The Awakening

EDIT: Since the story makes for difficult reading without context, an introduction won't be out of place. However, as it's also been suggested that I do away with this, I'll let you guys choose. If a mindmelt is what you want, go ahead, skip this summary and jump right in. :) If not, I rather recommend this actually (that does not reflect well on the story, I know), read the summary first. It won't take away anything from the actual read.


The story follows the evolution of a human mind from nothingness to full and proper perception. The key question it asks is: is the mind all powerful to start off with, and only shackled by a desire for material perception? Can a mind break free of the illusory shackles that bind it and take back a little of the infinite power it once held? A background in philosophy should ease the reading a wee bit though.

He was trapped. Walls enclosed him from every side, and left barely enough space to stand up and stretch. He dragged his bruised and battered body to his feet, drew back an arm slowly and drove it fiercely forwards. The scabs on his fist tore open and a shapeless sticky redness imprinted itself on the wall. Pain shot through his arm and into his head, and an involuntary gasp escaped his throat. He ignored it, and repeated the motion with his other arm. More blood spattered over the wall. Only the slightest hesitation betrayed the numbing pain that coursed through his body, for he did not gasp before he struck the wall again. And again. And again.

First, there was the void.

The void was black – smooth and featureless, the ultimate reality that transcended everything, and nothing at the same time. The void could have been, for all time, but that was not its purpose. Awareness was inevitable, and awareness was chaos. It broke the omnipotent stillness of the void and by the mere fact of its own existence destroyed it. The fate of the void was non-existence, yet it was not. Awareness was inevitable, but the inevitability was presupposed by the void’s existence. What meaning could awareness hold, but for what could be measured against the supreme uniformity of the void? Awareness destroyed the void in so far that it could never perceive it, but the void lay safely beyond.

It was so bright that he could not see. He raised an arm to shield himself against it, but the light scorched it. At the same time the light seemed to have become brighter because the impenetrable sheath of whiteness that clouded his vision did not dim the slightest bit. He pulled out his other arm from where it had been supporting his back, and closed it over the first. It was quickly scorched too, and the light only became brighter. A bout of self pity swept over him, but only momentarily, and it was quickly replaced by anger: a hot, indignant rage that would only add to his pain. In a quick, furious motion, he uncovered his eyes. Agony, like nothing he had experienced thus far, ripped through his broken physical shell. He laughed, for that was the nature of the rage that possessed him. He laughed, for he thought he had won. Surely, his endurance was broken now? His eyes melted away, but the whiteness persisted. The light did not dim. His rage ebbed, and he resumed pounding on the walls.

Then there was awareness.

The void birthed it, and shaped its purpose, but it rejected the void and brooded on its limited caricature of the supreme stillness. The awareness was nothing but the something that was different from the void. It was blessed with the power of perception, but the void was imperceptible and the awareness was yet ignorant of change. The awareness, infinitely patient, waited. However, it did not really, because such an action implied the passage of time, and time itself was not born yet. The awareness simply was.

He sought relief in numbness, and after a long while, found it. It was not to last though. His shattered hands lay uselessly by his side, as he slumped in a corner of the room. He wanted to give up, but whoever was playing this game did not want it to end, because that was when the sound started. Calling the grinding, raking thrum that set the whole enclosure into minute oscillations a ‘sound’ was doing it a kindness. Blood seeped out of his ears. He attempted to stem the flow with his fingers and simultaneously block out the worst of the drone, but just as with the light, it was an exercise in sheer futility. The noise appeared to pick up, seemingly dissatisfied with its impact on the prisoner. It swelled and swelled and just when it rose to a crescendo, the man passed out.

 At long last arrived the first thought.

Any superficial resemblance to the void was lost with the beginning of change. There was a shift in the awareness, the minutest of fluxes in the infinity of stillness, and suddenly the awareness perceived itself. The first perception was more than just the first step towards its own fulfilment; it was also the first thought, and consequently, or perhaps induced by, the first change. The first thought allowed the awareness to realize its own presence, but it could never define itself as a thought. Its primacy was its curse. It was a mere abstraction, but nonetheless a significant marker in the evolution of the awakening. The birth of change implied the birth of time. The illusion of complementarity had not come into being yet, and they were one and the same. The awareness perceived time, but still could not reckon it.

When he woke up, the light was gone. Utter blackness veiled him like a shroud. The sound had ceased too, but it was replaced by an oppressive silence that sat heavily on his ears. He did not understand his perception. Was the price for a relieving numbness an unbreakable attachment to the torture that produced it? He tried to stand up and found out that he no longer could. Apparently, the ceiling had closed in even further while he was unconscious. Undeterred, he started to draw back his arm to punch the invisible black wall in front of him. Only halfway through his motion, he was forced to stop as acute pain jarred his elbow. The back wall had moved in too! He frantically turned his body to one side and groped for the wall that lay at right angles to the first. He barely had to move because it was right in front of him. The prison had shrunk from all sides and was now barely larger than a coffin. He withdrew to his corner and crouched there, sobbing.

The awareness revelled in its identity. It was now a mind, fully aware of itself and capable of reasoned perception. It was in perfect harmony, and the newly formed mind wove a thought to capture the essence of it. Pleasure. It suffused the mind and enriched it, and for a while there was peace. But thought is change, and change does not suffer equilibrium. The mind wondered about purpose. Suddenly, harmony was inadequate. The mind was curious, and the pleasure faded.

The first bout was the most painful because it struck when the mind least expected it. An unending array of somethings, entities born of change, but cloaked in pain, assailed the mind, and it could not make sense of them, and it reeled. The mind looked for the calming influence of the pleasure but it was nowhere to be found. The things seemed to burn away the very core of the nascent mind, and the awareness throbbed. The mind felt diminished. A wisp of thought wondered if this was what true perception felt like. It was quickly dispersed as the mind continued to shrink, swamped by a sense of inadequacy. There were limits, and the mind would know them. It knew them, and it was now dying.

Nothing remained of the event but the memory of something that countered the mind’s idea of pleasure. It called it anti-thought. Anti-thought, the mind quickly came to realize, was educative despite everything. It left behind a strong sense of incompleteness which forced the mind to step away from pleasure and seek enquiry. The mind questioned, and the mind waited. There were no answers forthcoming, and the mind understood that its suffering was only just beginning.

This time the mind was ready, but so was the anti-thought, because its assault was doubly ferocious. Almost instantly the mind felt itself compress to a tiny point. Walls raised themselves on all sides and the stifling feeling of inadequacy resumed its inexorable spread. Unfathomable entities sprung into existence but before the mind could perceive them, vanished, only to be replaced by others. The mind’s resolution to fight the anti-thought wavered as the deluge of stimuli battered it into numbness. Limits! They physically cleaved the infinite capacity of the mind. An unheard cry pulsed in the awareness, and the mind fragmented into many tiny pockets of perception. Each fragment fought the wash, lost, and fragmented again. And again. And again. The universe winked out of existence.

Time was born.

The mind was right. Not in the way it had expected because even after several occurrences of the anti-thought bouts, no thoughts from those periods had survived. There was only that sense of incompleteness, and the mind had by then learnt to use it to drive itself, convert it into a form of the primeval pleasure. No, it was right because the anti-thought had birthed time. The mind learnt to measure time by the intervals between the bouts, which it marked down as of fixed size. This process had made it realize the extent of its own history. Only dimly could it comprehend the vast tracts of time that had been spent in the pure state of unchanging awareness. A form of pleasure, frightening and exhilarating at the same time possessed it. Awe. Again, the mind wondered: Why?

A new thought formed itself. It started off as a hesitant flame in the darkness, but soon grew to illuminate the whole of the awareness. The mind believed that it finally understood what the anti-thought had been telling it all along. God. There must be God, because there was purpose and the awareness had none without a Creator. Perhaps purpose had been the First Thought because the mind clearly and distinctly understood it in an axiomatic way that precluded reasoning. The mind did not speculate on this strain, because it could not. It focussed itself on finding God.

Days turned into months, by the reckoning of the mind. Pleasure was rare and even when present was no more than a shadow of what it used to be. The mind was assailed by doubt. Long and hard had it tried to perceive a higher awareness, in vain. It accepted that if any such existed, it might be so different as to be imperceptible. But it rejected this thought on the basis that its own Creator could not be imperceptible, for that would be purposeless. Still, it could not feel anything. However, in the process of the search, the mind had discovered something else.

Numbers.

The mind’s search for another awareness implied that its own was merely one of many, but it never developed a thought to specifically study the idea. The void was one, and minds were many, but what about the awareness? There either really were many kinds of awareness that were mutually incompatible, drifting like bubbles in the ultimate void, their powers of perception limited to their spheres of influence; or there was only one awareness, reflected perfectly by each of its children, only differentiated by the effects of time. The mind eventually hit upon the thought of multiplicity, and with it, found itself an identity.

The pleasure was almost totally gone, and the slow rot of stagnation had set in. He refused to embrace purposelessness and continued to seek the higher awareness, which if it did exist, deigned not to answer. The questions had dried up, and the curiosity that had sparked the search was nearly extinguished. What use was awareness, what use was perception, if they could not allow the mind to find its Creator? The mind was unaware of it, but he was dying.

It was a new thought that temporarily broke through the weariness. The Creator had forged my awareness, but had he stopped there? A personal God did not make much sense, because it could easily be reduced to an abstraction, a thought itself. So there must be other minds like my own, created by my Creator to be at the same plane of perception as me. He could perhaps, by continuing his meditations and focussing his thoughts contact one of them. He had no idea what he would do different to what he had been doing all along in his pursuit of God, but the renewed sense of purpose filled him with vigour and he knew he would not die.

When he eventually awoke from the brink of death, he asked mockingly, to no one in particular, what they could possibly do now that they had thrown everything at him and he had still not died. When he opened his eyes, he found his answer, and the rumbling laughter that had threatened to break free of his throat changed into a gurgle and died. The light was back, but it was not too bright. The sound was back, but it was soothing and mellifluous now. The walls had moved back to a luxurious spacing, and his eyes were whole again. His back had straightened itself, and the scabs were gone from his knuckles and elbows. A furious scream rent the tranquil air as frustration and rage swept over the prisoner. This was how it had all started. Everything was the same except for the memories in his head. They wanted him to do it all over again, and again, for all eternity. Death was no solace, for they would never let him have it.

This time’s bout was different. His thinking skills had advanced to a degree where he could now project thoughts to study earlier thoughts, and they told him that something had changed. Perhaps the Creator had tired of his futile hunt for other minds, and was offering him the hope of a new way. But if it was the work of His hand, it did not outwardly seem so, for it carried no pleasure at all. He probed at the new sensation. Constriction. He felt a weight settle on his mind that he could not shake off through any amount of meditation. He felt defiled, and scarred. Somehow his mind was now touched by a disease and he had no idea how to cure it. It was weakened, bounded by limits imposed by the anti-thought which he could not remember.

His mind was fragmenting. The pursuit of God, which he had never totally abandoned despite his shift towards equal minds, came to a grinding halt as the mind split into more and more shards of perception that strove for their own independent existence. He tried to formulate a single, overbearing thought that would shut down all the rebellious threads, but for each thread of thought he put out, another quickly arose to take its place. He did not know it, but this breakdown was just another step in the evolution. All he did understand was that the deterioration was not total. There appeared to be threads of thought dedicated to keeping alive strains of pleasure, the effects of which bubbled up to soothe his awareness. Such instances of positivity were mere trifles however, compared to the lavish gift one stray thread would bestow upon him.

How had the unfragmented mind, infinitely more powerful than the smoky insubstantiality of its multipart cousin, not chanced upon this idea? It was beautiful, because it was simple and explained everything it ventured answers for. The thought concerned the existence of perceptibles, things that exist solely to be perceived, and lack the power of perception themselves. If the purpose of the awareness was not to seek others of its own ilk, then surely there existed other entities whose sole purpose was to be perceived by the mind? They too would have to be creations of the same Creator, co-existing harmoniously in the sphere of influence the awareness wielded. They would, more importantly to him, serve another purpose. They would, by the mere fact of their existence, confirm the infinite superiority of the Creator. If the Creator was just another form of the awareness, birthing lesser awarenesses through thought, how was I different from Him? No one but Him could create the perceptibles.

At that point, for the first time in the evolution, a strain of thought speculated on the pre-ordained nature of the state changes the awareness was going through. Perhaps, the little thought thread ruminated, it’s only at a certain point on the stream of evolution that the mind attains the right set of attributes to perceive the perceptible.  That thought was however not brought to fruition, as it was cut short by the arrival of another anti-thought bout.

The bouts seemed to happening more frequently now. On the face of it, the dominant thread in his mind concluded, this was a ridiculous observation. The mind’s whole idea of time was based on the periodicity that marked the onset of those bouts, the consistency of the periodicity. Since he had no way of confirming this yardstick, he really should have no way of knowing if the bouts were occurring closer together. But the thought lingered, like a recalcitrant child that sneakily evades the adults looking to discipline it. He concluded reluctantly that it was not impossible that there was another measure of change he was yet ignorant of.

Then there were colours.

He could not recollect the exact moment when they had manifested themselves, but he vividly recalled his reaction. Pleasure. A tidal wave of it washed away months of grit left behind by the anti-thought in an instant. The wash of colours was all around him, and he knew, as clearly as he knew Him, that these colours were what he was meant to perceive all along.  A moment’s regret at the inordinate amount of time it had taken him to realize this fact was quickly smoothed over, as the dance of colours caressed his mind’s eye. These were the perceptibles, and in them he saw his Creator.

He was in a room with smooth, featureless walls on all sides. A soft light illuminated the space evenly, and mellifluous notes filled the air. He was in great danger, but he did not know it yet. His mind had assumed a form. He looked at his limbs in wonder. He stroked his eyes and ears, and felt the soft fluffy hair that covered the crown of his head. Then, suddenly, with no warning, his mind snapped out of the delirium. Where were the colours?

The colours were gone. He could not see them anywhere, and immediately he knew that the form that cloaked his mind, and the alluring beauty of it was what had banished them. Limits! He understood now the ultimate purpose of the anti-thought, and he rejected it. His mind would not be shackled by anything. He searched in vain for the slightest hint of colour, which he could nurture and grow till it destroyed his flimsy husk, but there was nothing. He was trapped! The helplessness of his situation reduced him to tears. He pounded the walls in frustration.

Things were moving along quicker now. Change had become a constant. He remembered parts of what had happened during the last bout. He remembered that something had locked the power of his mind into an eternal prison, but he could not remember what it was and how it had done it. Fear corrupted his many threads of thought, and the colours which had come to tinge every one of them dimmed. If he had truly understood the purpose of the awareness, then why was the anti-thought still bothering him? There was more, and now there was a deadline. He believed that the latest bout, which told him of the meaning of inadequacy, was a premonition; of a future that would come to be if he did not answer the questions posed by the anti-thought.

The room was alive. It promised him pleasure, an unlimited quantity of it, if only he gave up on his pretensions to greatness. His mind was not being shackled, it was being freed from the tyranny of eternity. Limits and boundaries were to pleasure what the void was to the awareness. It could not sustain itself without them. The white walls soothed his eyes, and the harmonious music warmed his mind. The light! How powerful it was, and yet so gentle. Slowly, but surely it drew the mind into its dominion, a cursed land whence nothing returned. Why would it? Unparalleled beauty would bathe the senses, every day of the week and every minute of the day. Yet, a lone strain of thought resisted, and befouled the rosy perfection of the room. If great pleasure did indeed lie ahead in the path of the room, then why did the anti-thought drain all of it in the first place? The stubborn little thought took refuge in its own insignificance, and weaved back and forth like a feather, eluding the grasp of the anti-thought.

He had come to perceive time acutely. The mind resolved divisions in time a thousand times finer than the interval that separated bouts, and had so mastered their nature that it no longer depended on the anti-thought to synchronize its workings. He knew that the evolution of the awakening was nearly at an end, he knew that his greatest thought still lay ahead of him, and he knew that he had little time to find it. Progress was slow, as his mind continued to fragment unceasingly, but he at least understood now that the colours were insufficient to capture everything about the perceptibles. He had come to believe that the resolution of this problem would be his salvation.

What was the nature of the interaction between the perceptibles? Did they interact at all? If yes, could he perceive them, or at any rate some manifestation of their symptoms?  He was so close, but the final answer eluded him. Meanwhile a large portion of the awareness devoted itself to pessimism. The next bout could be his last, because he had only just survived the last one. He had no time! He forced a few errant threads to join his meditation on the nature of the perceptibles, and was immediately hit by an anti-thought attack.

Sound was the key.

He accepted that one way or the other, that bout had been his last. His mind had shrunk significantly, and the process of constriction was already underway, perhaps irrevocably. Innumerable threads of thought evaporated in an instant, as their environment suddenly turned inhospitable, as if poisoned. His mind was dying, but the dominant thought in it was, after a long time, pleasure. He believed that the anti-thought had miscalculated. By wiping out vast groups of thoughts, it had streamlined the mind and focussed it, and produced almost immediate results. The perceptibles were the key, as he already knew, but he had underestimated their importance. He had assumed that the multiplicity of minds would apply to them too, because a perceptible was lesser than a mind, but the reality was otherwise. The perceptibles were one; rather they formed a unique set which was similarly perceptible by all minds. Therefore they formed a bridge between minds, and allowed for the communication he had sought in vain.

When the music switched itself on, he knew it was over. The colours that had faded away in the aftermath of the initial burst of perception, returned in full bloom, and they were mingled with melody. Innumerable streaks and patterns of various hues and differing brightness, but all equally and intensely perfect, rode the song tide like a gentle wave, and washed away the long hurt of the mind. He remembered clearly now the room of the anti-thought, and he laughed at the jealous imitations that he had thought beautiful. The world sang to him, and it was wonderful. 

I've decided to move submission history and other assorted trivia to the bottom because it's cluttering up the top and slowing down the people who actually want to get to the story. Also, writing about rejects before the story itself is a bit much for me to swallow. :)

EDIT: This story has been submitted to several markets, but nothing's come of it. I'll definitely link to the published story once (I won't say if) it happens.