Meontological Musings II: The Truth is in Here

[Hesperus]

(c) Hesperus, 2016

As described in an earlier post (), my personal experiences as a psi-vampire involve regular excursions through the psyches of donors. Immersing myself in my donors’ deliciously diverse ways of seeing the world allows me to function at my peak without suffering from the migraines, intense sensitivity to light and sound, fatigue, and malaise I associate with an unsatisfied need for donor energy. At the same time, such descents into others’ minds, when probing or lengthy enough to satisfy my need fully, sometimes present a threat to my sense of self. Occasionally I’ll disconnect from a donor at the close of an exchange and feel nourished yet floating in a sort of existential limbo, unsure of where exactly my donor ends and I begin.

Struggling to resolve this amorphous sense of self led me to all sorts of new-age self-help books and websites about discovering my true, inner self and grounding myself in my own personal truth. While those systems may work for some, they did nothing but frustrate me; their descriptions of a constant connection to a source of vital energy flowing freely to anyone truly open to it clearly weren’t written with a vampiric audience in mind. What did ultimately help me feed without feeling like I might forever lose myself in the process was a major change in perspective informed by my understanding of meontology.

As a quick review, meontology is the study of not-being, and my interpretation of a meontological void, or metavoid, is one that is not only defined by an infinite absence of substance, but also a complete lack of governing rules. As a result, such a metavoid wouldn’t be subject to the laws of conservation, and everything in every combination would simultaneously spring into existence. So let’s assume that model has some merit and there exist an infinite number of distinct universes. Why this one? Why does this universe experience gravity and electromagnetism and babies screaming on airplanes? It turns out the answer to those questions are self-evident given the right outlook.

Given such a boundless array of ontological realities arising from the single metavoid, the ontological laws making up the means of observation available to any observer would determine which particular combination of things an observer perceives. This concept is known as the anthropic principle and, put simply, means that what an individual perceives must be compatible with that individual’s existence. That I live on a planet capable of supporting life like mine isn’t that surprising no matter how rare such planets might be since, if there weren’t such a planet to support lifeforms like myself, I wouldn’t be around to notice or wonder about the nature of the cosmos.

Pretty much any similar question about why things are precisely the way they are can be answered by the anthropic principle. If you didn’t experience an exact series of phenomena, themselves dependent upon countless other forces and events, then you wouldn’t be asking that exact question. Remember, if we’re embracing the concept of the metavoid, every combination of forces must exist so there has to be an infinite number of universes in which you ask any given question and, by extension, an infinite number of universes that allow for and inspire those questions.

I would extend the anthropic principle to include also our experience of memory. Whatever must have occurred in order for our present circumstances to be what they are is determinable by our present state since this state includes whatever rules of causality apply to our particular offshoot of the metavoid. When we remember something, the accessing of that memory occurs in the present as a condition of our current state, the corresponding sensations and perceptions all contained in the instant of memory without necessitating any persistent consciousness through time. In terms of the anthropic principle, the perception of history may be explained wholly in terms of the present as precise past events are necessary to validate the circumstances that presently allow for our observations. In this view, those considerations of cause, those events necessitated in the past by our present, are our memories.

This is not to say that our experiences of time have not earned their title as another dimension alongside those of space or that there is no possibility of the presence of a divine hand; on the contrary, time as a dimension is precisely as valid as the dimensions of space, as our ability to confirm the existence and nature of each of these dimensions equally and inescapably depends upon our experience. It is far from inconceivable, even, that there should be those who perceive more than one dimension of time, interacting directly with the ordered possibilities of potential configurations of interactive patterns in space. Such a being could be considered magical or divine but, ultimately, there are occasions when we all, to some degree, see time this way, moments when we imagine the infinite potential of the future and organize our options according to how realistic, or near, they seem.

Conceivably, in any given instant, the whole of the universe throughout space and time as it pertains to you can be understood entirely in terms of your immediate experience. This idea probably isn’t going to help you travel from one multiversal reality to another or instantaneously transport yourself across even a single universe, but it has helped me overcome the feelings of disorientation I associate with deep feeding. After feeding, some of my perceptions may be temporarily impacted by a donor, but in those moments that I experience confusion, I am someone whose past experiences led to present confusion; I am someone whose personal perspective has been affected by someone else’s; I am a psychic vampire who recently fed, etc. Accepting everything that I experience in those times of confusion as clues to who I am in those moments and, by extension, what world I presently occupy allows me to walk away from feeding sessions not in a daze of existential panic, but with a sense of adventure.