After all those years of reading philosophy, religion, physics, medicine, I feel that my life is meaningless without exploring my inner self. Meditation helped me a lot, of course, but I still haven’t found that promised essence, the thing they call “self”.
Though it seems like all those years of searching are finally converging to an elixir that might just reveal the pure inner self, without filters and distortions. I look around on the walls: the thousands of AI assisted brain interface pictures seem to create a psychedelic dance in my mind. The enceladus squid seems to pop out of the image and move its tentacles from the virtual frame above me. To the right of my working screen the lonely astronaut seems to move on the lonely celestial body. And to the left, between the many generated images out of some corner of my brain the lights from the mountain city seem to pop up and their rays seem to pass through my eyes and through my head. No, no, this is not the time to fall into artistic melancholy. I need to work on the supreme drug mix. I need to find my true self beyond those standard dimensions of human existence.
A message pops up on the main working screen: My DNA drug interaction analysis has been finished by the cloud computing platform.
I knew it, the mix was not right at all, It could not have worked. Instead of a full blown out of body experience, I only experienced dizziness. No, the genetic profiling makes it clear: I have no sensitivity to the main compound. There is only a 1-2% chance for that for a human individual. But the alternative is very strong and hard to dose. So I will choose a lower dose and a few adjutants. Yes, that should do the trick. Let me estimate the time it takes for it to finish synthesizing all of them using the molecular assembler. With my eye controller I am picking up the substances needed with their corresponding code name: NDF 213, NMF 442.. 25 substance codes I have placed in the simulator, with their corresponding quantities. In a few seconds, the result is displayed: total time to synthesize this dose: 210 hours and 5 minutes. That will be a long wait. As I feel my head heavy as lead, I move my eyes slowly until the cursor stays on the large button in the lower right corner of the synthesizer application: Process. In a blink of an eye, literally, the button is pressed. The molecular assembler starts to sing its song: High pitched tones combined with a low rumble makes it sound like shamanic trance inducing melody in a jungle, with wind seemingly blowing slowly as the variable speed fans start spinning sometimes faster, sometimes slower, as the nano assembling quantum dot chips were performing their operations. I close my eyes and imagine the individual quantum dots driven by electrical potential modulated by the dedicated molecular processing chips. Like conductors in front of an orchestra of atoms, they are conducting them to play their piece like a gigantic orchestra. As my mind zooms out, I can imagine millions of such conductors as the individual atoms disappear and only the larger created molecules are visible, while their dance is performed faster and faster. As I zoom out even more until even individual molecules are not to be seen, the scene transforms into an image containing only colored noise. The noise slowly turned into fractals in a faster and faster dance until it dissipated and I lost track of it. I open my eyes: I have been asleep and dreaming for hours. The screen shows processing time left: 201 hours. I quickly open my work environment and the screen is filled up with the coloring graphs. This time, there will be no breakfast. I have to get to work.After all work still defines the economics of our time.
201 hours later: A notification is announcing the finished processing of my batch. Of course, I forgot, I need to choose the carrier fluid mix. I choose a ratio of 9:1 glycerin and polypropylene-glycol in a small quantity as I plan to consume it in one breath. 5 minutes of waiting and the batch is mixed. I open the lid and take the vial with the transparent yellowish liquid out and place it on my desk. I open the vape pen, take out the cartridge and I slowly fill it with the content in the vial. Then I assemble it. I ask the vocal assistant to play the shaman mix 23 which I have prepared for this occasion, a mix of amazonian folk songs used in rituals and direct the flagrance generator to use the indian mix 6, that pungent indian flavor which instantly brings my mind to the last psychedelic experience which has brought up lots of people that had influenced me during my lifetime: the jokes of my neighbor where I used to eat as a primary school kid, my father showing me as a kid how to play with a battery and bulbs and even my mother laughing. I knew not only that I was prepared and this act cannot wait any longer. I press the power button on my vape pen, turn heat up to maximum and wait for it to heat up. The seconds it took for it to heat up seemed to dilate until they were minutes. I take a few breaths to prepare myself and after the last exhale, I touch the mouthpiece of the vaporizer with my lips and start inhaling, 10 seconds, 20, it seems like taking forever and while inhaling, the sound of my breath seems to transcend into a breeze that gets stronger and stronger, almost turning into s storm which pushes me back until I simply fall on my back. I am being thrown in that primordial soup spinning like a nebula. This seems familiar, as I again encounter the persons that shaped my life but this time something seems a little odd: I feel like I am in some kind of superposition while seeing all those faces: The moment someone looks at me, everything else collapses and I can only see their gaze, the other ones are collapsing. But there is more to it, I even feel their.. feelings, as if they were mine. After the feelings seem to overwhelm me, I return to the superposition and then again, another person stares at me and I become “entangled” with him. This time something even weirder happens, I am now “entangled” with a colleague from primary school and I am thrown back in time with him when we were at school. We had a fight and I started punching and cursing him. As I am projecting my anger on him, all the background seems to darken and the class and the colleagues around seem to disappear in the dark, leaving just us two in an empty universe and before I can even grasp the situation, like an electron jumping from one atom to another, my conscience is jumping from me to this colleague of mine and now I can see myself throwing punches and cursing from his perspective. The punches hurt and the courses are piercing my soul like knives, penetrating every inch of my flesh. The pain becomes so intense that I feel like being thrown in a furnace that would instantly kill you and would make you instantly lose consciousness but even in this hell, I am consciously experiencing this pain. One eternity later my consciousness seems to evaporate in a cloud , swirling around at greater and greater speed. I can feel the accelerating forces placing a nauseating pressure on my senses like riding a roller-coaster but at far greater speed than any human made roller-coaster. The feeling stops and suddenly I regain a humanoid shape and darkness is all around as if I am the only being left after the heat death of the universe. A, ahh, I whisper with effort and this seems to create an echo so strong that my years hurt. I want to express something but I hesitate, not wanting to bear the piercing sound from that echo again. Even contemplating my existence in this dark strange universe seem frightening but I suddenly hear a voice which saves me:
“You have reached a new milestone. By now you should realize the significance of your journey.”
I try to answer: “I..” and then stop at the thought of that piercing echo, but the echo did not come. “ I don’t understand, am I dead?”
“There is no need to”, the voice said. “This time, your body did not have to die in order for you to grasp this existence. You completed a jump without the need for a reincarnation.”
“Where am I?”
“In the real world”
“So, I have been living in a virtual world? Am I out of it?”
“Temporarily,, you will return in the same body as you are not dead”
“And if I die, I return into another body?”
“Yes”
“For how many times?”, I ask, wondering.
“For billions of times.”
“ What is the purpose of that?”
“Experiencing billions of points of view in your universe”
Then the image of every individual on our planet pops into my mind. I wonder how is it possible for everyone to experience reincarnations billions of times. But the voice respond without the need for me to ask:
“There are no billions. There is only one”. This strikes me like thunder. I now realize that I am a single entity circling through billions of physical bodies.
“Before you can join the real world as an adult, this cycle must be completed.
“Does everyone in the real world complete such a cycle?” I ask.
“Of course. Everyone gets this chance”.
I pause and reflect on those words. The real universe is filled with entities having matured from a childhood which was not to be experienced as an individual but as billions of individuals. Entities in this world do not experience existence as an individual but as.. whole civilizations. Every individual represents the equivalent of hundreds of human civilizations. I wonder how a world like this would exist but that thought really made the time stop. Imagining such a society by itself would be a task so daunting that would simply break an usual mind to pieces. But the voice saves me again from this torturous endeavor:
“There is no need to contemplate the real universe. You experience lots of civilizations but in only a 4 dimensional space-time. But in the real universe, there are 10 dimensions. Every aspect of the history of the civilizations you are experiencing is expressed in those extra dimensions. One extra dimension describes every other virtual individual in ourselves. Four extra dimensions describe the four dimensional space for each of them. The tenth dimension is something that you can only understand after completing your journey. Words are not useful for describing it. Physics and mathematics cannot describe it. It can only be understood and felt after an individual has completed its cycle and has become mature”.
Those were the last words I heard. Now my mind stops. I am left hanging in the dark for another eternity. But this time, there is no torture. No pain. I simply exist in this eternity without feelings, without senses, just a pure existence until I start feeling the Indian flagrance in my breath and hear the drums of the music I started playing before my trip. Those senses seem to grow stronger as I am coming in contact with the “real” world, or rather the limited, 4 dimensional world which will be my refuge for some time now. I open my eyes and stare at the pictures on my wall. I watch them as every single one seems to be a window in their own universe. Flowers are saluting the time of their own universe by moving in the wind. The homo neanderthals pictured in another illustration are sitting by the fire and seem to dance in their universe that suddenly seem much more familiar to me as though everything happened yesterday just in front of my eyes.
Now I understand: The real universe is amazing.