Letter to Dennis

I recently wrote a letter to a friend on mine describing an experience that I had on April 10, 1976. Make of it what you will.

By the way, it's safe to say that this piece is a bit out of the perview of "Self Employment for Bohemians", but on the other hand, the events of that day have informed almost everything I have done as a worker and artist since.

YO Dennis,

Ha ha, you noticed that bit about the "singularity of the eternal now". What I know about that, I was told by a mushroom. No kidding.
It was quite a set up. When I was a freshman in college, Beaupre and one other friend and I ate some 'shrooms. I'd never tripped before. It was all fun and games, but after awhile it was clear I was way fucking higher than the other guys.

The clue was, Beaupre and the other fella seemed frozen on the couch; they looked like jagged outlines of themselves, pixelated into jumbled shards of color. Their eyes, however, remained constant, even piercing, and were alive and alien. They spoke to me through their eyes, without sound. They said something like "Steve and Rob have consented to let us use their bodies for a few minutes to speak to you. We are ancient travelers, and not from here (earth). We are going to tell you some secrets that are gonna kick your ass, that all people know, but few remember".

That was the intro. For the next hour maybe, the peak of the trip, I had an experience of dying, and splitting into possibly millions of shards of light, each one representing a life, or at least some separate energy field. I had to become each of them, immersed in time, they I had to be born as myself again, live my nineteen years again, to get back to where I started.

As I wove in and out of these lives over several eternities, the basic idea I was left with is that all our lives exist at once, that is, simultaneously. They are separated by a matter of electrical pitch or frequency, or some form of focus in a specific location in physical reality. But time, linear time as we think of it, simply does not exist. It is a construct of human comprehension of the physical system we are immersed in.
As it is always the present, there is indeed only one moment, a singularity if you will, out of which constantly emerges what we perceive as physical reality.
The constant property of the singularity is change; these changes we record as "history", or a notion of linear time.
Considering the nature of change, I propose that the motive force behind all action is creative curiosity, a will to have fun. If we're lucky, really lucky, we could define that will to have fun as "love". I'd like to think we're that lucky, but I'm not sure.
The other good news, I believe, is that when human beings wake up to the true nature of "time" in some fundamental way, we will realize that we are indeed capable of solving our knottiest problems, as a lot of received "knowledge" will drop away like last week's cheese.

Hey, you asked for it buddy!The mushrooms did indeed present themselves to me as interstellar sage/tricksters who really enjoy having a laugh at the expense of a rube like me.