#17
Science Fiction

Great thoughts are prisons between the worlds. Most of our expectations are just such great thoughts. Take, for example, the expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. Apart from the illusory appearance of our sun climbing up out of the underworld, there is the deeper illusion of time. Einstein rode a light beam a century ago right through that mirage.

If we were to get free of these expectations and escape the prison of illusion, where would we find ourselves? Riding a photon in Einstein's mind, we've learned that reality is instantaneous. The World of Light has no boundaries whatsoever. All is one. In the World of Light.

But not here. We are fallen from heaven, exiled from the domain of pure energy at the moment of the big bang. We exist far from the One, among the Many, where matter, time and space contour experience. What is this place?

It is consciousness. We have fallen awake. What we see around us, everything we experience, things and action, the whole world, all the way to the quasars, is located in our awareness and nowhere else.

The strong Anthropic Principle is the doorway out of the prison of expectation. Once outside, we wander in an energetic creation where everything is constantly changing within the ever-present context of consciousness. Welcome to the World of Action.

Let's write a short story about this identity between the unchanging World of Light and the ever-changing World of Action. We'll call it "Begin Being". What do you think? An anagrammatic title that joins together Action and Light in two words and also conveys their sameness. I think we've got a title, a useful charm to have when looking for a story.

Concept and title imply that this is a story about identity and the ontological necessity of defining oneself through action. Perhaps it concerns merging light and action into enlightened action. That’s a behavior weird and unusual for sapiens, and therefore well within the outré range of science fiction!

Creative writing is a way of finding oneself outside the limits of other people's expectations, beyond the prison walls of great thoughts, where the horizon of imagination runs free to forever. Yet, for all its freedom, writing constrains. And not just with the perverse bondage of sentence and form. Anyone who has tried to write anything, even a grocery list, encounters the defining limits of the self. The self fits words to the page with the same ineluctability as magnetic force arranges iron filings. Light and action share equivalency, and a writer is no different from what is written.

Neither does the sun rise nor the clock have hands.

This is the writer in the World of Action, striving for the World of Light and falling hard into the emptiness of the page.

Begin being.

Write!