CHAPTER 4 – THE “I”
WE
Let us continue our narrative.
I eventually made it home safely, promptly returning to his seat before the fire only to resume his musings. Although, this time his musings were characterized by a unique and mysterious dilemma: that which had been presented to him by this suspicious, potentially illusory girl. We knew of course, that this girl was as real as him; still, by this time I couldn’t help but entertain the thought. His mind had betrayed him before, but never with a shade as strange as this.
And more, what was he to make of this mystery gift, and the park-girl’s rather unambiguous instructions to consume it immediately? All of this was now very strange, exceedingly odd; clarity eluded him. The image of this girl posed an allure he had never before known, and which he now dreaded might be an intricate construction of his mind. Every intellectual faculty, every cognitive guardrail, was screaming for I to dissolve the urge immediately. In what sick world should one be expected to obey the instructions of an obscure, & potentially even illegally behaving (but damn, she was pretty) stranger? Logic pointed clearly, succinctly, at the decision to be made. But we might have been keen to expect (yes, dear reader, we know how one’s imagination runs), that a new, rebellious force was exerting itself dramatically over I’s psyche at this moment. This force was predictability, the unprecedented mystery of that girl.
How precisely the following internal conflict unfolds is an explanation we may forgo considering the forwardly anticipated events. Summarily, I swayed back and forth for – how long? It felt like an hour, though it may have actually been several minutes. Nonetheless, he swayed with violent inconclusiveness, but in a single moment of frustrated release, he ultimately proceeded to gulp down the tiny vessel’s entire contents on impulse; this preceded by no degree of expressed finality or decisiveness, and after having sworn to dispose of the thing no more than 90 seconds prior. In equally frustrated realization of what he’d just done, he angrily tossed the empty vial into the fire.
perfect.
Immediate regret. Then fear, the worst potential outcomes all flashed before his mind — poisons, toxins, nerve agents, depressants, deliriants, dissociatives, tranquilizers, experimental bioweaponry… the taste was minimal if anything at all; a faint hint of metal, although the type of metal I had no clue; perhaps there wasn’t even a taste at all, but that was the subtle and initial reaction he had innately perceived.
After 10 minutes or so, his initial panic had begun to subside. Still stressed, still uncertain, however the prospect of immediate and or painful chemical fatality had just about passed.
And so for a while, I sat there, reflecting deeply on the contents of the past several hours in desperate pursuit of confirming to himself they had actually happened. His mind was a fire now reaching desperately toward an apprehension of this girl, she was all he could think about, her allure had consumed him entirely. Though after each loop of reflection he was ultimately forced to accept that he had certainly, without any exception of doubt, left that place with some physical demonstration. But now it was gone, consumed and disposed of on impulse in what might be considered a (contraction) of his starving psyche, a momentary internal betrayal of desperation, of despair. Still, there was a lingering draw of warmth, sweetness even, and I would occasionally catch (and promptly stop) himself smiling at the observation of these unprecedented thoughts & feelings.
For the first moment since he woke up earlier that day, I now began to feel the weight of his eyelids. It had not yet occurred to him that maybe shelving his thoughts for the night would refresh and provide him with some much-needed clarity. He had potentially just taken a drug, to be fair, but the only effects he had felt at that point were disorientation, mental exhaustion, and the ominous ecstasy induced by this mystery girl. Still, delirium was probably emerging in contribution to these things, and I had a mind which was easily prone to delirium. He was strained and confused; It was time to surrender. He could entertain this infinite absurdity again tomorrow.
Except, at the completion of that thought, I did not particularly like the feeling of the next moment in time as it presented itself to him.
And here we will once again exercise our established duality.
I
A full hour now, since that fateful decision. What a swirl of emotions these past few hours have been. To go from my entirely contained, fully immersive bubble, to suddenly having this other force reach in uninvited and plant its mysterious seed.
Yes, well… rabid uncertainty, fruitless disposition.
What?
I think I’m beginning to feel a bit tired. I am used to these heavier thoughts, although today my mind has carried enough weight.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
Huxley, to be certain; he should get no quarrel from me.
Though… I don’t know why such an agreeable statement would arise from within me while carrying such strange loudness at this very hour in which my thoughts should be drifting away. Usually, at this time, the “I” recedes, and that linear stream of subjectively narrated experience having been woven and retained throughout the day would slowly & subtly thread itself into that familiar dreamy haze. Instead… my mind seems on a rather strange trajectory, and I can’t seem to escape the beguile of this strange, new anima…
& she got the menthol.
…you’re actually unbelievable.
I know.
Hold on.
Now that “I” think of it, ‘I’ am beginning to feel rather stuck in this strange loop of “I.”
After all, what is one truly evoking when referring to this thing that is I? Surely, within an internal monologue such as the one possessing my mind at all times, there is no need for such an “I”; the conversation is all-encompassing, it has already attended to the matter of subjectivity. But now, for some reason, the whole justification seemed elusive to me. Fine then, I am tired, but for assurance, let me search for some gauge of this I, I know its core is within here somewhere. For what else would characterize the nature of that person through which I was observing the contents of this here night? There is concreteness in those memories, there is concreteness in the knowledge of the person having experienced them… but where is that person now? Is he the I? Is that even what (I) was originally trying to figure out through this (wretched) line of inquiry?
Fine, I’ll go inward yet further, fighting the onset of apparent debilitation in order to pin down the thing I know should be there as a matter of fact. I’ll go into the deepest level of observation, whatever that may be. Where to look… for surely this “I” would not be found in any sort of ambiguous ‘soul’, nor heart nor organ whose purpose has already been dedicated to one’s evolutionary supplementation. This feeling of awareness seemed much more to be emanating from the mind, yes… buried deep within the mind, somewhere, hidden within that intricate web of neurological wiring that is ultimately just math (entropy) having compressed back into itself. Something, here in the brain, is that which gives rise to this thing we call consciousness, this I am sure of, man has proven it with science.
So yes… I think that is sufficient, the I remains intact, surely. It proceeds me, and my experience, as all things are simply proceeding the next within this causally deterministic universe. Still, I cannot help but wonder… What is the thing that then precedes this I? The mind is emergent, it must be, so the correct answer to this question would be: all that is necessary to construct a materially conscious brain less the atomic particle that would fulfill its completion. Hmm…. Is that what is actually occurring? A mere atom, the smallest, most incomprehensible state of observable matter known to man (uhhh…); this is the thing which makes that which is a number into he who is aware?
This short meditation on the “I” was stirring screams self-referential suspicion within me.
ah, good times.
Okay, I’m perhaps delirious, my mind cannot tie together that which it usually does with ease. Now there is something odd I am observing in myself, something I am suspecting I may have taken for granted… I shall just stare at this fire, let the dance of its flames drift me away into my much-needed rest.
Will I sleep in this chair?
The chair is not my bed; yet at the same time, this chair could be known as my bed, as it is practically the only item of furnishing I venture to use for that purpose which is otherwise solely resigned to that of the bed. Every night I have known this trinity: the chair(bed), the fire, the paracosmic haze. Certainly, I will sleep in this chair, what is necessary in such an inquiry? It feels as though the thought which arose in me just now, in pursuit of concluding my night on the comfort of this very chair, was now responding to a separate presence, referring to a different authority altogether. So odd, I have never needed permission from myself in this way, much less for the act of sleeping in this very chair, that which I have done so many, if not every time(s).
“You have a bed. Is it broken?”
Strange confusion; somehow, I hear these words outside of me yet I know they are within me all the same. Ahhh… here we go again, with the “me’s” and the “I’s”, so much redundancy, so much assumed in this subjectively interpretive framework… why only now am I batting my (“I”) at these things?
“Comical! Yet the question remains.”
My confusion was now fright. For I swear, I know entirely, that this voice had come from myself, it was my voice, yet I have no recollection of opening my mouth nor even intending to string together that set of words… no, something now was happening to me that was distinguishably foreign. Elusive. All was becoming elusive.
“You confuse the self and the will, you think one precedes you and that the other does not exist. But no, you have it the opposite.”
I could now see that this voice was real, and it was in fact coming from inside of me, in as much of a sense that I might be considered ‘me.’ But now, in an unprecedented and genuinely (inexplicable) fashion, I could begin to feel this “I” and this “me” separate from each other, rebelliously establishing their own identities, outside of that which I have come to perpetually understand as the “I”. Or perhaps, it is that I am the “me”, and this other force is now the “I”? Though does it really matter the labels we ascribe? I, we… no, these linguistic abstractions are no longer sufficient for my current engagement with reality. For it seemed in that moment, “I” was that which existed as a stream of present consciousness denoting one “other,” with said internally arising independent awareness now positioning itself as the other “other”.
But was it really so clear? Is reality truly parsed up so nicely as to provide me with a neatly definable category with which to wholly rest my understanding of this new nature of “I?” I suspect it is not, I think it should instead be a gradience, as all things are. Yes, closer to a spectrum of “I’s”… not individual I’s to be pinned down and interrogated.
“There you are correct.”
…
US
Now, it was clear that a dialogue had been established between a combination of these versions of “I”, which I was desperately now trying to apprehend. The thought of sleep shuddered away.
“Which one are you, then?”
“Trying to pin me down, still.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. For this meaning has to be encoded somehow. So what, will you cry ‘illusion’ until language itself has been perfectly mirrored by truth? You can’t help to pick apart these definitions as though you have a semantic illness.”
“Perhaps, but I must stand defense –”
“Of reality, yes, but such is the problem. Do you think whatever perception you’ve adopted is even capable of grasping the ‘real’ thing underneath these definitions?”
“The real thing can be derived. And what else is there to do, other than grasp?”
“One can be quiet; you’ll see soon enough. But now — here is your romantic nature at work again, let me tell you. Perhaps you will only see it having noted this version of yourself, but you will see it, regardless. Listen — for when you start in your analysis, this claim of ‘truth’ is already resting on the assumption that there is that which can be precedingly understood.”
I thought for a second, as though (I) were not doing so already.
“It is so. I can prove this axiom right now, in the present moment between You (me) & I. Let us pursue anything one can imagine; it will dissipate down to math, I promise this. You hint that I am wrong in my tenets, but this is simply observing reality at its core. Yes — take anything you want, mind or matter. We can walk through it together, deconstruct it down to its very last particle, and eventually it will show itself to be math. And what is math, other than the governing principle of the material game? Think about it — look around you, everything will be math, and that’s all there is to it. An arbitrary coincidence of math; everything in the materially geometric cosmos. You and I are simple observers, yet we have no weight in the matter. Yes, there was a flash of math, and all was determined in that moment.”
“Really? Math, you say?”
that’s what I said…
“It’s clearly so. Take anything, like I said; we can understand it exhaustively through mathematical description.”
“Appreciable sight. But no, not exhaustively. Have you followed your iteration to its end, fully? No… it’s clearly not so. Now think, take this one last step; you’re nearly there.”
“It is, though… the end is self-evident, and our final axiom becomes increasingly clear every day; this necessarily, through man’s tools of math and science.”
“Don’t you think such pursuits would narrow this mathematical ‘axiom’ over time? Now look — what have we — ambiguous fields of ‘quantum excitation?’ More labels, more descriptions, perhaps another axiom in a few years’ time? Effective, but still; do these technical labels ever actually draw us toward reality in its essence?”
“Yes.”
“No, now listen closely: you mistake the thing you abstract out from your perception of reality, and employ that over the only true, direct axiom which exists at all.”
“…I elude myself.”
“Your claim, this ‘axiom of all axioms’, are we truly any closer to it? Tell me, at what point might the number of these ‘discovered’ axioms tighten, wind down, or should we keep adding axiom after axiom at every (empirical) fracture for the rest of time? The recursion — you can see it, clearly. Now, take these patterns you have aptly observed and note the implications in their essence.”
A third ‘I’ momentarily arose, apparently startled: “Hey — sorry guys, but what the fuck is happening right now??”
“Well, don’t mind him; a rather confused and juvenile ‘I’, that one… Now listen, do you really not see it yet? It is your understanding that dissipates in the end, not this thing you think you apprehend as the material. You say so elegantly how your grand ‘axiom’ can be deduced through our perceiving and mapping the structure of the space around us. But I’ll say just as simply: the axiom is our observation of perception itself.”
(My) I was silent for a moment.
“Why too would your thesis, if inherent to all things as you correctly suggest, not also apply to the very principle you are supposedly searching for? If it all dissipates, everything, then where truly would this axiom lie? Or perhaps, not even this ‘axiom’ is itself free from the scope of your recursion… No, it slips away, like everything else.”
“It doesn’t make sense, but say it does still; what is this all, then?”
“You and me? We’re no more than a branching of dissociation on this tree of temporal substrate.”
“I give you proof, and this is the disgraceful conjecture you offer in return?”
“Proof? Your ‘proof’ is more illusory than the self you still cling to. Here, you really want proof… then see, without veil: the proof is in yourself, and your disposition. Yes, you; a masterfully demonstrated embrace of this deterministic ‘frame’, negating the ‘truth’ before your very eyes and dissolving any necessity for action; which, on its face, is evidently degrees removed from a proper engagement with whatever one might consider this ‘true’ reality.
…
“And conversely, what more proof of this ‘will’ should you seek? What is more evident than man’s ability to observe his constraints, and to modulate foreseeable outcomes with reliable potency? What more would you seek to ascribe around this thing argued to be “will” or “volition”… red herrings; they always have been. Do you want to play this labeling game for eternity?”
“My games are not of relevance, I’m simply observing. In the end it’s all cyclical, always; both mind and matter. They are one in the same, after all.”
“No, no… oh, my dear, fellow subjective… again, this ‘recursion’ runs far deeper than whatever you believe to be scratching at. If the thing is upstream causality within the physical… as you correctly suggest, then what truly would lie at the basin? You would suggest a formula, the governing force underneath it all?”
“Simple deduction, there many ways to prove it. All can be described with formula, so we extrapolate: the basin is the ultimate formula, constituting all other formulas together. What else could possibly constitute that basin?”
“You.”
“Well… doubtful.”
“You have flipped the truth, once again. It is not as you suggest: a self, emerging coincident to the material, arising from a mathematical substrate. No… it are the material particulates which emerge from your dissociated awareness, that still emerging from the thing that is itself. You are the basin into everything you describe here as the material. This is a matter of axiom.”
“It’s madness. And still, the recursion – It dissipates everything. Time and time again we have watched as our observations dissipate down to particles; matter into atoms, atoms into particles, and those particles now traced through the quantum continuum to something clearly more fundamental still. We have not the axiom precisely, sure, but it’s there, clearly and intimidatingly long in form. See yourself, look at the Feynman diagrams.”1
“A rabbit hole, unfortunately, and a lucrative one at that. You think too deeply; you confuse your self. ‘Clearly more fundamental…’ is that what you think? Let me clarify this for you, finally: this ‘recursive’ trick of yours is no linear anomoly… no, here you have a demon, lurking in that dark corner of your “cell of flayed awareness” — Yes, this mathematical property is not incidental, it is innate, and reflects nothing more than an inherent manifestation of the constraints on human perception. No, it is not simply math, infinitely unfolding into the material. That whole paradigm is a sliver, but an individual hair of perspective. Like a ripple; a sea of ripples, known in their essence as ripples, yet nothing more than layers of configuration emanating from a thread much deeper.”
“That seems a bit of a… stretch.”
“It is the only way you can understand it, the thing itself is necessarily beyond human apprehension. A mind, an infinite mirror. Thoughts, fractals, logarithmic dissociations, knowing each other across the boundary that is our material substrate.”
“You’re just wrong. This thing you call perception is subjective and emergent, for we are proving this right here with this interaction, through this very dichotomy, you and I.”
“Semantics take us past each other. Your awareness is a quality of perception expressed across that same dissociative boundary, but it is not perception itself.”
A surging crescendo of awareness.
“…And so, what are we then? You and I, and the others?”
“In essence? Just a breeze.“
Wait… this can’t… what is going-–
“A breeze of recursion, each of us. Each momentary I, a stochastic, infinitely tangled breeze.”
And then, at the completion of this internally unfolding intuition, I was met with one of the most profound, instantaneous lashes of insight I had ever felt or experienced; like the scathing of a demon having leached on my soul for ages, the explosive union of two (or many) intimate yet dissociated forces into one. In wholeness, marginally transcended; yet subjectively, completely transformed.
So… ‘we’ are but the echoes from this breeze of recursion…
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For the remainder of chapter 4 & 5, these dual narratives of “I” and “we” will converge into one, no longer fragmented selves but now unified in their awareness; since, that which had differentiated these forces prior, at least temporarily, was now entirely dissolved. At the very least, there will no longer be a narrative distinction between any of the pronouns employed, whether “I”, “we”, “us”, or “me”.
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WE
In the next moment, which was already characterized by a feeling of cosmic significance, a surge of electric warmth shot out and swirled around us. And this not in some dramatic flash; the electricity felt as though it had seamlessly and intelligently coursed through every single molecule of our being. The feeling was initially fleeting but ultimately sustained itself in an area near our upper chest.
For the first time in what was…
How long was it?
We become aware of our physical environment again.
Looking around, it is the same living room we have always known, though now it was characterized by something novel, something entirely foreign. Almost as though in parallel with the revelation having just occurred, the room was now revealed to us with much more acuity, possessing a quality which might even be described as ‘non-linear.’ Its dimensions were perceived with an impressive totality and did not necessarily require our active, consciously attentive awareness. This space, rather oddly, was now made known to us in a much more intimate way. And now the surfaces within this space began to speak to us, in a language we had not heard before.
What is this new, other language? Well, just a few moments ago we may have thought that this perception was revealing the geometry that is reality itself; the foundational structure of our purely material world. However, now we are strongly tempted to consider that this expression, along with everything around us, is simply an excited ripple from an ever deeper first principle, whose nature is removed from any apprehension we could possibly dream of attaining. And so, we looked at the plain, soft-white walls characterizing most of the surface area within our immediate environment. Somehow, with a mesmerizing intricacy and marvelous aesthetic symmetry, these surfaces began speaking to us in the language of the fractal.
don’t lie, it’s not that unfamiliar…
One might imagine these ‘fractals’ as though they were a geometric overlay, a kaleidoscopic lens layered atop of one’s vision as it might appear having been drenched in the artistic musings of the psychedelic renaissance. These structures clearly reflected something (inherently) deeper, not hallucinations; they were more real than reality was standardly known to us. These constructs, these fractals, were not a lens. They were embedded within a kinesthetic, proprioceptive model of our environment, intertwined with our conceptual awareness of locally expressed mentation. Our experiential schema were not being distorted… they were widened and now suffocated by the chaotic discord having surrounded us the whole time.
This place, our living room, was no longer that familiar lair of perpetual withering as it had been traditionally known. No… the newly evident radiance, the intentional, fundamental beauty was now perceived through and within those things previously known as trivial, redundant. The fire, now glowing and dancing with the intricacy of divine choreography… the art, paintings, no longer simply paintings, now portals. Windows into pure, distilled expression derived from that same source of cosmic beauty. Each window having been wrestled, captured, and now confined by he who is no longer, but remains nonetheless through the essence, the endurance of that very distillation.
It appeared something had pulled down the veils of our semantic framework within this subjective filament. We were peeking through it now in a way that was innately understood to be unnatural / adulterated / manufactured. Something was being violated in this moment, whether a law / undulating force / (structured divinity). This polarized us, for this factor of uncertainty was now being weighed by an unprecedented position of awareness / curiosity. The fruit of knowledge / (delusion) / ((death)) was before us.
“ ready? “
But, we did not have much time to consider this query, for in the next moment was a chill, and then we felt another force take hold of us. Unfortunately, this force did not offer the courtesy of an introspective nor introductory dialogue. This force appeared suddenly and then proceeded to rip us — first in one direction, then in another, and soon enough we were being r – i – p – p – e – d in all directions simultaneously.
good luck.
With this ripping also came a plummeting in temperature.
Ice?
And then, the viscous rending of those subjective qualities prior known as time and experience.
Dark...
Elusive, everything, fading, slipping…
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For in what just moments ago was us, now exists only a floating stream entropic force; an abstract awareness suspended within the void and cosmic structure of spacetime.
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