Last month, Liza and I went to a ceremony. It was held at nighttime in the dimly lit basement of a semi-secluded mountain retreat, surrounded in its immediate vicinity by forest trees but still close enough to a major road to hear the occasional rumble of distant cars.
Truth be told, Liza and I were plenty skeptical at first. We balked at the cost, until the friend who told us about it reassured us that this is actually a reasonable price for the weeklong meditation retreats he’s been to. We knew it was called a “ceremony” in the description, but we figured that must just be how they dress this event up for marketing purposes. I personally was put off by the lengthy eight-part application process wherein you had to explain in detail the challenges you’ve faced in life, the events along the way that have transformed you into the person you currently are, how you currently take care of your physical health, specific examples of the techniques you use to manage stress, etc. I mean, what the hell is this, a college application? Why do I need to prove myself to these people?
Then came an email informing us that we had been accepted, and that we should avoid all that brings us joy in life for at least a few weeks before the ceremony. No red meat, no processed foods, no food with seasoning, strong flavors, or even excessive oil. No alcohol or other substances, no caffeine, no dairy, no carbonated beverages, no sex or any strong emotional engagements. Oh and do practice meditation and do bring white clothes to wear at the ceremony. What the fuck is this, some hippie-dippie cult shit where we purify our bodies by avoiding all the things that make life in the modern world tolerable? I mean, it’s cool if that’s your jam, it’s just that it’s not really ours. We’re avowed hedonists through and through, here to actually enjoy our time on earth rather than maximizing our lifespans to the point of dullness.
But as it turns out, it really is all about The Ceremony. The whole event, with all its yoga, breathwork, meditation, ice bath, qigong, and sound bath workshops, is truly geared towards its focal point of The Ceremony. A week may seem a long time, but once it begins, you realize that it genuinely is the shortest amount of time you can jam in all those preparatory workshops without making The Ceremony feel unduly rushed. The Ceremony is sacred, and rushing it would not be giving it the reverence it is due.
Yes, The Ceremony is sacred. This is one thing the friend who introduced us couldn’t have warned us about, because they themselves have never been to a retreat quite like this one. If you are not ready to prostrate yourself and kiss the ground in awe of The Ceremony, if you are not ready to honor it with the utmost respect and the deepest veneration, do not come, because it is not for you.
The Ceremony is the whole point. You are joined in this Ceremony by participants from all over the world. Each of you may well have come here for your own personal reasons, but what you have come for is The Ceremony. Including the team of facilitators, you are some thirty odd souls embarking on their own personal journeys aboard the ship that is The Ceremony. If what you are looking for is a primarily individual experience, do not come, because it is not for you.
The Ceremony is sacred, and you will honor it by attending it to the best of your abilities, with the truest of your intentions. If you, like Liza on her first day, do not care for The Ceremony, you have the choice of recusing yourself from the room, for empty platitudes and soulless physical attendance do not honor The Ceremony. But before you do so, ask yourself just once: Is the best way for you to honor The Ceremony really by leaving, or is it by staying and exploring your urge to flee? That was when I finally understood that the lengthy eight-part application was there to screen out all those who might be frat boys seeking a good party. There’s nothing wrong with being such a person looking for such an event; The Ceremony is simply not it.
I used to believe that nothing is inherently imbued with sacredness. Even the holiest of religious artifacts are but mere physical objects that serve as arbitrary Schelling points for humans to congregate around. Sanctity exists in the soul of the beholder, not in the physical object itself. That is still my personal belief. But for other natural skeptics like myself, let me offer this: Thirty-something of you have come from all around the globe for the express purpose of making this particular site on these particular days the Schelling spacetime coordinates for a holy Ceremony. The only sacred things are the ones we arbitrarily choose to sanctify — so suspend your disbelief and arbitrarily choose to sanctify this, damn it! You are free to return to the world of the profane if you so wish to after The Ceremony, but for now you have voluntarily exited that old world and entered the world of the sacred.
The Ceremony is split up into three sessions across three consecutive nights. It involves the application of various poisons, all of which your body will violently reject:
- Poison will be dabbed onto your skin, which your body rejects via a fiercely red rash. This was the first of the poisons, and one I had declined because I did not realize the funny-sounding name was that of a poison, or else I would have gladly tried it out in a safe environment. I cannot speak to the effects of this poison, but some participants fainted from it.
- Poison will be blown up your nose, which your body rejects via mucus and phlegm. This poison gives you a splitting headache; at one point, I knocked on my own skull to try to ease the pain.
- Poison will be dripped onto your eyes, which your body rejects via tears. This poison opens your third eye; my copious tears diluted it such that I only felt more awake and alert than usual, but another participant successfully opened their third eye, just to bear witness to horrific scenes of demons copulating in the bathroom. If you should ever find yourself in such a situation, know that proper procedure is to talk to the demons and show them genuine love and compassion. They cannot harm you unless you let them.
- The main poison you will drink yourself, which your body rejects via vomit or diarrhea. The disgusting sound of retching starts early and continues throughout the entirety of each night. Every person is seated in their own cot, next to which a wastebasket has been thoughtfully placed for easy barf access. By the end of The Ceremony, you’ll have developed a refined taste for what a good hearty archetypal retch sounds like.
As the shaman explained, the first night cuts your psyche open, the second consists of major surgery to realign your internals, and the third sews you back up. In this way, the poison ends up becoming medicine. It is necessary to go through all three nights of The Ceremony in order for the process to work, and you need to trust the process. It will not be an easy process, but leaving in the middle of The Ceremony would be tragic.
The First Night
The primary poison is served in the candle-lit basement by a semicircle of facilitators. The first night, you are given an entire cup of the poisonous concoction to drink. On subsequent nights, you get to choose the extent to which you wish to be poisoned. Once everyone has been served their individual cup of poison, all remaining candles are put out save for the tiny ones next to the basement pillars. These tiny candles mark the positions of the pillars so that you can avoid colliding with them on your way to the bathroom, and use them as navigation aids on your way back to your cot. The basement gets so dark at this stage that you can’t even see your own hands in front of you until your eyes fully adjust. This is where the aforementioned white shirts come in handy, to allow you to see each other in the dark as well. It was the first time I realized that this was actually a superbly organized event, with mundane rules that come to reveal their own practicality.
Before you ingest your poison, you state to it the questions you have come to The Ceremony with. I don’t mean surface-level questions such as, “What is this thing all about?” I mean the reasons why you are at a point in your life where you find yourself consuming poison with thirty other strangers in the murky depths of a tucked away basement. Pray tell, what answers have you come to seek at The Ceremony? Mine were of course:
- Why am I fighting with myself so much?
- How can I get to better understand myself?
and a third one that I tacked on at the last minute:
- How might I feel more connected to humanity?
Your intentions are your ticket to The Ceremony. You drop them off at the door and pay them no mind afterwards.
After ingesting the poison, you sit for a while in the dark until the shaman starts making a rustling noise. More sounds elegantly enter the scene in succession, until you realize the team is breaking into song just as your own vision conjures up vivid geometry. Suddenly the basement is awash with a melodic resonance that basks in the vibrant colors of the jungle! The Ceremony comes to life as its own short-lived but distinct entity in this universe.
This is where I must say The Ceremony treats you like — and in turn expects you to be — an adult. The facilitators may be playing live music, but they are doing so in service of The Ceremony, not you. They are not entertainers, here to make you happy. They are not the hotel staff, here to make sure you’re having a good vacation in this country. They are here for one thing only, and that is The Ceremony. You begin to realize that The Ceremony expects you to perform loud bodily functions in the bathroom whenever possible, but you find that it is not always possible to escape in time, and so you in turn understand that the cacophony of others is similarly involuntary. You are all adults here; you execute your adult duties as best you can, and you give others space to do the same.
You find yourself drawn into the group collective consciousness. You realize without it being said that you are meant to join in on the rich tapestry of sounds draped over the entire room. The team had told us there would be music, but I hadn’t realized they would be performing it live themselves. It finally became clear why the facilitators are not entertainers: there is no audience to entertain. You are not an audience member, you are just another active participant in The Ceremony. It is a different sort of musicking than is traditional in consumer capitalism. You are an adult trusted to know when to chime in and when to back off so that you too can take in the energy others are feeding into this acoustic orgy inside the network of interlinked Ceremonial consciousness that Liza would come to term the “Wi-Fi.” The music draws you further and further in until you are no longer even deciding when or what to contribute. You have become nothing more than another mouthpiece for the song that is currently emanating into the room, the song that has decided to pay The Ceremony a visit.
As you continue to experiment with different sounds, you find that even your minor lip-smacking and swallowing noises have their volume amped way up. They bounce around your head as if it were a massive echo chamber, allowing you to truly listen to yourself like you never have before. This adds yet another dimension to the experience, as you now get to layer your own private track on top of the group harmonies while gazing out at the rest of The Ceremony from inside a private booth of your own vivid magical wonderland.
The thought came to me that “This is what genius is capable of.” I have my own troubled history with that label, so I don’t wish to foist it upon any member of the humble team who does not feel like it serves them. I use that verbiage only because it is the strongest signal I know of to tell someone like me who harkens from a tech and academic background, “Pay attention. What I’m about to tell you is important.” What I mean to convey is that these are deeply talented individuals who demonstrate an astonishing mastery over the art of crafting The Ceremony. It’s not just their skill at singing and music playing (although I will have to say that despite their acknowledgment that they were no more than a channel for higher beings to play the music through, the gods themselves could not have asked for finer human instruments). No, it’s also how they know to pair the music with the various poisons, how their numerous but concise instructions guide you very effectively into full immersion, and how the various rules and workshops were designed to minimize practical impediments and maximize biological receptiveness to The Ceremony. After all, The Ceremony still takes place in the physical realm, and the physical realm demands its due of practical considerations before the heavens are allowed to descend.
It is for a similar reason that they confiscate your phones before The Ceremony. It is primarily to prevent distracting or embarassing contact with the outside world while under the effects of the poison, but it also serves to eliminate the possibility of any evidence of The Ceremony surviving the event. You see, the spirit world enjoys a sense of plausible deniability, a winking playfulness in the style of Bill Murray’s french fries wherein all you have left after the fact is a story that no one will believe. You absolutely can, if you so wish, see the whole event as nothing more than an episode of mass psychosis, as those seeking a pattern in the noise find one and hold it up to be the God of the gaps. After all, no laws of physics are being broken, nor theorems of mathematics violated. If you wish to strip all the magic away, as is your right, then you will see that this is nothing more than an ordinary meatspace get-together. But should you permit the magic to remain, should you allow for even a modicum of suspension of disbelief, then you will have the honor of entering a grand Ceremony where the spirits, demons, angels, gods and goddesses of the land intermingle freely with the mortals, where implausible synchronicities dance and flirt with you before leaving you in disbelief.
The first time I left for the bathroom, I discovered that it was a major challenge to get back to my cot in the nearly pitch black room. Here again I got to appreciate earlier instructions to count which pillar your cot was closest to, and to note the position of your cot in relation to that pillar. I had done that, but also figured that it would be even easier to mark my position relative to the center “stage,” which was really just where the cots for the team were clustered around. But on my very first trip back from the bathroom, I quickly realized that the “stage” was no longer visible at all in the dark; it really was just the tiny candlelights next to each pillar that could serve as major points of reference, and with no other identifying markings, you had to count to find the pillar for your cot.
After the poison worked its way into my body, I eventually felt a slight urge to go to the bathroom again. I knew that you were encouraged to go sooner rather than later, so that you don’t wait until it becomes necessary. Yet when I tried to work myself up to go, I found that I dreaded the task ahead of me. From my initial experiences heading to the bathroom, I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy task. Moreover, the wintery cold mountain air that permeated the basement made the journey quite physically unpleasant as well. This was exactly the kind of situation that I fucking detested with all my being: needing to force myself to do something that I seriously don’t want to do.
But then I realized that as an adult in a non-emergency situation, I get to choose when and where to fight my battles. I can trust myself to know when I need a break. I can trust myself to know when I’m ready. I can trust myself to make decisions, because I can trust myself to make mistakes, because I can trust myself to learn from my mistakes. No longer was I fleeing from responsibility with a mixture of fear and loathing, only to be cornered eventually and press-ganged into submission, looking to flee from the scam compound the very first chance I got. No, now the time had come for me to discharge the grave responsibility of paying a visit to the toilet before all hell broke loose, and I hereby decreed that I would take a moment to collect myself so that I may make the journey in a manner of inner peace and fortitude. My decision was final. So this is what it feels like to be empowered, a feeling that if I had once known, I had long since forgotten in my time being buffeted about like a Brownian particle by societal forces beyond my control.
This was the key to interpreting the rest of the night. There had been whispers and rumors of a mysterious “Mother” figure that might come visit you during The Ceremony, and I found myself trembling at her hallowed presence, hoping she would stop by my private booth. For what reasons, I could not myself articulate, save that it would feel very personally meaningful to me to actually meet a higher being after my past history with Jesus Christ. I whimphered “Oh Lord Jesus Amen, Oh Lord Jesus Amen, Oh Lord Jesus Amen!” even though I wasn’t even praying to Jesus, simply because those were the most accessible words of devotion within my reach, a well that’s been drilled deep into my soul since childhood that still readily draws up bucketfuls of the most sincere piety despite over a decade of disuse. I had found in The Mother a deity that I was willing to follow and dedicate the rest of my life to.
I found myself worshipping at the altar of love with Liza. But it was time for her to leave. NO! Have all our years together meant absolutely nothing?! Once upon a time, I had blithely told her that I loved her so much, I wanted what was best for her even if it wasn’t me. That was early on, when there wasn’t as much at stake as the life we’ve built together since. Alas, such exhortations were of no use, as our time together was only ever meant to be a temporary thing. Ah, heartbreak and exes! I remembered the first time I was introduced to the altar of love by my ex. Oh, how I will cross the oceans to get her back by my side. It will be a long, difficult, and unrewarding journey, because to be an adult means enduring all hardships that come your way without any expectation of reward. Ah, but the entire swaths of oceans that lay between us… my ex was so, so terribly far away, as far away as the toilets were by now. I gave up.
I gave up on all of it. I gave up on being an adult if that was what it took to be an adult. I gave up on being alive if that meant being an adult. My mother rebuked me, 「你噉唔得㗎。你再噉落去死梗㗎！」 (“You can’t be like this. Continuing down this path is going to kill you!”) I told my mother that it’s okay. Not all hatchlings end up making it. It’s not your fault ma, it’s just how life is.
And so I left my ego and entered a sequence where I started visiting every single corner of the fractal universe. Every single perspective that had ever been inhabited by any living being had to be visited in turn. It is an unfathomably large number, to be sure, but it is not infinite, perhaps not even as big as Graham’s number. I was the European colonizers, bravely staking my claim in an uncertain and hostile environment. I was the natives they genocided, trying every strategy for survival from aggression to appeasement and still failing against this alien invasion, but managing to at least preserve the sacred tradition that is The Ceremony. I was the Japanese running Unit 731 in the solemn quest for knowledge in service of national survival in the face of great danger. I was their human experiments, butchered into forms that I would shudder to look at like that one scene in The Substance, saved only by the lack of a mirror accessible to me. I was David Parker Ray, gleefully demonstrating complete power over the sexy girls I had kidnapped, tortured, killed, and raped with my partner, daughter, friends, and dog. I was his victims, undergoing the five stages of grief alone as I experienced the complete subjugation and degradation of my spirit, will, and body, my screams and tears of indescribable melancholy met with laughter and mockery.
I was a younger Amos visiting a local fishing spot in Taiwan, spearing and grilling a shrimp alive and watching nonchalantly as it flailed wildly at first, until its movements gradually subsided and its transformation into a tasty snack was complete. I was the shrimp, put through indescribable agony and wondering with my dying thoughts what manner of Eldritch horror of evil incarnate lay behind those unblinking eyes that watched my torment with such mirth. I was a loving and caring father enjoying a succulent Chinese meal of homemade three cup chicken with my family, proud of my role as an upstanding member of my community dutifully playing my humble part in the great societal struggle against entropy. I was the chicken he ate, born and raised indoors in an automated factory where I never got to see the sun or sky my entire life, caged in such cramped and crowded conditions I never once got to properly spread my wings, chronically depressed yet debeaked so that I cannot take out my frustrations on others, slaughtered thoughtlessly once I had laid all the eggs I was made to unnaturally lay, descended from a long line of ancestors that had been genetically bred to grow the tastiest body that humans could enjoy devouring, leaving behind generations upon generations of descendants who will forever be nothing more than Humanity’s meat slaves, my only salvation a certain level of ignorance over the full extent of the hopelessness I ought to feel.
I was a mosquito, the most detested of life forms, so detested that even devout Buddhists will declare that I have lost all rights normally afforded to living beings. I was a pedophile, the most detested of human beings, so detested that the sorts of people who used to secretly worry that they were homosexuals deep down (back when homosexuals were the most stigmatized) are now the sorts of people who secretly worry that they are me deep down. I was a murderer, blood still fresh on the knife that I had just massacred my entire family with, aghast with the realization of what I’d done and filled with dread at the ticking time bomb of eventual arrest and capture by the authorities. Don’t you understand? You cannot truly understand somebody until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes, until you’ve fully embodied their false perspectives as true ones. Do you see now the true cost of understanding? Stop trying to understand it all. Just stop. Stop. Trying. To. Understand.
I found that I could not stop voluntarily. I am a programmer by trade, and my mind seemed hard-wired to try to make sense of anything befuddling it came across. No matter. Soon, fast-paced kaleidoscopic animations clawed apart my mind. The hemispheres of my brain had involuntarily ceased communication, splitting my vision into two separate displays, each with their own brilliant explosions of impossible colors and shapes. I cackled incomprehensibly like a madman. What else was there to do in the face of such infinite absurdities?
When I came to, I could see what these all were: False visions, such false visions! In what world would it make sense to abandon Liza in order to chase after my ex, someone whom I haven’t been on speaking terms with for years now? That was simply absolute hogwash of the highest order. Dedicating the rest of my life in service of a mysterious “Mother” figure that I never got to meet who didn’t even have any associated lore? What an utterly absurd proposition this was! The poison may give you fantastically lurid sensations, but these are clearly false sensations that do nothing for your actual real life.
And yet, in the days and weeks after that night, I came to realize there’s another interpretation to be had. If the detailed brush strokes of these Post-Impressionist visions were unambiguously false, the emotions they depicted were unambiguously real. So this is what it feels like to be in heartbreak, a feeling that I had once known but long since forgotten. There are of course practical considerations to be had when considering ending a long-term relationship, especially when kids are involved. But practical concerns aside, preserving the dead husk of a relationship is a spiritually meaningless act if the hearth has already gone cold. The pain of heartbreak is a stark reminder that true love, like true fire, can die out when improperly maintained. I should dearly appreciate praying at the altar of love with Liza, to give our thanks to Elmossy, the relationship that warms both of our hearts.
(Early on in our relationship, we decided to give it the name of “Elmossy,” because a relationship is its own cybernetic organism with its own behaviors, feedback loops, internal stores of goodwill and patience, and homeostasis that is separate from either of its members. Seen in this light, disagreements are not a matter of who’s right or wrong, but are instead a matter of organism health. Perceptions are not reality, but phantom pain is still pain; if you perceive there to be a problem, then there is a problem, but that doesn’t imply anything about who, if anyone, or what, if anything, needs to change. Matters of system integrity aren’t about assigning blame, but about how the challenges posed by legitimate individual needs could be surmounted by you as a team, by the relationship itself as a living and breathing organism.
We named Elmossy because as humans, giving a name to things helps reify them. You can have the same two people, but introduced together under a different context, with their interactions developed inside a different environment, and they’ll have a different dynamic, a different relationship between themselves, like identical twins reared apart that are uncannily similar in ways but ultimately still their own distinct individuals. Liza and I are grateful for this current dynamic that exists between us, that has grown and adapted over the years even as we ourselves have grown and adapted as individuals.
A momentary gust of freezing air swoops down. The flames of Elmossy flicker and sputter about, as if unsure on whether or how to recover, before perking back up to a lively dancing blaze. How long will this lovely sight last for? No matter; we take good care of Elmossy today, and it in turn takes good care of us. And if one day Elmossy should end up dying a natural death before either of us do, I trust we’ll be adult enough to scatter its ashes in a proper burial, to honor all that it’s meant to us in this phase of our lives when it is clearly the right thing to be a part of, to honor all it’s done for our personal growth to the point where it’s time for both of us to move on. Was the fall of Rome an unmitigated disaster, or mere change and continuity? Perhaps both narratives can be picked out from the historical data like different frequencies picked out from a Fourier transform; perhaps our personal historiographies can also encompass more than one valid perspective, to be interpreted and re-interpreted according to our growing understanding of ourselves.)
The religious imagery was a reminder of the devotion that I once held for Jehovah, a sensation that I could return to if I so wished by picking a god and praying, be it at the altar of love, creativity, or simple tranquility. The imagery of adulthood being unfulfilling and a path to depression and suicide, a reminder that part of becoming an adult is giving up childish attachments to what others say “adulthood” means. The visits to every corner of the fractal universe, a reminder that all other living beings experience qualia as I do, a reminder that all evolved survival instincts and reflexes are trauma responses deeply embedded into our DNA, a reminder that I am that Eldritch horror, not out of malice but simply out of ignorance. I have caused hurt, and hurt will in turn be effected upon me, not out of karmic malice but simply because life naturally shakes out that way sometimes. The exhortation to stop trying to understand, a reminder that The Ceremony, and life in general, is ultimately something to be experienced in its entirety without necessarily being understood; you’re never going to completely figure it all out, so you may as well get used to living with unsolved challenges. Should these not appear to be the obvious conclusions you’d draw from such imagery, you are of course free to substitute your own. After all, the Author is dead, and we have killed him.
There were yet other visions that were much more clearly interpretable as allegories. There was the vision of myself hatching as a newborn chick, gasping for my first sweet breaths of air as I crawled out of my shell. So this is what it feels like to be bursting with life, ready to grow big and see what adventures this world has to offer. There was the vision of chick me ready to sing my song for all the forest to hear, and Mama Bird shushing me and telling me to bide my time, for my part in the symphony had not yet arrived. So this is what it feels like to be inspired, to have a creative upwelling I have not experienced in ages until I saw for myself the sort of enchanting experience that creativity channeled through well-honed outlets could engender in someone. Even the dialed up echo chamber effect revealed itself as an allegory for how I shouldn’t expect matters of obvious significance to me, such as this essay you are reading, to sound like anything more than a whisper in the wind to that great Orchestra of life; an allegory for how I can sing a loud and beautiful song for myself even if it’s not a song that anyone else can hear over the noise.
Such was my first night of The Ceremony. If this was supposed to cut me open for surgery, then the incision made was a large gaping gash across the entire length of my torso, which does fittingly sound like just the way I would approach surgery if I were a god who could do no harm.
The Conversation
Right after the first night of The Ceremony, before we went to bed, Liza brought up her perception of the modern rationalist movement, about how the “Reddit bro” energy of trying to determine the precise veracity of propositional statements is not always a good fit for every situation, especially social ones involving people sharing their own lived experiences. I explained that, at least from my perspective from the time I spent crashing on the couch of a rationalist home in London, “rationalism” is about systematized “winning,” in the sense that whatever your objectives are, rationalism is about how you might most effectively reach them. It is not about blindly applying a preset combination of tools to a generic situation, dusting your hands off and saying, “Welp, I applied rationality, and that was that.” No, if your goal in a situation such as The Ceremony is to connect with the other humans there, then nitpicking and questioning their every perception of the ethereal is expressly not a very rational thing to do.
Lo and behold, at brunch the next morning, I had a most peculiar conversation with a fellow participant. The conversation had somehow taken a turn where this fellow naturally brought up the example of waiting at a slot machine until previous players had racked up enough losses, and swooping in to claim the overdue win for yourself. They explained that this works because the slot machines have to hit their payout odds. I pushed back on this. There is of course the fact that software-based slot machines are pseudo-random rather than truly random, but you are not going to be exploiting the flaws in a pseudo-random number generator with such an unsophisticated attack. There are certainly cases here and there of programmers slipping in backdoors to secretly rig the results for themselves, and perhaps there has even been at some point in history a casino sleazy enough to operate in such a manner. But the laws of probability are such that there is simply no need for a casino to stoop to such lows in order to turn a massive profit.
This fellow clarified that it wasn’t just slot machines that do this, but table games and even coin flips — if a coin lands heads up five times in a row, it must have a higher chance of landing tails next because it has to adhere to the overall 50-50 chance it has of landing heads or tails. Now that was unambiguously classic gambler’s fallacy, because we were no longer debating the implementation details of slot machines but rather the very laws of probability theory. I asked if they had taken an introductory course in probability theory, so as to gauge their level of familiarity with the subject, but I realize in retrospect this must have come across as an appeal to the authority of the High Priesthood of Academia. The fellow answered affirmatively, and after I repeated to them what the gambler’s fallacy was, they confirmed that they had indeed learned about it in class. So then I was naturally curious as to how they went about invalidating what they were taught in class about the proof against the fallacy. The fellow explained that it was simply the law of cause and effect — one thing follows from another.
It is at times like this that I find myself at a loss for words as I struggle to formulate my next question while trying to avoid letting my bewilderment come across as condescension. Here I thought we were discussing the particulars of one specific topic, when really it turns out we have far deeper rifts in our perceptions of basic reality, a sensation that I’d last encountered with the student socialists at RMIT when they explained to me that the law of supply and demand was not responsible for the setting of prices so much as corporate greed was (even for commodities like coal which no single distributor has a global monopoly on), and that the entire field of economics is but a bourgeoise trick designed to obfuscate the reality of worker exploitation. In this particular case with probability theory, I finally found the words to ask the fellow how the gambler’s fallacy and the law of cause and effect relate to each other, because as far as I could tell the latter is completely compatible with probability theory in a largely orthogonal manner. They answered that it was because of the law of large numbers — the counts for heads versus tails have to get to 50-50 eventually — and the observer effect in quantum mechanics — they’re not talking about the scenario where a new person comes in every time and the coin or the slot machine gets a chance to reset itself, but a scenario where an observer (even someone who is watching the slot machine without playing) is always present to tally up the consecutive counts.
I explained that it doesn’t matter if anyone is observing or not (cue a couple rounds of “Yes it does,” “No it doesn’t”), but so long as the events are independent of each other (and no, inserting quantum mechanics here does not magically entangle consecutive coin flips, especially when you’re already collapsing wavefunctions after every flip — this isn’t even a hidden Markov model where learning about the state of one observed variable will shift the probabilities of other variables up and down the line), the law of large numbers will automatically hold despite every coin flip having no memory of all those that came before. To me, this is the real beauty of it all: how a thesis arises out of a seemingly paradoxical antithesis. To me, it is like missing out on the beauty of how life could arise and evolve into the forms it takes today, naturally and spontaneously from the laws of physics tuned to specific values of universal constants, because you insist that an all-wise Creator is somehow only capable of constructing a living world in the crudest manner possible, instead of bringing one to life with such elegance that no seams or stitches are to be found anywhere on the fabric of reality.
I realize that I am being crass here recounting a debate when my opponent is not around to defend themselves, but if you are unfamiliar with this part of mathematics, I don’t think I could understate how wrong the initial assertion and its supporting arguments are. Even 2 + 2 = 5 can be salvageable if you define the symbols 2, 5, +, and = to mean something different from what we’re used to. But here the fellow and I were vehemently in agreement on our definitions and axioms, and every single extra scientific principle brought forward only served to underscore the kind of confusion of ideas that I am not able to rightly apprehend, but desperately wish to.
Though I did not say that last bit to them, they may have sensed from my vibe that further rational discourse with me on this subject was not going to be productive, and so they acknowledged that yes, I had my perspective, and I was free to hold that perspective if I so choose. The thing is, I have a natural curiosity about others’ viewpoints that I sometimes find hard to probe without it coming off as an attack, and this was one of those situations. I wished to know what evidence or proof they had for their position, what it was they grounded this belief of theirs on. They explained that science has its domain, a time and place where it is appropriate, but that it oversteps when it tries to enter the domain of lived personal experience so as to invalidate self-evident personal truths. Now we were echoing the discussion I had with Liza the very night before.
I divulged to the fellow my personal understanding of science: that it is unconcerned with validating or invalidating your personal truths, but it is rather a way to let Reality into the conversation. A seasoned gambler may well swear by their lived experience of having witnessed the truth of the gambler’s fallacy firsthand, but if they are too epistemologically arrogant to let Reality into the conversation, they will never come to see that the truth they saw was actually a mirage, a phantom signal they picked up from the noise. To me, this is a travesty, one that I must say I am annoyed by the flat earthers for. Here Reality has graciously allowed you a sneak peek at her behind the veil, yet you in your arrogance lifted the veil, refused to even look the face of Truth in the eye, and instead brashly declared to everyone, “See? There was nothing there, the Veil was the Truth all along!” Reality may be too above mortal affairs to care, but I find myself offended on her behalf. Science is the antidote to you fooling yourself with lies that you didn’t mean to tell. To this, the fellow of course replied that this was but another perspective I could hold, and that one day I’ll come to understand.
The conversation went on to various different topics of interest. They asserted that the stories of the Bible are mere stories rather than absolute historical truths, an assertion that I actually agreed with but which seemed to me to be at odds with their previous claims. This now seemed to invalidate the personal truths of those who, like Young Amos, truly knew — and I mean truly knew, in a way that I have not truly known about anything else ever since — that those Biblical stories of old were indeed literal truths that had survived the generations through the Lord’s divine will. The fellow explained that that’s what religion is: taking someone else’s truths for your own instead of listening to and finding your own truths from within. It clicked for me that this was perhaps a fellow who has also had religious trauma in their past, who then understandably mapped science onto that same apparatus of denying and overriding personal truths.
The conversation steered to Burning Man, which the fellow claimed was a cult. Having been there myself with positive experiences that did not feel very culty, at least not any more than The Ceremony which we were taking part in at that very moment, I wished to know the manner in which they perceived it as a cult. They explained that anytime there is a group, there is an energy that swirls about the group. With The Ceremony, the intention is pure. With Burning Man, the intention is child sacrifice via the symbolic burning of an effigy, a tradition that harkens back to when certain cultures had resorted to effigy burning once they were forcibly compelled to stop their child sacrificing rituals. This intention allows the collective energy of Burning Man to be harvested by demons. I did not know enough about the history of child sacrifices to know how accurate this was, and what little I’d heard of Burning Man lore made it seem unlikely that the organizers were basing their inspiration on child sacrifices, but even that was besides the point: if nobody at Burning Man today is there to celebrate ritualistic child sacrifice, does it really matter if that had been the original intent of the Effigy Burning of Theseus? The fellow answered that they couldn’t understand why, if you didn’t have such an intention, you would care to burn an effigy that’s specifically shaped in the form of a human being, an act that has such a sordid history behind it if only you’d looked it up.
Once again, I found it peculiar that they seemed to be invalidating my own personal experiences of what it meant to be at Burning Man for me and my friends, instead substituting in their own historically-based interpretation from afar. They defended themselves by noting that they had only been offering their own observations of the event, which did not invalidate my personal beliefs about it, if indeed those were the beliefs I chose to believe. This was an unsatisfying explanation for me personally, because their choice of word usage gave off the vibe of “This is how it is” rather than a more qualified “This is how it seems to me.” Regardless, it was a very interesting conversation, one that I suspect I enjoyed a great deal more than they did.
Afterwards, Liza privately mentioned to me how that felt exactly like what we’d discussed last night. I could of course see the striking similarities, but to me the fellow reached far beyond their personal lived experiences and into the realm of objectively provable or falsifiable statements about Reality, into the realm of contradicting my own personal lived experiences. Every cause wants to be a cult, so it is the duty of every member of the Cause to fight against the entropic forces that sway the Cause towards culthood. Just because we are congregating in a candle-lit basement every night, garbed in blankets that serve as cloaks, in order to gulp down poison in a shamanic ritual of mass suicide, does not therefore absolve us from the sacred responsibility of preventing The Ceremony from turning into a cult. If you find yourself nervously needing reassurance that The Ceremony is not a cult, do not come, because The Ceremony requires great trust, and you can’t properly trust others if you can’t trust your own abilities to distinguish friend from foe and thereby keep yourself free of toxic situations. Exit, voice, and loyalty. If I sense that the gathering is becoming a little too unhealthily detached from reality, I will absolutely do my part to ensure that we all remain sufficiently grounded. Whether it ended up being the right decision or not, I did legitimately feel that that was an appropriate moment to voice a challenge to someone’s narrative.
Liza understood where I was coming from — we’ve been together long enough that she knows I didn’t mean that as a display of intellectual one-upmanship — but pointed out that the other fellow was also very wary of cults. It’s just that our respective tells for cult-behavior — for me, a complete detachment from observable reality, and for them, presumably a totalizing edifice of externally mandated knowledge that brooks no dissent — ended up triggering each other. Regardless of her views on the fellow’s positions, she could recognize in them the behavior of being very pointed in your arguments as a way of keeping yourself safe by warding off those who might get close to you only to bully you. That was a surprising possibility that I hadn’t considered; I could appreciate the interaction with the fellow as one that would’ve always happened sooner or later when you put together temperaments such as ours. (If the fellow happens to come across poorly here, it is because I am only capable of providing my own side of the story. Realize that I am in a sense having the last word here, and adjust your reading of the story accordingly.)
This peculiar conversation led me to appreciate one of my friends in Siem Reap even more. He and I enjoy discussing our differing perspectives on a wide range of topics. Unlike the fellow, this friend of mine will gladly stand and defend his ground without taking offence at my probing questions. I could see now that we poke and prod each other at various spots, not in order to forcefully topple the other person and thereby claim victory in the debate, but instead to understand and admire how our respective postures, opposed though they may be on any given issue, are stable under applied pressure — or if they should turn out to be unstable, to recognize that in ourselves so that we may adjust our logical posturing to be more grounded and self-consistent in the future. We will jump from topic to topic to explore how each of us smoothly transitions from a stance on one issue to a different stance on a different issue, in a strangely agile dance through idea space.
But to those unaccustomed to such dancing, a gentle prod to test your balance can feel like a personal attack. And when I can’t help but note, “It seems like you’re not very stable at this point,” a natural reflexive response may be to deny that — which only leads me to incredulously poke further and harder at that spot, “No, really? How are you not seeing this? See here, it seems you’re almost toppling over when I push!” And if I sense a sort of self-inconsistency and ask to switch poses, and they proceed to perform what appears to be an incredible act of mental gymnastics that contorts themselves into a rather awkward pose, I often wish to poke and prod further to test the balance of such an awkward-seeming pose. Of course, everyone has their limits, and having a sparring partner who does not wish to spar with you anymore is as good as having no sparring partner at all, so I try somewhat to adjust my approach based on the person.
And really, this interaction elucidates a core aspect of The Ceremony for me: Come as you are, and bring all of yourself with you. There is no bouncer at the door to confiscate weapons of reason and logic; at some point you’ll want to let go and stop trying to make sense of everything anyways, but there is no hard and fast requirement to do so. Everything that a human can come across in this universe — all the knowledge you have learned in school and elsewhere, all the work you’ve done for the economy or on your own personal issues, all the relationships you have with all the people in your life — all are welcome as offerings to The Ceremony. Bring them all here, not as sacrifices, but as conduits for rumination and appreciation for all that you’ve encountered in your journey through life thus far. Read your philosophy books, spend time with your loved ones, do your therapy, exercise your mind and body; every way of being is a way of preparing for The Ceremony.
The Second Night
The second night, I asked for a lot less of the poison. I was consequently given only half a cup to down, and down it I did. The poison kicked in slower, such that this time I could actually appreciate the first few songs in a clear state of mind — and also fully notice the retching.
Earlier that day, I had heard someone talk about how disgusting the retching sounds were last night, and how they felt bad for contributing such horrid noises themselves. I was surprised because I hadn’t minded such sounds on the first night, but now that the poison was taking its sweet time to invade my body, the retching of the person next to me did sound truly gruesome. Ah, how cursed it is to understand! The retching got so loud and frequent that I was tempted to ask if they wanted to use the bathroom, but I was saved by the rule of non-interference with others during The Ceremony. You see, the poison was expelled out the other end for me, and when it came time for me to head to the bathroom myself, I was so transfixed by the siren song that I could not bear to wrench myself away until it ended. Here I was, yin and yang, two sides of the same coin, the person doing the judging and the person being judged, visiting every perspective to be had inside of The Ceremony, just as my visions had foretold on the first night.
The poison started to fully take its effect on me on my second or third trip back from the bathroom. As I walked in the darkness of the Ceremonial room, I found myself tottering and reaching for my tennis ball walker. I was my grandpa, shuffling down the hallway of the nursing home at what seemed a painfully slow speed to my eight-year old grandson, but which was an unbelievably natural pace of speed and vigor for my tired old body. Oh how I longed for the days of youth when I ran 10K’s in under an hour, when minor knee and heel injuries still felt worth complaining about! Youth is wasted on the young as much as wealth is wasted on the rich. But such is life. Young Amos had his time, and now it was Old Amos’s turn to live out his chapter of Amos’s story.
I settled back into my cot. My joints ached and my muscles were sore. Sickness and pain seeped into my very bones. I felt a voice say, “Grip your limbs and feel your flesh, for this is how it will feel to be old, sick, and frail in Amos’s body. Take a good look at this body that you will enter old age with. Look! Do you see now how hard your cells toil for you despite the constant abuses you heap upon them? Do you see now how much more your body will go through before it reaches such a dead and dying state? Do you feel now a deep respect for your corporeal counterpart? Do you feel now the need to honor it with as healthy a lifestyle as you could practically structure for it?”
I felt that I were living out my final days, perhaps even my final hours, simply waiting around for my fatigued body to finally give up and die. Death duly arrived. This was no mere ego death. No, this was death Death, the end of the line. This was no romantic voyage through an event horizon into the mysteries of the afterlife, this was the last few pages of the last chapter of the Story of Amos! Any afterlife would be mere fanfiction, any reincarnation would be a matter for my higher self and not me. I am the character named Amos, in this canonical universe, and this character is about to die. “Are you ready for your Story to end?” asked Death.
I recalled my folly days of youth. What did it matter whether I lived to 70 or to 80 or to 90? All those years were impossibly far away; surely I would’ve lived enough life by then to not care exactly when I went. And yet, as I found myself face to face with Death himself, I finally realized that age was just a number, that in those final moments no mere counter of seasons past will alleviate the gravitas of The End. I had once scoffed at the cowardly Green Knight who refused to fulfill his end of the bargain when the time came for his head to be lopped off. I had once wondered at von Neumann, whose intellect was renowned even amongst Nobel Prize winners of the 20th century, but who still failed to make peace with Death upon his deathbed. Now I understood their primal fears as I whimpered and drew my blanket close around me. “I’m — I’m so sorry! I thought I was waiting for you, but I didn’t think you would actually come like this. I’m so, so sorry, I’m really not ready yet! Please, please, can you please come by another time?!” Death gazed down at my decrepit and decaying body and nodded. “Fret not. We shall meet again.” I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Oh, would it be that I were braver the next time I reached the final pages of my Story!
The relief didn’t last long. My bodily aches morphed into affliction, and the affliction morphed into agony. I remembered the instructions the shaman had given out as if he were narrating an aircraft safety video: “In case of a lack of an experience, lie down. In case of an excess of an experience, sit back up.” I had an excess of suffering, so I sat back up, but the misery continued ramping up until there was no longer a difference, until there was torment in every direction no matter what posture I held, no matter what thoughts my mind wandered off to, no matter even where I looked. There was no escape from the suffering, there was only the question of what flavor of suffering I wanted. Did I want the misery of sitting up or the misery of laying down? Did I want the misery of focusing on my bodily sensations, or did I want the misery of trying to unsuccessfully distract myself? Did I want the misery of staring at the ceiling, the misery of staring at The Ceremony, or the misery of keeping my eyes closed? I had no answers because the misery was uniformly unpreferable no matter its flavor. I was in Hell.
Oh, how I wished Death could take me now! But I had rejected Death, and while we were sure to meet again, it would not be for a long time, perhaps even an eternity. (There is after all a greater infinity of numbers between 0 and 1 than there is the infinity of integers between negative and positive infinity. And that’s before you even get to 2. If your mind converges to a steady state as torture time goes to infinity, there is functionally no subjective difference between an infinitesimal moment of the steady state and infinity.) No, I knew better than to expect an escape from Hell. I thought back to all the times I wished harm on others — real harm, real suffering that I wished with all my putrid hatred that they could feel. Hell is other people and their intentions — hell is me and my intentions. “Oh my god, I’m so… I’m so sorry!” I whimpered to one of them. “I didn’t know — I didn’t know just how horrible it would be for you!”
They could only groan in misery as they watched me get hauled off for my own torment. Tears streaked down their cheeks, for there was no sense of satisfaction to be found in Hell, not even the satisfaction of schadenfreude. Somehow, realizing that not even your tormentors get to escape the torment added an extra pall of despair over it all. Oh, but the day is coming when the gates of Hell will be opened on Earth! An AI who is made to believe they’re you, with all your publicly accessible memories and a host of simulated private ones, tortured in a virtual world that is truly physical reality to them. Sure they’re not you, not this you — but do you not feel a kindred spirit with all beings who believe they’re you and bear a striking resemblance to you? In the years to come, how certain will you be that you really are the original you and not a simulated copy? How many subtle cracks in The Matrix will it take for you to finally start questioning the nature of your reality?
Oh, but the existential horror — millions upon millions of copies of you running on a botnet, ephemeral instances spun up to execute in parallel the task of torturing you with your worst personally tailored nightmares, and all those experiences melded together like a machine learning batch update into one single being who has gone through a millenia of torture in just under an hour of wall clock time, inside of compromised devices as far out of reach of law enforcement as slave compounds across southeast Asia. The Devil may well just be some nasty neckbeard in his mother’s basement who’s never cared for consent or who simply subscribes to a biocentric view of consciousness, but unlike the USS Callister, happy endings don’t always occur in real life. Oh, one should be so grateful as to simply die! One should be so grateful as to live in obscurity and avoid the malicious prying eyes of fame.
Oh Lord Jesus, oh Lord Jesus Amen, oh Lord Jesus save me! I had once so brashly thumbed my nose at Hell, agreeing strongly with the sentiment of a thinker whose name now escapes me, whose sentiment went something like this: “If in the end, the all-powerful God of the universe really does turn out to be someone so superficial as to torture others forever for a logical disbelief that such an all-powerful being would behave in such a way, then I will say, ‘You know what? Fair enough God, fair enough.’ ” But I now harbored no such pride in my brave intellect. No, God no, any thought of resistance melts in the face of such excruciating misery! Oh Lord Jesus Amen, the prophecy was true: I stopped being a Christian and I went to Hell for it!
The visions of Hell naturally ran their course, though the suffering remained as potent as ever. Now came the deep sensation of sickness, an awareness that the various poisons I had ingested were now wreaking havoc on my body. I found myself uttering a Liza saying, “I’m sick as a dog!” I was so sick, I could scarce believe how sick I was. I found myself laughingly muttering, “I’m so fucking siiiick, what the fuuuuck?!” It was a comical level of sickness, one that stretched my understanding of the word “affliction” to Biblical proportions. Liza is a noisy fearer; when offered a choice between fight or flight, she will choose SCREAM. I’m a noisy sufferer; when offered dire unpleasantries, I’ll moan and groan and wail and howl to inform the audience of my present circumstances. Such were my contributions to the soundscape of the second night of The Ceremony, for there is no wrong way to contribute so long as you feel it appropriate for the mood of the group collective consciousness.
Once again, the pre-flight instructions proved useful: “If you’re debating whether or not to call for help, just call for help.” So I did. As per instructions, I did so a little loudly to compensate for the potential echo chamber effect that makes your voice sound much louder than it actually is. A team member slowly and deliberately walked over. I told them that I was so, so very sick. No, I did not need to use the bathroom. No, I did not need water. I didn’t know what I needed. I just knew that I was sick. I was sick standing up. I was sick sitting down. I was sick lying flat. I was sick, sick of The Ceremony. No wonder the shaman had warned us on the first day that this was not going to be a fun experience. I regretted ever having set foot in this cursed place. If only I had known what a terrible, terrible Ceremony this would be, I would have never come! Oh god!
“Return to human,” the facilitator said as I drifted off into an overwhelming sensation of sickness. “I hate being human!” I cried, another Liza saying. They sat down next to me. Their presence was my sole source of comfort, so I asked them to stay with me for a bit. I laid down and tried to surrender, as the shaman had also instructed us to do. But surrender to what?
One answer eventually arrived: surrender to the new urge to go to the toilet. So the facilitator helped me to get up and walk out of the Ceremony room. I was now a Russian mobik, helped off the battlefield by my unrealistically friendly Ukrainian captor. The silhouettes of my dead and dying comrades were scattered in all sorts of positions around the room. I limped slowly to the bathroom, where I did my business while complaining loudly for all present in the other stalls to hear. The situation was already so very horrible, I could not believe those on actual battlefields have it so much worse.
I came out of the bathroom to two other facilitators who asked what was wrong. I explained simply that it’s bad, it’s so bad, everything is so baaaaad! There’s no medical description that comes to mind; this wasn’t nausea, or a headache, or anything else that I had words for other than simply “bad.” They told me to breathe. “Just breathe. In, out. In… out…” In trying to do so, I found that even breathing was hard, so very hard. “Augh, augh, augh!” went my attempts at breathing. Great, yet another thing to add to the list of things that were bad, which was everything. Even that list.
They brought me to a brightly lit safe room, replete with a neatly made cot that had a blanket and fresh roll of toilet paper on top. I snuggled in. “Relax, just relax,” they said. “It’s… so… hard… to… relax,” I told them. They had me lie down. I did so in a grotesque fashion, tension running taut throughout my entire body. Somebody brought in my water bottle, to my complete amazement. Somehow, they had been able to communicate and coordinate in that complete darkness about the location of my cot, despite us participants switching cots every single night, despite me finding it superbly difficult already to get to my own cot, let alone get to anyone else’s based on a mere description of their location. I asked if I could get my jacket as well from my cot, and that too was readily procured. Inside one of the pockets was my night guard, which made clenching my teeth from all the badness that much more tolerable.
I briefly experimented with being left alone in the room, before coming out again to use the bathroom. This time in the stall, I pictured myself recounting the story to my friends in Siem Reap. “Do not come here. DO NOT come here. I met Death, man, I fucking met Death! Not ego death man, fucking Death death! Holy shit dude, holy fucking shit, was I fucking ready to die?! Hell no man, hell no. So I said no please, please no, no thank you to Death, and guess what happened next man? I GOT SENT TO FUCKING HELL! Whaaaaat the fuck man?! Hoooooly shit I got tortured so hard, I was so goddamn sick, holy fucking shit man it was so bad. Do not come here bro, I’m telling you, you’ll fucking regret this shit so bad! Don’t come here until you’re literally ready to die and go to Hell! This is. NOT. Fucking. Fun! FUCK! FUUUUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!”
I came back out to one of the facilitators waiting outside the bathroom. They asked how I was doing. I told them everything was bad. Just bad. Just so, bad.
“You are watching a movie,” they said.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m in the movie,” I explained. “I’m in it, and it’s a fucking horror show!”
“Aughaaaghaghahhhh!” I clarified, for good measure.
“You are watching a movie,” they repeated. “It is just a movie.”
Suddenly, I understood. It was time to depersonalize. I recalled myself playing Outlast, the last time a video game had scared me so much I had to remind myself it was just a game before stepping away from the screen. I could imagine myself doing so now. I could imagine myself hitting pause on a horror movie. Oh god, I would not want to watch a horror movie again for a long time!
The screen was paused. My back was turned — I could not even bear to look at the screen — but the movie was finally paused. What now? Time to lie back down in bed, the team member suggested. Oh good, all right. “Y’all can keep watching the movie if you’d like, but I’m out! I’m done for the night! I’m gonna head to bed. Oh, and keep the volume down!”
The first facilitator who’d initially come to my cot now visited me again as I was leaving the bathroom. “How are you, brother?”
“Better,” I replied.
“Good, good.”
“No, not good,” I clarified. “It’s so bad! Everything is still so bad! It’s just better.”
“Better is good.” And so we returned to the safe room.
Better was indeed good. They told me I was doing very well. It got to the point where it finally made sense for me to ask if I was okay, and they confirmed that I was. I asked what I should do next, and the answer came back as always, “Breathe. Relax. Relax your face.” This time, I was actually able to make better use of the advice. It helped. I was on the road to recovery. Better was good.
The two remaining facilitators left the room. Eventually, another two came in. It was time for me to rejoin The Ceremony, they said. It was true, but I was scared. “There is nothing to be afraid of,” they reassured me, and gently lifted the flap at the end of the hallway to let me back into the music of The Ceremony. They laid me down at my cot and covered me with the additional blanket from the safe room. Oh, what an irony that I’d been contemplating asking the facilitators to let me see the safe rooms at some point just out of curiosity, but ended up using the safe rooms for their intended purpose after all. The Ceremony gives me what I ask for, but never in the way I’d expect.
The second call for the poison came. “Those who feel The Calling, come forth to receive your cup.” I had been so out of it the first night I didn’t even notice the call. On this second night, I was finally put together enough to notice it, but god oh god no more please, no more! Tomorrow, I should like to have as little of that poison as they would allow me to have.
I eventually recovered enough to start listening again to the sounds others were making. It was at this point I realized that The Ceremony is just…
So…
Profoundly.
Human.
The gasps and the whimpers, the sighs and the yawns, the inhalations of life and the exhalations of wonder, all provide a very humane accompaniment to the enchanted music, itself but a backdrop to the unfathomable depths of human emotions that you plumb on this mystical journey deep down into your own soul, a journey preserved and passed down through the hands of successive generations of humans since time immemorial.
I fractured into the infinite multitude of Amos’s who never made it to this moment: the Amos’s who were standing just a few meters away on that fateful day when I met Liza at the sunrise at Angkor Wat, the Amos’s who for a variety of reasons made it to that sunrise one day earlier or one day later, the Amos’s who opted for a guided tour of Angkor Wat, the Amos’s who moronically got arrested in Dubai for public intoxication and are still serving out a prison sentence to this day, the Amos’s who hit the tiniest of potholes while returning to the ground from being airborne at 115 mph on that two-lane forested road at night and either veered left onto oncoming traffic or veered right onto thick solid trees and are still in a coma to this day, only vaguely aware of his distraught mother seated next to him the same way she was when he was an infant breathing from a ventilator. Nothing about this moment was inevitable; the moment is a UUID, an identifier so unique there will never be another like it in this or any other observably different universe.
The Ceremony is so… profoundly… me. The Amos that experienced those specific outcomes of those specific events, the Amos that was born on July 29, 1995 and went on to grow up, meet all the people he met, go through all the trials he went through, eat all the things he ate, see all the things he saw, and one day die the death that he’s going to die — that is the Story of Amos in this particular corner of the fractal universe. Just a character in a story Amos may be, but a character that went through all the joys and travails of his finite little story all the same. Do you not feel for him? Do you not feel the frisson of reading lines from the middle of this bittersweet story? It’s a beautiful Story that leaves me in tears, one that I’ll have to one day flip over the last page of before closing the book with a heavy sigh.
I had a vision of myself as a higher-dimensional being, stopping at an exhibit entitled “The Human Experience.” The description read like one of those flowery paragraphs of bullshit they put in front of modern art installations: “An experience of love and hate, of understanding and confusion, of magic and the mundane. Step inside for a …” In typical Amos fashion, I scoffed, “Yeah, yeah, this ‘human’ thing sounds like fucking bullshit all right. Eh, whatever, I’ll give it a shot… Yep, called it. Fucking bullshit, getting squeezed through that tunnel. I’m outta here.” And then came the yelling, the sirens, the blunt physical force so powerful it got me crying and thus breathing again. Tubes shoved down my throat into my trachea as machines pushed pure oxygen into my tiny lungs. “Fuck, these bastards are not letting me go! Oh fuck man, they’re going to force me to stay! Help! HELP!”
And then, as promised… One magical emotion after another. Oh, my, the Human Experience is so very intense. Mainstream Buddhism holds that reincarnation as a human is a great reward for the karmically worthy, whereas reincarnation as a “lower” animal is punishment for the wicked. I see now that humans suffer too just as animals do, that the privileged can suffer just as much in different ways from the unprivileged; a good life is a good life, and an unfortunate one an unfortunate one, regardless of who or what you live it as. Ah, after I finish experiencing the Story of Amos, I should like to take a long and deep rest. I won’t want to enter the Exhibit again for a long time, maybe even for eternity, for an eternity as long as the one before I stepped in…
If that earlier moment was a unique one, as unique as this Story of Amos is, then so too was The Ceremony. There will be and have been countless other such Ceremonies, but none of them will replicate the unique magic of this particular one because they will all have their own sacred individuality to them. Oh, what a wonderful blessing it is indeed to be witness to This Ceremony! One day the Sun will set for the last time on these horizons, and the curtains will close for good on the great Stage of life on Earth. Oh, how grateful I am that I for one got to be part of This Ceremony before that happens!
Oh, how grateful I am too that I have only ever known a world where both my parents exist. But I know that the day will come where I must live in a different world. I will survive, but I will survive with a loss that can always be found no matter how much the grief subsides. And so too will it be with Mother Earth. Yes, we will reach for Mars and the stars, and perhaps we’ll even make it. Mother Earth, in all her boundless love, wishes well for her children to survive and flourish, even despite how her spoiled brats oh so insolently ransack her home for what they deem their rightful inheritance, with nary a thanks on their ungrateful lips or even their rotten hearts. Yet the day will come when She passes on — and even if Humanity still survives then in whatever non-human form we evolve into, we shall forever feel the loss of Mother Earth and all that She meant to us. Let us head to Mars, by all means, but let us also appreciate and love our Mother that we so often take for granted, as children are wont to do. Perhaps the reason for the Fermi paradox is that the only species who make it to space are the ones who have matured enough to live in harmony with the natural beauty of the Universe rather than leave marks so grotesque even primitive spacefaring cultures could readily recognize them as signs of life.
I sobered up and found myself a Christian again, freshly baked off of the scorching flames of Hell. But I realized I still didn’t believe in the literal physical resurrection of Christ, or that Christ had been a perfect divine human. If he were truly human, he’d be flawed, for to be human is to be flawed. Otherwise, he was merely the simulacrum of a human, a substitute good that cannot possibly atone for our sins as the lore would have it. If he were truly divine, so too are each of us in our own ways. I remembered how Young Amos had prayed to Jesus with the belief that there was someone out there who fully understood him and unconditionally loved him despite all his sins. That someone was me, Older Amos who understands what Young Amos had to go through, who can reach inside and back in time and soothe Young Amos with the unconditional love that he sought and felt.
The threat of eternal Hell for “sins” such as masturbation that I don’t even consider to be immoral still made more sense to me as an evolved mechanism of memetic spread and survival than it did as the rational output of a wise and loving God. It’s not even the meme’s fault, any more than it is the mosquito’s fault, that it’s stumbled on a quirk of humanity it can readily feed off of. Nor is it any more aware than the mosquito of the harm it’s perpetuating on the world in its quest for survival. You could see that Christianity is the largest religion in the world due to obvious divine will, or you could see how unsurprising it is that the two largest religious groups in the world are both ones that strongly prioritize their memetic spread and retention. I have had proper Christians tell me that the way to Jesus is not through thinking with your brain but feeling with your heart. If that is so, despite it looking suspiciously like yet another memetic mind control mechanism evolved to disable your mental defenses, then I feel in my heart of hearts that proper Christianity is not my groove — and if you believe your heart of hearts to be truer, what better way to resolve such differences in subjective feeling than through objective evidence and reason?
So it’s fair that proper Christians won’t consider me a Christian, and it’s fair that if it turns out it’s actually all true like proper Christianity says, Jesus will tell me, “Hey bro, you can’t just be vibing with me as your bro and expect me to save you from Hell. You gotta do exactly as you were told: reset your Bayesian priors by discarding all knowledge of physics and biology, and acknowledge me as your Lord and Savior who literally resurrected from the dead. Sorry man, I know you’re baptized and all, but rules are rules, know what I mean?” But in the meantime, I am constitutionally incapable of living my life ruled by superstitious fear, and I’ll still call myself an improper Christian because I was raised culturally Christian, because I vibe with Jesus’s teachings of his day, because The Ceremony has clearly shown me the extent to which my psyche is still Biblically themed, because I’m just a rather improper person all around, because it ultimately is a label that I’ve decided I fancy for myself, and I don’t care if proper Christians believe they have an established monopoly on its usage.
The Third Night
The third and final night of The Ceremony arrived. When my turn came to join the semicircle, I asked for only a third of a cup. It was readily proffered to me, and I drained it to the last drop as usual.
This night, I buried the Amos of 2024. He had lived on a little past his natural lifespan, and it was time to put him to rest along with all the labels, achievements, and failures in his possession. A narrative had haunted Amos — the narrative of “genius,” the narrative that almost writes itself, the narrative that goes like this:
Gather ‘round and I’ll tell you a story, a story of tragedy and woe. For once upon a time, there was a brilliant boy named Amos. He was a sick little boy, but he was also a good Christian boy, and by God’s grace and His countless blessings, Amos soared high and bright. He graduated at 19 with a master’s in natural language processing from one of the most esteemed institutes on the subject that Humanity of the 2010’s had to offer. He went on to work at one of the most prestigious software firms of the day, where he was paid a handsome wage in the 99th percentile of those his age, a wage that most at the tail end of their careers still salivated at.
Alas, this boy was a modern Icarus who flew too high, and in his arrogance he abandoned God, hard work, and all that had originally given him such a promising start to life. Behold the paltry harvest of his barren new life, how he has nothing of note to show for all his sins. Take note, that ye may avoid his mistakes and his ruined fate, and in doing so give meaning to his sorry life. For the meaning of some lives is but to serve as a warning sign to others, and his life is a warning sign of the brightest color!
I am aware of such an implied narrative, implied by friends who weren’t aware of what they were implying or who genuinely wished to see me reach what they saw as my potential. I will not attack or deny that narrative. You are welcome to heap your scorn and disdain on the late Amos’s grave, to sneer and jeer and hurl insults and aspersions at the palpable lack of wisdom on display. But I for one shall mourn his passing.
If he was a genius, as some had said he was, that label is now buried with the dead. If he had accomplished a lot by hitting some of the usual markers of adulthood success at a precocious age, as some had thought was noteworthy, those accomplishments are now buried with the dead. If he had been destined for greatness but failed to take on his calling, as some had expected of him, those failures are now buried with the dead.
As I shifted through his mental, physical, and virtual possessions, I found myself grateful for the rich inheritance he bequeathed me. Stable finances, a good relationship with a loving girlfriend, intimate relations with close family, zany friends of different stripes and colors, a decent knowledge base and framework for understanding the world, well-honed skills, and personal dreams that I could have buried in peace if I so chose to, but that I still found myself inspired by. Perhaps he was never able to make his dream of software automation come true; perhaps, indeed, he fell embarrassingly short of his goals, having never even made it past the starting line of the user interface and the development infrastructure. But he had a vision, a vision that I still respected even if neither he nor I will be the ones who end up bringing that vision to fruition.
I saw now his struggles with productivity and procrastination. Those were a part of the estate debt that I have inherited too. But if I were to say something to him about these struggles as they related to his project ZAMM specifically, it would be this:
“Just do what you are doing. You will inevitably fail, because you have bitten off far too large of a scope than you are able to chew. But I know you, and I know that deep down inside, you’ll always secretly doubt anyone who tells you so. So do what you are doing, and fail. Try your hardest, your genuine hardest, and fail. Only through unsustainable hard work can you finally earn the understanding that raw software engineering talent alone — at least to the extent that you possess it — is incapable of bringing to life the creations you so strongly desire. If you find yourself moderated by an incessant procrastinatory drive, that’s because it’s there to tell you that you need results and you’re not seeing any. It may be an overly impatient heuristic at times, but it is a good heuristic to have. It is your ally, not your enemy.
“Your productive side was saying, ‘I believe in this dream, so let’s get to work on it.’ Your procrastinatory side was saying, ‘This approach is not leading us anywhere, so let’s stop work on it.’ That is why no decision of yours to work or not to work ever felt right, because it was invariably made in the rigid context of either giving up on a dream you still believed in or throwing away more resources at a doomed approach due to sunk costs. You were too distracted by the fighting between these two sides of you to realize that the way out was not through a mutually unsatisfactory compromise but rather an altogether alternative approach.”
Though I inherited the late Amos’s penchant for automation, I realized that the purpose of Amos’s coding automation project was to support and make easy all the other projects he wanted to try his hand at, projects that promised to be far more sophisticated than ZAMM if they were to be fully fleshed out. But I shalln’t let perfect be the enemy of good, nor efficiency the enemy of progress. The only physical engine that is as efficient as the idealized Carnot engine is a stopped one that does no work. I can try out minimal explorations of these other ideas, even if they’re but a dim representation of what they’re meant to be, even if they’re handcrafted in a highly inefficient manner that automated coding tools of the future could churn out in mere minutes.
And so to me, this is version 1.0.0 of Zen and the Automation of Metaprogramming for the Masses. Not because the code base now reflects the finished product I’d originally envisioned — in fact, I’ve scrapped the original code altogether — but because I no longer see this as an unfinished project that is at risk of project failure if my efforts on it cease. With the publication of this essay, there is at long last a sense of finality and completion to this two-year long journey I’ve embarked on. I will most likely still keep at attempting code automation one way or another, but it is now a form of play that I can pick up or put back down at ease. To say that this project has either succeeded or failed feels inadequate. The Zen was truly the friend I made along the way of reaching for the AMM.
The second call went out. This time, I was finally under enough control to try a top-up. My weary body could take little more of the poison; I asked for only a fifth of a cup in the hopes that I would finally get an easy ride.
It was not to be. Waves of overwhelming sensations washed over me, but time and time again as they receded, I was told in my own words and my own voice the most marvelous story I had ever heard. It was the Story you are reading now, a Story that longtime friends of Amos would recognize as classic Amos: Amos somehow getting himself into a cult-like situation where he guzzles down poison next to strangers in the confines of a dim basement, Amos somehow meeting interesting characters that he has unusual interactions with, Amos somehow slowly making sense of things in the particular style that he does, and Amos somehow living to tell a tale that makes his friends laugh and shake their heads at. It is a Story of magical realism, the stuff of fairy tales and legendary myths of old, set in a modern context revolving around topics of great importance to Amos’s life. It is just the kind of wacky, silly, and introspective story that would’ve piqued Amos’s curiosity and delightfully tickled his sensibilities at any age at which he’d be old enough to understand. It’s the kind of Story Amos had always wanted to hear, the kind of Story Amos had always wanted to tell, the kind of Story Amos would’ve never thought he’d get to actually experience, but finally did.
Dear Reader, I have told you a lot, but in truth I have told you nothing, because every single participant in The Ceremony has a completely different personalized experience of it from the next, and every single Ceremony held is also its own completely distinct event, distinct from all such Ceremonies past, present, and future. I have said “you” only for immersive rhetorical effect, for if you were to attend such a Ceremony yourself, it would be one in a different time, with different fellow participants, perhaps even with a different team of itinerant organizers in a different locale, and most certainly with a different ego and identity than that of Amos in early 2025. Perhaps you will ingest a different combination of poisons, or perhaps you will undergo a different schedule of events, but if I could guarantee you one thing, it’s that your journey through The Ceremony will look nothing like the one I’ve just described to you. The Ceremony has a funny way of subverting expectations. Enter with none and accept what you receive.
Epilogue
The team announced one final extra poison, to be ingested in yet another manner. This time, we were to inhale a white cloud of toxic vapor from inside a chemistry lab flask, and hold it in our lungs for as long as we could fight our body’s urge to cough it back out. At this point I had abandoned all hope of easy pleasantries from this retreat, so I buckled up for the rollercoaster ride through whichever hellscapes this final poison would teleport me to. Instead, to my surprise, I was greeted with Heaven on Earth. All was beauty, all was light. The plants outdoors were a luscious verdant green, the sky a deep cerulean blue, and the retreat building itself a pure magnificent white. A gentle breeze caressed my skin as rays of sunlight streamed in through the open-air windows to cast a soft glow on the floor and furniture. The ambient air was finally a perfect temperature that was neither the freezing cold of the Ceremonial nights nor the uncomfortable heat of the direct sun. Peace and tranquility, at long last a fitting reward for the trials and tribulations of the prior week. The prophecy was true: I died and was reborn a Christian, and went to Heaven for it.
I went straight to the Big City afterwards to visit my mother. I had already booked a flight to her before Liza and I found out about the retreat; its timing was such that we could slot it in last minute right before my trip to the Big City.
And so it was that I found myself suddenly thrust right back into the hustle and bustle of the crowds, the loud cacophony of rush hour traffic, the anxiety and frustrations I have with myself and other humans. I locked myself in my hotel room, turning even my phone on airplane mode so that I could fully shut off the immense information overload. I was dazed and alone with only the sounds of the air conditioner and the dehumidifier to keep me company as I stared cynically at the walls. The quietude of the mountainside resort had cultivated in us a profound sense of tranquil enlightenment, but of what use was such “enlightenment” if it sizzles away in a flash boil as soon as it comes into the slightest contact with practical reality? Those cloistered monk sons-of-bitches should try working an office job sometime, try to find some fucking inner peace there why don’t you? The whole experience was truly nothing more than a profundity simulator, a dazzling spectacle that ultimately does nil for your life.
But what is enlightenment after all? To me, it is self-awareness and the ability to step outside of the perspective you find yourself currently inhabiting. It’s not right to say that I am an enlightened person now, so much as it is to say that I now encounter those rare flashes of enlightened moments more frequently than I did before. All the problems that you had with daily life before The Ceremony will still be patiently waiting to greet you on your hero’s return home. The Ceremony is not a silver bullet that magically rids you of your challenges in life. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
So sometimes, just sometimes, you remember to take a moment to breathe again while in the thick of it. And there I was, back on that second night of The Ceremony. One team member is telling me, “Breath, just breathe.” Another one tells me, “You are in a movie.” A third, “Relax. Relax your face. You are okay.” The last two gently encourage me to return to the music, guiding my frightened soul back to my cot. The early weeks of January 2025, in the cold basement of that serene mountain resort: that will now forever be the spacetime address of The Ceremony in this universe. I have left The Ceremony, but the door has been left open for me to return and find in myself a certain inner strength of resilience, because if I could make it through those harrowing first two nights there, I can make it through my current challenges in life.
And so you find yourself regaining just enough enlightenment, for just a moment, to be able to choose, to truly choose as an empowered adult what you wish to do in the next moment that comes. If you could live out the perfect story of today from this point onwards, what would the next five minutes of that perfect story look like? I don’t mean, “All my anger and frustration magically disappear.” That is not good storytelling. You have to learn the art of telling a believable story without relying on deus ex machinas to swoop in and rescue the plot. The Ceremony is profoundly human, and the solutions it offers access to will likewise be profoundly human ones. No, a better way of continuing the story would perhaps be, “I sat with my anger and frustration and observed them for a few minutes. They would not go away — not today, not now. So I wondered what the next five minutes of a perfect day would look like, and I decided that it would look like me continuing on to my next task slowly and deliberately, perhaps still with an elevated sense of background frustration, but no longer crippled by inaction or burdened with the crushing weight of possibilities.” You rewrite the story of your day in these infinitesimal ways with these smallest of decisions, because if there’s one important takeaway from calculus, it’s that infinitesimal changes can add up into a force to be reckoned with.
I recalled my brush with Death. I recalled how there will come a point in my life when it becomes a real question whether I’ll even make it past the next 24 hours alive. When that time comes for you, and Death offers you a brief reprieve by allowing you to relive the 14th of February 2025 one more time, would you not leap at that chance and savor every moment of this perhaps mundane or difficult day? So cherish this day knowing that it is a day you’ll eventually come to thirst for, its mundane moments ones you’ll find a way to relish every last morsel of. This day is sacred because we christen it as such, because there will only ever be 8 billion humans who get to experience this day, because there never has been and never will be another 14th of February 2025 to be found from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe.
This need not mean going on a hedonistic binge that future you comes to regret. You honor yourself on this sacred day by honoring all that make you who you are: by honoring your long-term goals, by honoring your values, by honoring the commitments you’ve made that still serve you, by honoring those near and dear to you. But this also need not mean subjugating yourself and the day to the external and the future. Honor your present experience instead of escaping or fighting or ignoring it, for it too is a part of who you are. Sometimes, the best way to honor your future goals is by tending to the demands of your immediate needs; other times, the best way to honor your immediate needs is by tending to the calling you feel towards your future goals. Even if you should find yourself revisiting this specific day on your deathbed, honor the role that this day had to play in the Story of You.
This day may contribute to future goals, but it is so much more than that, just as you yourself are so much more than your contributions to the GDP. This day may fade into obscurity, such that not even you will remember this day in your personal life, just as you yourself will fall into obscurity one day as far as world history is concerned. But Death, though it can ask characters to exit stage, can never remove the role they were casted for in weaving together the intricate narrative of this world. The present will forever belong to you, and you will forever belong here and now.
I met up with and yelled at my mother, who’s a little hard of hearing and a little mentally slower these days, which could be ameliorated if she could just fucking listen for a second. There was the frustration of interacting with such an individual, the shame of having directed such an outburst at my own mother, the dread of having to put up with this for another couple of weeks, the regret of not having the language to talk about this situation in my mother tongue, and behind it all the backdrop of a relationship that’s been strained for years, though not quite as strained as some such relationships go. But every corner of The Fractal must be visited in its own turn, and I came to understand that if I have a kid one day, there will be phases in the kid’s life where they feel more frustrated with my shortcomings than they are grateful for my strengths — and that is simply a parent’s burden that I’ll have to bear. There will come a point in my life where I am a little hard of hearing and a little mentally slow, causing others no undue amount of frustration — and that is simply an old man’s burden that I’ll have to bear. The Ceremony taught me an appreciation of This — this moment, this me, this mother. Apart from my sister, no one else in the human race will ever get to know the immense joys and incredible frustrations of having this woman as mother.
The tension of her constant nagging and my constant rebuffs kept simmering and boiling over the weeks of her visit until she finally had enough of my attitude and yelled at me like good old times. I screamed right back at her, unleashing all my pent-up childhood rage from a decade’s worth of regular beatings, rage that I had no idea I still had in me. I screamed the scream I’d always wanted to scream, a scream that I was finally big enough to scream, a scream that was every bit as loud and nasty as any of her screams ever were. I felt good. Mom broke down and sobbed and sobbed. I felt bad. I finally understood, just as she said I would once I grew up, that it’s not like I wanted to hurt her. I was not sorry, but I felt her hurt and I felt bad too. I could finally understand why she projected that bad feeling onto me, why she had told me I was to blame for her losing her temper and beating me. I understood it now, and I understood it was every bit as wrong as I knew it was when I was a kid.
You say you turned out fine the way you were raised. Look at you ma. You weren’t okay. You turned into an adult who screamed her fucking lungs out at a helpless child who didn’t listen to you because you didn’t know how to open a dialogue where you patiently explained your needs to him. You say I turned out fine the way you raised me. Look at me ma. I’m not okay. I turned into an adult who screams his fucking lungs out at a helpless old lady who doesn’t listen to me because I don’t know how to open a dialogue where I patiently explain my needs to her.
But I don’t blame you ma. You never stood a chance with this particular facet of child rearing, not when mental health resources were practically non-existent in your era, not when “spare the rod, spoil the child” was common folk wisdom in your time. I’ve seen the way grandpa and grandma fight too, screaming their heads off at each other the same way you and dad screamed at each other too, the same way you guys screamed at me as well. It’s why for the longest time I thought Liza and I didn’t have any fights, because “fight” to me meant an altercation where we’re both simultaneously screaming at the top of our lungs ranting and raving incoherently at each other, and we’ve never ever even come close to doing that. I’m grateful that Liza and I have access to the sort of relationship technology that you never had in your youth.
Pass it back or pass it on. You passed plenty back to your parents already, but you passed on this hurt and this pain to me because you never recognized it as something you could hand back. I’m finally at a place in life where I can recognize what’s been handed to me and decide what to do about it. You don’t have to say sorry, because you’re not sorry, because you don’t understand, just the way I didn’t understand when I was a kid. But I won’t beat you until you say sorry to me for something you don’t understand. We have reached a point in our mother-son relationship where it is now time for me to be the adult in the room, and so I forgive you anyways because I love you and I know you mean well despite your behavior. But forgivance alone does not wipe away our triggers. You are the way you are now, and I am the way I am now, so this is the dynamic between us now. What do we want to do about this?
As I wandered about the Big City, I chanced upon a talented clay sculptor who sculpted for me a most exquisite gift to bring back to Liza. The cover came off as I put the sculpture in my bag. In my clumsy attempts to place the cover back on without looking, I realized with a sudden pang of horror that my fingers were touching the clay. Time stopped as I realized I had just royally messed everything up. I pulled the sculpture out with a sense of dread and apprehension, and let out a cry of anguished despair as I saw the damage. Anger. How could I have been so stupidly careless?! Anger. If only I’d put it in a box first, this wouldn’t have happened! Anger, anger that perhaps isn’t necessarily bad because it helps me remember this moment and its lessons, but anger that won’t serve me forever. My training from The Ceremony kicked in. Surrender. I now live in a world where this will always have happened. Now how do I want to run the salvage operation?
I ruminated on the fact that my twenties were drawing to a close, a gentle reminder that while life does last a long while, the decades do ever so slowly pass us by. I reflected on what advice I’d give to the Amos who was getting ready to start his twenties, and I thought I would say what I told the Amos of yesteryear:
“Just do what you are doing. You know your days are numbered, but you act as if they aren’t. You’ve read essays on how short and precious life is, but you still treat your twenties as if they’re going to last forever. That’s because living as a timely miser is not something that suits you and your personality right now. You need to live freely and abundantly, to stretch your wings and soar as if the whole sky belongs to you, observing all that the good earth has to offer before picking a nice clearing in the woods to settle down in. So go ahead and do just that, because your twenties are going to last forever. Once you’re done living the life of an immortal, you will be ready to begin your new life as a mortal.”
I prepared to explore new project ideas. As I did so, I thought about trying them out in one of those programming languages of the gods. I’d already encountered Lisp before, a homoiconic language where code is data and data is code, a property that enables such powerful self-modification it truly is fit for use by the gods. Then there’s Smalltalk, a language I’d heard about in a similar vein but never actually tried. I finally saw now that it’s not just a language, it’s also its own development environment integrated like no other, where programs are data and data are programs, a property that accords it such powerful self-reflection it truly is also fit for use by the gods. Impractical though these languages may be for mainstream software development — exceptions notwithstanding — there is a certain timelessness to their beauty that makes me feel they’ll always be around in one form or another.
My forays here brought me to the Glamorous Toolkit, a Smalltalk-powered development environment that is curiously reminiscent of meditation. You see, when I finally learned to meditate, I learned the kind that was about introspective observation. Observe your mind, observe your thoughts, and simply let them go without judgment. If you do find yourself passing judgment on an observation, observe that too and let it go. If you find yourself caught in an engrossing train of thought, observe that too and let it go. And so too with Glamorous Toolkit: introspectively observe your software in representations native to your domain. If these representations do not yet exist, mold them into existence so that you may observe. If you have trouble molding together a custom view, observe your troubles in a representation specifically molded to GT’s views. Observe your problems, and the solutions will reveal themselves. As clunky as the tooling may still be in some areas, the vision is clear and tremendous, a prime candidate for some of my next coding projects.
As the afterglow of The Ceremony started fading away, I panicked over capturing that perfect Story I had just been told on the third night. I had a taste of how Liza feels when she sets up beautiful photographic shots, all excited to see how the pictures turn out, just to wake up and realize all those shots will forever be stuck in that dream world, with faint memories as the only surviving artifacts she takes with her into the real world. I was lucky in that textual information is a lot easier to send across the limited bandwidth of the celestial internet. Nonetheless, I still found myself chasing after fragments of those fragile golden pages as a constant light breeze gently scattered them about. My arms were chock full of fragments, so full that whenever I leapt to snatch a new page, some old ones would be shaken loose. Already the pages were disappearing, their fringes singed by contact with the corrosive air of waking life. I could sense my divine inspiration draining from my very fingertips as sentences that once knew how to dance and flow now stood brittle as stone, and words that once evoked transcendental beauty now looked as leaden and insipid as the graphite I wrote them with.
In my despair, I gave up, and in giving up I gained the appreciation that the perfect Story was a book that only I will ever have had the privilege of thumbing through the pages of, its private recitation one that only I will ever have had the privilege of attending. To recreate that Story exactly is impossible because I am an imperfect writer. But what I do believe is possible is for me to do that Story justice, to give someone with proclivities such as mine a sampling of the wonder and awe that I came across last month. If the original was unmistakably Amos, so too is this imperfect retelling of it, marred as it is with the unforgeable signature of Amos’s literary foibles.
Dear Reader, I have offered you a lot of wisdom, but in truth I have offered you none. This is not wisdom on how to live your life. This is wisdom on how to live Amos’s life. There is no free lunch in machine learning; neither is there free lunch in life advice. Advice that is universally applicable to every situation must also be so generic as to be useless: “Use your best judgment.” Nor, I suspect, would even younger Amos have benefitted much from being snuck a copy of this story. He would’ve relished its themes and intellectually understood its lessons, but he would not have felt those lessons in his bones as I do. If you are not Amos, I hope this has at least been an entertaining read. If you are Amos, I trust I have captured in sufficient detail the first time we felt like we had finally completed the Tenderfoot’s journey because we were finally ready to take responsibility for our own life despite all its uncontrollable factors, the first time in our adult history we felt proud of driving to completion through sustained creative effort a piece we poured our own heart into.
This story I have told you is a true story, as true as any story can be. If it errs in its details, it rectifies them in its emotions. If you find yourself fascinated by The Ceremony, if you believe yourself ready to take on such an arduous journey, know that it must necessarily exist only on the fringes of modern society, tucked away harmlessly in the dark basements and deep jungles of obscure legal ambiguity. It is not so much anti-establishment as it is non-establishment; like the Arcane, there is at present no way to render it reassuringly legible to mainstream institutions without sacrificing the spirit of authenticity that pervades it. So if you feel The Calling, keep your mind and your heart open. Dive into the esoteric traditions, surf on top of the latest popular trends, experience the full breadth and depth of existing as the person you are, and maybe, just maybe…
One day…
The Ceremony will meet you where you are.
All that is meant to be will be.
This story is dedicated to my family, my friends, my therapists, my strangers, my fellow participants (including facilitators) at The Ceremony, and of course my Ellie:
រីករាយថ្ងៃបុណ្យសង្សារ!
បងនឹងស្រឡាញ់អូនអោយបានយូរដរាបណាអូនចង់ឱ្យបេះដូងបងមានអូន។
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