The Universe, Epistemology, & Everything Else

By Bub

What do you do with unfettered access to the universe?  I know that I’ve wasted it in the past - Previous occasions where the answers to the most important questions to me were laid bare.   I was instead more concerned with how I would be perceived in that moment by others, or how my access to the universe would live up to the accounts of others.  I’ve personally had more than one Naked Lunch; insect people constant dread, and all; daring whatever darkness lurked beneath to challenge me not to give in; I literally resisted commands to kill more than once; being chased and attacked by the skeletons of people that I loved, including ones still living; feeling the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced, keeping me home from high school for an entire week, leaving a copper taste in my mouth for months. This prompted more questions than it answered.  I also had unfettered access to the universe that I completely ignored – indulging myself in carpet patterns and hyper activation of my facial recognition capacity while staring at a mirror.  At one point, I kept it alongside identical, nondescript altoids in a tin.  I unexpectedly experienced it on a plane sitting next to a nursing mother, right behind a carpet separating us from first class.  That was fun, if unsettling, but it was fine.  Was that all unfettered access to the universe had to offer?  No.

Ten years after my last ticket to unfettered access to the universe I decided to get one more.  It had been long enough that my fears of harming others had subsided and just to be sure, I had procured a babysitter.  I had absorbed official accounts of people with micro-unfettered access to the universe, and they had found that subjects reported feeling better, being able to get through their day better, feeling more empathy and understanding, etc.  I wanted that.  So I cut off a tiny piece and put it in my mouth.  I had had a headache and was tired, and within an hour, I no longer had a headache, was no longer tired, and felt more love for everyone around me than I had in a long time.  ‘I want more of this experience,’ I thought.  So I took a whole hit.  I did not expect much more than what I had already experienced, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I took off right after the second round for a walk.  It was dusk.  It was warm but beautiful in Chicago.  The neighborhood to the north of my apartment has some interesting and beautiful architecture and plenty of vegetation, so I set off in that direction.  I listened to the Radio Lab episode ‘Loops’ on my walk, because I remembered the first time I heard it, I imagined myself thinking about myself, the way the subject of one of the segments had, and feeling a tingling in my forehead.  I had hoped doing so would provide a special insight or at least a special feeling.

It didn’t.  I consciously tried to commune with trees and plants on my walk.  ‘Look at that majestic creature in front of me’ I’d think to myself, ‘I bet it has an incredible amount of wisdom to dispense’.  I would reach out and touch its trunk, and when that didn’t work, I’d touch its leaves – to no avail.  Finally eight blocks later I got to a Walgreens and went inside to purchase an unsweetened tea.  Then the unfettered access kicked in.  I waited in line to purchase my tea with a beaming look that only new fathers and axe murderers are allowed to have.  Fortunately, it was Chicago, and I was but one weirdo in an entire sea.  The lady in front of me had an entire grocery cart full of Vitamin Water.  Lord knows what access to the universe she had been granted.

I started off incredibly nervous on my walk home – I knew I needed to be supervised and I was afraid of what kind of interaction I might have with a passerby.  I walked out into the middle of a busy intersection thinking that all the cars that had the right of way were legally obligated to stop.  They weren’t.  So I sprinted the rest of the way across the intersection.  I kept my head down & half-way back turned down a street next to a rail line that was isolated and had murals painted on it.  It was an amazing experience.  The murals were incredible, and poignant, and sad.  They expressed the city psyche in our neighborhood in totality.  Once I had experienced some art without retribution, I felt a bit bold.  I decided to walk the blocks around my apartment as I returned home down the middle of the street as I finished the podcast I was listening to.  As I did, I cannot confirm if this was reality or not, but a group of children danced past me, mockingly, at 9pm, unsupervised.  I walked past the brothel near my apartment and the teenagers out front were confused as to why a white guy was walking through their neighborhood but not to conduct a business transaction.  Frankly, they looked relieved as I walked past them.  I was relieved that they didn’t have to verbally acknowledge this as well.  I went up the stairs to my apartment, but the podcast was just getting to the part where the person was looking at her brain waves as she was thinking a thought.  I climbed three flights of stairs then sat on the top one in a sauna while I listened to the end of the podcast in peace.  By looking at an EKG machine mapping her own thoughts, the person interviewed was changing her own thoughts.  She chose whether or not to feel pain.  This seemed like an incredibly valuable skill.  So I tried to focus on what I was thinking and shed the rest.  By the time I got it to work I was sitting outside of my front door, sweating profusely, hallucinating that phrase ‘by thinking of herself thinking her thoughts she was changing her thoughts’…

Then, it happened.  All of a sudden, I was granted unfettered access to the universe.   All of a sudden I felt the impulse to sway back and forth.  I began to experience the quantum waves of the universe. This gave me more physical pleasure than I had experienced, even on ecstasy.  Here is what I discovered; starting point – there are infinite universes.  Every experience that you have is the result of a small finite number of quantum particles ultimately making up the sub-atomic particles, making up your cells, choosing to experience you.  That is to say, whatever experience you feel yourself having right now, a number of cells made of quantum particles, made of quantum sub-particles, are choosing to associate in a way that makes you conceive of you as a single entity, as opposed to experiencing those same particles without barrier to the air and space around you.  This means that cells are conscious in their own way and make decisions in their own right as to their borders and of how they perceive objects in our world - & also the pieces that make up cells, & also the pieces that make those pieces up.  As you can imagine, quantum particles are quite amorphous. But when you have a single experience that is the manifestation of the infinite love of the universe you begin to feel the totality of it all.  When everything is infinite, as multiverses which are infinite are, everything becomes qualitatively equal.  Therefore I can ascribe love to everything, because I could just as well ascribe hate but choose not to.  The point is, whatever experience you feel right now, is the manifestation of countless, infinite, quantum particles choosing you to have the relationship with all other quantum particles in a particular perceived existence and their chosen aggregate forms that you currently enjoy.  Whatever experience you enjoy cannot help but be a single manifestation of the ultimate love, which is infinite.   Everything is experienced in a particular moment, and there is no continual individual.  Only aspects of former selves remain, and stills of former times, however these are plot points on the infinite globe rather than a straight arrow of time meaning your particular future is predetermined as well, but it always has been as your past, that you experience in any given moment.  Your experience of life can change dramatically, however.  Apparently, if you prime yourself for love that is what you will experience.  That was really the only subjective experience of my experience – to experience it as love.  20% of the universe that we are aware of is dark matter and 75% is dark energy.  15% can be explained by current science.  What I felt was that all of that was actually infinite – that infinite possibilities existed.  So whatever experience you have in your life is perfect, eternal, and a manifestation of the infinite love of the universe.  Sometimes it can be hard to realize this, but in an infinite universe every possible combination must happen, meaning the happiest combination will happen also and is always happening.  And if you feel like you are experiencing a combination of events that are less than the happiest possible – since experience is infinite it is all qualitatively equal, meaning that you are indeed having the best experience possible.

At one point I was hugging the cupboard door and coffeemaker to commune with their quantum particles.  And to be honest I felt as though I was able to break down the cellular barrier and empathize with these inanimate objects. That alone is an incredibly amazing experience.  They chose to experience ME, just as I chose to experience them.  In an infinite universe that choice is perfect.  That choice is love.  It may be other things as well, but once you experience infinite perfect love from a cupboard door or coffeemaker, you cannot help but approach life with a happy, content disposition.  All of you, in my life, I have chosen because I love you, infinitely, because you are perfect.  Thank you for being you.