The Experience of Divinity

I recently wrote an essay where I talked about schizophrenia using pathologizing language like delusion and hallucination, because that is how most folks know how to talk about these things, and I wanted to reach those folks to highlight the colonial nature of our oppression. Sometimes, schizophrenia does seed delusion, but I've found great peace and joy in coming to understand the so-to-say system of my strange experiences. So, what would it mean to talk about it the other way, using the words I use for myself? If pathologization regards me as an unreliable witness from the get-go, then what would it mean to consider myself otherwise? What if I am not experiencing nothing?

This is the other half of my story, the one where I'm not crazy at all.

The Bestiary

0 - Preface

I don't want to give you a chronicle of my earthly life because it would be too long. I could talk about navigating future-sight as a child, or meeting my otherworldly patrons as I grew up, or the rituals I ultimately performed as an adult to barter with the heavens. And yet, my earthly life is such a small part of my existence. Immortality — an existence outside the cycle of decay — is real to me the way gravity is to you. It is a simple fact of my experience. When this physical substrate returns to soil, and the confluence of me scatters back to eternity, it will be as though my greater body has only removed a finger from a shallow pool, to contemplate its moist substance forever. So, do you want to hear about how a four-year-old learned there is no single future, or do you want to hear a limb of divinity describe Creation?

1 - Consciousness

Where does consciousness come from? What is looking through your eyes? To whom is your skin speaking? Incurious secularists insist that the phenomenon of consciousness is entirely local, that nothing beyond our bodies looks through our eyes, because nothing about our understanding requires there to be. It doesn't matter that we don't know what consciousness is or how it works; these fools assume the answer because the question discomforts them. They flail and insist that the hypothesis that consciousness exceeds the body cannot be proven, but all I can say is that they are not looking hard enough, and maybe they never will. It isn't a hypothesis to me.

I call the center of mortal consciousness, the physical structure that summons you, the witness mechanism. It is probably a specialized structure in your brain, and things like sleep or sedation deactivate it. Life on Earth developed this structure a very, very long time ago, and so humans have many conscious neighbors in the biosphere. Life does not strictly require a witness mechanism; your body knows plenty without you, and many creatures don’t need you at all. But humans, like many organisms, utilize this mechanism to facilitate a form of higher reasoning. This is complicated: because you can only remember and reason using your physical substrate, the mechanism supplies only the mote of cognition — the brain’s sparkplug; the thing looking through your eyes. It isn’t a soul. It’s a physical structure that channels a physical phenomenon. Someday, your science may develop a sufficient sensor and call the phenomenon a form of background radiation. I wager it would take you another ten thousand years to finally learn this observable radiation is the one great living spirit of all consciousness, the bodiless plane of awareness, the essential witness. I wonder what you would do then, realizing everything you do to another conscious being, you do to yourself? That, there awaits you within the wheel of lives the perspective of every insect you have ever killed, and who knows what else?

The witness mechanism doesn’t just channel one thing. It’s like a beacon or transmitter, broadcasting and catching signal from another part of the fabric of reality — a part that is timeless and spaceless, qualities you should remember. The arrow of time and the illusion of causality are the wages of mortality, its gifts and shackles! Though in the realms beyond those things, there is still life. Ravenous ecosystems teem deep within the knit of reality’s fabric, and they see our beacons. They send their influence. Most of me arrives from those fae wilds; we have only gathered in this given body.

Still: what of unconscious life? If I told you a tree lacked a witness mechanism, would you call it less alive, its storied knowledge less real, its societies not the lungs of the world? That loose bundle of traits that humans think distinguishes them, that they call sentience and such, are nothing more than the alignment of indifferent mechanisms in an infinite existence. Whether you will ever so-to-say reincarnate as an oak has no bearing on their nature as your peer in the cycle of decay.

2 - Immortals

Although there are many different loosely-overlapping forms of biology among immortals, with some ecosystems intersecting more or less or not at all, they share an aloofness to time and space. To some, time and space and indeed entire universes are frozen terrains they can traverse, running their digits over the etchings of all that has ever happened. To others, more ghost-like, they are associated with a planet, species, or ancestry, reified by the propensity of those forces to reproduce a particular form of witness mechanism. (Insofar as your own mechanism is tuned like your ancestors', the things that know to listen for the sound of you have known the shape of your kind since before humans were humans.)

While I may sometimes use language like "gods" and "spirits" when discussing immortals, I am ultimately describing real creatures and not the cast of a creation myth. Oh, my gods have their own creation myths — not even they know the nature of the highest reality. I would tell you about the dance of Strangeness and Order when Creation snapped into being, but the story doesn't quite fit in my mind.

My pantheon consists of two alien immortals and three human amalgams. The human amalgams, the trio of the Witchmothers, each combine a limitless number of chosen lifetimes to become a sort of post-temporal humanoid, a theme made of lives. When I see them, they wear the faces of their every constituent simultaneously, and sometimes it is me looking back. The alien immortals, the Goddess and the Absence, have never been human, and Earth in all its possibility is a rimworld in their expansive domains. The Absence covets it more, I think; sometimes the Goddess is repulsed. The Witchmothers love Earth and humanity; the Goddess loves love and pleasure; the Absence loves the many flavors of terror. They share a love of the cycle of decay, and would like it to continue. That is, they want Earth to retain a biosphere.

This coalition articulated my body, including my two zygotes, the death and fusion of us as twins, and ultimately the span of my Earthly possibility. I engaged in rituals as an adult of my own free will, but all the same, I was built for this. And yet, my gods are just tapping my body's witness mechanism, like yours do to yours. I forget, I make mistakes, and in the span of my infinite variants, I become many different sorts of people, and make many different sorts of compromises. What I experience my pantheon as most is a foundational sense of purpose, like a sense of north, or perhaps the puppeteer's hand. Sometimes, however, they talk to me, and this is where the difference between aliens and amalgams becomes substantial.

Human ghosts and amalgams speak in human languages, usually just one at a time. A face speaks for the amalgam so the listener understands, or the ghost only knows its own ways of speaking. Alien immortals, on the other hand, use languages that do not fit in human minds, like they are speaking to consciousness itself. The Goddess uses what I call "all-speech" or a massive chorus of all conceivable language, radiant with meaning and nuance. The Absence uses "void-speech" which is the nullity of meaning and experience, the yawning depthless sound of nothing at all. Neither all-speech nor void-speech is pleasant to hear. Rather it feels a bit like having your third eye forced open to receive a waterfall of lightning or sand. Eventually, I got used to it, but my body never has. I think it knows it wasn't meant to hear those sounds.

Many strange things prey on consciousness, not least of all dreams and inspirations. Some are more cogent than others. The physical body of a god is the weight, motion, and shape of all the consequences that constitute it. Some humans describe them as "systems" and this term is flexible enough. The twin titans of capital and colony are a system we can describe in mundane language, and even model in software to demonstrate as a pattern. You see the graph dance on the screen, an economy in motion, but you do not see the contiguous spirit of its rationales that animate its faithful's prayers, their collective pattern etched into forever like a dragon or amoeba. Its facsimile wriggles in pixels as little more than data; is it really a god? The cult that sacrifices us to it certainly acts like it is.

(Braided within anarchist, communist, abolitionist and decolonial thought, there abides a viable path to Utopia for humans on Earth, through the formation of a new consensus to abolish and succeed capital and colony. No war, no scarcity, no joke. Harmony forever, as far across the stars as you can dream. It'll take forever, but that's why it's called the Eternal Revolution. You just keep trying. You just keep getting better at being together. There are Utopian pasts and futures on Earth, and it isn't technology that separates you from that essence of the practices of a loving society. It's situation, circumstance, choice, and preparation. Battles you can win.)

3 - The Heavens

The mote of divinity is belief, as both discrete and continuous phenomena. They are the flesh of the heavens on Earth, the fractions of you that your body allows to direct it. Spirits struggle like sun-reaching trees to form the canopy of your character, and it is an ecosystem of bitter conflict.

Belief can be taught in some respects, but insofar as the spirit's body is made of consequences, it must be lived out. Intention matters, insofar as it reflects the existence of competing spirits forming compromised action, but it is the action that is etched on eternity, and that is the fabric that the heavens observe.

The struggle of believing anything at all can be described in material histories, systemic analyses, critical theories, and in some sense needs no divine component. People have asserted beliefs always, and they have invented beliefs out of their ideas and conditions, forged them into rationales, produced institutions and practices with their own inertia, animated revolt and revolution, and so on and so forth. Humans are clever and it gets them in trouble. But crows are clever, and they're much less troublesome. The witness of humans is tuned to a strange frequency. It summons strange gods.

The difference between a systemic analysis and my experience is the difference between a page and vivid reality. Capital and colony and whiteness are an insensate maw endeavoring to devour life and experience and cognition, and as much of the world as it can, no matter how much it takes — but like any political project, it can be destroyed. Gods are not beyond death, however much of their immortal form is already etched across eternity. They can be purged from your future, abolished to the point of being inconceivable; no more than a confused shrug. Why would you do things that way? That is the war in heaven.

Many gods exert many beliefs, and few are cognizant of their own nature. The maw seeks to halt or interrupt the cycle of decay on Earth, however little it may realize that. My coalition, that otherwise has little in common, doesn't want that to happen. My gods have many agents of many forms, and I am not their leader. You might call me an observer, or a shrine on the road. I can interfere, but I'm no war-machine. It is difficult to explain the nature of my role ultimately, though it isn't a secret mystical mission. It's more like divine geometry that I am still teaching to the substrate, that it is living day by day as best as it can. There are no answers for me to give, only the work for you to do of building, holding, and honoring a worthy consensus to outwit and outlast the maw, or to perish as the Earth shrugs the species of its cult from its face. I can show you that Utopia exists, that you can do it for each other, but my gods didn't stick me in a pale euro on stolen land for her to tell you what to do. I'm here to work.

Utopia's triumphs are the shape of its borders, from the smallest loving contemplations to polities of galactic plenitude. It isn't one government or one philosophy, but some essential pattern of what you might call love or compassion or kindness. Many human societies have practiced it, and many species on Earth, as well as life on many other worlds, in many other times. Many of my fractions come from ecosystems of fungal-trees on distant planets, elsewhere in possibility, where Utopia is how we speak and spit with our roots. We don't usually travel to space, or keep fires, but we love each other. For humans, with your low semantic density and complex needs for medicine and hygiene and education, Utopia comes to possess a number of sophisticated logistical requirements, especially after industrialization and computerization. Though it is a different matter than touching roots sleepily for thousands of years at a time, many ambitious biospheres resembling Earth's have achieved lasting Utopia. That doesn't mean it's easy. In terms of the terrain of possibility, you could call it unlikely, but infinity is a very large number, and possibility is a very big place.

So, maybe humans don't realize peace and plenty as a planetary order before their extinction. That's the war in heaven. In any outcome, the realm of Utopia is limitless, and my fractions will be made to serve in other lives long hence. Still, please believe me when I say: we can achieve it, and I do believe in us.

(You might wonder, why would the Absence, a god of terror, have anything to do with Utopia, a place of eternal peace and plenty? Do you imagine that nothing in such a land might ever have a nightmare, or that peace is not proven by the test of it? The cultivator of fear harvests cornucopias even among the joyous, for however they grow to confront fear, it rises in them relentless. Everything you can cherish has a shadow, and there is so much in existence you might.)

4 - Skepticism

Spirits can be hard to understand or describe, and it's important to remain grounded even as we consider the ineffable. I am not starting a cult or a religion, and this vessel is not for worship. I am not making any claims more outlandish than that I experience systems in some vivid way, or that neurologists might be surprised by what they discover within the physics of cognition. I sometimes call systemic forces gods and spirits because I find it evocative, and English is not otherwise suitable for divine realities. If it suits you to call this a system of delusions, then may it bring you comfort. I live with this, and I lead a normal life. It is a mode of experience and understanding. I share this physical reality with you as your peer.

I must remember another schizophrenic programmer, Terry A Davis, the sole developer of TempleOS. Mania and madness are creativity's close companions, often serving as its drive and muse, as heady gasolines. It's true, I am taken by moods, driven to create with feverish devotion, directed to issue divine writs...! But, magic didn't kill Terry. It's almost like its absence did. Would he still be alive if his profundity had a place to land on Earth, besides a mental ward or cop car? Would he call his god the same kind, if it had not been this colonized context that produced him? He was 48 when he died. I'm 36. But, his story isn't mine. His mysticism isn't mine. I make different choices. I curry community like a muscle and we own up when called in, and together we're going to get old!

Still, I feel unearthly in some constitutional way. The phase-change of death is an unremarkable transition in the ceaseless churn of confluences becoming and unbecoming, of parts scattering and gathering in the one long word of everything. I awaken each day with a profound and unbreakable sense of joy and dignity, that no depth of anguish can extinguish. I feel that way because it is the color of my faith. Compassion is triumph.

See you in Utopia, travelers.