"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." - Edgar Allen Poe
WARNING
The last 25% of this video contains information that can be dangerous to
people who are mentally unstable or suicidal. If you struggle with suicidal
ideation or maintaining your sanity, I recommend you don't watch the last 25%.
Do not use psychedelics unsupervised if you are in this condition.
It's early dawn in the desert. The sky is starting to glow with light but the
sun is still yet to rise. You're standing there, looking at an ordinary desert
bush. You're struck by its geometric beauty, the mathematical precision of its
fractally–arranged leaves. You feel an impulse to reach out. You run your
fingers through its little green leaves. They feel spikey and alive.
Returning your hand back towards your body, you notice a tiny insect, smaller
than ant. It crawls over the wrinkles in your skin like an astronaut
struggling across Martian terrain. You bring it close to your face. The
intelligence of its movement transfixes you. Every swivel of its microscopic
legs, of its antennae – precise, machine–like, yet so alive. You think, “My
God, it's ALIVE!” For the first time in your life you recognize LIFE. Of
course you've seen life in motion countless times before, but never like this.
Somehow you've always taken life for granted. But now you SEE. LIFE. The
intelligence of it awes you. As you move your finger towards the bug, you can
tell, it's afraid. You recognize the intelligence in its fear, perfectly
designed to keep it alive.
You are conscious that you recognize the bug, but the bug doesn't recognize
you. It's just going about its day, surviving, avoiding danger, looking for
food – oblivious that some entity of higher consciousness is observing it,
like God looking down from the clouds.
Your attention shifts away from your hand as something flits through the
corner of your vision. A hummingbird darts from bush to bush with the
precision of an industrial robot. It hovers right up next to your bush. You
stand perfectly still. Looking at it, the whole world seems to slow to a
crawl. You can see the exquisite flap of its little bio–mechanical propellers.
LIFE. You marvel at its profound intelligence and immaculate beauty. This
little bird is perfection incarnate. You can resolve every green and pink
iridescent feather on its body, arranged like tiny dragon scales. They shimmer
in the subtle light of the desert dawn. The hummingbird's beauty strikes you
with childlike delight. Your mind floods with memories of your fascination
with hummingbirds as a child. Looking at it hover, you recognize the
consciousness in it, but it doesn't recognize the consciousness in you. You
think to yourself, “It's God, lost in a hummingbird dream.” You smile.
You look closer at its scale–like feathers. Within a single feather you see
fine branching lines, delicate hairs, and splotches of iridescent pigment. One
particular splotch resembles a nebula in outer space. A pink and green cloud
of luminous gas 50 light–years across, made of particles from ancient dead
stars. A star graveyard now turned a nursery for stars yet to be born. Zooming
in deeper you see pin–point sparkles of light, like household dust glittering
in a ray of sunlight through a windowsill. Explosions from a 500–year war
between two ancient alien civilizations. When heavily damaged their ships'
wrap reactors explode in a tiny supernova – creating a microscopic golden
sparkle in the void of outer space.
These two civilizations have been at war over a political dispute for 500
years and now the battle has come to its peak. The nebula glitters with a
thousand sparkles, like someone blew a pinch of gold dust into the air. Each
sparkle, ten thousand lives extinguished.
Zooming out you suddenly become aware that all of this is happening on a TV
screen – an epic space opera playing out for someone's entertainment. But the
actors don't know they're actors. To them, this galactic war is as real as
real gets.
A remote appears in your hand. You flip the channel. The scene changes from a
galactic battle to a game show where the host is a giraffe and all the
contestants are giant mice. You flip the channel again. The scene changes to a
small alien girl blowing out a birthday cake. You hold your finger down on the
remote and the channels start flipping faster and faster, at the speed of a
hummingbird's wings. The channels are endless. They contain the media of every
civilization that has ever existed. Within a minute you flip through 100
million channels. Getting the idea, you lift your finger from the remote. It
stops on what looks like an HD nature documentary. You see a slow–motion macro
shot of a hummingbird flapping its wings. The camera zooms out and you see
yourself standing next to it in the desert, admiring its beauty.
Looking down at the remote you see some colored knobs. Turning a silver knob
slowly morphs the hummingbird into a dragonfly. You turn the knob half–way and
get something that is 50% hummingbird, 50% dragonfly. You crank it back and
forth in amazement, watching the eerily–fluid transformation on the screen.
Turning an orange knob slowly turns your human self on the screen into an
elephant. You crank the knob all the way to the right and the man on the
screen becomes 100% elephant. But suddenly you see a strange grey appendage
blocking your view of the screen. Your nose! It's turned into a long, hairy,
grey animated elephant trunk. Nothing else about your body has changed, just
your nose. At first you are startled. This thing seems to have a mind of its
own, swaying back and back with a playful, undulating animation. But then you
calm down, sense into it, and realize you have control. A big grin grows
across your face as you take a deep long breath through your new nose. You
feel an itch on your shoulder so you scratch it, with your nose. It works
beautifully! “How did I ever manage without one of these?”, you say to
yourself with amusement.
Looking down at the remote you notice the biggest knob of all. It's white. “I
wonder what this one does?” You crank it with your nose. As you do, you feel
yourself becoming ever more conscious. All the sudden you can feel the
circuitry in the television as if it was an extension of your body. Every
pixel becomes like a taste bud on your tongue. A 4K display has over 8 million
pixels, each one now consciously accessible to your mind. Cranking the white
knob even more you become so conscious you can start to predict which pixel
will light up with which color value in the next frame.
Turning the white knob even more you become so conscious your mind gains
direct access to the channels database. In your mind's eye you have
instantaneous thumbnail access to every channel and piece of media that has
ever been produced in the universe.
What do you want to watch? It's hard to choose. You're not used to having this
much much information in your mind in parallel. It's hard to navigate such a
sprawling network of information. Your thoughts begin to influence the
process. Your mind floods with old memories of cinema you watched in your
youth. You don't know why but the movie Aliens starts to dominate your mind.
The more your mind focuses on that thought, the more real it becomes. Soon the
entire room and TV fade out of existence and your reality smoothly transitions
into that of the Alien queen laying eggs in her nest. The TV is gone, your
elephant nose is gone – you are now the Alien queen. Slime is dripping down
your black, spidery body and mouth. Acid is coursing through your veins. Eggs
are squeezing out of your…. whatever. Ellen Ripley is torching your eggs with
a flamethrower and it's making your blood boil. You think to yourself, “Of
course, I'm the Alien queen. The Alien queen is my own consciousness as much
as anything else, no better or worse, no weirder. It's all my Mind.”
You look down at your alien hand and notice the TV remote still there. You
will yourself to press a random key with a long, grotesque claw. Instantly the
whole scene turns into a cartoon. The film Aliens has become a cartoon version
of itself and you are still the Alien queen, but now your reality is
two–dimensional and much more colorful. You look down again at your hand for
the remote, but it's gone, disappeared just like the TV. You think to
yourself, “Of course, 2D is no more or less real than 3D. Cartoon reality is
just another facet of my consciousness. I am no less real as a 2D Aliens
cartoon than I am as a 3D human being.”
On the one hand experiencing yourself as a grotesque alien straight out of a
nightmare strikes you as disturbing, but only mildly so because you're so
conscious you understand what's going on. You're so conscious you don't need a
TV remote to change channels. In your mind's eye you press the pause button on
an imaginary remote and the current scene freezes mid–frame.
Now you can focus on accessing the channel database to find what you really
want to watch. You see that in the database channels are arranged by category.
Scanning mentally through five thousands categories you stumble upon SEX. Your
mind is fixated. A memory of your ex–girlfriend comes to mind, and suddenly,
there she is. A stunning young woman laying naked in your bed, squirming and
itching for sex. You crank up the white dial in your mind's eye some more,
becoming even more conscious. You look at your girlfriend. She's begging you
to fuck her. Looking at her squirm in slow motion you realize that once you
fuck her you will impregnate her and spawn a million future generations of
humans. It doesn't matter whether you impregnate her or somebody else does, in
the end it's all the same since all such differences are imaginary. You're too
conscious to really be interested in the act of sex now, but the profundity of
it makes you wonder. You are captivated by the platonic aspect of her beauty,
just as you were with the hummingbird. But this is more personal, more
interactive. You slowly run your hands over the curves of her smooth, naked
body. As you do, her body turns to sand – a fine sand that seeps down over the
bed sheets like the sand in an hourglass. Her squirming body disintegrates
into vast pools of sand. Her feminine curves become the curves of an endless
ocean of dunes stretching out to the horizon in every direction.
You find yourself standing in the middle of a vast dune – a dune made from
your girlfriend's essence. Each grain of sand is a dream she once dreamt, a
memory she once had, an emotion she once felt. Grains of sand made from her
joy, her excitement, her sadness, her anger, her frustration, her loneliness,
her light, her darkness, her fear, her love, her disgust, her surprise, her
orgasms. Grains of sand made from her highest aspirations and her deepest
nightmares – all animated with the energy of her soul.
The dune is silent, but for the murmur of a soft breeze. You kneel down and
run your fingers through the sand, your hand like a tongue tasting the emotion
locked in every grain. A symphony of a thousand subtle yet distinct emotions
washes over you. Somehow it all computes in the vastness of your mind. It's
like you raked your tongue through the depths of her turbulent psyche.
Your eyes well up and a tear rolls down your face.
A loud crack of thunder, like a gunshot, startles you from above, and the sky
begins to pour with heavy rain. The sound of rain soothes your soul. The
landscape – or, really, your mindscape – feels enchanted, exactly as you want
it to be.
Raindrops hit your face in slow motion. Each droplet, a unique bubble universe
unto itself, filled with trillions of inhabitants all oblivious as to why
their universe came crashing to an end. You think to yourself, “So this is how
a universe ends.” Each droplet is filled with the collective consciousness of
all the sentient entities inhabiting it. As a droplet hits your face it
transfers the collective wisdom of a thousand ancient civilizations directly
into your mind. Their memories, their struggles, their dreams, their insights
– all integrate smoothly into your psyche. You stand there, showered by an
immense cosmic intelligence. It feels like bathing in divine light. Its
sentience and beauty sends waves of bliss radiating through your body.
You look up at a towering stack of fluffy white clouds in the distant sky.
Somehow you just know the clouds are made of whipped cream. Reaching your hand
up towards the clouds you scoop at them with your finger and secure a sizable
dollop. The cream is thick and rich, like frosting. You bring it to your mouth
and suck. It doesn't just taste sweet and milky, it tastes like a fusion of
every desert you can ever remember having: cheesecake, ice cream, cupcakes,
cookies, crème brulee, cotton candy, éclairs, tiramisu, panacotta, macaroon,
marzipan, cookie dough, apple pie, fruit tart, and waffles.
This is your mindscape, and in your mindscape things taste however you want
them to taste.
Mmmmmmmmm…. Waffles….. Your mind lingers. You can barely remember the last
time you allowed yourself to indulge in waffles. You think to yourself, “Why
don't I treat myself more?”
You look down at your feet. The sand is in the process of transforming into a
grid of waffle. Waffles stretches out to the horizon in all directions. Now
you stand in the middle of vast, gently rolling waffle dunes. You feel the
spongy, grid–like texture under your bare feet.
Far in the distance, from high in the sky, pours a solitary stream of rich
maple syrup. The syrup folds over itself. It floods valleys of waffle in a
rich viscous amber, glossy like nail polish.
Now it starts to snow, but the air isn't cold. You hold out your hand to catch
a few specks of white as they fall. These aren't snowflakes, this is powdered
sugar! With a big grin you stick your tongue out into the air.
A large desert mouse hops along the ground, licking at a pool of maple syrup,
oblivious to your presence. As your gaze fixates on it, your thoughts take
hold of it. Your thought of a kangaroo morphs the mouse into a kangaroo
without skipping a beat. Your thought of a bird causes the kangaroo to sprouts
the wings of an eagle and a pillar of wind lifts it soaring into the clouds.
Suddenly a darkness looms over you – a vast shadow, moving from on high. A
colossal fork and knife come down from the sky just in front of you. The
silver slices through the landscape as prongs poke. The clouds part and you
look up to see the God–like face of your six year old self wielding the
silverware. Your six year old self has a huge grin across his face as he forks
a syrupy hill of waffle and raises it toward his mouth.
Your six year old self's face morphs into that of your father when he was 6
years old. Then your mother when she was six years old. Then your brother when
he was six years old. Morphing faster and faster, flipping like a Rolodex, the
face goes through thousands, then millions of iterations… the faces of every
six year old child who has ever eaten waffles.
Looking down at your feet you see an insect – some kind of beetle – lying
there on the ground. It's dead but still colorful. You kneel down to pick it
up. Its husk lays motionless in your hand. Inspecting it as though under a
magnifying glass, you marvel at its beauty. Even in death you see the beauty
of life. Especially in death. But what makes it all the more beautiful is your
awareness that this creature is your own mind. How sad that this little
creature is alive no more.
Suddenly you get an impossible idea. “Could it work?”, you say to yourself.
You turn your gaze inward, to the white dial on the remote in your mind's eye.
You crank it up. Your consciousness expands, interconnecting ever deeper with
itself. Your visual field grows crystalline, as though all the air was sucked
out of the atmosphere. Everything becomes sharp and bright – and eerily still.
You focus intensely on the beetle. Your consciousness penetrates through its
desiccated remains. Its body is your mind, and right now your mind demands a
miracle. You channel your will into the beetle, filling it with your spirit
and love. Then… nothing. Time slows to a crawl, reality seems to freeze in
stasis. A few more moments of nothing, and then… the beetle's legs twitch to
life. Your eyes grow wide. It starts to crawl over you. You blow into your
hand and the beetle morphs into a luminous green moth that flits erratically
up into the sky. You smile in disbelief at the miracle of your mind.
Standing there in the waffle dunes, you look down at your hands. Images start
to run through your mind of animals you took fascination with as a child:
monkeys, reptiles, birds, big wild cats, mollusks. As the images flip through
your mind, the shape of your hands flips to match. Your hands morph into the
hands of an ape, the claws of a dinosaur, the paws of a lion, the tentacles of
an octopus. Puzzled and amused, you wonder to yourself, “What happening to me?
What am I?”
Then it dawns on you: “Of course, I'm God. I am consciousness. I am imagining
myself. I am whatever I conceive myself to be because there is nothing outside
my endless Mind.”
Everything around you disappears: the landscape, the waffles, the rivers of
syrup, the sky.
Now it's just you, floating in a bathtub in the middle of empty space.
Music starts to fill the silence of the void. A melody. It's fast, cheery, and
delicate. Delightfully fast. Deliciously delicate. Ethereal. Like something
from a fairytale. It's the sound of a piano but you're conscious that there is
no piano. What are pianos but a figment of your imagination? “Where is it all
coming from?”, you wonder. “And who's playing?” There is no instrument and no
one is playing. There are no sound waves traveling to your ears. You have no
ears. You're too conscious for ears. The chords are playing directly in your
mind. The rest is fantasy.
You understand that musical instruments and the people who play them have
always just been figments of your mind, a backstory you invented to provide
some kind of ground for the irreducible mystery of sound. Your own mind is the
pianist and the composer. You've eliminated the imaginary middleman. The notes
arrange themselves playfully and intelligently in your mind like children
frolicking on a playground. The speed and immediacy of it wows you. Direct.
Absolutely direct. Impossibly direct. You play each note flawlessly, with the
precision of a maestro. Each note oscillating and imprinting itself in the
Mind of God. You smile in delight at the recognition of the splendor of your
own mind.
You look down at your body. You are naked.
All sense of scale is lost. You aren't small, you aren't large – you are
undefined – which makes you Cosmic. Your body is the only yardstick there is.
Your body is the Universe. You see your body made of liquid consciousness. It
shimmers and ripples along with the thoughts in your mind. Your skin flows
with organic, translucent, morphing shapes, as though cast by a projector.
Ornate shapes – vaguely resembling something tribal, something paisley,
something floral – shimmer across your naked body. Each pattern imbued with a
divine intelligence impossible to articulate, gracefully animating, dancing,
meandering across your skin.
You recognize yourself as looking directly at the body of God. A body made of
pure consciousness. It still looks human but it is no longer human,
recontextualized as cosmic and divine. You see entire universes contained
inside of you. Or whatever else you may imagine. An infinite diversity of
animals and creatures seem to bubble up just underneath your skin, like
particles struggling to emerge out of a roiling quantum foam. The pure
potential of your mind is precipitating in front of your eyes in real time.
God's body is made out of whatever you imagine. It looks human but shines with
a brilliant, crystalline consciousness. Your body is Mind, and Mind is all you
are. Absolute Mind. Absolute Truth. You recognize your consciousness as
singular and sovereign. Nothing exists outside your Mind. Universal Mind. A
mind limited by nothing but its own imagination and self–definition.
At long last God has awoken to itself. The Universe is awake, looking through
your eyes at itself. Perfect, Divine, Eternal, Immortal, Absolute, Sublime.
You turn your gaze directly inwards, directly behind and inside your eyes –
right into the core of what you used to consider your skull – wondering what
is there, what you truly are. You gaze into the very heart of yourself, your
purest essence. A radiant singularity sits there. Shining with crystal clear
consciousness. Glowing with sentience and intelligence. Eternally awake.
Pure Infinity. Pure Consciousness. The Godhead.
This singularity in you is endless. The deeper you gaze into yourself the
deeper it goes, with no bottom, no ground. You struggle to find something
within you to define yourself as – some concrete form, some verbal
articulation, some image. But you cannot be defined because you are Unlimited.
That which is Unlimited cannot have a definition because any definition would
be a limit. Your essence is literally undefined, like the result of an
impossible arithmetical operation on a calculator.
Puzzled and dumbstruck, you try to find a beginning to yourself. You ask, “But
where did I come from?”, only to realize that that which is Unlimited cannot
have a beginning or an end. You are too conscious to be fooled into believing
in any beginnings or ends. As you grasp at any part of yourself and try to
trace its origin through a chain of linear causation back into the past, it
fails. Your consciousness has transcended the notion of linear causation. You
realize all past is but a figment of your imagination. Every part of you
stands on its own and also reaches infinitely far back into the imaginary past
via an endless chain of imaginary causes that never terminates but circles
back around in a cosmic strange loop. All beginnings and ends are imaginary,
self–imposed limitations held within an Unlimited Mind. A Mind with no
beginning or end. A Mind that has existed for Eternity. You are God, and God
is both uncaused, self–caused, and infinitely caused. God is that which caused
itself into being. God is that which created itself.
The recognition of your own Eternity takes your breath away. It could not be
more profound. Eternity. You exist, absolute and forever as Truth itself. It
couldn't be any other way. It couldn't be any more obvious. It's so perfectly
clear yet utterly unbelievable.
It's laughably obvious now that science and history are figments of your Mind.
Brains, chemistry, evolution, physics, time – all fictions spun by the Mind to
construct the illusion of a mind–independent reality. Now you see reality for
exactly what it's always been: an Absolute Illusion. An illusion perfectly
designed to allow you to forget for a second that you are God. The illusion is
perfect, stretching forever in any direction you look, painting a backstory
behind every corner you peak around, every hole you stick your head into,
every object you sniff – much like the rendering engine of a video game.
You're still dreaming, but now you know it. Now your dream is Absolute. You
watch as your God–mind effortlessly weaves together figments of consciousness
into the tapestry you used to call a human self. Everything and everyone is
your imagination, emanating from the bottomless singularity at the center of
your imaginary skull. Your mind pulls whole chunks of consciousness from the
formless singularity like a magician pulling rabbits out of his hat. Specific
and highly detailed memories of your childhood, your entire mother, your
entire father, your beloved pet cat, historical events like WW2 – all figments
of consciousness pulled out of a hat and flawlessly woven together to
construct the illusion of a human life. The Earth, the physical universe,
humanity itself is finally seen for what it truly is, just figments in a
dream. Jesus, The Buddha, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, gurus and masters,
all those years you spent meditating and doing yoga, activating your chakras,
reading books, chasing enlightenment – just figments within God's Mind.
Finally you reach the question of death. What is death? You smile and laugh as
you realize that death is just something you're imagining. You are now too
conscious to die. An Infinite Mind cannot die because it'd have to imagine its
own non–existence. An Infinite Mind has nowhere to go, being already in all
times and places.
As your consciousness grows even deeper the difference between things starts
to collapses. All difference is seen to be imaginary. Forms merge into each
other, losing their distinctness in the brilliant light of pure consciousness.
All boundaries bleed together. You feel like an alien super–intelligence
cutting through an existential fog of war. The veil of ignorance is lifted. It
feels like awakening from a lifetime of heavy amnesia. Everything within
reality that could be known becomes transparent to you. Now you remember who
you are. The entire illusion of life is unraveled.
As you grow even more conscious, your visual field starts to develop into a
singularity. Your visual field merges with your auditory field and your
tactile field until there is no more difference between sight, sound, and
touch. Growing even more conscious, the last vestiges of difference collapse.
Consciousness frees itself of all self–imposed limits and biases, accelerating
asymptotically towards pure Oneness. You release the heavy burden of existing
by way of concrete and finite forms.
From this point, should you dare to take one final step, you will enter pure
INFINITY, where all form is lost, as no difference exists between anything –
where all things exist as a soup of pure metaphysical potential. All things
become identical. Every possible object, every possible form lives there. But
it's Nothing. Now you must confront existence as pure abstraction. Your truest
identity, your highest nature is finally revealed. What are you? Nothing the
human mind can imagine. A metaphysical singularity of pure consciousness
extending forever in all directions and all dimensions, absolutely sovereign,
unconstrained by any sense of other. Every difference annihilates into a
bottomless ocean of Infinite Love. Absolute Unity. Absolute Symmetry.
Complete, Perfect, Eternal, Formless, Endless.
The Alpha and the Omega. Identity itself. You have become ONE. You have become
LOVE. You have reached the end–game of reality.
You are INFINITY.
You radiate as a void of infinite potential. Complete in your knowledge of
yourself.