through years researching the deeper nature of time, I explored every imaginable path. down in the damp, musty tunnels of experimental physics, I gazed at the curious traces of particles passing through our dimension, sometimes forward, sometimes backward, sometimes in directions unfathomable to our conventional sense or even our capability to imagine. when my research funding was withdrawn, due to apparent lack of progress, as well as my increasing single-mindedness, I neglected my duties, and after that unfortunate incident … I began to explore alternative paths, finally being drawn into the dark vortices of arcane mysticism, archaeology and the occult. it was somewhere in these difficult, lonely years, following a tortuous path that finally led to a dusty ziggurat in Iraq uncovered during the recent war, still riddled with fresh bullet holes and blood, some of it my own, I found scrawled in cuneiform the name of one who had traveled this path before. there followed a journey of many years, years of self-discipline and denial. I withdrew entirely from society, becoming something like a mad rishi, living in the wild, my hair matted and my clothes ragged and filthy. I fasted for days, meditated for weeks at a time. it was then that I first saw him, a young boy, perhaps 10 or 12 years old, playing with his toys in a room lit against the dark and vast void. years passed. I chased the vision, flitting in and out of my mind’s eye, until finally I found myself standing at the glass door to his apartment. my mind was everywhere at once, and I could see him within, without seeing him, playing still with what seemed like blocks, placing one upon the other, stacking, unstacking, endlessly rearranging. I wait. no need to knock. he’s expecting me, and we both know it. we’ve both always known it. I tell him someone else is looking for him — he knows — but waits for me to fill in the blanks — as a test I think — the Griswolds — very powerful, very wealthy, very persistent, have been dogging me for years, and seek that which I seek, but for their own nefarious purposes.
he takes me outside and lets me play with two puppies, tumbling over one another: light and dark. he says, “within any stream of time, cause and effect” and he casts out a stream of sparkling dust, like stars and clouds and it stretches from his fingertips far into the inky blackness, and I see within it colors and whole worlds, and suns and galaxies and species and lives and deaths and love and hate, and peace and war, and everything. and he says “no amount of action within one stream will affect any other.” and he throws out more time lines, streaming in different directions, up, down, left and right, forward and back, in the eight cardinal directions, and in the void, in eight more directions beyond explanation orthogonal to the former, each with entire histories, parallels and alternations within and among one another.
“but the mind is more powerful. it can transcend space and time, jumping from one linear stream to another, or comprehend them all at once; and effect can precede the cause.” and I looked closer, and saw myself, my whole life, and my history, and my family, going back to the beginning of life, and before to the beginning of everything, before there was even time. and he says, “but its all here and we inhabit that which we choose.” and I examined another stream, and saw a different path, and my consciousness inhabited several different existences, each unique and a reality unto itself, and I knew what I had to do.