ORIGINS: Mise en Abyme
Between dream and meat is the beginning of a story about writing a story while writing the story.
Worldly pressure says the path to favorable outcomes is to FOCUS ➡️ PLAN ➡️ EXECUTE. Personally, this mindset just creates conflict and doubt and a vulnerable desire for external acceptance and validation. It cuts limbs off my tree of imagination before it’s even sprouted from the seed.
I’ve suffered mountains of grief trying to force outcomes in my 54 years of existence. Worse, the sought outcomes were not mine, they were ones fed to me. It has made me accept that the creative part of me is wild. Feral in its authenticity. It will not be domesticated by our infatuation with technique and artifice. And it will be heard, one way or another.
It does not care if it comes as blasphemy or divinity or idiocy or a pile of shit or the next greatest thing.
It is omnipresent. It incessantly churns. It spins a continuous web between self and collective, real and unreal, clarity and delusion, known and unknown, revelation and mystery—weaving patterns within patterns within patterns.
I can’t corral or train it. Declaring war against it is suicide. I have to meet it on neutral ground. I have to create a welcoming space for communion and participate in whatever happens. Scheming for outcomes is not allowed. I have to surrender to altar and ritual.
So far the transmission is that it wants everything.
And well, of course it does. It’s been muted and denied and discounted and mocked for most of my life. But how do I write EVERYTHING?
I don’t fucking know. Regardless, that is the demand. It may be madness or high foolery or a fever dream, but I’m going to honor it.
For better and worse, I’m going to write everything.
Here we go.
Three Gifts
Disruption makes for a strange bedfellow.
The pandemic did a lot of heavy lifting to explain all the weirdness that has emerged during and since. Its strength was scale. But in vast but less in-your-face ways things have been fracturing and enshittifying for decades. The pandemic is but one consequence, not a totality of cause. Our eagerness to return to normality betrays the fact that we’re still in the opening act of a multidimensional storm of change that will completely alter the trajectory of human belief and behavior.
We will be witness. Fun, huh? [laughs nervously] But, I digress.
The pandemic’s first gift to me was time. It was weird-time though. It dilated to a crawl, almost to a stop, but it also accelerated. It was strange to experience both simultaneously. Yet it was hard to take advantage of in a purposeful way due to its dreamy Limbo/Purgatory-like quality.
The second gift was headspace. Modernity is all about preoccupation—a constant dazzling of the senses with manufactured desires, repetitive tasks, and addictive distractions to keep its momentum rolling. My emptied mind had room to explore possibilities.
The third gift wasn’t from the pandemic. It was from a date with psilocybin mushrooms that revealed an ineffable plane of consciousness. I feebly attempted to relay the indescribable event in a previous essay:
Behind my closed eyes colors begin to flash and take vague shapes. This trend slowly intensifies, sharpens. The colors cover the entire spectrum, their glow ranging from muted to neon to laser intense. The colors and shapes organize into moving geometric patterns. At first this appears flat, as if projected onto a wall, but then becomes three-dimensional.
This prismatic geometry becomes more and more complex to the point of the unspeakable. Its constant morphing is infinitely emergent, boiling with sentient aliveness. It breaks out of three dimensions into a scale-shattering “cathedral” of precise alien hyperdimensionality. It becomes a realm, a plane of existence, a beyond-reality of otherworldly consciousness. “I” am within it, part of it.
It revealed to me that the inexplicable is real. Having an intimate encounter with something modernity’s brutal material rationality cannot explain (and therefore control) instilled me with a lasting sense of awe, wonder, and hope. A sense of enchantment forgotten since I was a child returned.
Don’t mistake this as romanticization. Psychedelics are a way, but not the only way that an Extraordinary Experience can possibly occur. They can happen while sober, under mundane conditions, while meditating, under extreme physical exertion, while ill, or during a traumatic event. Seeking one is antithetical, as it would be anticipated. An important factor of these experiences is their shocking, reality-challenging arrival.
In short, it’s not about the drugs, man.
The Weird of Worldbuilding
Since I was mired in quarantine-purgatory I started to do research. What else was I going to do but worry about the tire-fire of my circumstances? This led down many paths, but due to the intense hyper-geometric nature of whatever “place” the psychedelics allowed me to experience, the field of mathematics rose to the top. Roger Penrose and the infinite pattern that never repeats resonated, as did the integrated symmetry of the Platonic solids—known and studied since antiquity.
Around the same time I’d been thinking about “greater forces”—influences, aspects, and phenomena of existence that we ignore and discount or simply can’t wrap our heads around due to the vastness of their presence. Our real gods, so to speak, not the anthropomorphic human-centric myths we’ve dreamt up or their related dogmas. It (currently) looks like this:
The Cosmic/Quantum ⬇️ Time ⬇️ The Sun ⬇️ The Earth/Moon ⬇️ Consciousness* ⬇️ Humanity ⬇️ Culture ⬇️ Family ⬇️ The Body ⬇️ “You”
*(The mystery of consciousness might supersede everything, but it certainly exists here on Earth, and existed long before humans were a thing.)
From this confluence of events and my studies, ideas of a vast fictional world sprouted. Realms and characters and story arcs flooded my thoughts. I jotted down the ideas as they came on a notepad. I didn’t force the thoughts. I let them come a go over a few weeks. Some ideas held and I built upon them further.
Facets and planes and connecting vertices of consciousness and realities tried to become unified but they soon became a tangle of thoughts. I needed to get it out of my head and beyond words. I needed to see it, touch it. So, I made a map out of a wall in my apartment:
It was too big, and felt inadequate. I gave it another go:
Better, but it was still missing the mark in some unconscious way. I tried again:
This version felt much closer, but it lacked the required depth. I didn’t know what the needed requirement was.
By this point I couldn’t help but feel a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. The process reminded me of certain scene in the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
I switched to constructing the five Platonic solids out of paper, just to get my mind to let go of the riddle. For whatever reason, the eight-faced octahedron held my attention more than the rest.
The flattened representation of it, known as a “net” can be used as a pattern for folding into a three dimensional shape when printed on paper. It looks like this:
I thought, that looks like a map. I recreated it on the wall and added my world’s continually evolving puzzle pieces:
I was onto something but the pieces didn’t fit right. I moved them around:
Still not right. I moved them around again, and again, and again. Then it happened:
Bam. I had it! I moved the map and enlarged it on a wall next to my writing space:
I had the basic structure of the universe where my embryonic story(ies) are yet to manifest.
The Map of Everything
Recently, I recreated the map using Apple’s Freeform program. I like it because the learning curve is low. This is the result:
That’s it for now.
In upcoming posts, I’ll dive into each, introduce lore, and develop characters.
Hooked!!