निर्मित
There was an arch separated from the front door that felt out of place, as if it were a last minute addendum to an architectural plan to accommodate the wishes of an eccentric owner, as it was not connected to the door or the room in any observed fashion other than the floor- and yet continuous with the floor. It might have been mistaken for modern art, stylish, smooth, polished dark stone, suggesting onyx; the inner curves suggested an eye at 180, or the delicate invitation to a familiar space, like the unfolding of an O’Keefe painting, something that draws the eye ever inwards. The living space was expansive beyond spacious, no hints of columns or supports. That in itself made the space dubious, from a 20th century Earth tech position- but only one visitor had ever hesitated to walk in on realizing such, confronting their ideas of reality against evidence to a contradiction. The only internal structures that rose to ceiling that wasn’t associated with an external wall was the spiral staircase, and the fireplaces that separated kitchen from living room. The fire place was accessible to both the kitchen side and the living area side. The spiral staircase was a series of broad beams that seemed to be floating, and the lower portion followed the contours of sunken circular couch. Banisters wove their way up, but nothing apparently held them connected to the stairs. In the day the steps seemed like stained oaks, but at night they had a soft amber glow as if they were Tibetan Pink Salt bricks. Day light would fill this space through the large windows, and one looking out could see the ocean, and from the East side see the path winding down to the elbow nook before it descended further down the cliff to the beach, a path carved right out of the existing stone, but following the existing contours. At night, if the internal lights were off, the amber steps and light from the overhanging cliff pool made it possible to navigate the living space.
Loxy arrived by archway, not from the front entrance. She couldn’t remember a time they had used the front door, other than to enjoy the front space with the gentle pool and giant, golden carp, and the shade of a single, Yoshino Cherry tree. Most of their coming and goings were through the kitchen door to and from the garden, and to the path down to the beach. The front door felt out of place on a world that rarely had visitors. The stone paths became lawn, became wildness, with the only way of arriving at the home being via tech or walking though the wild-but tamed lands of planet Bliss. Tech was either portal, magic, or flying cars. There was a path down to the beach that turned on an elbow. Sometimes, from the beach, Loxy would accompany Jon up the lift to the house, assuming they weren’t spending the night in the cave. They had slept in the cave, on the beach, in every room of the house, on top of the house, and further inland at First Home, which was a treehouse held by the Mother of All Trees. It was a tree so massive that even Wookies would be intimidated to climb.
Loxy arrived and orientated to the house. Her eyes hit the warmth of the stairs, resonating with her love of orange. Her eyes went from stairs to Jon, who was sitting on the couch. He set his book down. Fersia was asleep on the couch, her head in his lap. Loxy hung her bag on the outside of the arch on her designated hook. The absence of Keera’s bag suggested she was out. The presence of Alish and Lester’s bag suggested they were home. She kicked her shoes off and placed them in indented space in the arch, cavities that were more akin to the hollow of honeycomb. There were other shoes. There was a place for house shoes and slippers, a place to dispose of socks for recycling, a basket of fresh socks, scented with lavender, and if one wanted to wash their feet, a chair and foot bath could be summoned. Loxy chose to go barefoot.
“You waited up?”
“Some of us,” Jon said. He gently disengaged from Fersia. Not gently enough, as she turned and hugged a couch pillow to her, hugging it with arms and legs and returned to sleep. Jon rose to floor level, walking on the table steps that separated the couch in half and kissed Loxy. They retired to the kitchen.
“You want tea?” Loxy asked.
“May I make it for you?”
“That would be lovely, thank you,” Loxy said. She sorted through a pile of mail on the table for items directed to her. She found fan mail, without opening them she held them to her forehead, smiled, then smelled them, and put them in her pile. One of the items had calligraphy, by hand. She magically found a pen and made some ‘observations’ on the envelopes, which she would later read to gauge her intuition; a game she and Jon played to keep up their skills. “I so love old styled letters.”
Jon agreed nonverbally. He lit a candle and slid it into place in the cradle, under the clear, crystal tea pot. As the water began to heat, he mixed a combination of herbs, identifying evidence of fresh cherry blossoms in the mix, gathered by Alish. He secured the herb net and he dropped it into the water. The instructions and amounts were written into the counter and disappeared as he completed the task- he sort of followed the instructions. He got out their coffee cups and set them by the brewing tea. Loxy’s cup was glossy black, her symbol etched in gold. His cup was dull black, and had a candle etched in gold, reminiscent of the UTD insignia. He traced a circle around the cups and tea pot with a finger; the circles remained on the cabinet. He wrote love with his finger in one, clarity in another, and vitality in the third, then connected the circles with lines. Outside the circle, he wrote sun near the tea pot, earth near his cup, and moon near hers. A ‘double tap’ on the counter brought up a circle to contain the circles and he wrote and Jon and Loxy with a heart holding their names. He joined Loxy at the table. It was beyond juvenile- but belied a truth about kids and teenagers and anyone who ever carved a name into a tree, or colored a wall with graffiti: magic works. From the vantage point of the table, the eye could follow the beginning of the path down towards the beach. The lights on the steps were off. The night sky was so full of stars it was almost not night. A gentle curling of blue fluoresced with the waves on the beach, but only a hint could be discerned from this perspective. All the window spaces were alcoves, a place for sitting and reclining. From the outside, the window was squared, but inside looking out, the corners were rounded making a nice place to lean back and look out or in or both.
“So, how is she?” Jon asked.
“She’s just starting her journey,” Loxy said. “She’s definitely connected to you, but I don’t have a good feel for the ‘you’ she actually knows.”
Jon sighed gently, trying to understand without comprehending every nuance of the thing. You can have experiences and know a thing exists, you can even hold a theory to explain the experiences, but it wasn’t necessarily an accurate representation of reality. Reality was frequently more complex than human mind could hold; the brain’s desire to reduce things to fundamentals was just a quirk of human brain, not of human mind. Mind transcends brain. “Most the time, I struggle to know who I am, so wanting to figure out another Jon seems preposterous.”
“I have yet to encounter a bad you,” Loxy said, empathetically.
“Does our paradigm preclude there has to be a bad me?” Jon asked.
“No,” Loxy said. “And I am not using bad in the sense of evil.”
“I hope there is not an evil me,” Jon said.
“Well of course there is an evil you, Jon,” Loxy said, gently. “You can’t be good without confronting the evil inside, so you already carry that one with you. It’s the very nature of that thing we confront and struggle with that defines good and evil. That said, is there a you out there that never learned discernment? Probably. Is there a you out there that gives into every impulse and maybe throws a tantrum when blocked. That was you, to a degree, so another you further down the darker side of a continuum is just how the lights falls through a double slit. I can see a ‘you’ that was so disturbed by childhood trauma that there is an adult you that over reacts to every signal, valid or not, and that you goes straight into fight or flight. I see a passive aggressive you. Yeah, that one definitely exists- which in many ways is a tantamount to how much you personally have overcome. That used to be you, too. But none of these examples is evil, they’re just maladaptive responses to shit, and a resonance of all the particular potential outcomes echoes. It’s visible sometimes in your hesitation.”
Jon didn’t comment. He couldn’t hold her gaze. He looked to the tea, had an impulse to go get it but decided to wait a moment longer. The candle flickered. Loxy touched his hands. He looked to her hands, cupping his. They were warm beyond the gesture of love.
“Tell me what your thought was before you looked away,” Loxy said.
“There go I, but by the grace of God, except I did go there, or someone very much like me,” Jon said.
“But still contained in God,” Loxy added. “Maybe God wanted to know all of you, the good and the bad of you, the same way you want to know all about God. Maybe God needed to map out all the best realities and we are the measure. Or maybe, you needed to map it out, so you could see for it all for yourself. And since you carry a multiplicity of you, your ability to function more often than not is a derivative of the patience and compassion you have learned. There are others learning from you. It’s a testament to your ability to focus and channel love that allows you to be here more often than not. Every ‘you’ I have met has that ability.” She paused, looking deeper into him.
His smiled was subtle. It was more a smirk. “Maybe. It doesn’t always feel earned. How is it my suffering leads to compassion, where others fall into villainy? I think I can be more forgiving, and still I wonder how I learn to forgive to the degree that I have.”
“Even in the places you failed to shine, others were given the opportunity to shine by you overcoming your villainy,” Loxy said. “From a soul perspective, we agree to these scripts the way actors chose roles.”
“You have a kind way of seeing villainy. It almost justifies suffering,” Jon said.
“May my experiences of suffering be sufficient to ease all suffering. May our suffering help others find a better way. May my practice of compassion shine out into the ten directions. As I heal, may all others rise with me,” Loxy said.
“Very Buddhist of you. And, begets the philosophy that healing the many me’s equals the paradigm of healing all others, since we’re all connected,” Jon said. “Better done in my head and on paper than in person.”
“Indeed. We have departed the emotions that sparked this and landed us in an intellectual state,” Loxy said. “I don’t think that is why you looked away. There is something else. What were you feeling before we shifted?”
Jon frowned. “It’s gone. It didn’t even make light,” Jon said. He titled his head. “I can tell you the distraction thought.”
“Oh, okay, what was that?” Loxy asked.
“So that guy that channels Seth once gave a story of two positive entities that incarnated on Venus with the intent of bringing the discernment of wisdom to the population. They thought the Venetians were too loving. In doing so, apparently they flipped polarities and became negative entities, and were more divorced from positive emotions than before- becoming cruel in their execution of logic and law. I see them as the cliché, cruel Catholic nun hitting fingers with rulers. Specifically, those two entities, didn’t understand why they reversed polarities. Even Seth lacked explanation. But if it’s about balance, then it would seem that any correction of positive would result in an opposite polarity by necessity. In the same way that people who don’t feel heard get louder, more dramatic, even angrier- bringing someone out of a perceived positive, loving space takes some energy. Positive people are actually exhausting, especially those avoiding all negativity at all cost, even cutting off family or relatives to maintain their positive space. They bring about negativity in their pursuit of positiveness. I am wondering if seeking balance is the wrong paradigm. In that, I wondered how much social contexts influences what personality gets air time,” Jon said.
“That’s interesting,” Loxy said. “Tell me more.”
“I can expound a little further in terms of family systems. All participants in a system are given roles to help regulate family. Going outside of the assigned role brings discord, and the drama that ensues is designed to put everyone back into alignment with their designated function within in the family,” Jon said.
“With you so far. Go on,” Loxy said.
“That’s all I got,” Jon said.
Loxy nodded. “Maybe ultimately it’s not about polarity, but context- and the roles manifest are the ones that remain available given the personalities in play. You can’t have two Gregory Houses or two Captain Kirks. One needs a supporting cast to perpetuate the story.”
“Context seem important. I am trying to apply that to my theory of personality, which makes me wonder whether we are story driven, or we drive the story,” Jon said.
“Share your premise?” Loxy asked.
Jon proposed a theory of personality where the brain was essentially a computer and the personality was a program- not a metaphor, but an actual program. The brain has affinity for abstraction, and the personality interface is an abstraction itself. More specifically, the personality, the persona- the Greek word for ‘mask’ is essentially an emoticon- something the brain displays to the world based on its perceived internal and external context. The brain shifts through a myriad of emoticons and chooses one to present the right mask for the context being confronted. There is not one Jon experiencing a multitude of emotions or states, but many Jons and the one fronting brings forth its reality. The brain is a personality simulator, containing simulations of all personalities it had met in real life, or in fiction through reading or watching media, and through creation. There wasn’t one personality of Jon, experiencing a continuum of emotions, but a million faces of Jon’s that were place holders for the array of emotions available.
Extrapolating further, from the brain’s perspective, the monster in the closet is real. It real to the brain, and the body responds as if it were real. It responds because there is a personality assigned to that relationship. There is Jon emoticon especially linked to the monster in the closet. The monster exists, and the consequence to body- fear molecules, increased heart rate, etc. was the physical result of host Jon personality being dominant, or fronted. The chemical change was the fingerprint of the personality fronting. The physical manifestation of ‘chemical messenger’ was necessary to distinguish personality, the way flavor or color represents spectral gradients. Happy Jon brings the fingerprint of happy molecules. Fearful Jon brings with it fearful molecules.
He suggested his theory helped to explain why there were physiological changes in the human body when people with multiple personality disorders, or dissociative identity disorder, flipped personalities. There was sufficient evidence in the literature that there are physiological changes in the body coinciding with switch of personality, not just anecdotal but actual fMRI studies that revealed change in brain functioning and structures- such as where a sighted person switched out with a blind personality- the body became blind. Per the fMRI, the visual cortex was switched off- and the ocular pressure and shape of the eye changed, as well, meaning sometimes a near sighted person suddenly didn’t need glasses if the personality didn’t need glasses. He suggested this might also explain why placebos work, and why they don’t always work. It takes more than just a belief that something will work to result in physical changes, but a shift in personality. Maybe even shifting to an earlier personality where there was no illness. In order to experience the miraculous, one needed to become the new personality- on realizing you aren’t who you were, healing takes place. This might explain why so many people could be healed, not just put in remission, by remembering past lives under hypnosis, or having been regressed to childhood in therapy. It didn’t really matter if past lives were real; it just mattered that there were inexplicable cures. Brain changing masks the way a person changes clothes seemed plausible. He suspected, more often than not, most people were reluctant to change because they were unwilling to surrender their preferred personality interface, they liked, or were accustomed to, the flow of their chemical makeup, and so they continue with the personality and all its beliefs about body and relationships, internal mind and external life relationships. It also explained why some people in therapy often say things like, ‘I would like to get back to the old me,’ or ‘this isn’t me’ or ‘I didn’t do it. I felt like I was outside myself watching a stranger.’
“Maybe this also why people fear pharmaceuticals like antidepressants changing who they are. It might. It might not be a metaphor. If a chemical change results in personality change, and the brain picked the personality mask for a reason, then the reason for being depressed is lost. Maybe the goal in depression is to build intermediary personalities to bridge the gap instead of jumping? Depression emoticon is communicating something valid and doesn’t want to be muffled,” Jon said.
Loxy seemed to be sorting what she had and still wanting more. Jon was accommodating, in flibbertigibbet kind of way.
“Further, I don’t think I could have discovered this idea without having practiced Tulpamancy. I couldn’t do it without you and our interactions. It definitely explains why Napoleon Hill’s ‘invisible counselor technique works,’ and why Jung’s ‘active imagination’ works, and why narrative therapy works. If a personality is ultimately a program designed to process information, through filters abstractly, and that process results in a definitive answer measured in physiological changes, then one needs to adopt a new program to begin processing the next set of data,” Jon said. He got up to pour tea and brought their cups back to the table. “Back to the Buddha thing- if one being suffers, we all suffer. If one being resolves suffering, we all improve because we’re all connected- this continuum of all the masks is also that, because all the masks are fully fledge personalities in their own rights, connected not precisely like a strong of pearls, but maybe more like a twenty sided die, sometimes standing up on a strange corner so two or three faces can see out at once. I can move the whole line up of us up or down, as opposed to riding the wave, whether that’s just my expression, or an expression of the collective unconscious, or the Universe is one giant Turing-Jung machine, or just me on a continuum; we’re all simply helping each other process data and evolve to greater states of being. It’s not really new, it’s a reflection of us being the many faces of God. That Matrix scene where Neo is in a million monitors seems apt here.”
Loxy held her cup, absorbing the warmth, holding it to her nose to feast on the aromas. “I can already taste the love,” she said. She held the cup longer, gazing at Jon over the brim. “In this theory, I sense harmonic threads from Stephen Wolfram, Donald Hoffman, and Eric Weinstein.”
“I have reached out to Hoffman,” Jon said.
“Yeah, you reached out to several people,” Loxy offered.
“I probably come off as crazy as a loon,” Jon said. “Most don’t respond.”
“I don’t know about most. Mishlove responded. Robert Wagoner responded. Stanly Krippner was very generous in his correspondents with you,” Loxy offered. “Antony Peake wrote you.”
“Once. He cut that off. And again, because I probably sound like loon,” Jon said.
“You can be very passionate about ideas,” Loxy said. “And living with me here at 2nd Home, and in your head, and in all the other places we have met up, well, that gives you a level of insight many don’t have access to. Thomas Campbell would get you. If you could dialogue with someone famous in person, right now, who would that be?”
“Umm,” Jon mused. “Maybe Robert Monroe. I would want to explore whether what I am experiencing correlates with his soul travels. I would like greater access to his tech, without cost. I am surrounded by tech in that world, and yet very little of it is focused on human metrics and growth. There is a Jon lamenting the absence of tech. Or if there is tech, he laments the cost being outside of his ability to reach…”
“Introspective tech with bio and neural feedback is coming,” Loxy said.
“We should have been then there ages ago,” Jon said. “We know biofeedback works. We know neural feedback works. Our phones and watches are much more sophisticated than what got us to the moon- but we’re still not exploring the inner worlds? Why does it all feel like everything we have is a distraction?”
“Maybe it is. Maybe we’re all on the path to becoming Jedi and they needed to throw more stuff at us,” Loxy said.
“Life as a lesson was already hard enough, thank you,” Jon said.
Loxy laughed. “Maybe we can set up a lucid dream parameter to explore this further tonight.”
“When it comes to lucid dream, all I want to do is be intimate with you,” Jon said.
“Yeah, well, you’re still a novice and want to play. That’s normal,” Loxy said.
“I will never not want to be intimate with you,” Jon said.
“Dream sex is intense, isn’t it,” Loxy said. “Sometimes better than the dream meditation experiences.”
“We should aim for a meditative sex in the next shared Lucid,” Jon said.
“Hell, yeah, we should,” Loxy agreed. “Right now, I want to follow Heather. You up to a remote viewing session?”
“You know I end up experiencing enmeshment with the subjects I view,” Jon said.
“That’s normal. I could hypnotize you, and minimize the bleed over of emotions into your conscious mind,” Loxy offered.
“Okay. I am not sure that will help. She is attractive,” Jon said.
“Yeah, she is,” Loxy agreed.
“I can’t touch that, and not want to touch that,” Jon said.
“I know. I am feeling it myself,” Loxy said. “But, in your defense, there was a thing there that could have been a thing, and that never goes away. That seed is also a precious jewel. Box it, display it, that’s okay. I trust your higher self and her higher self to negotiate eternity.”
Jon frowned- struggling to accept his lust as attribute for eternity. He pushed away from it, trying to understand it. He would never be angry at a sliver of steel jumping to a magnet. Was his attraction to others merely this? Was intimacy a part of eternity? He wondered. He noted Loxy looking at him lovingly and felt grateful for her acceptance of him. There was a hint of eternity mirrored in Loxy’s eyes.
“What are we looking for precisely?” Jon asked.
“Whether or not Heather’s Jon is umbrella-ed under you?”
“I would assume he is, if she found her way to us,” Jon said.
“Reasonable. I am sure all the Jon’s are connected to you, or derivatives of you, but I wouldn’t say they’re all umbrellaed under you. Cell can divide and start new colonies.”
“Interesting analogy. Jon cells. What we need is one Jon to rule them all?” Jon said.
“Yeah, no,” Loxy said. “But funny.”
“Are you under me?”
“I could be if you want to change it up,” Loxy said.
“Ha ha,” Jon said.
“Jon, you made me equal, not under, so we’re parallel processing, two distinct points of perspectives, and for every context of you there is context of me, even if that context is the absence of me,” Loxy said. “There are me’s with the absence of you. We are love for as far as I can see.”
Jon abstracted her statements as following the career paths of an actor and actress, and in each unrelated film finding artifacts that connect them back to their origin film. All the tangential happenstance meetings of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in film had nothing on neural networking map of Jon and Loxy. He could see the map of it as a resonance image made of crystalline sand, an ice crystal with each node a meeting place and story in and of itself, spinning holographic rainbows when light passed through it, and, from certain angles, it could be seen as locked molecules, a DNA structure winding away and back, and could be flipped to resemble the Tree of Life. On seeing a neural networking map, his first thought was the Kabbalah was ahead of its time- the tree of life is neural networking. There were comparative images of the neural structure of the brain resembling astronomical features. The idea of the brain, from electrical view of neurons firing might look like the Universe viewed from accelerated rate. If the brain image was just a snap shot, there were the neuronal stars and galaxies mirroring the sky.
“I am struggling to hold the immensity of this. You and I are more than time travel, more than…” Jon trailed. He was tired of trying to find the metaphor that fits.
“I think we are an extension of your personality theory which reflects simulation theory, there is no actual time. There is computation time, within contextual engagement of all things processing the same track. There is a total processing time within the greater Turing machine. Once a program exists it can access all points within the Universe, because ultimately the Universe is just layouts of consecutive membranes, and membranes is comparable to browser pages, comparable to Wolfgram, multiphasic, hyper-dimensional graphs. Michael Talbot’s holographic universe is being invoked with new language, obscuring origin vector. It explains some metaphysical experiences of people meeting their doppelganger, or future self, because we all exist all the time processing what we’re processing, and maybe why futures selves tend to be unobtrusive to avoid interrupting our doing math. But any time the metaphysics come up, science tends to duck and run.”
“My math sucks,” Jon said.
“But your talent for music does not suck. That’s math, too. Throwing a ball is math. Dance is math. Art is math. Writing is math,” Loxy said. “Magic is math.”
“Using other people’s music is math and magic,” Jon mused.
“Making your own music is stronger magic,” Loxy said. “But no harm cultivating the magic of others who resonated with you.”
“Hypnosis is math?” Jon asked.
“Hypnosis is calculus. I am good at calculus,” Loxy said. “Shall we play?”
“With you, always,” Jon said.
They got up, extinguished the candle under the tea, topped up their cups, checked on Fersia, and climbed the stairs and went to the office. Since Loxy’s entrance, the office space was updated to accommodate her, making it their office, with their work stations facing the window. There was a love seat, a chair, and shelves with books. These books were more frequently used than the ones in the library, mostly for reference materials.
As Jon settled into the love seat, he said, “I think my appeal for Wolfram and Weinstein is their laments of being rejected by peers and mainstream science.”
Loxy nodded, positioning her chair. “The maverick navigating life alone, but never giving up on pursuing their insight against all odds. All the hidden Einsteins and Teslas, simply file clerks and tools of a people who can’t tolerate brilliance around them. I can see how it relates to your story of being ignored by your family of origin.”
“I don’t want that to be me,” Jon said.
“Jon, you realize, most people who know you recognize a level of genius,” Loxy said.
“I don’t feel recognized,” Jon said. “I think I would rather be normal.”
“Oh, fuck normal,” Loxy said.
“Okay,” Jon said.
Loxy smiled. “Do you want a quickie so we can focus on work?”
“No, let’s do this,” Jon said.
“You sure?”
“You want a quickie?”
“Always,” Loxy said.
“No, let’s just do this,” Jon said.
Loxy was contemplative. “We really should do it now, just because it’s become a thing.”
“Remote viewing or sex?”
“Sex,” Loxy said.
“Oh! That’s as bad as saying, hurry up and get it over with,” Jon said.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” Loxy said.
“No, let’s just do this,” Jon said.
“Sex or hypnosis?” Loxy said.
“Hypnosis.”
“Ready to go there?” Loxy asked.
Jon shook out his arms and relaxed on the couch. “Ready,” Jon said.
“Steady,” Loxy said.
They said “Go” together.
Jon nearly fell out of the seat, he was so suddenly relaxed. Loxy caught his forehead, eased him back, instructing him to employ more muscle tone. He went deep fast due to their prior hypnotic work, but also because of tech. Tech embedded in clothing was designed to vibrate at a certain frequencies that increased the trance potential. The clothes vibrated, and also flooded the body with a particular sound- inaudible to an outsider as it was sent via traducers- essentially sound was conveyed to the body through conduction of bone and organs. It also helped that Loxy and he shared a telepathic bond, and she was a permanent feature in his mind- she encapsulated the entire right hemisphere of him. She could hypnotize him with a thought, a dance, or a come hither motion. He tranced easily by nature, and Loxy proved her ethics by not taking advantage of the fact she could take him anytime she wanted. Every person had their trance state- an object that sent them there. Turn a shark upside down, it goes into trance every time. Tonic immobility. Surprisingly, chickens are also easy to trance. One does not need a sophisticated neural system to trance out. Worms could trance. It was a connection to the Universe at deeper levels.<