Ten Thousand and One Lives

"No, I don't know what I want for dinner

because I'm not even sure I've ever eaten dinner before. 

In fact, it's possible that I'm incapable of consuming food. 

But I guess, the shrimp in marinara sauce sounds good enough."

    That used to be a typical daily conversation for me in the beginning -- if we go ahead and change a few details. Namely, that I was living alone in the woods and had never heard of "sauce" let alone marinara before, but of course I knew about shrimp -- no, wait...my mistake, that can't be right, let me start over.

Some people think it would be rather nifty to have lived ten thousand lives. And maybe that could be true if they were all reincarnations and you couldn't remember any of them. Or even if you could remember a few of them, it was only a few of them, and they were relatively neatly organized in your mind. You might say, "Oh yes, in this my current life, I had Mrs. Gellstahlt as my 2nd grade teacher. In my life before that, it was Mrs. Vennerink, and the one before that it was Mr. Lemmsulf. After that it gets a bit murky, but I do distinctly remember at one point having a Mr. Branscher for either 2nd or 3rd or maybe 1st grade because he was the one that wet himself when the bear broke into our classroom."

You see what I'm saying? There would be something orderly to your memory. I'm not saying you'd be able to remember every single detail of every single life -- that would be torture, but even that would be better than my lot -- I'm just saying that all in all, you would have a pretty good sense of who you were and whether or not you liked butter or marmalade on your toast. 

You wouldn't, for example, be additionally wondering if you actually knew what marmalade was and if you'd even ever eaten toast.

Let's return to the 2nd grade example. You see, I did live ten thousand lives (or possibly more, why keep track, really?) but I lived them all at once, and now none of them no longer exist per say -- they've all collapsed into themselves, into just this one all at once. So for me...when you ask me who my 2nd grade teacher was, I'm inclined to say something along the order of:

        "2nd grade? Hmm, oh yes, I remember going to that. No wait, that's wrong, I skipped second grade. Or actually, no, I had to do it twice. Wait, what am I saying, school didn't exist back then. Or maybe it did, but to be honest, shrubbery doesn't go to school. On second thought, Mrs. Willton was my 2nd grade teacher. Ah yes, that's right, but I moved mid-year so it was also Mr. Gripst, but then he went out on maternity leave...no, that doesn't quite make sense. I think I was home-schooled that year because of the small pox."

It's very hard to keep a clear sense of self when you can't keep track of your experiences and all your memories bubble up out of turn like a great big winter soup full of squash and beans and bits of chicken parts and fingerling potatoes. Some instances of myself had a 2nd grade teacher. Other ones of me were plants that never went to school. And still more had multiple 2nd grade teachers, and so on and so forth.

There hardest thing to understanding this all is that all those versions of me happened all at once -- that's the problem, the biggest part at least. I didn't live ten thousand consecutive lives. I lived ten thousand concurrent lives. And then one day they all started to coalesce back into each other, which basically -- in the way that quantum mystimanics works -- means that none and all of them happened simultaneously and not at all.

How can I say something like, "I'm the type of man who's interested in how clay pots are made," when I have been a potter, a cook, a clay pot, and also never seen a lump of clay in my life?

Who knows what interests me or what I'm good at or what experiences shaped my world view -- and if a person doesn't know those things (and I am a person now, though sometimes I wasn't), how on earth is he supposed to contemplate his future -- what to do with his life: where to live, how to earn a living or who to spend his time with, etc.

Don't worry -- I can see it in your eyes. You never knew this was a thing that could happen and now you're worried it might happen to you or your child. This isn't like flesh-eating bacteria or a meningitis brain infection -- things you didn't know existed until they irrevocably alter everything you care about in life. This isn't like that. 

In fact the Multiverse of Multiverses is organized -- believe it or not, despite the chaos it thrives on -- to prevent this sort of thing from happening. It's not good for sustainability purposes because each fraction of myself that lived had to do so in its own separate microverse. And it takes a tremendous about of energy to stabilize reality enough to withstand the pressure of near-infinite universes expanding within an already infinite space. You'd think the reverse would be true -- there should be tons of room, so no worries, right? Wrong.

Here's the ocean. Look at it. Look at all the life teeming inside of it. It's filled with trillions of life (well, depending on when you're reading this, it could be down to millions at the rate things are going). So let's pretend humans didn't exist ever -- for the purposes of this example -- right, okay. So here's a beautiful ocean, full of all sorts of sea life. Animals and plants and microorganisms and things that look like they should be plants but according to science are actually animals and stuff that looks like a lifeless blob of mucus that is actually a plant. Tons of life. And the ocean contains it all. And from the perspective of all the life within the ocean, even the big things like the whales, the ocean is basically infinite and from time to time, given the natural fluctuations of the planet and climate and however the moon's gravity pull works, the ocean expands and contracts. And in a similar rhythm so too do the population sizes of all the things in the ocean. 

Mathematically speaking it is a contained infinite system. Remember, we're using real math, not the nonsense humans invented to make profits look like losses to qualify for tax breaks. This is sensible math, the kind that says, in the grand scheme of things, this thing you're looking at is too enormous for you to process, so let's just say it goes on forever, provided certain limits stay in place.

Sorry, I think I might have lost you a bit there -- so, the ocean is big and full of lives. But you can't say, "Look how big and infinite this thing is, lemme just cram a whole 'nother big and infinite ocean full of lives inside of it." It's not expansively infinite in that sort of way, there's no room for that sort of thing. The Multiverse of Multiverses contains an infinite number of universes within an infinite number of multiverses, but you can't go and shove a whole new set of multiverses within one of those smaller universes -- you'd break reality.

Maybe not according to human science, but that's the same sort of insanity that tries to convince people that magic isn't real, that humans evolved from apes and not squirrels and that technology will solve any environmental apocalypse we might face, but at the same time, human scientists still can't really decide if eggs are healthy or not for you to eat.

No, I'm talking about quantum mystimanics. Real, functional science.

So, my point is, you have nothing to fear. The Multiverse of Multiverses actively works to prevent what happened to me from happening to anyone or anything else. For example, think about our ocean again. But pretend you shoved a giant mirror ball inside of it and then shmooshed the ocean inside a mirror lined cubed. You'd have a lot of reflections of life. A lot of concentrated energy. Some sort of magical build up for sure. You'd definitely get some sort of reaction. Reality would at least feel and look like it was a little bent, but the fish would eventually figure it out and stop bumping into the walls and the weird "invisible" ball in the center and life would go on.

Human science would say that new dimensions would be birthed and the universe as we know it would simultaneously collapse and explode if something like that happened to the Multiverse of Multiverses, but the reality is, life would course correct and accept the weird reflections as normal oddities and brush them off.

This is why demons have never in their entire history of existence ever believed that a comet was a sign from a supernatural deity that the world was ending and they should repent for their sins by killing themselves. Even the most prehistoric demons looked up at comets and simply thought, "big sky firefly," and left it at that.

What happened to me was a curse. A forbidden curse. A curse that everything in existence is contrived against preventing from being used. Except for one thing: human irrationality. Most particularly, maternal love and ego -- which sometimes can be one and the same.

Human mothers get a bad rap. They get blamed for a lot, especially for things that aren't their faults. Like their kids being crazy, stupid, deformed, friendless, mean, poor, lazy, disabled, gay, world leaders, bank robbers, superstars, alcoholics, divorced, and most especially artists. Sometimes it's because the mothers took on too much responsibility. Other times it's because they didn't take on enough. Usually, it's just because they aren't fathers.

So I'm not trying to pile on more guilt. I think mothers are just as responsible, more often than not, for their offspring's life outcome as throwing a pair of dice. You can't predict what numbers it'll land on with an real measure of certainty, but you do know what numbers the die can't land on, and you can guess at the probability of certain summed values being displayed (ie. a better chance of totaling seven rather than two). Furthermore, if one edge is nicked, you can infer that it will impact the result -- but in what way, who knows. Finally, you'd be hard-pressed to prove that the way in which the die were cast had any measurable impact on what numbers they landed on. 

I don't know, maybe that's too generous?

My point is, although it's my mom's doing that this happened to me. I don't blame her. It might not even technically be her fault. She was using human logic. Her brain couldn't understand the ramifications. And since she didn't even want my dad to know I existed, it's not like his vampire input was available for consideration. But it might not have mattered really even then. I'm told -- though I never met him -- that not only was he missing some marbles, but to replace them he'd added in some acorns, a handful of birdseed and a few pieces of broken piano keys. He might have goaded my mom on, for all I know.

It happened like this -- and this is why it will never happen (probably) to anyone else for the rest of all spacetime. There's a prophecy, rather there's the Prophecy about the world ending. One puny version of Earth gets destroyed by some special baby and somehow it sets off a cataclysmic change reaction of events that puts the entire Multiverse of Multiverse into some sort of tizzy. 

My mom was convinced that if she gave birth to a set of stillborn twins it would prevent this Apocalypse from ever happening because she was convinced that she could make the special baby (with marginal help from my father).

Now, she wasn't matricidal. She wasn't throwing herself down flights of stairs or guzzling booze for months. Her family had a non-magical curse. Every woman for all known generational recordings that gave birth, gave birth first to a set of stillborn twins. Then, she'd have whatever normal births were probabilistically appropriate for the era in which she was giving birth.

But things went awry. Firstly, my sister and I survived. Then, my sister was kidnapped. And my mom decided that I needed to be hidden, because the only thing worse than one world-ending special baby would be two. So she begged Bastian, one of the Ten Sacred Guardians, to perform this forbidden fracturing curse on me. He explained the risks. That it would be a very bad idea. But my mother was convinced that the only way to save the world, save the Multiverse of Multiverses and my life was to split me into a bazillion partial lives.

At some point a few years later when she'd basically decided there was no hope in ever retrieving my sister, she started to feel some sort of way about what she had done to me, so she asked Bastian to reverse it. Hence the great merger of lives-once-lived. Which took place over the course of several years because there were so many lives to condense down to and cram into one body. It was supposed to drive me to death by way of insanity. 

Obviously, it hasn't. At least, not yet. 

Meanwhile, my mom's disappeared. 

And to really complicate things. My sister inadvertently (during her own personal crisis to prevent the same lingering Prophecy from coming to fruition) used my brain as basically a back-up hard drive for eighteen years of her life.

So now, in addition to definitively knowing and not knowing how to to juggle, I am also certain that Under Armor sports bras are better for running, but Nike ones are preferable for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and when push comes to shove, a piece of tightly rolled notebook paper will actually hold your hair into place better than a pencil or pen.

Do I like Britney Spears' music? I'm not sure I've even ever heard a single song, but I know all the lyrics to her first three albums and the complete choreography to "...Baby One More Time" without ever having seen the music video.

Could I tell you whether or not I like shrimp -- not a clue, but I can tell you that my sister thinks that sweetening chamomile tea with maple syrup is delicious.

Ten thousand and one lives -- you see, now? And you're asking me for directions? It's possible I've never been in this country -- let alone this town -- before in my entire life.

But, actually my sister has. So, what you need to do is go left at the stop sign, then make your first right...