Shush... I thought. Quiet your mind. Focus. Calm.
I was sitting cross-legged on the bed in my Chiang Mai apartment, staring at the wall. I was 26 years old.
I began to meditate.
A few months prior, I'd stumbled upon an online energy school — and by 'school,' I just mean a private forum. The students were doing all kinds of strange things: telekinesis, pyrokinesis, orbing, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences. It all looked rather weird and wonderful.
My ego snorted its disapproval. Your father is a doctor — a man of science. You're in for a lifetime of playful mockery if he ever finds out about this.
But I'd already deduced, several years prior, that I was living in a dream world — a world that was much more malleable than scientific consensus seemed to suggest. I trusted scientists to answer the small, incremental questions, but it was obvious they couldn't handle the bigger existential ones. You should never send a scientist to do an artist's job.
Actually, that was something I found quite odd about modern physicists. If your full-time occupation is to understand the laws of nature, shouldn't you be analyzing edge cases and scenarios where those laws fail? Shouldn't you be exploring the weird and the counterintuitive? Shouldn't you be focused on falsifying your beliefs?
This is very simple logic. To discover something new, things that we think are wrong must be right, and things that we think are right must be wrong. If everything we think is right is actually right, then we would have all the answers already; we would have a perfect model of reality.
And since physicists didn't have all the answers and were failing to find them, an efficient search algorithm would have them exploring edge cases. By definition, edge cases are only labeled 'edge cases' because they don't behave as expected. In other words, an edge case exists when something we think is right is actually wrong.
As an outsider looking in, the scientific community's prevailing belief in materialism puzzled me. Obviously consciousness is more fundamental than the external world. I mean, consciousness is the only thing we know for sure exists. Why were scientists treating it as an afterthought? It just seemed so... odd. Weird. Mad, even. A collective delusion of the masses.
And if consciousness is fundamental, why did physicists expect to reverse-engineer the universe while sitting inside their offices? Shouldn't they be out there, living? Moving fast and breaking things in their own life? Shouldn't they be pushing and poking and prodding their minds, then observing how the universe moves in response? Shouldn't they be finding connections between spiritual mythology and science instead of arguing that they're mutually exclusive? Wouldn't those strategies help them form better, testable hypotheses? I certainly thought so.
Besides, the scientific community's lack of creativity was an existential threat to themselves. Their logic was cancerous, and the cancer would kill the field of physics if it wasn't extracted soon. All of the brightest minds would self-select into different careers with better pay and more growth and excitement. That's just economics. When that happened, nature's secrets would remain hidden forever.
And that last part there — well, that was an existential threat to humanity. If you trace our current quality of life back to its roots, almost every big advance came from the hard sciences. If we don't continue to deepen our understanding of the natural world, we have very little hope for the kind of technological progress we'll need to support our rapidly changing society: clean and affordable energy, climate change solutions, efficient agriculture, alleviation of poverty. If we want to save the world, we have to save physics.
So I'd pulled out my card and paid my money to enter the magical portal of this online school. Once inside, I was relieved to find a humble community. There was no showing off. Nor was there an incessant need to prove to others that what they were doing was real. These people quietly existed on the fringes of society.
It reminded me of that scene from The Matrix where Neo visits The Oracle and finds a waiting room full of gifted kids. One spoon-bending child tells Neo, "Do not try to bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth... there is no spoon. Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself."
The Matrix wasn't fiction. It was a channeled documentary — a deep message wrapped in a palatable sci-fi skin, distributed to the masses.
The universe has used every contrivance to place this Truth before you. In song and story, in poetry and dance, in words and in motion — in pictures of motion, which you call motion pictures, and in collections of words, which you call books.
I didn't resonate with the spiritual language of the school, though. I'd never been a fan of the fluffy, vague concepts that often accompanied new age ideas. Imprecise language and superstitious rituals irked me.
I just wanted to know if there was something to this 'energy' thing. I wanted to know if my consciousness could bend reality in visceral, tangible ways. I didn't trust other people to tell me the Truth — the scientists or the spiritual crowd. I needed to experience it first hand and decide for myself. If school taught me one thing, it was nullius in verba: take nobody's word for it. The System was run by adults who played silly games to win silly prizes — and consequently believed silly things.
I committed to doing the energy exercises every day. Worst case scenario, nothing would happen. I'd cross the idea off my list and label it a failed experiment. Best case scenario, my deepest suspicions about the universe would be confirmed: we live in a magical dream world that our consciousness can manipulate.
After several days of practicing the first exercise, I was able to feel a kind of magnetic flux around my body — just as the instructor had claimed.
Hmm... Interesting. The instructor claimed something. I tested it. I found it to be true. Maybe there's something to this, I thought. My Bayesian priors began to update.
After a few weeks, my entire worldview turned upside-down. The instructor would make a claim, then I would test it. With some practice, I could produce the strange effect that he talked about.
I remember sitting in my studio apartment one night as I practiced de-focusing my eyes. I looked in the direction of my grey couch. Thick, grey steam was rising from its surface.
What?! Is that what this spiritual concept of 'energy' looks like? It looked similar to the hot surface on a tarmac road.
I wandered over to the couch and examined the energy. It was definitely there, rising into the air in thick waves.
I looked down at the powerpoint behind the couch. I could see energy pouring out of it.
I looked at the cushion that lay askew on the couch. It was supposed to be on the back of the sofa, but it wasn't. It was lying, disheveled, on one of the seats.
How peculiar, I thought. I could see a thick, energetic pull between the cushion and the back of the couch. Why would it pull there? Why there, in particular? Why not somewhere else?
I focused my eyes on the gap between the cushion and the back of the couch where the energetic pull was visible. The next instant, I felt the strangest sensation of my life. It was like I merged with the consciousness of the cushion. I became the cushion. I don't even know how to explain it. I felt a tugging in my heart; a deep yearning to be on the back of the couch.
And then, seconds later, the feeling was gone.
Did I imagine that? I wondered.
No. Definitely not. If I imagined that feeling, then I imagined everything else, too. But I could still see the energy in the room.
Why did the cushion want to be on the back of the couch, specifically? I wondered. Why there, of all places? Why didn't it yearn to be on the moon, or in the tree outside?
That question would haunt me for the next eighteen months until I figured out the answer: the lowest-probability place to find that cushion was on the back of the couch it was originally designed for. The further the cushion ventured from the couch, the more free energy it generated — like a fish out of water. The cushion wanted to return home to its authentic self; to its original blueprint. I'd felt that same yearning in my own heart.
I kept practicing over the next few weeks. I'd tumbled down Alice's rabbit hole, and everything seemed quite real. The instructor would make a claim, then I'd confirm it with experiment — and I was only doing the easy lessons. More advanced students were learning telekinesis, pyrokinesis, orbing, healing, and how to have out-of-body experiences at will. That forum was like a silent underworld in a computer game where all the cheat codes were exposed. Although I'd only done the basic exercises, a simple application of Bayes' theorem suggested the instructor's bolder claims were also true.
So that's how I found myself in a deep meditative trance, sitting on my bed cross-legged, staring at the wall. I'd taken off my Havaiana flip-flops and placed them next to me in the center of the bed, upside-down.
About ten minutes into the exercise, I heard something smack the floor. I snapped out of my trance and turned around to see one of my flip-flops on the ground, several meters away from where I last saw it.
That's odd, I thought. A moment ago, the flip-flop had been in the middle of my queen-sized bed. And I'd been perfectly still. So how did it get on the floor?
And then I saw it — the strangest thing I'd ever seen. The biggest prediction error of my life.
My flip-flop began moving across the floor by itself.
I'm not talking about grand, sweeping movements here. I'm talking about short, sporadic jolts — just an inch or two at a time. The movement stopped altogether after a few spurts.
I stood up on the bed and stared at the flip-flop, my mouth gaping open in shock.
It's one thing to know something intellectually — to know, for example, that the laws of physics are consistent emergent patterns of information. It's quite another to experience that knowledge for yourself, integrated into your see-it-smell-it-hear-it-taste-it-touch-it life. The word 'surreal' doesn't even come close to describing that moment.
My logical mind immediately jumped into action, trying to minimize my raging prediction error with a solid explanation.
Wait... am I insane? I wondered. Or maybe there's a cockroach underneath the shoe...
I reached out and flipped it over, half-expecting to see a bug scurry out from underneath.
But there was nothing. It was just a flip-flop.
Did I imagine that? Am I hallucinating?
No, I concluded. If I were hallucinating, then I should've been able to snap out of the trip to see my flip-flop back on the bed where I left it. A hallucination is supposedly "all in the mind." It can't move physical matter through space and time.
I paused for a second to assess my options.
A moment later, I slipped the flip-flop onto my foot, grabbed my tattered copy of The Holographic Universe from the bedside table, and rapidly exited the room. At least if the flip-flop was on my foot and I was nowhere near that bed, I wouldn't be tempted to retroactively brush it off as a hallucination. The object physically moved from point A (the middle of the bed), to point B (across the floor) to point C (outside the room) in an unbroken chain of observation.
As I waited for the elevator, I flipped to page 137 of The Holographic Universe...
Indeed, given that the universe and the laws of physics that govern it are also products of this flux, then they, too, must be viewed as habits. Clearly they are habits that are deeply ingrained in the holomovement, but supernormal talents such as immunity to fire indicate that, despite their seeming constancy, at least some of the rules that govern reality can be suspended.
That's it, I thought. The construct's been broken. The system just revealed its hand.
God winked, and I smiled.
"Damnit," I whispered under my breath as I looked down at my feet. I was standing barefoot in the pouring Sydney rain. It was April 2017. I was 25 years old.
I ran the remaining stretch back to the office.