"Zac!" I yelled as I burst through the door of my apartment in February 2019. "Zac! I've figured it out! This is huge!"
"That's what she said," Zac quipped as he emerged from the study. He'd been crashing with me for the past two months. It was our last summer in Sydney before Bryce and Pandora packed up their lives and moved to New York, marking the end of an era: our care-free twenties. Zac had flown over to spend the summer eating ice cream by the harbor together — just the four of us.
I rolled my eyes. "Ugh. You're such a man-child. Anyway..." My mind was racing at the speed of light. I was trying to figure out how to articulate my thoughts at a fraction of that velocity. "You know how I've spent the past few years trying to reverse-engineer the universe by running experiments on my consciousness?"
"Yeah," Zac replied. He glanced up at the wall where my 'memory board' was hanging. It represented one such experiment — an exercise in conditioning my mind to view future events as being in the past. "You're obsessed, in a good way. It's one of your more endearing qualities, when you aren't being a complete dork."
I smiled. "Obsession is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated. Anyway, I think I've figured out the riddle. You ready?"
Zac nodded and I continued. "I've already told you a million times that we live in a non-dual universe. That part takes, like, two minutes of critical thought to figure out. But then a few years ago, I came to suspect that reality was functioning on holographic principles. Yet, I always thought of it as an esoteric concept. Like, the universe is a non-dualistic dream in the mind of a superintelligence and we're all experiencing ourselves as separate holographic fragments of that entity, etcetera, etcetera."
I was on a roll now. The thoughts were starting to connect in my mind. "But here's the thing: It's not a theistic 'God.' It's not 'spirit.' It's not some mystical 'universal force.' It's an algorithm, Zac! A beautiful, holographic, recursive algorithm! Just pure math."
"Right…" Zac trailed off. I could see he had that I'm-being-a-supportive-friend-but-I'm-not-quite-sure-what-she-is-talking-about look on his face.
"Okay," I continued. "Let me try to summarise this: the universe is a superintelligent neural network observing itself in an attempt to understand and experience all the different facets of its own consciousness. It runs on a game loop where each Markov blanket in the neural network is fed into a computation at a variable frame rate. The computation at the lower dimension recursively calculates the mutual surprise between all the Markov blankets, both now and n increments in the future. This mutual surprise is called 'free energy'. Then the algorithm calculates the most efficient way to minimize the free energy for every Markov blanket both now and ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand years in the future — or actually, until the end of linear time when the universe will probably return to a state of being everything and therefore nothing in particular. And we’ll probably get another Big Bang from there because the universe appears to be a recursive loop — like a snake eating its tail... although I'm a bit fuzzy on those cosmological details. Oh, and it can perform this calculation because it knows every possible configuration of the multiverse, and it's manifesting the most parsimonious route through the information structure. So you, as an observer, exist on the most parsimonious route to your future self. And from your perspective, the past that manifested in your reality is necessarily the most parsimonious route to your current self — which explains why the universe is so finely tuned. But then you end up with these retrocausal loops which are so trippy, but so cool. Did you know our future is creating our past? And we control the whole thing in the present moment with our free will? That’s how we’re getting a physical experience of our own consciousness. It’s such a brilliant design, isn’t it?"
I drew a breath.
Zac looked at me, then looked at his phone.
"Are you listening to me or am I boring you?" I asked. "I know that was a terrible explanation that probably made no sense, but I just had this epiphany an hour ago. I can see it so clearly in my mind. This is it! This is what I've spent over four years searching for!"
"Oh, I’m paying attention," Zac assured me. “But you’re right — I have no idea what you’re talking about. However, reverse-engineering the universe does sound like a big deal, so I’ve ordered something delicious for us to celebrate. A giant cookie is currently en route to this very room!" He sighed. "Nikki, there has never been a better time to be alive."
I agreed. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, my mind on fire with magic and possibility. There had never been a better time to be alive.
"So do you get why this is a big deal?" I asked.
"Alas, I do not."
"See, it’s like any other game or system — if you understand the rules of the game, you can hack it. You know what to focus on to get results, and that means you progress in quantum leaps instead of blindly bopping around and bumping into things and wondering why the game is such a chaotic struggle. The game isn’t inherently a struggle. You just don’t know how to play it.
If the algorithm is minimizing free energy, then all results stem from that one variable. Individually, and as a society, we need to learn how to generate strategic buildups of free energy throughout the system. Then the algorithm will do all the work to minimize the free energy by procedurally generating all the resources, ideas, and ‘luck’ we need to make those quantum leaps and save the world from poverty, war, climate change, and all our other problems. We have one thing to optimize our economic, legal, political, education, and business systems for, and everything else becomes secondary to that. That one thing is signal, and everything else is noise. And that’s how we save the world. Boom! Solved it! Fifty points for Gryffindor!"
Zac lay back on the floor and stared at the ceiling. “Ugh. This is too much to process on an empty stomach. Can we have a cookie break now?”
“Zachary Borrowdale!” I jumped up on the couch, my hands stretched wide in grandiosity. “We’re reverse-engineering the universe here! We’re undoing centuries of stagnant thought that has hardened and solidified into dogmatic, unquestioning belief inside the walls of the very academic institutions we never quite belonged to-”
“Speak for yourself. I actually gradua-”
“We are bold intellectual explorers, navigating ‘crazy’ ideas without the shackles of authority chaining us to the status quo! No one to answer to but our own curiosity. No one to please but our own questioning minds. No cesspool of groupthink to marinate in while we collect our paychecks and look down our noses and laugh at all the plebeians who believe in ‘weird things’ like magic and wonder and that there’s something more to this world than the materialism force-fed to us in high school science textbooks.
No papers to write with word counts and formatting requirements. No exams, no essays, no academic jousting. No religious worship at the altar of atheism or gods or research grants or university presidents or profits or popes. We’re allowed to think what we want to think, and challenge assumptions we want to challenge, and be who we want to be without anyone telling us otherwise.
You and I — we have a role to play in this game. Nay — a responsibility! We are a dying breed of Truth seekers in a world gone mad. We look illusion straight in the eye and see right through it to the possibilities that lie beyond the edge of what’s reasonable. We are renegades, my friend.”
Like, do you feel like you belong on planet Earth? [...]
What they’re showing me about the origin of your soul is that you took a little bit of a different path than a lot of people. A lot of times a soul will pick a home planet or home environment of some kind, and you didn’t do that. I would say the first… oh God, we’re talking about time that is so beyond linear time and it is so hard to put a linear quantity on it but… I don’t know… maybe the first ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years of who you are as a soul, if we were going to put it in linear time… which, they’re saying, in terms of the length of your soul is not all that long, but to us it sounds like a long time. You spent that time as pure light in different environments. You went as light to different locations. What’s it like to be light in a world of all light? What is it like to be light in a world of no light? What is it like to be light in an environment like ours where there’s physical bodies?
So you were exploring all of your ‘lightness’ and what you could experience and understand, because in the moment of your soul’s origin, part of your awareness would be to take in the creative nature of light and how most physically manifested worlds like ours begin because light is creative. There’s a way in which our manifested form is a whole bunch of photons put together. In a lot of ways what you were doing was exploring the whole nature of what a photon is. It’s more than just that, but in our physical world that’s how we talk about it. We talk about photons and the motions of energy.
So then, after that experience, what you started doing, and have done more or less since then (there have been other things you’ve done at a soul level)... a lot of what you started doing was exploring the nature of how light is manifested. For us, using English, we talk about light like "turn on the light" and we mean the physical bulb, but it can also mean understanding. When we're in the light we see better and understand better.
So, in other words, what you started investigating was the spiritual expression of light. In a world where there is no religion versus all religion versus only one religion. All the various combinations of all of that one could get to. Then you were also pulling together experiences about the physical components of light and the spiritual components of light and integrating them.
It's interesting because it’s like your soul had a second ‘I Am’ moment that is really important to Who You Are. The way I would explain this is… if you think about a wheel, and you have the center of a wheel with all the spokes going out, there’s something about the wheel and being the center of the wheel that really caught your imagination. It’s not about balance so much as it is about integration. So think about a car, and the car’s got four wheels, and there are axles that connect the wheels to the car. You were really, really, really taken with the whole concept of the axle — the center of the wheel and how everything turns around that, literally and figuratively. It’s not that balance isn't important, but it's about how the axle is integrated into the experience of the wheel. And how the axle ends up being a clearinghouse in a funny way, because the wheel is dependent upon the focus or weight in that point and without it it's like the wheel could just fold in on itself. It doesn’t have enough power and strength at the center to maintain itself.
Essentially, you explored all of that. In part, you were off exploring light. And on the other hand, you were off exploring this experience of being the central point for something that revolves around it, and also the clearing house. Your soul's original intent was to follow, as best you could, the concept of light in all its iterations and what it means to be a wheel and an axle and a clearing house — a central gathering point for power and strength.
You've chosen to be here. I don't think you've been on Earth for a while. You've been to other places. You've chosen to be here now because you know that the shift in the planet that's happening is going to require the deepest understanding possible of what light is on all the different levels, and essentially the idea of being a clearinghouse. [...] It's almost like you're standing at the crossroads, answering questions for the travellers as they come by.
You do not see the human race as very evolved, do You? I mean, if the whole of evolution were placed on a football field, where would we be?
On the 12-yard line.
You're kidding.
No.
We're on the 12-yard-line of evolution?
Hey, you've moved from the 6 to the 12 in the past century alone.
Any chance of ever scoring a touchdown?
Of course. If you don't fumble the ball. [...]
It's vitally important that you understand this.
Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology, rather than your technology being a product of your society.
When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself.
Why is that? Can You explain that?
Yes. The crucial issue is the balance between technology and cosmology — the cosmology of all life.
What do You mean by "the cosmology of all life"?
Simply put, it is the way things work. The System. The Process.
There is a "method to My madness," you know.
I was hoping there was.
And the irony is that once you figure out that method, once you begin to understand more and more of how the universe works, you run a greater risk of causing a breakdown. In this way, ignorance can be bliss.
The universe is itself a technology. It is the greatest technology. It works perfectly. On its own. But once you get in there and start messing around with universal principles and universal laws, you run the risk of breaking those laws. And that's a 40-yard penalty.
"Magic" — Yennefer, her eyes fixed on the sky above the hills, rested her hands on the pommel of her saddle — "is, in some people's opinion, the embodiment of Chaos. It is a key capable of opening the forbidden door. The door behind which lurk nightmares, fear, and unimaginable horrors, behind which enemies hide and wait, destructive powers, the forces of pure Evil capable of annihilating not only the one who opens the door but with them the entire world. And since there is no lack of those who try to open the door, someone, at some point, is going to make a mistake and then the destruction of the world will be forejudged and inevitable. Magic is, therefore, the revenge and the weapon of Chaos. The fact that, following the Conjunction of the Spheres, people have learned to use magic, is the curse and undoing of the world. The undoing of mankind."
So, are we out of our league here?
You're getting close. Only you can determine whether you're out of your league. You'll determine that with your actions. For instance, you know enough about atomic energy to blow yourselves to kingdom come.
Yes, but we're not going to do that. We're smarter than that. We'll stop ourselves.
Really? You keep proliferating your weapons of mass destruction the way you've been doing, and pretty soon they'll get into the hands of somebody who will hold the world hostage to them — or destroy the world trying.
You are giving matches to children, then hoping they won't burn the place down, and you've yet to learn how to use the matches yourselves.
The solution to all this is obvious. Take the matches away from the children. Then, throw your own matches away.
But it's too much to expect a primitive society to disarm itself. And so, nuclear disarmament — our only lasting solution — appears out of the question.
We can't even agree on a halt to nuclear testing. We are a race of beings singularly unable to control ourselves.
And if you don't kill yourselves with your nuclear madness, you'll destroy your world with your environmental suicide. You are dismantling your home planet's ecosystem and you continue to say that you're not.
As if that weren't enough, you're tinkering with the biochemistry of life itself. Cloning and genetically engineering, and not doing so with sufficient care to have this be a boon to your species, but threatening instead to make it the greatest disaster of all time. If you are not careful, you will make the nuclear and environmental threats look like child's play.
By developing medicines to do the work that your bodies were intended to do, you've created viruses so resistant to attack that they stand poised to knock out your entire species.
You're getting me a little scared here. Is all lost, then? Is the game over?
No, but it is fourth-and-ten. It's time to throw a Hail Mary, and the quarterback is looking around for receivers in the clear.
Are you clear? Are you able to receive this?
I'm the quarterback and the last time I looked, you and I were wearing the same color jersey. Are we still on the same team?
I thought there was only one team! Who is on the other team?
Every thought which ignores our oneness, every idea which separates us, every action which announces that we are not united. The "other team" is not real, yet it is a part of your reality, for you have made it so.
If you are not careful, your own technology — that which was created to serve you — will kill you.
Right now I can hear some people saying, "But what can one person do?"
They can start by dropping that "what can one person do?" stuff.
I've already told you, there are hundreds of books on this subject. Stop ignoring them. Read them. Act on them. Awaken others to them. Start a revolution. Make it an evolution revolution.
Isn't that what has been going on for a long time?
Yes, and no. The process of evolution has been ongoing forever, of course. But now that process is taking a new twist. There's a new turn here. Now you have become aware that you are evolving. And not only that you are evolving, but how. Now you know the process by which evolution occurs — and through which your reality is created.
Before, you were simply an observer of how your species was evolving. Now you are a conscious participant.
More people than ever before are aware of the power of the mind, their interconnectedness with all things, and their real identity as a spiritual being.
More people than ever before are living from that space, practicing principles that invoke and produce specific results, desired outcomes, and intended experiences.
This truly is an evolution revolution, for now larger and larger numbers of you are creating consciously the quality of your experience, the direct expression of Who You Really Are, and the rapid manifestation of Who You Choose To Be.
That's what makes this such a critical period. That's why this is a crucial moment.
For the first time in your presently recorded history, you have both the technology, and the understanding of how to use it, to destroy your entire world. You can actually render yourselves extinct.
I didn't think I'd ever be doing this again. I thought this process was complete.
There is more to do. One more invitation, Dear One.
I've already accepted two: change the world's mind about God, and give people back to themselves. I thought that was it.
I know. It wasn't time yet for the third.
Now it is?
Now it is. [...]
It's The Perfect Time for Advancement on your planet.
That sounds really exciting, especially when it feels like just the opposite. It seems as though our civilization is moving backward. It feels like we're becoming less civil, less tolerant, less capable of controlling our indulgences (to say nothing of our anger), less able to access the better angels of our nature.
I'm glad that you're seeing this, experiencing this, because if you pay attention to what's happening with you and around you — and do what you feel inwardly called to do in response to it — there's nothing to worry about.
Well it looks bad to me, but I don't know if I'm getting into my own judgement about things and can't see clearly. I mean, there's a lot going on around this planet that I think shouldn't be happening.
It's not about what "should" or "should not" be happening. It's about what is happening — both in your individual and highly personal experience, as well as the experience of the collective called humanity — and how you can change, actually rather dramatically, what you may feel are the worst parts of that.
This is The Perfect Time for you to begin making those alterations, because what's happening now — environmentally, politically, economically, socially and spiritually — is providing you with conspicuous and unmistakable, incontrovertible and crystal clear signs on how you can do that.
And so it's time for the Third Invitation.
Okay, I'm ready. We're all ready. What is it? What's the Third Invitation?
Awaken the species.
If God "desires" humanity to awaken — and I presume this is to preserve and improve its way of life — is there any question that this is going to happen?
[...] My desire is not that humanity be fully awakened. My desire is that you always be empowered to have and to create, to express and to experience, whatever you wish. If that means being awakened, wonderful. If that means not awakening, fine. I have no preference in the matter, except that your preference be fulfilled.
Then why is the Third Invitation extended by you? This is not us coming to you, this feels like you coming to us.
But you are coming to me. You've asked me, you've all asked me, for help. Everything that you think and say and pray for tells me that you want your life to change. And that you want life on Earth to be different.
Do you imagine that I don't hear this?
What is clear is that the only way your own life, and the life of your species, is going to change for the better is by awakening. And so, awakening becomes the agenda.
Yet this is your agenda, your prayer, this is what you want. My role is simply to empower you to create what you wish.
That is why I've extended to you the Third Invitation. [...]
Can you not hear the loudest call of your species?
"Help us! Somebody, please, help us change."