Riffle Through: A Defintion of Reality.
Whenever you take psilocybin mushrooms it’s like your consciousness is defragmented, and there’s a constant flow of shapes, matters, images and sometimes insights are going through your mind — especially when you close your eyes and let the darkness surround you. One shape is seamlessly morphing in to another, from abstract designs and fractals and geometric patterns to actual images; a wave of water goes over to a lock of hair who transforms into a winding mountain road which then turns into a snake, whose bodily structure becomes the profile of a face whose eye becomes a flower and so on. It’s constant and you can never catch your breath trying to catch whatever you’re watching, but you’re still aware of what you just saw. Imagine opening a book and let the pages riffle through your fingers, you see page numbers, letters and images at a fast speed. It’s impossible to focus on one detail, and you just have to look at it is as a whole until the last page of the book.
Is this also the case of reality? Look at what you have before you; maybe a wall of bookshelves, a crowded street, a person you love or hate, a landscape of trees and water, maybe even the roof in your bedroom. You can see all of this because you’ve reached to that very moment in time, in your existence. What you see is the essence of reality right in front of you, a compressed visualization of your experiences. Your life is built upon billions of experiences which have led you to decisions in one way or another, and the result is where you are right now. Imagine that what your mind see is a definition of your whole life, a compact symbol of all the events that lead you here. It goes so fast you can’t comprehend everything at once and you’re watching the end result of every moment. Reality is a billion layers of things that have happened to you, and everything you see is connected to your past and present.
Another metaphor is the plenoptic photography technology, or light-field technology, which — to quote Wikipedia; “captures information about the intensity of light in a scene, and also captures information about the direction that the light rays are traveling in space”. A different version of this concept is the Nokia 9 Pureview, which its depth map function — five cameras at once creating one image, and through that you can set your focus point on which layer you want. Reality is like a LED screen, where you can reach out and touch whatever you want to touch — and it will react to your will.
Imagine now the book parable and the fingers riffle through it and the fact that you can stop at any page and a certain time, it’s your own free will. There you will be able to see what words that are written, what number is printed and color images of interest. Imagine if you can do that with those layers of compressed reality in front of you, by focusing on a certain detail(s), and grasp exactly what lead you there. I have a concrete skull on the table in front of me, and by looking at that it brings me memory of my childhood, my mother, countless horror movies, work I’ve had, people I’ve met — and most important; experiences and insights I’ve had during those moments. Outside from our balcony I can see hints of lives of others, I can sense smells and light, my neighbors flowers points at a certain personality trait, maybe an admiration of beauty and beyond that I can hear laughter and traffic. It’s all endless reality built on the past.
It’s impossible at a glance to get them all, but if you stop and think and focus, maybe you can reach whatever you want and therefore manage to control, affect and change the reality both behind you, right now and what will be coming during the next moment. That’s only one definition of how we can perceive reality. Remember that all what you have is a creation of your choices, even if they seemed at the time to not be just that. Every choice makes another reality layer and every layer of reality gives you yet another choice.
Maybe in the end the true definition of reality is ourselves, as the creators of what we’ve become?
Fred Andersson is an author, individualist and television freelancer from Sweden. His book Homo Satanis: How I Learned to Love Satan and other Insights from my Childhood was published in 2018 is available on Amazon.
