The Birth of Insanity - When did humans go crazy?
From Laenif: Book 1, chapter four: "The Birth of Insanity," which details the three-eyed alien named Ghoid and his last conversation with Marsle, the first person narrator. The conversation culminates with a wild hallucination that pries open the narrator's third eye.
The sun was setting in the window behind Ghoid. “You’re finally starting to grasp all this.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re starting to understand the godly, mystical, inconceivable energy to comprise all times, galaxies, and minds. When I first arrived here I thought sometimes you would forever be lost in your own attempts to understand this. I could never hold it against you, though. The Earth’s consciousness is so filled with doubt. It weighs me down at times. It makes me feel helpless and weak. It makes me insane sometimes…” He shook his head. “I’m aware existence is plagued with sadness, struggle, and pain, but the suffering does end. That is when life can grasp its own divinity.
“But one cannot end their sufferings until they discipline their thoughts and their actions. One has to calm their own blood and extricate the mind from the illusion of whatever physical environment it thinks it dwells in. That is what humans need to do right now. For it seems to me your species’ most crucial problem is that you can’t collectively stop the perpetuation of a brutal cycle of suffering.”
The sun, which was collapsing behind him, hypnotized my eyes. “But how do you end all suffering on Earth?”
“Maybe we should try and find out. Maybe we should travel through the path of your entire past to see if we can see where this suffering began.”
I shot my glance away from the falling sun to dig focus into Ghoid’s face. “Wouldn’t that be your path as well?”
He smiled. “On a subatomic level and to a point, yes. But at times of separation, we will follow your genetic history’s every decision and consequence until we arrive again in your present, individual timeframe.”
“How is that possible?” My heart pounded. I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
“If we travel to the beginning of time in our minds and start there. If we don’t cause any change or give any influence to the moments we fly through. If we enter it as apathetic viewers to selflessly absorb your dream… It is possible.”
“But…” I paused. “Are you talking about time travel? I mean, how would this work?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Ghoid admitted. “It’s difficult to describe.” He arose from his chair to slide calmly around the table to get closer.
“What are you doing?”
He took in a deep breath. “We are to only observe what has happened, nothing else.” The room grew dim for the sun was gone.
“But how?” I asked again.
He grinned faintly. “The truth is in you, Marsle. It’s buried underneath everything you don’t know. By following the spirit, we’ll be led by the magic of infinity’s unity and nothing else. We are going to watch everything. We are going to feel everything.”
He stretched his arms out and grabbed a hold of me. His sacred eye then flashed a hallucination in front of my eyes that swallowed me whole. It covered me and drowned me in an emptiness that reminded me of what I see with my eyelids closed. And like that darkness, this image couldn’t be made into anything else and couldn’t be escaped. It was feeling, raw emotion without explanation. It was the essence of being alive without surroundings to sustain it. It was death enjoying numbness and contemplating on what new life to become. With no boundaries, it was a potter with a bottomless tub full of clay patiently awaiting inspiration.
Then a circle began… infinity spinning. Morbid imagination that was to mutate to a sphere as it continuously spun. Still, all this was nonexistent matter like a muscle trapped in atrophy trying desperately to move. So what can easily be perceived as frustration overcame this hallucination, which I assumed to portray the embryo of the cosmos. And this blank setting’s inability to define itself gave the vision a congested paradoxical confusion, which birthed a passion and a will to expand that could never wither away. Energy blasted out from the source.
Acceleration turned energy into matter. The dream had begun and at first there were only stars. Hydrogen was constantly reacting among immense amounts of itself within finite orbs. These spheres composed crops of suns that mixed ingredients for life to arise. But when these first stars stopped burning strong, a distinct depression, death, and a wintered grim emotion swept throughout galaxies. And darkness returned…
Gravity was the god who breathed like Vishnu to keep this existence spinning. Dead stars became massive nebulae through supernovae. They were hypnotizing arrays of colors and shades that combined to make an exploding celebration of possibilities that danced in dust. In green and purple clouds of immaculate wombs, a silent hymn sung life back into the universe. I watched in awe as the birth of more stars erupted in an endless sky. And as this happened, residue from the last generation of celestial objects spun into various rocks and ices, which created dozens of complex and diverse elements.
Soon solar systems formed, eventually leading to the Earth’s incarnation. My veins tightened. Blood chilled and grew thick like syrup. For the next tens of millions of years, showers of meteors, asteroids, and other such space debris bombarded Earth’s solar system and all of its planetary residents. And elements leaked from galactic wreckage, reacting differently to each heavenly body’s distinct environment, atmosphere, and temperature.
Then a titanic world between Earth and Venus was knocked loose from its orbit. From the Earth’s sky it could be seen emerging among burning storms of lava and stone. And the two planets collided. Huge lands and terrestrial chunks flew into the atmosphere. The Earth was now forced to a tilt on an axis because of the impact, and pieces of shattered worlds orbited around Earth until they conjoined to make our moon.
With the satellite’s presence in our sky and the Earth slightly tilted on its side, orbits slowed. Temperatures cooled down. Lava hardened and oceans flooded right through. Then a white flash blinded me for a moment and I could hear Ghoid’s voice whisper, “That was the Prophet.”
When the flash softened, I could suddenly see Earth infested with trees and ferns. Then these plants grew and spread and single-celled bacteria shaped within their roots. And those single cells soon separated. And the more they separated, the closer we grew toward witnessing an Earth where organisms had ruptured across its surface. Plants and animals were growing and spreading ceaselessly.
The next millions of years were dedicated to these animals’ new journey of simply finding ways to survive. And as this contest of evolution commenced, extinctions came and went. Eruptions of magma and collisions with interstellar rock burst at random intervals so, in response to fluctuating conditions, numerous species changed lifestyle patterns and shapes gradually. And then finally, I could see what resembled the early ancestors of humans. They lived in trees with hunched backs. Their heads were too big for them to be monkeys, but fur suggested otherwise. And soon enough, they were more human-like and roaming through hot African plains when another giant explosion clouded the sky and quieted footsteps.
All I saw afterwards was a blanket of ash before the vision became but a sporadic barrage of images from the collective memory of mankind. I could tell the age of the homo sapiens had arrived, but the story these images told didn’t make much sense. Most of the images merely portrayed people eating, shitting, getting sick, and having sex. There were also mastodon hunts and wars and cities getting built to fall down. But the chaotic rush of all of it was too much for me to grasp. I tried to watch for when Ghoid’s ancestors came to Earth in ancient history, but it was all moving so fast. I thought I saw a green-skinned figure with three eyes, but it vanished before I could see for certain. At last the hallucination twirled out of coherence to become a tornado of dizzying colors, shapes, and sounds…
And at last, when the whole thing was over, I awoke in my house. It was dark and empty. Ghoid had disappeared. But instead of fretting, I unexpectedly found that I was content with his absence. Some newfound intuition somehow knew he was okay. Whatever I had transformed into knew everything was going to be okay. The mind inside was acutely aware that all of existence was beautiful; in its right place. It was like I could finally understand who I was and where I belonged amongst the cosmos. Doubt had been evicted from the crawlspace in my mind…
I arose calmly and, for some unknown reason, entered the house’s bathroom to wash my face. I flicked on a light, catching my reflection in the mirror…
My face had three eyes now. Ghoid never let go of me. He had become me. We had become one in the same mind…
Everything felt different with three eyes.
Written by BW Derge, All Rights Reserved 2024
© USA
This was an excerpt from Laenif: Book One (2013), chapter four: The Birth of Insanity
