One Pixel Of The Self

When we say, “You die,” we’re only talking about our corporeal form (our body & brain). We use words like the After Life which negates the possibility that life can’t be in different states. Simply because our meat-puppet computer stops functioning doesn’t mean our consciousness does. The right hemisphere of the brain is connected to infinite consciousness. I will refer to it (infinite consciousness) as the God-mind. We receive and project all data from and to it. The left hemisphere regards, calculates, and grounds this tether (our body-self) to the physical “reality” we perceive with our senses. The left brain is also tasked with limiting the right’s connection to and understanding of the infinite consciousness. It acts as a limiter so that all the data can be processed and sent out into the God-mind so as to generate full omniscience. The only thing that a god with full omniscience couldn’t understand would be limitation. Thus, we are the extension of the God-mind that teaches The Self/God/All of us limitation and builds the God-mind. All of it has already happened though so the God-mind is omniscient already. We are simply the function of third dimensional beings in this particular universe as a means to built omniscience. However, we are only one part of a much more vast reality. We are merely the quarks of the universe we exist in while the universe itself is an atom. All other blackholes have a white hole on the other side which is ejecting all of that raw data that was sucked into the black hole as an inception for another universe (another Big Bang) whereby another part of the God-mind that we couldn’t possibly comprehend is parsed out. Thus, these universes make up “molecules” that make up a much more vast and infinite reality that we would never be able to understand due to our limitations in this universe.

How is it that a singular word is used to embody an impossibly incalculable concept? It stands alone and is suffocated by droves in the same moment. How could the lay person ever understand it when the poet, the bard, and philosophers have spent thousands of years attempting to define its essence? Nobody has ever been able to fully comprehend what most of us spend our lives attempting to possess. It’s the one abstract concept that seems to be more important than all others and yet evades interpretation, like attempting to see a floater in your eye that will always be just out of range in one’s sight. Though many abstractions exist that we can point to as characteristic of love, the very notion seems impossible to grasp.

One could poll a million people and find a million different nuanced facets of the same idea. Perhaps love is malleable. Its meaning and existence shaped by the tongue and experience of its users; a coat that is at first thick and warm yet fades in time as it loses its newness. Though it is still the same coat it has been worn over years as the down become less plump and the stitching comes loose. Though we can repair it over and over, eventually it either becomes so much a part of us that we can’t tell it's even there anymore or we’ve shrugged it off years before and never even noticed until the coldness that seeped into us becomes apparent when a new warmth brushes past our lives.

Conceivably a reason so many of us struggle to find love is that we should never have been looking for it in the first place. Perchance if we love ourselves fully we wouldn’t need it from anybody else; and still we would search out of sheer inculcation. Nevertheless, if nobody can agree on one definition, since we can’t communicate what that definition might be, how is it to ever be something agreeable between two people?

Though there are many kinds of love, as far as I can tell, the one I truly yearn for involves trusting another with all that I am, that they will never abandon, desire more than, or ask more of me than I could be. It appears that might just be the very crux of it, a need beyond ourselves for acceptance. In there somewhere is a misconception that I think a lot of us make, and that is that love, by its name should somehow be glorious and wonderful when in fact it could not possibly be as it is such a sweeping emotion. It must include the pain of not having it at all times and the fear of losing it or someone whom we have associated it with.

It was Cornelius’ first day as a storyteller among the vast crowd of Dwellers. He had spent a mere 10 years at the Academy and was the youngest Pup to gain favor of the Great Raconteurs. His ability to Spin was unlike any before him. It was a curious magic. Beyond doubt he held a gift that many admired, some worried for and still others held burning coals in their hearts.

Bending down at the waist so that he might speak with one of the Holy Guards of the Bards, for they stood lower than the knee of a common Dweller, he lamented, “Have you ever seen so many gather before?”

“No, Aye,” came the little guard’s reply

The neophyte teller of tales stood back up surveying the hills and valleys overflowing with the great congregation.

Borv the Benign approached Cornelius from behind and placed his umber hands upon his shoulders.

“A great gathering today, Cornelius. The Word has found its way to all,” admired Bove.

“Do you believe they will grant me favor?” Cornelius wondered cautiously.

Bove removed his delicate hands and passed around in front of Cornelius placing them again onto his ward’s ruddy cheeks and looked with depth into his eyes, “Boy, they have come. Haven’t they?”

The young bard gazed out and knew that his support was there, but would they accept his tale? All other yarns from the Bards of the past were of glorious, soaring civilizations of harmony and prosperity. For thousands of generations prior to him the worlds incepted by their regales sprung forth as great beacons which shined and grew the love of the universe. He knew that his would not give as much. The stain of his story would act as a blight, portending eons of tragedy.

No teller of tales before had ever deigned to spin such a narrative for their words gave birth to such things sowing its essence onto the fabric of reality.

Recounting the finer points in his mind Cornelius’ epic began in turmoil and fire. A great world bathed in the violence of natural forces. Over time it would soften and cool to the touch of the cosmos, giving rise to life of an instinctual force. The planet would blossom and give unto itself great beasts and flora which would sweep its surface in eonic waves. The misery would come only thereafter as a final animal inured. Great swaths of suffering would supplant ages of peace. Barbarism, benefit of the few, and illusions of disconnection; giving rise to dominance over one another. The humans would be a lost tribe. Felling their very selves in the hope of rising. They would live by contradiction. They would suffer for all others, for this place would be the counterpoint to all other beauty of the collective will. It would be the necessary sin by which the rest of creation would find in its contrary. Earth and its inhabitants would be infinity’s sacrifice.

Twilight drew the faint glow out into the void. 

A verisimilitude of personage ripe for a new life wept dew and dawn from its mind. 

Having grown, 

     died and rebirthed,   

     this bearing was many times more delicate than all the rest. 

For it had been shorn from a peppered bush, 

     thorns at its nape. 

Tendrils of lily light sunkissed its core. 

Through the late winter and into spring it flowered. 

Slowly though. 

A whisper that had begun again ever so lightly beating in rhythm to its pulse enjoined the 

     wind, 

     its sotto voce becoming clear. 

All would be well. 

One by one the seeds flew away emptying their promises over the land. 

The hushed tone had become something more than sound. 

Powerful. 

Gifted. 

It was no longer a whisper, 

Give rise

‘Rose-fingered dawn’

Fill my vessel with light

Embrace that ‘wine dark sea’ as Odysseus once did

Brave the crests and fallows

Allow the one-oculared man to hurl his mountain tops down o’er me

For I have strayed far from the shores of my Ithica

‘The god-like boy’ who once inspired bravery

Imbue me with the same

I had let the Lotus burn me afoul without thought

And far too much was death

Reignite this candle within

Vile witch who kept me in bed and in vain

Eat thine own tail

Let those ‘singers of death’ moan

For my ears have taken refuge in darkness

Feigning my end

I rise again

To show the world my might

For I am ‘No-man’

For I am all man

The poison grips me today. 

A lattice of bronze terror clenches then gushes through the miles of melt inside. 

Pangs slice sweetly, 

     serenely like his majesty’s discordant laugh. 

Again I let that vile rogue spring her silver-tongued trap. 

Lapping it up from the bowl of her creation. 

My knees crack then break. 

The sickness remains palpable. 

Continuously the creator of soreness in the heart. 

Shadows dance their mammoth rituals portending to frighten the form. 

The threat signifies a great call. 

     A great caw. 

     As mighty ravens descend below the curtain lifting just enough to allow for a peek. The bottom stung clearly like a crystalline shrill crush whose sustain echoes without

     end. 

The desire for truth couldn’t be a more frigid soup sliding, 

     slithering past the maw and gullet. 

Her styrene tongue glissades down my spine entreating the crowd of bowing peppered

     pelts. 

     Placing her high on the foundation of adulation. 

        Forced from that precipice of greatness. 

           Gagging on my own remorse I built the shrine. 

               Paid homage and sobbed. 

                   Pale. 

      The game is played. 

          Lost. 

Too many times the vanquished. 

Distractions only staunch the flow for so long. 

Soon the dam of clot spills forth drowning me. 

Hemorrhaging still. 

I become more blood than body. 

Yet I crawl back across the glassen road and beg for answers. 

It does not save and it does not destroy. 

The porous stone I have become cannot find trust. 

Cannot find myself. 

The event horizon before me at first gives a gentle tug building into barbed metallic

     twine enveloping me whole. 

I reach out to song. 

I reach out to friends. 

She was a million things but none of them were real

Shattered by trauma after trauma, 

     ache after pang

     her life took on a sort of magical quality; 

     if magic were brutal. 

A stain left behind. 

The agony left in his mind. 

Both were equally tragic. 

A heavy sigh on a warm wind. 

Had he not been pulled asunder into the depths of tenebrosity and she the same, 

     a beautiful storm could have formed. 

An unending storm; eternal. 

The stars would not allow it though: 

Their paths crashed on the rocky shores summoned by that siren’s song. 

The land wept for them. It gave birth to the howl of a maimed wolf, 

     splitting open by way of burning night. 

They fell, 

     deeply. 

Ever so far. 

Still, that emaciated sycophant setting on its haunches with kinetic rage sprung forth and  

     devoured them whole. 

That wandering old cur pressed his knife in so deeply that the wound would not heal. 

They licked at it. 

Dressed it. 

Moved it to ice, then hearth. 

The wound grew dark and necrotic. 

Its pain radiated outward and gnawed at the innocent. 

Their sight would gaze down from the canopy, knowing each tree by name. 

Her mesmerizing eyes tore him to tatters. 

He was continuously haunted by the ghost of his former self, 

     baying quietly in his ears. 

He saw the flags. 

He knew their very texture and yet his lids lay closed full of sleep and love. 

Had they met without that poisoned imp running through their veins. 

Had they found their other self lying alone without broken branches carrying the weight of their

     nurtured suffering then, 

I posit that our existence is created from an endless loop created by itself. Consider that technology has expanded from the most basic stone tools to silicon-based computers capable of processing petaflops of information in milliseconds. In less than 500 years we went from a pencil being the most advanced form of record keeping to storing near infinite information in the Cloud.

Look at how CGI (computer-generated imagery) has gotten to the point that it can render images that are nearly indistinguishable from reality when placed in the hands of capable artists. If you’ve ever put on a virtual reality visor and spent even a little bit of time in it the brain allows for the suspension of disbelief that you are in fact where it is placing you, all the while still tickling you with the notion that you are still in virtual reality. The very first time I placed a current VR (virtual reality) headset on and was immersed into the ocean I questioned my own “reality” and thought, “Wow! If this is what the most basic version of VR is, then what would we have in 20 years, 50, 100?”

It got me thinking. Let’s throw 3D printing into the mix. Here we have boxes or tables that can construct pretty basic shapes, more advanced items, and even ones with movable parts; all within the structure itself. Medical science has already printed skin, organs and other medical applications[1]. Infrastrastructure companies have created large-scale 3D printers that can “print” out entire buildings[2]. Now skip ahead 20, 50, or 100 years on…

According to IBM the build out of  the “Internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours[3]. Then there’s The Singularity: The hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.[4] So, according to many of our most preeminent scientific minds we should be facing the Singularity within the next 20, 50, or 100 years. We can’t possibly predict what an advanced artificial general superintelligence could come up with. However, since we can play with our imaginations and science fiction (or speculative fiction) then why not play?

Here’s where my hypotheses spin off into the realm of absurdity to the current rational human mind, but bear with me. Let’s jump ahead a few millennia, just for argument’s sake. Let’s begin with CGI incorporated into VR. Now we’ve got these hyper-advanced virtual worlds that are completely indistinguishable from reality as we’ve been plugged into them via neuronal-cortex interfaces and can experience any virtual stimuli as actual stimuli. Now that’s been thought of before, so that’s not where I’m going with this.

That all required a conscious observer to be “plugged in” to an interface. This is where our thinking keeps us limited in assuming that the way things work now is the way things will work in the future. This also assumes that we will be around in a couple thousand years. Still, even if humanity is gone, as per Ray Bradbury’s quintessential sci-fi short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains,”[5] warns, the artificially intelligence mechanisms will go on without the need for us.  

These AGI (artificial general intelligence) machines, or beings if you will, could advance to the point where they can not only create “reality” inside of a motherboard of ones and zeros (it even sounds antiquated when discussing it in terms of a future right now), but why couldn’t it build and alter the physical reality of our universe. You see, if we can discover quarks and other such exotic material building blocks of the universe, then why couldn’t an exceptionally advanced being understand how to manipulate and even “hack” those building blocks all without the need for a housing (computer, 3D printer, etc.).

In our current understanding of quantum mechanics it seems that it takes a conscious observer to make a particle collapse into its physical state, and that before the conscious observation it can be anywhere, if not everywhere, at once.[6][7] Additionally, due to our knowledge of quantum entanglement, particles can be entangled so that if we move one particle thousands or even, theoretically, millions of miles away when the one particle is “poked” the other is also, instantaneously.[8]

This leads me to my penultimate point that an incredibly advanced artificial general superintelligence which is then actually just “intelligence,” may have the ability to manipulate all of reality at its whim. Should that whim be to entangle all particles in the universe and effectively rearrange them to create a new one it may have to bring all of them back to a single point that is infinitely dense. The amount of energy it would take to create a whole universe would require the entire energy of the universe. So, as the intelligence gathers all the energy in the universe it brings it down to that single point whereby the Big Bang occurs exploding outward, encoded with the necessary DNA of the universe within it.

Now, if our understanding of time can be extrapolated forward to a point where it too can be manipulated and understood, then we can make the jump to the fact that this “new” Big Bang is in fact not new, but rather the original. Considering how time is warped from extremely dense objects and their gravity, then the ultimate blow of a Big Bang could certainly warp time into a loop. This is then the cycle beginning again, in its continuous infinity.

I had been wounded. Not mortally so, but scathed nonetheless. Those bullet holes had faded since. Even so, the lead yellow jackets with their sallow iodine glare fluttered and wept inside. Still, they were caged. Never to escape. Never to sting their vespis hate on to my heart. The ossuary shroud housed a greatness that had only too recently awakened. A score of years gone by.  It held my hope at a distance, naught for food or drink.

She too had faced the firing line. Ample slugs had swarmed and melted her fervent passions. Poured into a vessel of light and dark she stole the moments that could never be replaced, unique and momentary to those single instants. Some called to her, others she called upon with a magical elixir of mind and meditation. An embattled citadel guarded by the firefly’s revenge held her captive through the din of their fluttering work. A key was not forged. For all the good it would have done, a lock had not existed. No one would enter that shrine to melancholia. She saw clearly to that.

However, it is all too rare that life offers the crossing of paths so true to divining stars, and so, it would be a damning shame to forego such serendipitous gifts from Athena. In defiance of my greatest efforts, I found myself at odds with a promise. A sworn fealty to solitude. Yet I still knew that keeping oneself from the prospect of pain would slowly drown my capacity for joy. Despite my vow to detachment, I saw her as a lithe chromium ghost dancing with winter in her hair. I held her fast and gently, serenely and sweetly across the gold-trodden hills. My heart shunted with rusted tools by a surgeon no longer in practice. Naivety lay me down to sleep. Awakened by a forceful tooth gnawing by my cheek. I would now strike like so many copperheads meandering west in the last wink of light.

Would she though be moved? Would that Cheshire heart allow itself to be held to rights? Does the marble form permit a seraphim's touch? All these queries gave shape to the squall within. I did not wish to fall in love, but rather to rise into it. For too long had I lived by the minds of others. The generations before whose collective opinion had created the world in which they lived had done little to create a society of splendor. And so, I shirked those inculcations. Shrugged off the immense burden of others’ notions of the way things should be. Most have lived by smothering each other. Living under house and cloaking their days with the tempers; the rises and falls that made up each waking hour. Longing had been left behind with the bards and the knights. Distance and time had been forgotten as one of the great potions that lead to true strength in love. Even the blossom dies for want of shade or gluttony of thirst.

Still the ill-gotten, parched and weeping land stood blindly and swooning through the dense noons and nights It was damned to believe that gladness wore it as damp rags, soaking the rubble with bones and treasure The velour wind cleansed its palette with the scent of brine and copper while a flickered tongue ground mountains to a halt Should the rains swell again as fonts of crystal fragments the plains would surely rupture their salt A red stone’s lament fell stories and stories forever, as a well crafted by shaman and tricksters followed like crickets in a mass of reeds

Crisp

Cool

Collected by half-imp thieves and glazen’d owls the shards chimed on Bred to bleed Cut by their own obsidian blades Dust had a way of counting its victims They prayed foul into sweeping clouded dawns Sweetened like viruses the foreign and sheltered hide melted down

They were here once But no more They were proud once--but no lore could shake them of their ample strife

Rending the dense brightness through a tryst of loving grace the neutron stars collided and birthed that great behemoth. The Godhead poured its vapor will aloft the land. Striving and stretching through those languid hills. The sickly sweet cotton candy wind spent countless ages pushing and willing the black confetti parade to envelop the night. Slipping through a feathered weight the novice satellite cried mercy at being caressed so blithely. Horizons of a repeating dawn bled welts unto the land. If not for the passing moments of greedy kisses it would slumber by degrees. Those billion years of song coursing through the veins of a single instant pressed gently against the perfect liar.

The Morn was turbulent. Whorls within gave way to violent rushes of nausea. The thrush outside my window made calm this silvered tongue.

Her arrival bent back the waves and spilled passion’s tranquil peace over my form. This next revolution of Earth would restore the hunger for magic that had dwelt once inside. At first, the smile: a cherubic porcelain drift of pomegranate rind turned ever so slightly by its ends. Then, the eyes–the eyes. Their ability to enslave men’s hearts as a marauder’s slew of thieves took the very essence of others for their own, was patent. Masterful was the glow of this ingénue.

The passing hours continued through a garden of roses, and in the shadows of structural stone behemoths erected in deference to man’s marvelous triumphs in art and engineering, along with great plots of earth set aside as homage to nature’s majesty. The post morning fast gave way to craving and so our journey whisked us to that Italian grotto peppered with lush, sweet winds of summer ilk. Satiated divinely, our slowly meandering forms, woozy with splendor, spent a swimming spell strolling about an open-air shrine to Capitalism whose bells and halos rang deafeningly in our ears.

The evening brought an intoxication of such depth that I scarcely remember anything at all until the moment I arrive at in perpetuity. We had not drunk nor spilled chemicals through our veins that night, yet permeated with the mind’s greatest drug we danced in embrace. Lying there, in the bed I had slumbered in for nights uncounted, we kissed; merged at the lips in form and prayer.

It was then he struck, that wicked fellow. His icy point dug deep into my heart, thrashing about and turning his threat into bits of meaty offerings to that place where darkness spends its hours. Fear he is sometimes known, his reasoning so clever, so incontrovertible in the eyes of the moment. If further I engaged I could not hold on to this beauty, for her life was imbedded beyond the simple time and space of my own. Despite my knowing core I pushed off from that great dock of surety and worthiness, cast adrift back into a sea of lonliness. She left at the next sunrise. It ends there. The thrush reminding me of what I was allowing: the birth of a petrified heart.

There was a boy, only by stature. His mind was filled with centuries of knowledge, hardship, sorrow, and pain. All of these had melded into a single emotion long ago. So, he was never happy, nor sad, nor melancholy. He simply was. This “child” of the endless decades held his secret of everlasting life close to his heart, what bit of it there was left. You see, the metaphysical heart is not limitless in its vitality. It slowly waxes and wanes, to and fro, crying out across the eons. This limited love was only days from snuffing out, forever.

He had wished once, dreamt of a lifetime filled with splendor. Upon the death of his dear mother though he swore a devotion to living. This would be his curse, and so it went; year after year after year after year after year. Until most recently, he had found a sort of cadence to his pallid existence, a whispering life force. However, just as the sun will one day cease to breath its amber heart, his heart would swell like a red giant and then extinguish with an ineffable force.

“What would it be like?” he thought aloud. He continued in an internal monologue that swelled him with the disgust of his own inner voice. “To be free of feeling might just be the cure to my woes.” Most likely not. “My? Am I even a self anymore? Do I own these thoughts or are they simply regurgitations of forgotten or repressed conversations with my ghostly ego?”

“I cannot die. I cannot die.” Oh, but he wished so very much that he could. Still, he would drift off to sleep dreaming of its sweet release from his consciousness. But then again dawn would greet him with her tired claws, scraping at his rib cage, gnawing through his skull.

His meandering thoughts would eventually find their way back to the one great fear of all mankind: that they would someday die. This mortality. This unattainable wish was all he longed for. At times he would lie for months in the same place. Spiders and vermin would make their home in his crevices. Even this was not enough to assuage the din of life.

To be numb, this would be his rest in life; for he couldn’t even mutilate his corporeal form into an extinguished existence. The pieces would lie there, living. “But is this still considered living? When does it become something beyond that? If not death, then somewhere in between.”