༺ Thesium ༻

Self

From the peace of the void, the Abystery lifted the High Neem’s experience upwards. As he ascended he became aware of a great wailing cry. He accelerated up through a multitude of voices all crying out at once from areas of intense heat and penetrating cold by turns. Dimly he saw creatures as he rose. Creatures with terrible distortions to their bodies, ravaged by torments, lashed out at him with their claws and long teeth and he was afraid. The atmosphere was rancid and he felt a dread at the force of hatred he felt all around him.

This awful realm was left behind but before he could really relax, again he found himself surrounded by more shadowy creatures. They had enormous bellys, huge pleading eyes and very small mouths. They muttered to themselves and seemed lost and searching in their darkness. Their long arms reached out to him, their hands snatched after him in their great hunger.

There was another interval of relative peace but not for long. The next realm was filled with dull eyes, fur, scales, horns, wings. They preyed upon each other and hardly noticed him in their animal stupidity.

Leaving this layer his ascent slowed and he began to hear the unmistakable sound of babies crying. Human babies gurgling and chuckling. He approached one such baby and found himself all of a sudden inside the baby’s experience as though from the inside. This baby reached out to a toy ball. It was red. He saw that it was red. He found that time had slowed down to an incredible degree and his point of view crunched down to the infinitesimal once more. The surface of the ball was absorbing most of the colours in the light that fell on it, all except the red frequency. He saw its undulation, the electro-magnetic propagation of its field. It spread out in a languid way until it met the eyes of the now practically motionless baby whose apparent size now seemed collosal. The light flipped over in the eye’s lens and entered a viscous substance until it bounced against a forest of little tentacles. These protruberances quivered and sparked lightening along their roots.

Following these little shocks into the tentacles, he found himself travelling along a tunnel, as though surfing on the electric pulses. The tunnel joined with many others, like tributaries feeding a river, an electrical river of information. This river emptied out into a vast, dark web of nodes. They flashed and sparked and chemical messages jumped along their networks. The redness of the ball was recreated in one cluster of nodes which joined with other entire edifices of nodal structures, all working in concert, creating the baby’s experience of the red ball.

A huge double-cluster of node complexes responded to this ‘red ball’ with stored memories of similar things encountered. Gateway areas began making decisions about this particular phenomenon and decided that, on the whole, it was allowed. The gateways let these recreations continue on to more areas again, areas concerned with preferences and plans. The baby had enough previous experiences to come up with intentions and schemes and set into motion outgoing pulses of information. These pulses were instructions and they travelled much as they had arrived. He saw this huge network spreading throughout the baby and was awestruck by its complexity as the baby stretched out its hand, moving more rapidly now, and took hold of the ball. It lifted it to its mouth and put its tongue against the red surface. The waves of incoming and outgoing messages started all over again, in fact as time sped up, he saw that waves of incoming and outgoing messages were pulsating every which way as though in an immense sea. Not even the tiniest part of this enormous orchestra was silent. Not one iota was still.

Time sped up some more and once again he saw the baby as though from outside. The baby’s continuously changing sea of processing gathered pace and he watched as the baby became a child, a toddler, a boy.

The boy was himself.

As he was about to speak, the Abystery lifted him up once more and he approached a realm of Titans. They lived in magnificent castles and mansions amongst wild mountains and vast plains. They were at war with each other. They were intensely jealous and each sought power over their enemies.

Next there was a realm of splendour. Its beauty was beyond his powers of description. Ethereal angelic creatures enjoyed every pleasure and all was perfection. At the same time all the processes he had seen going on inside the boy, himself, were continuing here. Nothing was truly at rest.

He understood that there was no special, internal ‘boy’, no essence or kernel in charge of all this. Just this heap of lightening fast processes all acting in concert to produce this.. well, what could he say? To produce this part of what the universe was doing here? He saw this was just as true for all the creatures and realms he had been shown. So, no self then!

Although he had only thought this, he heard the Abystery’s voice once again.

“Yes!” it said.