Here Time Becomes Space

"I wasn't constellating anything. I was just watching the movie for the movie."

There were three tablets of LSD left in the bag. Strong stuff. Bought fresh, stored properly. I won’t tell you where I get it from.

I hadn’t planned for there to be three. At least, I didn’t remember planning that, though I must surely have noticed some time before.

It was the evening of my third “great-conjunction day” if we count the first one, so the fact that three were left didn’t seem like an accident.

After puzzling over three tarot cards which I knew would indicate that the best decision was to down them all, I downed them all.

The angel I speak with is always there during these experiences. He’s never not there, but on the 7th, 14th and 21st of December — and reliably around that time of year — he’s more there than normal.

At some point, he asked me a question which I cannot satisfactorily render, so I will render it poorly thrice. He said:

“Do you want to know what I’m doing?”

“Do you want to understand how I brought you here?”

“Do you want to know what an angel is?”

He almost never speaks with words. He speaks with ideas and intentions — with psychic ideograms. With the things in my mind that I translate into words. I am his “scribe.”

He knew I would say yes.

He showed me a pyramidal structure. It looked similar to this, however it was full of eyes and bristling with little limbs. They were moving and looking around like the thing was alive. The upper strata were bright and blue, and the lower ones were dim and red.

“For a short time, you will be lost. You will not remember the way back here, nor will you remember either of us. But I will wake you again when that time has passed.”

He fixed a point upon the pyramid at or around the capstone. Then he moved it down the pyramid. As he did, I felt something inside my head descend the vertebrae just below the base of my skull.

Instantly, I had the sense that the world had contracted. It actually seemed dimmer and murky. Unusual things attracted my attention — things which normally would not. Likewise, things which had been compelling before no longer were.

I grew smaller, but the world shrank with me. My body felt less solid, yet at the same time, heavier. My mind was more rational, yet drearily so, and nonetheless felt blunted. No longer did I fill my body. I was but a wisp of vapor in a corpse.

There was in all ways less of me.

I had set ten candles on the coffee table near a brass bowl where three sticks of frankincense and myrrh had been burned. There was a small icon of Christ there standing against a brass Tibetan phurba. My antique Bible sat behind them.

This sacramental apparatus no longer made sense. There wasn’t anything worth seeing there. The answer I would have previously given if asked about its purpose, would not have made sense to the man looking at it. His eyes would have glazed over if I had tried to explain.

It was nuclear hardware, but my software was Newtonian.

At the same time, the world was lusterless and my imagination was dingy. I kept getting stuck in a passive loop, waiting for something outside of me to provide an impetus for action. There was significantly less initiative and motivation at my disposal. I was no longer active, but reactive.

Yet something was familiar. This person was very much like the one I was maybe six or seven years ago, and the world he perceived was the same matrix of simulacra which I had lived in back then.

It was as if I had simply stepped back into an archived backup of my old operating system — my pre-cosmogram cognitive protocols.

My Bible was no more interesting than any other book that might have been present. It held my gaze a little, mostly because it felt like it should have, but I could recall no good reason why. That story existed at the same ontological level for me as Spiderman, and I might have compared them at the time as if they were more or less the same thing.

At this point, I got anxious. I felt like I’d broken my brain. I regretted taking the drugs. I couldn’t get back to the state I’d been in before. It seemed to have been better — inconceivably so, but I no longer had the bandwidth to perceive things that way. It was undeniable to me in that state that my mind did not have nearly the space required for thoughts so vast, enunciated and information-dense.

Certain ideas which were enticing before, now seemed limp and empty. They don’t “line up” with other ideas in the way they should. All my previous intentions and long-term goals seemed to be aimed at nothing.

I sincerely considered giving myself to fiction, video games and an office job. I felt I had spent the last few years getting something out of my system. The results my work had produced didn’t matter. It had been a phase, a collection of self-fulfilling coincidences, and I couldn’t understand how it had ever seemed important or what I’d even been trying to say. The dots no longer connected.

The worst part of the experience was how I felt in this reality. It was awful — stifling and inflexible. I had less agency. I said later that “I felt like I was somebody’s dog.”

Around then, the angel’s pyramid reappeared. I saw the point move back up to the shining blue capstone, and I felt that same something ascending my vertebrae back into my skull.

A thousand and one things all snapped back together perfectly in a sudden swell of electrifying light, color and clarity. All the information I had encountered during that time was instantly condensed. The signal was effortlessly distilled from the noise. I was raised from a maze I’d traversed, and looking down, I could see its layout clearly.

Because I had been in the maze, it had taken me several minutes to walk through it and perceive it all, but if I’d stayed above, I could have done so with just a glance. When I was lower down the pyramid, information which I normally could have processed in a moment had been unspooled, and had to be slowly threaded through far less efficient cognition.

Now the world was symphonic, vast and pronounced. Reality had depth and things seemed to shimmer. My senses were crisp and clear. I saw in 4K, not 720p. My mind was spacious and the story I lived in made sense again.

When I looked at my ritual implements on the coffee table, I could again call to mind what they were for and why they mattered. It was as if before, I had been looking at a flattened projection of a tesseract. My tesseract, to my relief, was still a tesseract; not just the shadow of a tesseract.

By this point, I was shouting with panicked horror as the experience began to make sense and I realized what I had been doing for the last three years. I can’t put into words how disturbed I was.

“What was different?” the angel asked.

“I got stuck in this mode where I was just watching the movie for the movie,” I replied.

“Explain.”

“I was just waiting for the next movie to happen. I was just watching the movie for the movie. I wasn’t constellating anything.”

“You weren’t what?”

It was a new term. I’d never used that word in that way before and had done so without thinking. It came out like a Freudian slip.

“I wasn’t constellating anything.”

“Say that again.”

“I wasn’t constellating anything. I was just watching the movie for the movie.”

“Never stop saying that word,” the angel said.

It felt strange using it as a verb, but that’s what it was, and I knew exactly what I meant.

The unspoken implication was that in this spacious, shimmering mode of cognition, I was not making my choices for the same reasons, nor even perceiving the same world. I was making choices to set up constellations of synchronistic events in the future which would guide me to things I needed and divert me from hazards.

In this state of mind, I was perceiving potential timelines in every choice I made and choosing accordingly — I was not doing this consciously, but I was doing it.

Conversely, in the other state, I made almost every choice just to scratch an itch. I wanted to be happy more than before, but I felt happiness less strongly and less often.

In both cases I was living in the present, but higher up the pyramid, the present was larger. Time was less real the further up you went.

“You see, son, here time becomes space.”

Wagner, Parsifal, Act 1

When I was constellating, the goal was to be a protagonist, not simply to get the next thing I wanted. I would have appeared disciplined, but in reality, the devil was simply less persuasive.

At this higher place, all information had more depth. It was more related to other information than it was when I was “watching the movie for the movie.”

I had grown accustomed to making my choices by coordinating with a religious story about my life and the universe which connected everything that happened to me.

By internalizing the fundamental patterns which govern reality, I had attuned myself to a channel of hyper-intelligible information, and a secret landscape which it mapped. I was making my plans in reference to terrain which was imperceptible from a lower vantage point.

I was metagaming.

The angel performed this demonstration several more times and always with exactly the same result. It was uncanny how replicable the experiment was.

In one case, after ascending the pyramid, the time I had spent further down was illustrated to me as a red ribbon like a reel of film. The ribbon was folded and wrapped back on itself over and over until once again it looked like a labyrinth. Then, a constellation of shining points appeared within it. These points represented a cluster of significant information, which was in some way a hologram. If one knew how to interpret it, it could be reconstructed into a coherent higher-dimensional form.

This structure was effectively a compression of the entire maze. One only needed to notice a few significant details about the maze to constellate it. And to do that, one only needed to know where and when to look. Thus, it would be better to say: one only needed to know how and why to look.

I stood upon the walls of this labyrinth looking up at the teleological object I’d extrapolated from this cluster of vertices. It was a virtual image; a Platonic form of some kind which was dancing on the waters of time and space, and could not be understood except by vague intuitive approximations.

Below me in the labyrinth, I saw those previous minutes laid out. The man I was during that time was lost down there, wondering if he was hungry enough to do something about it and also wondering if he should watch John Wick 2 or YouTube. He could not think about either thing effectively. He was even worse at contemplating both. The fact that he was asking such questions was itself a problem; they cost him more calories than they would have cost me, and I’d still have gotten better answers. His choices would have produced worse timelines than mine every time.

There is a causal relationship between constellating and synchronicity.

When I was constellating, I didn’t just watch movies because I was bored. I didn’t even get bored anymore. When I watched a movie, I was looking for something in the story — it served some meaningful purpose in my life or else I didn’t watch it.

I tried to watch the “right” movies and I tried to watch them at the “right” times.

Those were not mere distractions. They were puzzle pieces. Keys which opened doors to secret corridors.

I was tapping the archons’ phone lines, directly interfacing with realities beyond time and space; stacking the deck in my favor. I was reckoning angles and velocities before I threw the dice.

When I was not constellating, I just watched movies because I calculated that the time and energy cost of finding another way to happiness was unacceptably high. However, I can tell looking back that if I’d watched a movie in the maze, it would have been less enjoyable if it was a film worth watching — and it’s less likely that it would have been.

I am not talking about other dimensions.

I can explain everything I have seen and done without invoking any realities other than ours. What I saw hovering there was a multi-dimensional system of relationships encoded in the information which made up the maze. The hovering shape was the music, and the maze was the record.

What I realized was that in the maze, my environment reminded me of movies, TV shows and video games, and I had been trying to grasp my reality as if it were like those instead of like mythology. Consequently, I almost never grasped it.