A tanned, shirtless guy with sandy feet rode by on his bicycle, narrowly missing a coconut on the sidewalk. An enthusiastic labrador ran after him. Palm trees, coconuts, bicycles, sand — it was April 2021, just another day in Mexico. I was taking a short stroll around my favorite neighborhood.
The guy circled back and stopped his bike. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me, but I do remember it being one of the cheesiest pickup lines I’d ever heard. So cheesy, in fact, that I burst out laughing.
“Does that actually work on women?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“I don’t know. Does it?” he grinned.
Smooth. Cliché, but well executed.
The labrador caught up to the bike. He had a cute red bandana tied around his neck. Now that worked on women.
I stroked the dog’s soft ears as the stranger and I began chatting. I was a bit standoffish at first. He’d caught me deep in thought on my afternoon walk, and I don’t like being disturbed when I think. I considered putting an end to the small talk with a classic white lie — the one that had never failed me in a beach town where hot-blooded American men were always looking for a holiday fling: “Sorry, I have a boyfriend. I respect the hustle, though.”
But before I could open my mouth, the stranger asked something, completely out of the blue: “Have you ever read The Celestine Prophecy?”
The Celestine Prophecy...
I flashed back to eighteen months earlier, perusing a second-hand bookshop a few hours north of Brisbane, Australia. My fingers wrapped around a slim, well-worn book. I pulled it from the shelf: The Celestine Prophecy.
The cover didn’t offer much information. I googled the title and found a summary:
The story opens with the male narrator becoming reacquainted with an old female friend, who tells him about the insights contained in a manuscript dating to 600 BC, which has been only recently translated. After this encounter leaves him curious, he decides to go to Peru.
On the airplane, he meets a historian who also happens to be interested in the manuscript. The historian explains how the world is currently undergoing an enormous shift in consciousness, elaborating on how things had been generally understood (until now) to be:
1) In the beginning, people believed the world to be governed by the forces of divinity; everything could be explained as an act of a god or gods.
2) With increasing knowledge of the world, brought about by scientific inquiry, people turned to the men and women of science for an explanation of life and their world, and...
3) Since the problem of how to find meaning in the world could not be solved by science, people chose to instead focus on efforts to improve their lives materially, subduing and plundering the earth for its natural resources, with a hyper-emphasis on controlling economic conditions and market fluctuations.
What was now occurring, explained the historian, was that the baseness of our current conditions had begun to infect our souls as well. We had become restless and desperate, primed for another fundamental shift in consciousness so as to bring about the creation of a new, better world.
Cool, I shrugged.
I tucked the book under my arm and kept browsing the shelves until the rest of my friends approached the checkout to purchase their literary hauls.
We drove home from our road trip the next day. I remember zooming down the highway, surfboards in the back, Nate at the wheel, the dreamy vibes of Rüfüs Du Sol playing on the speaker as I read poetry to the group from Rumi’s Little Book of Life.
I crashed on Nate and Soph’s couch while I was in town. Our good friends, Ed and Louise, were in Brisbane from God-knows-where. Jimmy and Bailey were there too. As was Cat, who I hadn’t seen in a while. The crew was back together, if only for a few days before life dispersed us around the globe again. It was September 2019.
After returning from our road trip, we sat in a hot tub and talked about the future. The brother-sister team, Nate and Soph, had a medical device company that was growing beautifully. Bailey’s new business was soaring to new heights. Her fiancé, Jimmy, had embarked on a new venture that was gaining traction. Our favorite married couple, Ed and Louise, had a diverse portfolio of successful projects and moved around the world as they pleased. They’d recently bought a place in Georgia, right on the ski slopes. “You should come stay with us in the European winter!” Ed offered. By the end of the night, we’d all converged on the idea of moving to Lisbon, Portugal, for a summer together. Maybe next year, in 2020, we said.
It was nice seeing everyone again. But at the same time, it was difficult for me. I’d just gone through the most challenging year of my life, and I was picking up the pieces of the aftermath: another failed startup and the debris of debt that came with it. I was heartbroken; lonely; grieving the loss of my children’s coding school. It wasn’t even a bad business. Parents would call me up in tears, telling me how our classes had changed their child’s life; that their 9-year-old had gone from a shy misfit to leading the code club at his primary school; that their 8-year-old had found his intellectually-stimulating niche and stopped misbehaving. I tried so hard to make the price point accessible to all kids — not just the rich ones. I really did try. And I could’ve sold the business if I just... I just couldn’t... my mind wouldn’t let... whatever. It doesn’t matter, anyway. What’s done is done.
It’s hard not to compare yourself to other people when you’ve hit rock bottom. I’d been working on my dreams just as hard and just as long as my friends, and I couldn’t help but wonder: “when is it my turn?” The only glimmer of hope in my life were the hundred-thousand words I’d written in one of my creative fevers, and a PowerPoint I’d made myself: a logical proof that there was order in the chaos; that the system would rearrange if I just kept going — if I just kept generating free energy and expressing a belief in the mantra I repeated to myself daily: Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. Everything is always rigged in my favor. Always in all ways.
I wasn’t a stranger to comparison. Or failure, for that matter. Five years had gone by since my last startup tanked. I wrote a blog post about it at the time: My Startup Failed And This Is What It Feels Like... After sharing it on my personal Facebook, the story instantly went viral, with over a quarter-million views in forty-eight hours. It was translated into multiple languages and syndicated in online publications around the world, including the front page of Australia’s top news site.
A few months after that ship went down — back when I was 23 years old — my close friend asked if I could give a talk at her coworking space with two other well-known founders in the Australian startup community. I said yes, because she was my friend.
I got up on stage, flanked by two women who were everything I was not; two entrepreneurs who hadn’t led their team off a cliff and watched four years of hard work crumble before their eyes.
When it came my turn to speak, I looked out at the crowd, their smiling faces staring back expectantly. They’d come to hear me talk about failure. They’d come to hear me tell the truth.
And there I was, staring back at them, tears silently rolling down my cheeks, drowning in my own inferiority. I thought I was up for it, but I wasn’t. I was a mess. It was too soon. I completely choked.
I went home to my parent’s place that night, embarrassed. I remember sitting up in bed in the wee hours of the morning, thinking about how I ended up in this situation. Deep questions were starting to bubble up in the back of my mind, hardening and compressing into a sharp splinter that lodged itself somewhere in my consciousness.
You see, I hadn’t always had a rough journey. When I was just starting out as a naive 18-year-old, it was honestly like the Red Sea would part to deliver me every resource, every person, every opportunity, everything I needed to assemble the next part of my vision.
I was skipping through life, from one beautiful conversation to another lucky ‘coincidence’ like a happy little leprechaun. I had no idea what I was doing, so I just followed a trail of curiosity and took action on ideas that excited me with a sense of childlike wonder. I’d take a step into the unknown and a golden path would magically materialize beneath my feet as fast as I could run.
And boy, was it an adventure!
I’d somehow find myself in a photoshoot for Vogue magazine, draped in expensive diamonds. Or on a phone call to the CEO of the biggest talent agency in the world, who met me for five minutes and wanted to make a reality show about my life. Or at the top of the Empire State Building at 1 a.m. with a handsome European stranger I’d met at the airport as we ran around Manhattan for one spontaneous night like a goddamn rom-com movie, and then he kissed me in the hidden nook of a little bar on West 4th street — a temporary portal into a magical universe.
And I’d think to myself, how on earth did I end up here, having this experience? I was just a girl from a small country town with an overactive imagination, who spent her childhood mucking around with horses and having sword fights with her blue-haired best friend. How did all the stars line up to deliver me this? Things just seemed to happen for me.
So then why did I fail? I asked myself.
My brain rattled off the usual culprits: I didn’t do X well; I executed Y poorly; I thought that idea was good but it turned out to be terrible.
Okay, but why did I feel so compelled to execute that terrible idea?
Hmm… my brain ran through some compute cycles. Data? Intuition?
Okay, but where do my ideas come from?
Oh fuck, we’d entered philosophical territory. God, maybe? But I didn’t believe in a man in the sky. The religion taught to me in school always seemed completely nonsensical and reeked of man-made moral posturing and power plays — a type of collective delusion.
Hmm… let’s try another question:
How come I had a year-long stretch of green grass to sprint along when I started that business, but somehow found myself lost in the muddy, murky woods over and over and over again like a recurring nightmare?
The entropy in the adventure was suspiciously low. It felt like tossing a coin one hundred times and getting thirty heads in a row, then seventy tails. Wouldn’t that make you curious? Wouldn’t that make you suspicious of the coin? Something felt off.
I’d been taught that life was disordered; random. But when I walked through the world and observed a seed growing into a sunflower, a child laughing with that sparkle in their eye, or the vast beauty of the cosmos — well, there was nothing disordered about any of that.
And when I considered the way reality would contort itself to deliver me another resource, another opportunity, another idea, another person that would be instrumental in my success — no, I just couldn’t pass it off as ‘random’ or ‘luck.’
Years of societal programming screamed in my ear: “Cognitive bias! You’re finding patterns where there are none! Stay in your lane like a good girl and move on with your life.”
But I’ve never really been a good girl.
That splinter in my mind was digging in, sharpening, twisting until I couldn’t take it any longer and my pent-up curiosity erupted in a flurry of action.
I needed to understand why I experienced what I experienced. It wasn’t enough to just tell myself, “better luck next time.” Fuck that! I used to be insanely lucky and then pretty darn unlucky, so what variable changed?
It almost felt like the past four years had been set up as some kind of game, some kind of mystery for me to unravel; an intellectual chew toy for me to gnaw on.
What variable changed, Nikki? Look beneath the surface. Find the common thread. Experiment with it. Play with it. Solve it. Be creatively logical. Be logically creative. That’s what you’re good at.
I pulled my laptop from the bedside table, opened it under the covers, and typed three words into the search bar: What is reality?
I pressed Enter.
A portal appeared before my eyes, softly beckoning me to come explore its secrets and magic and mysteries.
I leaned forward, and tumbled down the rabbit hole.
***
“The Celestine Prophecy,” the stranger repeated. “Have you read it?”
“No,” I replied. “But I have a copy. I bought it at a second-hand bookshop eighteen months ago. It’s probably still in my suitcase somewhere. Why?”
I continued on my walk. He wheeled his bike next to me.
“It talks about synchronicity. Do you believe in coincidence?” he asked.
“Coincidence can’t be defended from first principles.”
“Is that a no?”
“Yes,” I smiled.
The stranger kicked another coconut off the path before asking his next question: “So, what sequence of events brought you here, to this conversation in Mexico?”
***
I walked through the door of my sister's empty one-bedroom apartment and collapsed in a heap on the floor. Her fluffy cat, Bella, jumped off the couch and came to investigate. “Hello, princess,” I cooed. “Your aunty’s had a hard day. Can I have a hug?” I opened my arms.
Bella looked at me for a moment, then turned on her heel and walked towards the bedroom, her tail swaying elegantly in the air. “Nooooo!” I whined. I got up on my knees and shuffled towards her, hands outstretched like a zombie. “Love me! Love me!”
Bella ran under the queen-sized bed — the one my sister and I had been sharing while I stayed with her.
My phone buzzed with a notification. It was a photo from a school in Kenya where we ran a pro-bono coding program.
“Congrats on being so incompetent,” I whispered to myself. I’d fired my full-time teachers the previous day. As I ripped away their livelihoods, all they could say were kind things like, “get better soon,” and “this was the best job of my life,” and “we love and appreciate you, Nikki.”
Meanwhile, all I felt was shame. Heavy, suffocating shame.
I felt even worse when I thought about settling my business debts without any new revenue coming in. Or supporting myself, for that matter. My baby-boomer father, whom I love dearly, is not the most emotionally sensitive man. Several months earlier, he’d said to me: “That’s great if someone will hire you. You’re 27 years old with nothing to show on your resume.” I burst into tears. He didn’t know what to do, except to run to the kitchen for some chocolate and awkwardly offer it to me while saying, “I didn’t mean it” — which was obviously a lie. I knew what he thought of me. I dreamed of the day when all my risk would pay off and he’d finally see that it was worth it; that I was right; that I wasn’t stupid for walking my own path.
I wandered over to the fridge, which was neatly stacked with grilled vegetables and quinoa that my sister had prepared. She’d given me three objectives for the day: get out of bed, eat a healthy meal, go for a walk.
I shut the fridge door. I wasn’t hungry.
A few days later, two of my mates, Rick and Brennan, called me in an emergency. Their virtual reality company was overloaded with demand and everything was breaking. They needed help from someone with a general skillset — a temporary “co-founder as a service” — and I needed to work my tail off to pay down my business debt. It was a perfect match. “Can you start this afternoon?” they asked.
Another month went by, and I found myself zooming down the highway, surfboards in the back, Nate at the wheel, the dreamy vibes of Rüfüs Du Sol playing on the speaker as I read poetry to my Brisbane crew from Rumi’s Little Book of Life. I had two laptops with me: my MacBook and a bulky 17-inch gaming PC for working on VR projects.
Three more weeks passed, and I found myself in Washington DC, visiting a client with Rick and Brennan. We’d hack all day and go rock climbing in the evening. I didn’t like the chilly October weather. We agreed to fly down south for Christmas.
Several weeks later, I was sleeping on a sofa bed in a beautiful loft in West Village, NYC. Two of my closest Sydney friends, Bryce and Pandora, had recently packed up their life and moved to Manhattan. I’d promised to visit by the end of the year, but I had no idea how or when that would happen. Gallivanting around the world was the last thing on my mind in 2019. And yet, there I was, exactly where I promised I’d be.
The calendar flipped to November, and I found myself in Medellin, Colombia. My best mate and brother-from-another-mother, Zac, owns a huge place there, so we stayed with him for a few months. Rick and Brennan brought their girlfriends, and Zac’s girlfriend visited from Brazil. I was the seventh wheel, but I was used to it. It was a fun summer: working, laughing, funneling all of my income into paying off debt. Colombia is great for that: cheap rent and good coffee. That’s all I needed.
Along came 2020, and with it, a mysterious virus emerging from China. I was sorting out my visa at a Colombian immigration office when news of the pandemic hit. Brennan had been following the virus since January; he’d already flown back to Australia. Rick decided to stay in Medellin. Colombia shut its borders. Australia did the same. I figured I wasn’t getting home for a few years. So what was supposed to be a month-long trip to the US quickly turned into an extended stay in Colombia. I don't own anything other than a MacBook, a deck of tarot cards, and some sundresses, so it wasn’t a big deal. As with all things in life, it just is what it is.
As chaos descended on the world, a strange sense of calm washed over me. Something was coming into focus. I felt clear — like I could shine sunlight through my mind and split it into different colors. I hadn’t felt that way for a while. My mind had been a volatile storm for the past eighteen months — two weeks of clear skies followed by months of storm and fog. The Muses don't speak to me in the fog. I can’t get a clear signal.
A few weeks after the global lockdown began, I understood what was happening: Stephen Wolfram announced his Wolfram Physics Project — just like I’d predicted six months earlier in a period of blue sky. The system was re-arranging. I could feel it. It was only a matter of time until Karl Friston began publicly talking about the FEP's application in physics. And when that time came, I wanted to be ready.
Rick and Brennan’s VR startup was hit hard by the pandemic, so my consulting gig stopped. As fate would have it, I’d just finished paying off my short-term business debt after six months of intense focus. With nothing else to do, and no more problems to solve for my friends, I felt my soul whisper, “If you were waiting for the opportune moment, this is it. Finish what you started. Complete the mission.” I sat at my desk and worked seven days a week, structuring my knowledge into a philosophy that I could clearly communicate to other people.
This was actually quite difficult to do indoors because I walk while I think. I'd clock up a half-marathon each day on my Fitbit, wandering in circles, barefoot, around the living room, trying to deconstruct and articulate highly abstract concepts in my mind. It drove Zac nuts. His five-bedroom penthouse was so large that I barely saw him. But occasionally he’d wander downstairs to tinker with his 3D printers or retrieve a book from the library, and he’d inevitably end up trailing me, throwing little objects at my head, saying, “Goddamnit, Nikki! You’re a nutter! You know that, right?” To be honest, it was a bit rich coming from him. I’d lived with Zac, on and off, for a decade. To describe him as “eccentric” would be an understatement.
After six months of strict lockdown, Medellin began to reopen. I emerged from the apartment, light shining in my eyes, surveying the damage. The tourist area in my local neighborhood was devastated. Friends warned me about higher crime rates as desperate, starving Colombians did what they had to do to get by. Zac was mugged at gunpoint a few blocks from his place, which had never happened before. I’d always felt safe in that area, but I was empathetic to the situation. I’d spent six months trapped in an ivory tower, relatively immune from the economic devastation. Many locals had spent six months without jobs, without opportunities to work online, without pedestrians on the street to beg to or busk for. I could’ve been a criminal if I'd been born into different circumstances. I could’ve held a gun to Zac’s head if The System held a gun to mine.
My work progressed immensely during the quiet quarantine. I channeled hundreds of short essays, all connecting together into a story of our universe. My self-confidence slowly began to return.
That confidence reflected back in subtle ways. One day, I was at my local coffee shop when a stranger tapped me on the shoulder.
“Are you Nikki?” he asked. He was definitely Colombian, but with a slight American accent.
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how he knew my name.
“Okay, so...” the stranger continued, “my friend, Forrest, said you had this thing. A proof, or something. Can I see it?”
I gestured him over to my table, pointed to my laptop, and walked him through a rudimentary, draft version of the 3-step proof that eventually formed the backbone of Gameism.
The next day, a twenty-something-year-old Colombian woman tapped me on the shoulder.
“Are you Nikki?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how she knew my name.
“Okay, so...” she continued, “my friend, Andres, said you blew his mind yesterday. You made a proof, right? I’m a physics nerd. Can I see it?”
I was dealing red pills under the table at my local coffee shop.
I gave one stranger, Juan, a tarot reading that left him speechless. “What the hell?!” he said. “That was scarily specific and accurate. How does that work? I’m a rational guy, but this feels mystical.”
“It’s not mystical,” I shrugged. “It’s just free energy manipulation. It’s math.”
The next time I saw Juan, he’d gone down the rabbit hole, reading scientific papers on the FEP, a short draft of my work, anything he could get his hands on. After years of rejection, being misunderstood, and struggling to find my voice, I was starting to see small glimmers of hope. I believed that maybe — just maybe — I could figure out how to communicate something as complex as the universe in a simple way. Maybe I wouldn’t carry this knowledge to my grave.
A new year — 2021 — rolled by. My Colombian visa expired, so I found myself living in Airbnbs in Mexico. Australia’s borders were still shut, and Mexico offered a generous period of visa-free travel. It was exactly what I needed at the time.
I kept to myself in Mexico. I had one goal: finish what I started seven years earlier in my bedroom when I typed what is reality? into a search bar. I optimized my life around that objective, erasing everything superfluous: people, activities, events. Every day was the same: sit under an umbrella at my favorite cafe in my favorite neighborhood and focus. Go for an afternoon walk. Do another creative session. Workout. Sleep. Repeat. It was a multi-month, uninterrupted, rolling flow state: my idea of pure bliss.
I did take a short break when Eman passed through town. The last time I saw him was in Medellin in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Zac had warned me about the impending arrival of a “smart and ridiculously good-looking Argentinian gentleman” — a friend he’d met through mutual connections at a business thing in Lithuania. I’d heard the guy’s name thrown around throughout the years — “that time Eman and I were at Simon’s villa in Italy,” “That time Eman dove into the lake and rescued the drowning girl,” etc. Zac asked if I wanted to be set up so he could save me from my sad state of perpetual singledom. I wasn’t interested. The last thing I wanted was a distraction while I put the pieces of my life back together.
Nevertheless, a few weeks later, I found myself seated next to a tall man in his mid-thirties with caramel skin, dark eyes, massive biceps, interesting opinions, and an open mind. Zac had mentioned his friend had “a certain effect on the ladies,” and I wasn’t immune to it. The Argentinian and I sunk deep into conversation during dinner, which kicked on to drinks at various local bars when the rest of the group went home. As the night wore on, we found our bodies pressed against each other at a reggaeton club, the scent of cologne and perfume and sweat saturating our senses, his arms wrapped around my waist, my arms wrapped around his neck, dancing into the wee hours of the morning while happy Colombians smashed shots of aguardiente on a little wooden table. The adventure ended with us walking home, plotting the hypothetical heist of a colorful piñata from the neighbouring bar, then making out under the stars on Zac's terrace next to a little waterfall and a potted tree that sprouted berries in the spring.
Mery, Zac's full-time cook, wasn't a fan of our little fling. The moment she figured it out, she chased me around the kitchen, smacking me with her spatula and yelling, “No, Nikki! Hombres son perros! Hombres son perros!” It was a standard warning among Colombian women — men are dogs. “You don't go near Latin men who look like that,” she berated me in Spanish. “They're all womanizers. He'll break your heart.”
Zac was waltzing past the kitchen at the time, roaring with laughter. “You think Nikki's in trouble? That's cute. Nikki's not the one you should be worried about.”
He was right. I was used to this transient lifestyle with people, places, objects, things floating in and out of my game like a rhythmic tide lapping at the shore. If happiness is reality minus expectations, then I'd mastered the art of a happy nomadic romance. At 28 years old, I was perfectly content to live in the moment, connecting deeply with a human, then saying goodbye as they caught a plane to their next destination. Not everything is meant to last forever, and I'd made peace with that.
That’s not to say I didn’t want to find my person. A bonded pair of scarlet macaws flew past my window every morning, and I never saw one magnificent parrot without the other by its side. Macaws live up to seventy years. That monogamous pair was probably flying over Medellin, side by side, during the Pablo Escobar days — quietly watching the city descend into chaos and rise from the ashes again.
I wanted that. I really did. I dreamed of finding my permanent partner in crime, and laughter, and adventure, and life. I wanted to stand beside a king and build a kingdom together — a home, a family, a legacy. But Eman wasn't that man for me. We connected physically, intellectually, even emotionally — yet we also had fundamentally different goals and values. I didn’t feel the spiritual connection I was searching for; the resonance that comes from a shared vision, a mutual model of reality. If wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your choices, then I’d gained enough wisdom to set a boundary with him. Eman and I enjoyed each other's company, both knowing it was fleeting — and all the sweeter for it.
Yet, the universe always delivers exactly what I need, exactly when I need it. And at 28 years old, a brief romance with a man like him was exactly what I needed.
I remember standing in Zac’s kitchen before the pandemic hit. Eman was cooking dinner while I explained the free energy principle.
“Does that make sense?” I finished.
“Not really,” Eman laughed.
“Yeah, sorry," I sighed. “It's super weird. We don't have to talk abou-”
“Actually, it's super interesting. Why are you apologizing?”
“I dunno,” I muttered as I fiddled with my dress.
He looked at me. “I know you're intelligent. It's one of the things I like about you. But you're a lot smarter than you let on, aren't you?”
“How am I supposed to answer that?” I asked. “If I say yes, then I'm vain. If I say no, then I'm lying.”
“Can I give you some unsolicited advice?”
“It's not unsolicited if you ask me first.”
“Nikki," he said. “Stop apologizing. Don't apologize for who you are. Don't apologize for what you're passionate about. And certainly don't apologize for your intelligence. If other people can't handle it, then they can fuck off.”
I looked at him, head tilted to one side in fascination. “Where does it come from?”
“What?”
“Your confidence,” I said.
He shrugged. “Why wouldn't I be confident?”
There. Right there. That was my problem. Why wouldn't I be confident? I could think of a million reasons why I wouldn't be confident. I could start with the cellulite on my thighs, or how I struggled to verbally articulate my thoughts because my mind moves in multiple directions while my mouth only moves in one. I could then move on to my overwhelming enthusiasm for topics and ideas that most people don't understand, or the shame I feel over the trail of failed projects in my life, or how uncomfortable I become when my bold opinions are perceived as immodest arrogance.
I could easily extend grace towards the perceived imperfections and failures of other people. But to myself? It was a constant struggle for me. As a young girl, the world taught me that confidence was something to be earned by staying skinny, and being well-liked, and neat, and conscientious, and productive, and ‘good.’ Who was I to be happy with myself, exactly as I was? It just seemed so… presumptuous. Immodest. Unladylike.
But there he was — a six-foot-two hunk of muscle with a cheeky troublemaker personality who wasn’t perfect by any means. But what was ‘perfect,’ anyway? He’d get fired up about little things in day-to-day life, and his Latin passion was triggered way too easily in my opinion. He called it having ‘high standards.’ I personally didn’t care about trivial minutia, so I thought he needed to chill. Aussies have a motto: “She’ll be right, mate.” In other words: “Don’t worry about it.”
But then, the previous night, Zac was being an asshole to me and Eman was all over him like a rottweiler, teeth snarling, ready to rip his throat out. Zac looked in my direction and told me to heel my dog, but I didn't want to. I appreciated Eman’s masculine aggression because I sorely lacked it in my own life; it was something I needed to integrate. Plus, I'm a product of evolution, and there was no escaping my biological programming: watching Eman verbally maul Zac on my behalf was kinda hot. I guess ‘perfect’ is a subjective concept, after all.
“I want what you've got,” I said, prodding him in the chest.
“And what's that?”
I could sense it in the air. I inhaled, intoxicated by its aroma. “Power. I want my power back. I wrote over 100,000 words on this thesis last year, and I’m onto something. I know I am. I want to finish what I started.”
“What’s stopping you?” Eman asked while he continued layering the lasagna.
I flashed back to 2019. All the pain from that year washed through my body, deflating my spirit as my ego threw another whiney tantrum. “It’s just... nobody cares about what I have to say,” I mumbled. “No one gives a shit. Nobody wants to hear it.” This wasn’t strictly true, but fear has a habit of distorting one’s perception. I was parroting words from my well-meaning mother, who wanted to keep me safe in a judgmental world (”Nikki, tone it down. When people ask what you’re working on, they’re being polite. They don’t want to hear your thoughts on the universe. No, I’m not telling you to lie. Talk about something else, like... No, you don’t embarrass me. You just can’t go around saying the smartest scientists in the world are wrong. You dropped science in high school. You have no credibility. People will think you’re... No, Nikki, I never said you were crazy. I never said that. Just practice some humility, okay? I worry about you.”)
“What?” Eman said.
“Nobody cares,” I repeated, louder this time. “So why bother? All my creativity does is fuck up my life, drain my bank account, and leave me with a mess to clean up while the world judges me. And for what purpose? Nobody listens. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear it.”
Eman stopped what he was doing, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Nikki, I don’t give a fuck about what anybody else wants. I want to hear what you have to say. So go ahead and say it. Write what you want to write. Then send it to me when you’re done.”
I never sent it to him.
He called me on it a year later in Mexico. “Why didn’t you send me your book?” he asked.
“Because it’s shit,” I replied. “It’s simultaneously the best creative work I’ve ever produced, and total shit. It’s not good enough yet. I need more time.”
“Are you sure you're not being a perfectionist? Why don't you just release someth-”
“No. I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think you understand how high the bar is for me. Being good is not good enough. If anyone other than my friends is going to take me seriously, then I have to be an order of magnitude better than the academic elites — ten times better than them. I want to be respected, not ridiculed. Respect comes from competence. Competence requires training. Training requires patience.
And then, once I've mastered my metaphorical sword, I also have to get eyeballs on my work. Being right is irrelevant if no one listens to why you're right. So I have to wrap my thesis up in something pretty and palatable, like—”
“—like a practical philosophy,” Eman finished.
“Exactly. I'm not allowed to make bold scientific claims without a Ph.D. I'll get slapped with the crackpot label and dismissed before I even open my mouth. But anyone can be a philosopher on the internet and wax lyrical about life.”
“Wait...” Eman paused. “So your philosophy is a Trojan horse for delivering a serious scientific idea?”
“Pretty much,” I shrugged. “I mean, the philosophy is immensely useful in and of itself. I live by it every day. But it's derived from the FEP, and the FEP is kinda important for our academics to pursue. They just don't realize it yet. I'm going to make them realize it. I only need one credible, influential person to read it and start spreading the idea within the castle walls. The philosophy is the pretty wooden horse, but my thesis is the payload.”
Eman softly stroked my hair. “You make it sound like intellectual warfare.”
“It is,” I replied, indignantly. “Sometimes man must go to war to make the grandest statement about who man truly is: she who abhors war. You cannot have it all unless you're willing to give it all up.
This is the harsh reality of the situation: a religious dictator — King Materialism — has control of our academic institutions — and, by extension, our entire society. He has control of our minds. The king punishes dissenters, and a huge army of biased, brainwashed soldiers defend the border from outside rebels who might challenge the king's regime.
So how does a lone rebel assassinate a guarded king? Step one: get inside the castle walls via a Trojan horse. Step two: rapidly construct a kill zone.”
“What does that mean?”
“The scientific community worships logic and rationality, right?”
“Yeah...” Eman replied.
“So you use The System's rules against itself. I can construct a kill zone from binary logic gates, herd all the shit ideas into them, and slaughter them all at once. And there's nothing the materialist soldiers can do about it because I'm right by default. It puts them on the defensive, not me.
Think about it: by writing clean epistemic code, I can logically dismantle our current scientific paradigm with a single logic gate. With two logic gates, I can introduce the concept of God, thereby fusing science with spirituality. And, unlike most boring scientific papers, I only need a few minutes of focused attention to do it. I've been testing this on willing guinea pigs at the cafe. What used to take me twenty minutes to explain via writing now takes two. I'm getting faster on that front. Speed is critical.”
Eman grinned. “Is it wrong that I'm turned on by this?”
“Shush,” I giggled. “Step three is delivering the payload: my third and final logic gate — the FEP. It's not enough to assassinate the old king. I need to offer them a new king; a new paradigm to explore. This is the only vulnerability in my logical assault-”
“How come?” he interjected.
“Well, I make a claim in the third logic gate, which means the burden of proof is on me. It's the first time I have to play defense. That's why I'm waiting for Friston to begin aggressively pushing the FEP in the context of physics. Friston is one of the most credible academics in the world. If anyone's going to call me a looney crackpot, then they'll have to call him one too. At the risk of sounding callous, I want to use him as a human shield. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
So that's my audacious plan. And I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but the fate of the world depends on the quality of our collective knowledge. Improvements in physics, biology, medicine, philosophy... imagine what humans could do if they had the source code of the game. Imagine how many people could be pulled out of poverty with incredible technology wielded by a spiritually-evolved civilization. Now that's a future worth fighting for.
That's all to say... I'm just... I'm trying... really trying... to resist a metric fuckton of entropy here, all by myself, and it's both thrilling and insanely difficult. Every time I reach a new summit, I look up and there's another one ahead of me. Over and over and over again. All I can do is put one foot in front of the other and trust that the universe will self-organize in response. I know that one day I'll experience myself as a competent warrior, but today is not that day. My book isn't ready yet because I'm not ready yet. I need more time.”
“You should come stay with me in Spain and work on it there,” Eman teased. After years of planning, overcoming obstacles, and methodical execution, Eman and his teenage son were en-route to Spain, about to start a new life in Europe. Mexico was a short business trip before the final voyage.
“Maybe,” I said as I kissed him goodbye. I have a meticulously-calibrated internal compass, and it wasn’t pointing to Spain. “Or maybe not,” I continued. “Maybe you’ll fall in love with a beautiful Spanish woman in a red dress. I hope Europe is the gateway to everything you ever wanted.”
And with that, he was gone. And I was alone in Mexico again.
As I mentioned earlier, I spent every day at the same cafe in the same neighborhood. It was a gated community full of green grass, trees, happy dogs, joyful kids, beach, and jungle. I’d sip my cappuccino and watch the mothers have coffee together, entertaining their young children with coloring books and banana smoothies. They all looked around my age, give or take a few years. After several wistful glances in their direction, I’d put my head down and continue typing. I wanted what they had, but it wasn’t my time yet. I had work to do. I had to complete the mission.
One Saturday, I settled into my morning session at the cafe and listed my priorities for the day. I intended to book a new Airbnb apartment that afternoon, after my daily walk. I had a week left at my current place.
There were hardly any small apartments to rent in the gated community that I liked so much. The neighborhood was mostly full of large houses and expensive short-term holiday rentals. I'd tried renting nicer apartments before. But while I liked the idea of the amenities, I never actually used them.
You see, I measured my income in weeks: “if I consult for one week, how many weeks of uninterrupted creative time does that buy me?” Time was the most precious resource I had — especially as a woman — and I hated trading my youth for money. I couldn’t do deep work if I had to context-switch to solve trivial problems. But I also couldn’t do deep work if I didn’t solve trivial problems for food. Hence, to simultaneously do deep work while avoiding starvation and context-switching, I had to keep my expenses low. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought myself something nice.
On that particular Saturday afternoon, I packed up my laptop and went for my usual afternoon stroll around the neighborhood. As I traipsed along the sidewalk in my floral sundress, a tanned, shirtless guy with sandy feet rode by on his bicycle, narrowly missing a coconut. An enthusiastic labrador ran after him.
***
“So, what sequence of events brought you here, to this conversation in Mexico?” the shirtless stranger asked.
“I got caught in Colombia during the pandemic, then ended up Mexico, and here I am.” I said.
“Where are you off to next?”
“No idea,” I laughed. “What’s your story?”
We walked and chatted for a while. The labrador ran ahead, bored with our slow pace.
Eventually, we reached a side road that curved into a beautiful jungle area. “I’m cooking lunch with my house mates by the pool. Do you want to join us?” the stranger asked.
I checked the time. I was supposed to sort out my accomodation that afternoon, but lunch wouldn’t hurt.
I spent the whole afternoon talking with his house mates — a Russian woman and an older man I nicknamed “the Israeli pirate.” They prepared a huge feast: a whole baked salmon, a variety of salads, dessert. I thought I'd have to roll home.
As it turned out, the shirtless guy was moving back to New York in a week — neatly coinciding with the end of my Airbnb booking. The place was exactly what I wanted: quiet, surrounded by trees and nature, five minutes walk to the beach. My room had a huge desk, and the Israeli pirate gave me his spare desktop monitor so I could work from home — something that most touristy Airbnbs lacked. Not to mention the cost — it was way cheaper than a mediocre short-term rental, and I could move out with two weeks notice.
I loved waking up in the morning to the sound of chirping birds, and sitting outside while massive lizards sunned themselves in the backyard. Every few days, the labrador would scramble downstairs, barking like mad as he chased away the huge monkey-like creatures that snuck into the house to steal his food. I’d occasionally get home from the gym at night to find wild deer wandering around our driveway, or birds perched on the dining room table (we never shut the back door). Animals and nature nourished my soul.
Like I said: the universe always delivers exactly what I need, exactly when I need it. It’s not mystical. It’s math.
I leaned back against the wall and sunk to the floor, my face in my hands. I was in my room in Phuket, Thailand. I'd been training at a Muay Thai camp for the past few months, occasionally spending weekends at my Uncle's place. He and his wife lived by the water, a short fifteen-minute drive away.
How did I, a cognitive athlete, end up sparring at a Muay Thai camp in Phuket, you ask? Well, that's a funny story...
It starts in Brisbane, Australia. I'd been living there for six months, but my soul had become restless again. My good friend, Lachlan, and I were getting drunk on cheap wine and racing office chairs around our coworking space one Friday night. I told him I needed a new place to go; somewhere on a US timezone. He looked at me and said, "Doesn't your best mate live in Colombia?"
Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, I flew into Medellin, Colombia. Zac and I immediately opened some cold beers and sat on his outdoor lounge under the starry night sky, catching up for hours. I hadn't seen him in two years. When I was a teenager, we used to hang out all the time at his place, laughing about internet memes and working on our businesses. When we got bored, we'd wander down to a hidden Sydney beach in the middle of the night, sit on the pier, and eat mangoes while dreaming about everything we were going to do with our lives.
The thing is, those dreams weren't dreams. They were more like plans. I moved to New York as a 22-year-old, and Zac moved too. My startup failed while Zac's business thrived. As I packed up our New York apartment as a 23-year-old, I told Zac I wanted to try the "digital nomad" thing, running a location-independent business that did something wholesome and fulfilling. Zac told me he was going to gallivant around Europe all summer, then fly down to Colombia and buy a beautiful penthouse in the City of Eternal Spring. He'd been my trusty, hilarious, fiercely loyal sidekick for so long, and that fork in our path marked the end of an era.
Years later, as I sat on his penthouse balcony in the City of Eternal Spring as a 26-year-old who ran a wholesome-and-fulfilling children's coding school, we realized we'd both done exactly what we said we'd do. He was a broke bartender when I met him, but now there he was — a small town Aussie kid running rampant in Colombia.
And just to clear things up, because I know people are incapable of believing that a heterosexual male and female can be close platonic friends: no, there's nothing romantic between us. Zac and I spent the first five years of our friendship saying "Y'know... it would be so convenient if we were attracted to each other." But the body wants what the body wants. As Zachary likes to say: there are so many things I want to do in this life, and my sister is not one of them.
Anyway, I joined a boutique gym in Medellin. There was only one other person who worked out in the middle of the day. He'd always take his shirt off and spend several hours doing all manner of grueling exercises. He looked like he'd walked straight off the cover of Men's Fitness magazine — dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, chiseled jawline, ripped body. Zac, being the collossal asshole that he is, would come to refer to this handsome stranger as "Hitler's Wet Dream."
One day, I was packing my bag at the lockers when the stranger came by. "Hey," he smiled. He had a beautiful smile. I mean, who the hell looks that good after a workout? Honestly...
"I've seen you around for a few weeks," he continued. "Where are you from?"
"Australia," I replied. "What about you?"
"Vienna. I'm Mikel, by the way." I could tell he wasn't a native English speaker.
He asked me where I'd been traveling. I reciprocated. He was a contruction engineer and property developer back in Vienna. He'd spent the past few years traveling on-and-off, doing what he loved — hiking, training, sports.
After a thirty minute conversation by the lockers, Mikel asked if I'd have coffee with him the next day. Several hours went by as we sipped cappuccinos and ate a croissant de almendras and spoke about various things. As the sun set, we moved on to drinks, then dinner, then drinks again.
There was something mysterious about him. He was like an enigma; a puzzle. I like puzzles. I couldn't quite figure him out — which I'm pretty sure was the point. My soul knew exactly how to pique my mind's interest.
Unlike most people I met on my travels, Mikel made his living the old fashioned way: offline. He also had no social media, which I found refreshing. He loved building things and talked with such passion about a house he wanted to construct when he arrived back in Vienna. I could tell he'd been raised with old-school European manners — opening doors for me, walking on the outside of the footpath, making sure I got home safely. In some ways, he was like a time capsule floating around in a modern lifestyle. I found the paradox fascinating.
We quickly became friends. Nomadic life is transient, and he was leaving in a few weeks to head to the US, then Canada, then Thailand to train at a Muay Thai camp. "You should meet me there!" he said as he leaned against my treadmill one day. "I think you'd like the training."
"Maybe..." I replied. I was enjoying Colombia. I'd established a productive work routine and social circle there. However, my visa was going to expire in a couple of months and I needed a new place to go — preferably a cheap one. I still kept all my money in my business for growth, so I'd only withdraw the minimum salary needed to live comfortably. Luckily, "living comfortably" is far more affordable in foreign countries — much cheaper than living a mediocre lifestyle of ramen noodles in a place like Sydney. And yet despite this creative hack, my career still felt like a never-ending exercise in delayed gratification: invest, invest, invest, hold on, hold on, hold on, it's just another month, another year, another failure, another business... but one day, you will reap the harvest. Compound growth is the eighth wonder of the world.
"Come on," Mikel coaxed, flashing me his movie-star grin. "It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of training. There are so many things to try: Muay Thai kickboxing, yoga, jiu-jitsu, fitness classes, traditional boxing, Thai sword fighting-"
"Sword fighting?" My ears pricked up. For the past eighteen months, I'd been having recurring visions of me wandering around the world with an ornate sword in my hand. I wasn't sure what the visions meant, but Mikel's words caught my attention.
There. I felt it. That gut-level clarity. It was a voice that whispered, Follow the white rabbit, Nikki. Follow the white rabbit.
So that's how I ended up in Phuket, sinking to the floor of my apartment, my face in my hands. And no — my mental distress had nothing to do with a man. Nor did it have anything to do with Muay Thai, which turned out to be a poignant metaphor for my creative process: getting repeatedly punched in the face, and learning to love the taste of my own blood.
No. My mental distress was self-induced. I was just furious at my soul.
You see, after arriving in Thailand, I'd begun to free-fall into another full-blown existential crisis. I could usually feel these waves building up in my consciousness, and I wasn't very good at diffusing them before they crashed down on my life, obliterating everything in their path. This one was accompanied by an uncomfortable pressure in my solar plexus — like the power of a mighty ocean, trapped inside a little box.
I'd recently begun feeling constrained in my career. It wasn't matching up with my interests anymore, and everything felt like a chore. I was scared and confused and disillusioned. What went wrong? I thought I was doing everything right — taking risks, working hard, overcoming obstacles, leaning into fear, allocating time for myself so I didn't burn out, staying active, following my passion and curiosity, making daily progress towards my goals.
I used to love this. I used to love building tech products. But now the thought of doing that seemed so humdrum. I loved my children's coding school, and I was confused as to why I suddenly felt complete apathy towards it — just like so many other creative projects that had faded in and out of my life.
Please don't do this to me again, I begged my soul. Can I please stay focused on this one? I like this creation.
Nothing was ever stable for me. Everything was always transient and fluid — like sand, shifting through an hourglass. One minute, I was high on life. The next, I was crashing and tumbling and falling and lost.
And I judged myself so harshly for it, too. I'd tried corralling my soul when it wanted to change directions, but I was starting to learn that resistance was futile. I'd tried running in the opposite direction of my curiosity, with abysmal consequences. I'd tried smashing it into the mold that society had built for it, and that gave me no success. I'd tried muting it, and subduing it, and lassoing it, and yelling at it, and every time I tried to fight against it, the roaring ocean would rise up at full force and come crashing over my head, sending me tumbling down into the darkness.
The depressive phases were hopeless and debilitating and grey. I would swing down into these melancholy states for months on end, but it wasn't a depression in the sense that I had no will to live. No, not at all. I had plenty of will to live. My mind was a silent explosion of ideas in the depths of a pitch-black ocean.
The darkness only swallowed me when my heart pulled one way, but my head resisted it because it wasn't what I "should" be doing. I should be doing this and this and this to be successful and be a good person and be responsible. I should be reaching my potential and earning more money. I knew I was capable of earning way more, but money didn't motivate me like it seemed to motivate other people. My soul only cared about money to the extent it gave me freedom to follow the white rabbit. Once that need was met, it ceased to provide any incremental value to my life.
I should be making my parents proud of me. They loved me and supported me, but I also knew they were worried I'd never grow up. It was hard for them. They wanted me to be safe and secure, but I wanted to be wild and free. I was their difficult child, and although they'd done everything right by the parenting books, I think they wondered where they'd gone wrong with me.
"But how is this going to earn you money?" my mother would ask. "I don't understand where the value is in all this work you're so obsessed with. Why does it matter?"
"Mum!" I'd say, incredulously. "I honestly don't understand how you can't see this! It is the only thing that matters. It is the root cause of everything. What is the meaning of life? How is the illusion being constructed? When I throw an apple in the air, why does it move? Don't tell me it moves because of Newton's laws — that's a description of what it is doing. I want to know why it is doing it. I want to know what is happening at the lower dimension. And if I can just figure it out, then the world will finally make sense to me. And maybe other people would like to know the answer, too."
"Well, as long as 'other people' pay for it somehow, that's all I care about. You can't keep working for free forever, Nikki. You need to think about your future."
She didn't understand. No one understood. I was all alone on my quest. And if I failed, I'd be all alone in that too.
So my mind would say, "do this responsible thing." But my soul would whisper, come over here, instead. Come over here and get lost in the middle of the night for hours on end, chasing rabbits down imaginary rabbit holes in your mind, and achieve none of those responsible goals. Oh, and don't worry about everything else in your life — I've replaced it all with apathy. I've removed all passion from everything you used to adore, and focused myself right here, in this vortex of fate that you can't fight. Come over here, or get lost in depression.
If I could just remove the cage of "should" I'd shackled around my mind, maybe I wouldn't feel this guilt and anger and frustration wash over me like waves smashing against rocks.
I just wanted to feel like I was useful to the world. What did I have to do to feel useful to the world?
Just be, Wisdom whispered. Just be.
No, Wisdom! I want to know what I have to do. What do I have to do to finally feel like I matter? Like I'm valuable? Like I'm in my element? Like my life has a purpose? What do I have to do to finally feel proud of myself? To finally feel like I'm not an imposter? A loser? A failure?
Tell me what to do and I'll do it!
I was so sick of working hard and building a skill, then having my passion change form, constantly manifesting in different areas. Every time I applied myself diligently and began to feel successful with a project, my curiosity would pull me in a different direction. I felt like I was being dragged through a winding path, over rocks with jagged edges that left scars in my confidence and ripped at my self-worth.
But for what purpose? It didn't make any sense. I'd spent four years running around, observing things, trying things, learning things. What was the point of it all, anyway? What was the point? I couldn't see the bigger picture. My life was a mish-mash of random brushstrokes. It was chaos.
Nikki, my soul whispered. Stop lying to yourself. You've seen flashbacks of your future. You already know how this story ends. But you're feigning ignorance so you don't have to come to terms with your own power. You're not scared that you're wrong about this — you're scared that you're right. You're scared that you could strike one match and blow up the whole world. Yet know this: the privilege of a lifetime is to become Who You Really Are, and the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
But I couldn't hear the whisper of my soul over the frantic screams of my ego. I leaned back against the wall and began to cry. Alone, in the middle of the day, in my bedroom. I'd been crying a lot lately.
"What the fuck do you want from me?!" I yelled at my soul. The sobs were erupting from my mouth. I was a mess. "I don't understand what you want from me! I've followed you around the goddamn world, and here I am, miserable and alone on the floor of a Thai apartment."
I want to return you to yourself, my soul smiled. I want to-
"Where's all the success I was promised, huh? I followed you, and followed you, and followed you, and you promised me it would lead to something. I worked my butt off in pursuit of my dreams. You promised me my dreams would come true if I just had the courage to pursue them. I trusted you, and you lied. I've followed you for a decade, and all I have are some beautiful and bitter-sweet memories.
"I followed you with 99dresses, and that failed. I followed you with Jesse, and he left. I followed you with all the different skills I've learned and then lost interest in. I followed you with CodeMakers, and now I've suddenly fallen out of love with that business too and it's breaking my heart. It's too painful. I can't bear it."
That business has served its purpose in your life. It's time to let it go, and move to the next phase of your journ-
"-And now, to top it all off, I'm starting to question my entire choice of career. I don't even think I want to build these tech products anymore, and I've been doing this since I was a teen. Why do I feel a longing to write and teach and talk instead? Why do I feel a longing to just tell stories, and make people laugh, and make them cry, and help them see the world in a different way? Why? I'm not perfect. Look at me. I'm a fucking wreck right now. I oscillate between melancholy and euphoria. What can anyone learn from me?
"Fuck you, intuition. Fuck you, curiosity. Fuck you, passion. Fuck you, soul. I thought you were supposed to be looking out for me. Whatever happened to that, huh? Whatever happened to 'follow your heart, and everything will all work out?'"
Oh, I am looking out for you. Just let your ego throw this tantrum, then it's time to pack up and keep moving. The next clue is in Sydney. Go home, say hello to your parents, and start looking for a job. I know that sounds like failure to your ego, but trust me: basecamp is right on the other side of this dark ravine. The shortcut to heaven runs straight through hell-
"-I just don't get it. I don't get it. I'm done. I'm sick of this. Do you hear me, God? If you want someone to solve this fucking riddle, maybe you should pay them for it. Isn't that what academics are for? Don't they get paid for all this stuff I'm doing for free? I'm twenty-seven, and I'm getting older, and I have to think about my future. I can't keep going on like this — being a slave to your childish agenda. I can't keep treating the world like a wondrous playground. Can you please just stop this storm raging in my heart and let me be? My God, what is wrong with me!?"
In that moment, and many moments like it, I hated myself. I loathed who I was. Unsuccessful. Undisciplined. Fucked up. Failure. Loser. Idiot. Fraud. Imposter. Unlovable. Worthless. There were so many colorful labels that I placed upon my own forehead.
What value do I add to the world? I wondered. What is the point of it all? If I follow my soul, I end up here. If I don't follow my soul, I kill myself at twenty-seven, then spend the next seventy years waiting to die. What gives?
I needed some meaning in my life.
Very few of the value judgments you have incorporated into your truth are judgments you, yourself, have made based on your own experience. Yet experience is what you came here for — and out of your experience were you to create yourself. You have created yourself out of the experience of others.
If there were such a thing as sin, this would be it: to allow yourself to become what you are because of the experience of others. This is the “sin” you have committed. All of you. You do not await your own experience, you accept the experience of others as gospel (literally), and then, when you encounter the actual experience for the first time, you overlay what you think you already know onto the encounter.
If you did not do this, you might have a wholly different experience — one that might render your original teacher or source wrong. In most cases, you don’t want to make your parents, your schools, your religions, your traditions, your holy scriptures wrong — so you deny your own experience in favor of what you have been told to think.
Like Whitton, NDE 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. This is apparent in several aspects of the experience. Frequently after arriving in the world of light, NDEers are told that "it is not their time yet."