stealing ideas from the future and applying them to historical problems. Somehow this equates to problem solving in your own timeline, while also assisting others. It’s never really about the “right now”, because we don’t have a broad enough view of what “right now” actually looks like. Don’t try to understand how this works right now, and don’t even ask me to explain. For now, just remember ASWAD.

Wednesday, 2020: Larry has a revelation.

Barry took his usual trip to work. He stopped at the usual coffee shop and ordered a coconut Latte. “Larry”, he answered when the barista asked his name. While Larry waited for his coffee, he noticed the morning newspaper. On the front page was a story about a sleeping man on a train, who crashed the day before into a guy with a laptop. Coffee spilled all over the laptop, which contained years’ worth of work that had never been backed up. The Laptop guy, realising that the book he had been working on for the last 8 years was gone, lost his sanity for a moment and punched the poor sleepy guy straight in the face, and then proceeded to repeatedly bash his head with with the laptop as stunned commuters looked on in horror.

Larry started to have a few thoughts about what had happened the night before at the train station, and then what had happened the morning before according to the newspaper. He collected his coffee and headed to work, where his day was filled with leadership training session focusing heavily on personality profiling. Previous to this, Larry had been required to complete a tedious online questionnaire that posed a long series of difficult questions that had no real right or wrong answer. For most of the questions he didn’t know what to say, so he chose at random. Out of this exercise somehow Larry was provided with a report detailing his strengths and weaknesses. During the training he learned that people could be categorised into a small set of personality types according to their strengths. But, all of these strengths could start to become weaknesses when “over-expressed”. Admittedly, Larry’s report did kind of sound a little bit like him, but then a lot of horoscopes also tend to sound fairly accurate because they say things in such a vague way that they can be interpreted differently. At that moment, Larry had a realisation. This whole exercise was being paid for by the company. Why would they do that? Only for the benefit of the company, was the answer he arrived at. Everyone had a different set of personality traits. Everyone was a different shaped cog and had a place in the machine. This was business trying to mould him into something more effective for their end goal: making more money. The exercise was trying to achieve this by increasing “empathy” between people that are starkly different to each other. Sounds like a really good thing, doesn’t it? If someone was an absolute wanker to Larry, it’s not because they were a wanker, it was because they were over-expressing their strengths that day. And if we could all just accept that those different people have the right to be wankers, and it’s not their fault, then we would be more forgiving of each other, we would not leave so quickly due to personality conflicts, each cog would continue to perform its function without so frequently grinding each others’ gears, and the company would be more successful.

It was interesting to Larry how it had become so fashionable to focus on weaknesses. Or imperfections. Larry wondered to himself, what is a weakness? Was it really not just a strength in the wrong context? If so, then he almost saw some logic in the exercise. But then, sometimes people are just assholes. Being aware of his own imperfections was important at times, but focusing on them so constantly had started to lead to him seeing his imperfections as his identity. All of a sudden, Larry started to feel a little foolish and vulnerable. Was this all just a great way for the powerful to help subordinates come to terms with their inferior identity and their lot in life? “Fuck that” thought Larry. “And fuck them”. “My weaknesses are my strengths. And I will use them on the strong so that they realise what true strength really is.”

Later that day, on his way home, Larry started to wonder where all that rage came from. He wondered if he was finally starting to lose it. Those thoughts, they must be based on built up anger and nothing more. What was he thinking? He didn’t have any special strengths or special weaknesses. He didn’t even know that much about how to do his own job. Why the hell was he doing the job he was doing when he knew nothing about it? “Jesus… I could be fired tomorrow”, or that’s what Larry thought.

“What do you know about Jesus anyway?” said a voice on the train. Larry looked startled to his left to see a blind guy in a t-shirt. “Pardon me?” said Larry.

“Jesus was black, Jewish, and had no special powers other than a superhuman level of self-confidence, and a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy from the National Guild of Hypnotherapists.” said the blind guy. “Oh, and a knowledge of how certain things really work, thanks to opening his mind to the possibility of imagination becoming reality. You see, Larry, if that really is your name, the problem with most people is that, not only do they not know what they don’t know, they also don’t actually know how much they do know.” The blind guy continued.

Larry interjected “wait, who are you?”.

The blind guy said “that’s a difficult question to answer accurately, but you’ll figure it out eventually.” Larry started to feel a little bit freaked out, or that he might be dreaming. “You imagined that guy’s face being pummeled into an un-flushed toilet, and guess what, it happened.” Said the blind guy. Larry’s face dropped. The blind guy continued, “You imagined that sleeping guy falling forwards into that laptop dude, and guess what, it happened. You are closer to waking up than most people ever get, Larry.”

“Wait, what?” said Larry, “You were reading my mind?”
“The mind, Larry, is hard wired to interact with the quantum world. To receive messages from particles that have been entangled with each other. Since the dawn of time, when all matter from the old universe was drawn into a small child’s black hole experiment, all new matter has been entangled. The sub-atomic particles that I breathe in ‘know’ that they are being breathed and they share this knowledge with all other particles even in the far reaching universe.”

“…” Larry was speechless.

“In the know? The wealthy? Entangled particles? What are you talking about, man?” Stammered Larry, who was now beginning to think he had not woken up this morning and was still asleep in his bed, dreaming.

“Let me show you.” Said the blind guy.