Ron Burgundy's ridiculous voice bellowed in my ear: "Do you know who Friston is? I don't know how to put this, but he's kind of a big deal. People know him. He's very important. He has many leather-bound books and his apartment smells of rich mahogany."

I chuckled to myself and continued reading.

• For the past decade or so, Friston has devoted much of his time and effort to developing an idea he calls the free energy principle. (Friston refers to his neuroimaging research as a day job, the way a jazz musician might refer to his shift at the local public library.) With this idea, Friston believes he has identified nothing less than the organizing principle of all life, and all intelligence as well. “If you are alive,” he sets out to answer, “what sorts of behaviors must you show?”
The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI Shaun Raviv | Wired Magazine

If it's the organizing principle of intelligence and life, then it's the organizing principle of everything, my mind casually commented. The entire universe is a conscious system. Duh.

Oh wait, I paused. I guess that's not obvious to a lot of people.

Peter Thiel's famous contrarian question echoed in my mind: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

I recalled a passage from Thiel's book, Zero to One.

• This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
  
  Most commonly I hear answers like the following:
  “Our education system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.”
  “America is exceptional.”
  “There is no God.”
  
  Those are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.”
Zero To One Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

Okay then, I thought. Most people believe the observer and the observed are separate variables — but the truth is, they're the same thing. Most people believe the universe is primarily made from unconscious, inanimate matter — but the truth is, the universe is a conscious system, observing itself. Most people believe life is random and chaotic — but the truth is, randomness can't be defended from first principles. Most people believe they are thinking — but the truth is, they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

A dialogue from Conversations With God popped into my mind.

• God: [...] “Someone else decide! I’ll go along, I’ll go along!” you shout. “Someone else just tell me what’s right and wrong!”
  
  This is why, by the way, human religions are so popular. It almost doesn’t matter what the belief system is, as long as it’s firm, consistent, clear in its expectation of the follower, and rigid. Given those characteristics, you can find people who believe in almost anything. The strangest behavior and belief can be—has been—attributed to God. It’s God’s way, they say. God’s word.
  
  And there are those who will accept that. Gladly. Because, you see, it eliminates the need to think. [...]
  
  Most of you are not interested in such important work. Most of you would rather leave that to others. And so most of you are not self-created, but creatures of habit—other-created creatures.
  
  Then, when others have told you how you should feel, and it runs directly counter to how you do feel—you experience a deep inner conflict. Something deep inside you tells you that what others have told you is not Who You Are. Now where to go with that? What to do?
  
  The first place you go is to your religionists—the people who put you there in the first place. You go to your priests and your rabbis and your ministers and your teachers, and they tell you to stop listening to your Self. The worst of them will try to scare you away from it; scare you away from what you intuitively know.
  
  They’ll tell you about the devil, about Satan, about demons and evil spirits and hell and damnation and every frightening thing they can think of to get you to see how what you were intuitively knowing and feeling was wrong, and how the only place you’ll find any comfort is in their thought, their idea, their theology, their definitions of right and wrong, and their concept of Who You Are.
  
  The seduction here is that all you have to do to get instant approval is to agree. Agree and you have instant approval. Some will even sing and shout and dance and wave their arms in hallelujah!
  
  That’s hard to resist. Such approval, such rejoicing that you have seen the light; that you’ve been saved!
  
  Approvals and demonstrations seldom accompany inner decisions. Celebrations rarely surround choices to follow personal truth. In fact, quite the contrary. Not only may others fail to celebrate, they may actually subject you to ridicule. What? You’re thinking for yourself? You’re deciding on your own? You’re applying your own yardsticks, your own judgments, your own values? Who do you think you are, anyway?
  
  And, indeed, that is precisely the question you are answering.
  
  But the work must be done very much alone. Very much without reward, without approval, perhaps without even any notice.
Conversations With God Neale Donald Walsch

I continued reading the Wired article.

• Over time, Hinton convinced Friston that the best way to think of the brain was as a Bayesian probability machine. The idea, which goes back to the 19th century and the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, is that brains compute and perceive in a probabilistic manner, constantly making predictions and adjusting beliefs based on what the senses contribute. According to the most popular modern Bayesian account, the brain is an “inference engine” that seeks to minimize “prediction error.”
The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI Shaun Raviv | Wired Magazine

Cool, I thought. Makes sense.

Before long, a particular passage caught my attention.

• Markov is the eponym of a concept called a Markov blanket, which in machine learning is essentially a shield that separates one set of variables from others in a layered, hierarchical system. The psychologist Christopher Frith — who has an h-index on par with Friston’s — once described a Markov blanket as “a cognitive version of a cell membrane, shielding states inside the blanket from states outside.”
  
  In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. And within us are blankets separating organs, which contain blankets separating cells, which contain blankets separating their organelles. The blankets define how biological things exist over time and behave distinctly from one another. Without them, we’re just hot gas dissipating into the ether.
  
  Ever since I first read about Markov blankets, I’d seen them everywhere. Markov blankets around a leaf and a tree and a mosquito. In London, I saw them around the postdocs at the FIL, around the black-clad protesters at an antifascist rally, and around the people living in boats in the canals. Invisible cloaks around everyone, and underneath each one a different living system that minimizes its own free energy.
  
  The concept of free energy itself comes from physics, which means it’s difficult to explain precisely without wading into mathematical formulas. In a sense that’s what makes it powerful: It isn’t a merely rhetorical concept. It’s a measurable quantity that can be modeled, using much the same math that Friston has used to interpret brain images to such world-changing effect. But if you translate the concept from math into English, here’s roughly what you get: Free energy is the difference between the states you expect to be in and the states your sensors tell you that you are in. Or, to put it another way, when you are minimizing free energy, you are minimizing surprise.
  
  According to Friston, any biological system that resists a tendency to disorder and dissolution will adhere to the free energy principle — whether it’s a protozoan or a pro basketball team.
  
  A single-celled organism has the same imperative to reduce surprise that a brain does.
The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI Shaun Raviv | Wired Magazine

Wait. What?!

My eyes squinted at the screen.

Did he just say what I thought he said?

I scrolled down, rapidly skimming the remainder of the article.

• This isn’t enough for Friston, who uses the term “active inference” to describe the way organisms minimize surprise while moving about the world. When the brain makes a prediction that isn’t immediately borne out by what the senses relay back, Friston believes, it can minimize free energy in one of two ways: It can revise its prediction—absorb the surprise, concede the error, update its model of the world—or it can act to make the prediction true. If I infer that I am touching my nose with my left index finger, but my proprioceptors tell me my arm is hanging at my side, I can minimize my brain’s raging prediction-error signals by raising that arm up and pressing a digit to the middle of my face.
  
  And in fact, this is how the free energy principle accounts for everything we do: perception, action, planning, problem solving. When I get into the car to run an errand, I am minimizing free energy by confirming my hypothesis—my fantasy—through action.
  
  For Friston, folding action and movement into the equation is immensely important. Even perception itself, he says, is “enslaved by action”: To gather information, the eye darts, the diaphragm draws air into the nose, the fingers generate friction against a surface. And all of this fine motor movement exists on a continuum with bigger plans, explorations, and actions.
  
  “We sample the world,” Friston writes, “to ensure our predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI Shaun Raviv | Wired Magazine

I blinked a few times and cocked my head to the side.

I'd already begun running the computation in my mind. It played in my head like a multi-dimensional movie, full of purple Markov blankets and yellow shaded areas representing distributions of free energy in the system.

I replaced the Markov blankets with images of the things they represented: objects, people, money, ideas. Then I did something strange: I placed Steve Jobs in the system — a man renowned for his 'reality distortion field'. I watched as Jobs began expressing a belief in something that didn't exist yet.

As he held steady to his vision, a substantial buildup of free energy began accumulating in the system. He was deliberately creating and holding a prediction error — a gap between what the information coming into his senses told him was true, and what he believed to be true. His prediction error was throwing the entire system out of homeostasis.

As he walked through space and time continuing to think, speak and act in alignment with his vision despite what was manifesting around him, the connections in his neural network strengthened. This increased conviction generated even more free energy. That free energy created a magnetic pull, drawing his vision towards him.

As Jobs convinced others of his vision, they began expressing their belief in it too. Their new prediction errors generated additional free energy in the system, throwing it further into chaos.

Even the market's collective, unconscious desire for a smartphone was creating a huge buildup of free energy. It appeared as if the iPhone was being pulled out of Jobs to fulfil the market's desire and restore homeostasis to that economic system. Jobs was just the open vessel — the most parsimonious route — for that emergent pattern of information to flow through.

I watched in awe as the computation continued playing in my mind. Resources were shifting around, minimizing their mutual surprise via the path of least resistance. It all looked like disordered mayhem to the naked eye.

But then the free energy began to disappear. The gap between what Steve Jobs saw in his mind — what he believed to be true — and what was physically showing up in the outside world, had closed. There was no gap. He was holding a beautiful, low-entropy creation — an iPhone — in his hand, like a modern-day sorcerer.

Holy shit.

***

I furiously flipped through Conversations With God until I found the parable I was searching for.

• There once was a soul who knew itself to be the light. This was a new soul, and so, anxious for experience. “I am the light,” it said. “I am the light.” Yet all the knowing of it and all the saying of it could not substitute for the experience of it. And in the realm from which this soul emerged, there was nothing but the light. Every soul was grand, every soul was magnificent, and every soul shone with the brilliance of My awesome light. And so the little soul in question was as a candle in the sun. In the midst of the grandest light —of which it was a part—it could not see itself, nor experience itself as Who and What it Really Is.
  
  Now it came to pass that this soul yearned and yearned to know itself. And so great was its yearning that I one day said, “Do you know, Little One, what you must do to satisfy this yearning of yours?”
  
  “Oh, what, God? What? I’ll do anything!” The little soul said.
  
  “You must separate yourself from the rest of us,” I answered, “and then you must call upon yourself the darkness.’
  
  “What is the darkness, o Holy One?” the little soul asked.
  
  “That which you are not,” I replied, and the soul understood.
Conversations With God Neale Donald Walsch

I flipped back to the Wired article.

• In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. [...] Without them, we are just hot gas dissipating into the ether.
The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI Shaun Raviv | Wired Magazine

My mind was reeling.

Souls are Markov blankets!

Another spark fired in my brain. I frantically began pouring through my notes, searching for another passage from Conversations With God.

• And so I gave to each of the countless parts of Me (to all of My spirit children) the same power to create which I have as the whole. This is what your religions mean when they say that you were created in the "image and likeness of God."
Conversations With God Neale Donald Walsch

The image and likeness of God, I muttered. It's a metaphor for recursion. If every soul is made in the image and likeness of God, then every Markov blanket is optimizing for the same thing...

I cross-referenced this with a snippet I'd read in a scientific paper a few moments earlier.

• The key point here is that at every level, the same variational, surprise-reducing dynamics must be in play to supply Markov blankets for the level above.
Answering Schrödinger's Question: A Free-Energy Formulation Friston, Ramstead, and Badcock

I immediately recalled Stephen Wolfram's work on cellular automata — particularly, Rule 30. A simple, recursive program generated the incredible 'random' complexity of that pattern.

• It is not uncommon in the history of science that new ways of thinking are what finally allow long withstanding issues to be addressed. But I have been amazed at just how many issues central to the foundation of the existing sciences I have been able to address by using the idea of thinking in terms of simple programs. [...] Indeed, I even have increasing evidence that thinking in terms of simple programs will make it possible to construct a single truly fundamental theory of physics, from which space, time, quantum mechanics and all the other known features of the universe will emerge.
A New Kind of Science Stephen Wolfram

Wolfram's ideas ran around my head before colliding into those of the brilliant physicist, David Bohm — a man who was way ahead of his time:

• Similarly, [Bohm] believes that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life, too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe. [...]
  
  The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. [...] Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives new meaning to William Blake’s famous poem:
  
  To see a World in a Grain of Sand
  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
  And Eternity in an hour.
The Holographic Universe Michael Talbot

I knew Bohm was right, I thought as I furiously flipped through my tattered copy of The Holographic Universe. He's a fucking genius. The free energy principle is covered in holographic patterns!

I quickly found the section on near-death experiences (NDEs).

• Some of Whitton's research is also relevant to this issue. Amazingly, when Whitton hypnotized patients and regressed them to the between-life state, they too reported all the classic features of the [near-death experience (NDE)], passage through a tunnel, encounters with deceased relatives and/or "guides," entrance into a splendorous light-filled realm in which time and space no longer existed, encounters with the luminious beings, and a life review. In fact, according to Whitton's subjects the main purpose of the life review was to refresh their memories so they could more mindfully plan their next life, a process in which the beings of light gently and noncoercively assisted.
  
  Like Ring, after studying the testimony of his subjects Whitton concluded that the shapes and structures one perceives in the afterlife dimension are thought-forms created by the mind. "René Descartes' famous dictum, 'I think, therefore I am,' is never more pertinent than in the between-life state," says Whitton. "There is no experience in existence without thought."
  
  This was especially true when it came to the form Whitton's patients assumed in the between-life state. Several said they didn't even have a body unless they were thinking. "One man described it by saying that if he stopped thinking he was merely a cloud in an endless cloud, undifferentiated," he observes. "But as soon as he started to think, he became himself".
The Holographic Universe Michael Talbot

It's the same pattern: surprise minimization, I muttered. My blue eyes are a symbolic representation of an abstract belief in my neural network. They're not fundamentally real. I stared at my hands. None of this is real...

I leaped back onto my laptop, performed another Google search and began inhaling the results. I needed to see a very specific phrase reflected in the scientific research.

As I skimmed through a paper titled The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?, only one paragraph caught my eye.

• In this setting, surprise is called the (negative) model evidence. This means that minimizing surprise is the same as maximizing the sensory evidence for an agent’s existence, if we regard the agent as a model of its world.
The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Karl Friston

I needed more. I began skimming another paper titled The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle.

• This teleological (Bayesian) interpretation of dynamical behaviour in terms of optimization allows us to think about any system that possesses a Markov blanket as some rudimentary (or possibly sophisticated) ‘agent’ that is optimizing something; namely, the evidence for its own existence.
The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle Kirchhoff, Parr, Palacios, Friston, and Kiverstein.

But still, it wasn't enough. I was looking for something very specific.

And then, all of a sudden, I found it hidden in a paragraph about a spider.

• It is in this sense that one should understand a Markov blanket as establishing a statistical boundary separating internal states from external states. To then act on inferred states of the world means to actively secure evidence that I am what I am; namely, a critter-eating creature.
The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle Kirchhoff, Parr, Palacios, Friston, and Kiverstein.

That! That right there! That's what I was looking for: I am what I am; namely, a critter-eating creature.

My mind was on fire.

I recalled another paragraph from Conversations With God.

• I tell you this: There is no coincidence, and nothing happens “by accident.” Each event and adventure is called to your Self by your Self in order that you might create and experience Who You Really Are.
Conversations With God Neale Donald Walsch

It all made sense.

God is a neural network, observing itself.

Souls — a.k.a observers — are Markov blankets.

Observers are made in 'the image and likeness of God', which means every Markov blanket is optimizing for the same thing.

And that thing is it's own self-existence i.e. Who You Really Are.

God had cloaked his source code in mythology, then buried it inside a book that I'd carried around the world for the past four years.

Well played, God. Well played.

***

Damnit!

I chewed on the end of my pen, brow furrowed in thought, mind running in overdrive.

But what about my flip-flop? If the algorithm is minimizing chaos in the system, then what the fuck happened in Chiang Mai?

As I pondered this objection, a chessboard appeared in my mind. Black knights and rooks and bishops and pawns were lined up on my side of the board, ready to begin a game of chess against an AI superintelligence — a gaming engine — known as God.

As the game began, God drew himself a map of all possible board configurations.

Once he'd created a multiverse of every possible arrangement of information, he could locate every instance of checkmate and calculate the most parsimonious route to his goal.

To do this, he'd need to predict how I'd respond to each of his moves. Given a particular board configuration, maybe there was a 90% probability that I'd take his rook, and a 5% probability that I'd dodge his trap and protect my bishop instead. The efficiency of God's gameplay relied on the accuracy of his predictions.

But what if God didn't need to guess which move I'd make? What if God knew which move I'd make with 100% certainty? What if my consciousness was a holographic fragment of God's consciousness, and I was playing a game of chess against myself?

God could calculate how I'd react to every move, and what my next move would be. Even if I tried to be clever and outsmart him by making unpredictable moves, he would've already accounted for that in his model. My 'unpredictable' moves would be exactly what he predicted. I'd be walking down a predetermined path; the single most parsimonious route to checkmate.

At that moment, I recalled a passage from Conversations with God.

• Perhaps this is a good time to go over once more how it is that I interact with you, because you think it is a question of My desire, and I’m telling you it’s a question of yours.
  
  I want for you what you want for you. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t sit here and make a judgment, request by request, whether something should be granted you.
  
  My law is the law of cause and effect, not the law of We’ll See. There is nothing you can’t have if you choose it. Even before you ask, I will have given it to you. [...]
  
  In this sense, your will for you is God’s will for you.
  
  You are living your life the way you are living your life, and I have no preference in the matter.
Conversations With God Neale Donald Walsch

I ran another simulation in my mind. This time, God wasn't optimizing for checkmate. Instead, he was calculating the most parsimonious route to whatever my intention was — and my intention could fluctuate at runtime.

As the opening moves were made, I believed I'd lose the game. I knew I was outmatched by God and I just wanted it all to be over. So for the first thirty moves or so, he obliterated me. God took all my most valuable pieces and left me with a weak battalion. I was definitely losing the game — just like I intended to.

But then, by some stroke of 'luck,' I somehow managed to capture God's queen — the most powerful piece in his army. This gave me a confidence boost and changed my perspective. I suddenly decided to play all-out and win the game, not lose it. After another forty moves, I manoeuvred God's king into checkmate and claimed my victory.

When I examined this scenario, I realized something peculiar: from the beginning of the game, God was already optimizing for whatever I was optimizing for; my will was God's will; he was just minimizing my surprise.

But if God knew, with 100 percent certainty, how I would respond to each of his moves, then he would've known that I'd win the game in the end, even though I initially intended to lose it. Therefore, from the beginning of the game, he was giving me an experience of losing in the short term, even though I would eventually win in the long term. In fact, everything that unfolded in the 'losing' phase was an essential part of the journey to my eventual victory — as if the dots only connected looking backwards.

The only reason I changed my intention in the middle of the game and decided I wanted to win was because I'd captured God's queen in the past. But the only reason I'd captured God's queen in the past was because doing so sat on the most parsimonious route to my future intention — winning. But the only reason I intended to win in the future was because I'd captured God's queen in the past. But the only reason I'd captured God's queen in the past was because, in the future, I intended to win.

I ran my fingers through my hair and stared at the model in my mind. Am I interpreting this correctly? I wondered. The past is creating the future, but the future is creating the past. The dance between my neural network and God's neural network was creating a retrocausal loop, like Escher's Drawing Hands lithograph. Even before I asked for something, this algorithm had already given it to me...

So it's a life plan... I whispered as I thumbed through The Holographic Universe, searching for the relevant section.

• Like Whitton, [Near-Death Experience] researchers have also uncovered evidence that our lives are planned beforehand, at least to some extent, and we each play a role in the creation of this plan. [...]
  
  That our future is at least partially sketched out is also evident in a phenomenon Ring calls the "personal flashforward." On occasion, during the vision of knowledge, NDEers are shown glimpses of their own future. In one particularly striking case a child NDEer was told various specifics about his future, including the fact that he would be married at age twenty-eight and would have two children. He was even shown his adult self and his future children sitting in a room of the house he would eventually be living in, and as he gazed at the room he noticed something very strange on the wall, something that his mind could not grasp. Decades later and after each of these predictions had come to pass, he found himself in the very scene he had witnessed as a child and realized that the strange object on the wall was a "forced-air heater," a kind of heater that had not yet been invented at the time of his NDE.
  
  In another equally astonishing personal flashforward a female NDEer was shown a photograph of [Raymond A. Moody, Jr. (psychiatrist and author of Life after Life)], told his full name, and told that when the time was right she would tell him about her experience. The year was 1971 and Moody had not yet published Life after Life, so his name and picture meant nothing to the woman. However, the time became "right" four years later when Moody and his family unwittingly moved to the very street on which the woman lived. That Halloween Moody's son was out trick-or-treating and knocked on the woman's door. After hearing the boy's name, the woman told him to tell his father she had to talk to him, and when Moody obliged she related her remarkable story.
The Holographic Universe Michael Talbot

I snapped the book shut.

My Akashic records reading from eighteen months earlier echoed in my ear. I'd asked the Oracle why Jesse had suddenly been ejected from my life in the same week that Sam had handed back all of his equity and left me as a single founder. Love and loyalty were the only things keeping me in Australia. And in the blink of an eye, both of those commitments crumbled into dust.

But the light beings... well, they'd told the Oracle about a plan...

Akashic records reading Recorded 18 months earlier, in August 2017
• 
  
  Your records want you to know that those [events] were [part of] the big plan. The timing, the shifting to give you the opportunity if you should choose to move to the next stages of your journey. And you are riding it, so...
  
  Just so you know, your records actually show that when you find the right person, that you know is compatible with you, and that will understand you… actually it's very important to understand you in terms of the energy and also the connection that you have with the divine source. That person... you will find inspiration, actually. Your relationship will bring in a different level of inspiration. You will also find a sort of partnership — not only emotionally, but you will find a sense of partnership in a spiritual way. Like, you are an individual but you will find coherence in energetic space that you both share. So you will actually sense that. You will know that’s the right feeling energetically.
  
  Oh, I’m just going to tell you what they show me because I thought it’s kinda really Disneyland, like a Disney movie. They show — here’s you, and here’s this guy, and he’s the right one, and when you get together it shows this… this is so Disney movie. It shows the two of you close to each other, together. And then there are just sparkles of like, you know, like a Disney movie, right? Tinkerbells and literally, like, a star magic thing sparkling. And then a heart shape like this. And I’m like “Oh, really? Seriously?” I’m like “Okay, I’ll tell her.” I was resisting but, like, okay fine. I’ll just tell you. So that’s the big finale.

So heartbreak was always part of the masterplan. My love story with Jesse was doomed before the first line was even written; from that day in the little French village of Albi, months before our fates collided on the opposite side of the globe.

Those events only manifested because the system can't evolve without chaos, I thought. And that means what happened in Chiang Mai was a long-term optimization...

I flashed back to eighteen months earlier, standing on my bed in shock as I watched my flip-flop move across the floor of my Thai apartment by itself — completely defying Newton's laws. That incident generated the biggest prediction error of my life. It was the moment reality broke for me and exposed itself as an illusory construct, lodging a sharp splinter in my mind that twisted and turned, day in and day out, invalidating everything our materialist society had taught me to believe.

If I was computing this correctly, a pattern of information that surprising would've only emerged in my reality if my observing it then set me off on a choice trajectory where my future self was minimizing massive amounts of free energy in the system. If I wasn't doing something impactful in the future — if I wasn't fulfilling a vast collective desire or answering a grand collective question — then my observing that pattern of information would not have mitigated enough expected free energy to disrupt a neurosis as strong as Newton's laws.

So then what is my future self up to? I wondered. Besides hooking up with my hot Disney husband, of course.

And then it hit me: The Prophecy.

Akashic records reading Recorded 18 months earlier, in August 2017
• 
  
  And you will actually be utilizing this [the way you live your life] helping more people than you can see now. Like, of course you have a business and you run your business and all that. But your records want you to have this understanding... what you're doing... the way you're doing it and how you're doing it, is actually pretty valuable.
  
  So down the road when you feel called to do it, just do it the way you always do it. Allow it to happen. If you're called to share with people about how you live your life and how things work for you, feel free to share it. So this is just something your records want you to have some heads up about. Because your gift is not just teaching kids coding for the game. There is a lot more that you'll be able to share with the world. [...]
  
  They show this image that's you, but not in this lifetime. The wardrobe is more like an ancient lifetime, but everything they show is metaphor. What they show is a tiara... it's almost like you're in a ceremony or something and it feels like it's a king or queen or a royal kind of feeling. You're in a ceremony and a tiara is being put on you.
  
  
  
  So the records want you to know... the message is... at some point in time your soul actually chose to accept this mission that you're going to complete in this lifetime. You actually decided before you became a person here, you had decided that you were going to do this. This is part of your mission, in terms of what you are going to be sharing with other people. You have accepted that this is going to be a part of the knowledge that you're going to spread and share when the time is right for you.

My entire life flashed before my eyes. I gasped as a bolt of clarity struck my consciousness, sending shivers down my spine.

I’d never believed in destiny. It always seemed like a nice, romantic idea relegated to myths and fantasy novels, where heroes slayed dragons and sorcerers cast magic spells and oracles made prophecies.

And yet, I'd marched straight into destiny like a mathematical soldier.

The irony of the journey took my breath away. This whole time I thought I was searching for the answers to the universe; for God. But, in the end, I was really just searching for myself. They’re the same thing, after all...