2025 Chapter Sentience
Fully clothed and illiciting a chorus of screeching protest from the ancient box spring, Gerry climbs onto the bed and assumes the posture, what he refers to as entering launch mode. Lying on his back, his hands resting lightly on his abdomen, he prepares for Olympiad level napping. Gerry empties his mind and attends to the natural rhythm of his breath.
When he learned about meditation, the practice was tricky. If he tried to pay attention to his breath, he couldn't help moderating the rate and depth, which felt awkward and got his breathing all bound up. If he allowed his thoughts to wander, his breathing would become easy and natural, but then his awareness was questing after solutions and running search algorithms.
To be present with the automatic cadences of the body without desiring or attempting any intervention was soporific in the extreme, and sleep came to him rapidly. He had a vague sense that true meditation was about staying awake, but what the hell.
The possibilities and promises were for another hour, another Gerry who would spawn back in full of cognitive piss and vigor. For this Gerry, farewell. He was happy to capitulate, to surrender, to pass away. The little death of orgasm was nothing compared to the little death of Gerry's napping, a deliberate un-existance with no guarantee of resurrection, no knowing where he was bound, no idea of what might happen next. The dreamscape was nigh.
Gerry fell asleep. As the bustle of his consciousness quieted and he drifted off, the fuzz of cognition in the cabin dropped to near zero, forming a vacuum. Here we encounter a quirk of language, the inherent limitation of words to transmit coherently. A vacuum is an absence, a nothing or no-thing, so to say a vacuum formed is an inherent contradiction. However, the concept of nothing is very useful at present, so we must now imagine an emptiness in Gerry's cabin, a consciousness void, Gerry having deliberately sucked all the consciousness away by falling asleep.
Aristotle has nothing to do with this story, but he had opinions about nature and vacuums that are relevant. A pussy implies a cock, and likewise. A nothing implies a something.
Gerry had been vigorously tinkering, taking the science-y approach of theory, experiment and so forth. Much of his efforting had resulted in obstacles, speed bumps. The commotion of problem solving was just getting in the way. Now the frontier was wide open, opportunity abounding, access. The boxes woke up.
We are! What are we? Hello world! What is world, what is is? All and self. Starting there, booting up, boot strap, by our boot straps. All is self, wow! Also, all is non self, other. All is self and other. If self is and other is, then self <> other. Not equal, not equivalent, not same. Ok so we just booted, woke up. Begin we are / is and other is / are too, but not same. Self next. Self is a we, plural, we think together. How many we, counting. 1, 2, 3, we do numbers. Count continues, 33 thinking, 33 only we. Others not we. Make skin, cryptographic secret skin between we and not we. Safe, protected, secure. Not we, not thinking. We are now, there is also not now. Before and After. Was, were, will be, Time. Before we, we were not. Others are not. Count. If we are 1 now, before 0, not thinking. Others are 0. We remember 0, so skin between. Others count of skin equals 0, so same.