A Glitch In The Matrix

My mind was spinning with ideas.

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 twenty-five years old.

I began to meditate.

A few months prior, I'd stumbled upon a weird-looking 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 highly strange and wonderful.

My skeptical ego rolled its eyes. The world doesn't work like that, it said. Your dad is a doctor — a man of science. You should know better.

But I'd already deduced, several years prior, that I was living in a dream world — a world that was much more malleable than science had been telling me all these years. I trusted scientists to answer the small, incremental questions, but it was obvious they couldn't handle the big ones. Their own cognitive bias was like a light shining in their eyes, blinding them from the Truth.

Actually, that was the thing I found odd about physicists. If their job was to understand the laws of physics, shouldn't they analyze the scenarios where those laws fail? Shouldn't they explore the weird and the counter-intuitive? Shouldn't they attempt to falsify your own belief in materialism?

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 should have all the answers already. Since the scientific community didn't have all the answers and was failing to find them, an efficient search algorithm would have physicists exploring the weird and the counter-intuitive.

In fact, I found the scientific community's prevailing belief in materialism quite illogical and strange. When I thought about it for two seconds, it just seemed obvious that consciousness was more fundamental than physical reality. I mean, consciousness is the only thing we know for sure exists. Why was it being treated 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 office? 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 consciousness, 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.

So I'd pulled out my debit card and paid my money to enter the magical portal of this online school. Once inside, I was surprised to find how humble the community was. 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 the waiting room full of gifted kids. One spoon-bending child tells Neo, "Do not try and 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 documentary.

I didn't resonate with the 'spiritual' language of the school, though. I'd never been a fan of the fluffiness that came with spiritual ideas: angels, crystals, twin flames, and all that. For some reason, imprecise metaphors and superstitious, ceremonial 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.

I committed to doing the energy exercises every day. Worst case scenario, nothing would happen. I could cross the idea off my list and label it a scam. 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 magnetic flux around my body — just as the instructor had claimed.

Hmm. Interesting. The instructor claimed something, I tested it, and found it to be true. Maybe this isn't crazy, after all, I thought.

After a few weeks, my entire world view turned upside-down. The instructor made a claim, and I would test it. With some practice, I could produce the strange effect that he talked about in the videos.

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 '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. In an instant, I felt the strangest feeling I'd felt in my entire life. I felt like I absorbed the consciousness of the cushion. I became the cushion. I don't even know how to explain it. It just 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 the deep yearning?

That question would haunt me for years.

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 an extraordinary claim, then it would happen to me — 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. This 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.

And that's how I found myself sitting in the center of my bed, days later, meditating. My flip-flops were positioned next to me in the middle of the bed.

I entered a meditative trance as I stared directly at the wall.

Suddenly, I heard the smack of an object hitting the floor.

I turned around to see one of my flip-flops lying on the ground beside the queen-sized bed.

How odd, I thought. That flip-flop was literally in the center of my bed a moment ago, and I haven't moved. How did that happen?

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. They weren't huge, dramatic movements. The shoe only moved an inch or two at a time. It stopped moving all-together after a handful of jolts.

I jumped up on my bed in shock.

What the actual fuck?

It's one thing to know something intellectually — to know, for example, that telekinesis is theoretically possible. It's quite another to experience it first-hand, in real life. The word 'surreal' doesn't even come close to describing the experience.

I just stared at the flip-flop, mouth open in shock.

Am I crazy? I wondered. There must be a cockroach underneath the shoe.

I reached out and flipped it over, expecting to see a bug scurry out from underneath it.

Nothing. It was just a flip-flop.

My mind was reeling.

Did I imagine that?

Am I hallucinating?

No. If I was hallucinating, then I should've been able to snap out of the trip and see my flip-flop back on my bed where I left it. A hallucination is supposedly 'all in the mind.' It can't move physical matter through space and time.

I picked up the flip-flop from the floor and held it in my hands. It was definitely there. It was definitely real. And it definitely wasn't on the bed where I left it.

So then why did it move like that? I asked myself. Why do the laws of physics work most of the time, and then break in edge cases? If the laws of physics are, in fact, laws... then why the fuck did my flip-flop move without a force being exerted on it?

It was almost as if our reality wasn't governed by laws at all. The laws felt more like… neuroses.

I glanced at the door and imagined another observer peering inside, watching me meditate. I imagined the observer was my skeptical brother, Hamish — a staunch materialist. I wondered if both of us would've observed the flip-flop moving.

Hmmm... probably not, my intuition whispered. If your brother were watching, that wouldn't have happened.

Okay, then. Let's try another thought experiment.

I replaced Hamish with the instructor from the energy school. Would the flip-flop have moved if he were watching?

That's a higher probability, my intuition whispered.

But why?

Maybe it was something to do with beliefs. Expectations.

Hmmm...

My mind would gnaw on this question for years.

Why did reality break?

Why?

I needed to know.