And because we just don’t yet know we’re already Über-Mind, Dick’s statement—
The machinery for this transformation … is at work now; in eternity it is already accomplished.
—is jam-packed with implications.
Childhood’s End pinpoints one of the biggest. In Clarke’s fiction, the kids’ inconceivable metamorphosis into a being of pure consciousness doesn’t happen until the very end of the story.
But the truth is in Really-Real Reality we already are Über-Mind—and what that means is that this, right now, is The Fierce Moment of Our Inconceivable Metamorphosis. This very moment. This is exactly what Inconceivable Metamorphosis is like—what it looks like and feels like and sounds and tastes and smells like.
Which is maybe why life hurts like the dickens.
Inconceivably, our metamorphosis is complete and yet somehow simultaneously we have to experience every excruciating nanosecond of it. ‘Now’ and ‘eternity,’ as Dick is trying to tell us, aren’t different. Or rather, the difference between them is only a matter of perspective.
Which is what Einstein was getting at when he said,
The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion
—an observation that actually doesn’t take a genius, because everything is just a stubborn illusion from our perspective trapped here inside The Matrix, the ‘me’ being the most goldang stubbornest illusion of all.
The truth is if it weren’t for the illusion of time and especially the illusion of ‘me,’ the ‘moment’ of our inconceivable metamorphosis wouldn’t be fierce. But it is fierce because:
(a) We want inconceivable metamorphosis and we want it somethin’ fierce, but
(b) It takes time, and
(c) We want it for me, me, me.
Come on, let’s be honest: we want a metamorphosis that’s inconceivable, but one that doesn’t actually lay a metamorphosing finger on the ‘me,’ because we can’t conceive of metamorphosis of any kind without a ‘me’ to experience it.
Truth is, our thinking just doesn’t add up. It’s bad math.
But: Inherent in our hopelessly bad math is enormous potential. And the enormous potential is exactly what the Tibetan Buddhists are getting at: the illusion of time, the illusion of ‘me,’ and the somethin’ fierce they engender are all manifestations of the inherent playfulness and potentiality of Über-Mind’s ceaseless spontaneity.
Meaning: Our bad math’s not without purpose. Far from it.
The truth is because our bad math is so wildly out of balance, it’s full of exactly the kind of enormous potential energy Über-Mind needs to send The Matrix skidding out of control around the next sharp curve, launch it airborne over the guardrail, and hurl it crashing to the bottom of the ravine below in a cinematic display of pyrotechnics.
Über-Mind, bursting with the luminosity of its inherent playfulness and the potentiality of its ceaseless spontaneity, manifests every possible world. Über-Mind’s inherent playfulness is where the multiverse of quantum physics comes from, for crying out loud! Of all the Many Worlds out there, we happen to find ourselves in the one where our desperately bad math and the suffering it engenders somehow inconceivably add up to our inconceivable metamorphosis—they must, otherwise why the heck else would our metamorphosis be inconceivable?
Probabilistically speaking, we could’ve ended up in any old world, but by some wild stroke of luck we got one that’s—
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 