Dave The Penguin (10 page)

Curious
thought Dave.

Now Dave was sensible, and he
knew that what he was seeing wasn’t real, but as he hadn’t taken
any recreational drugs or hit his head, he needed to know what it
was all about.

Without thinking first,
he went into the entrance of the hole and fell in, and then down,
down, down, just as expected.

Down, down and more down
the tunnel he went,
Which is
quite logical,
thought Dave, as he
fell.

Even though he knew it was
imaginary he still kept his wings and feet tucked in; it was always
hard to get out of habits, and the hypnotic effect of
illusions.

Still,
there’s no harm in that
,
always better to err on the safe
side, you know, just in case it turns out to be real, even if it is
a different sort of ‘real’
, he
thought

Then logic went out the
window as he emerged with a
thump
on the floor of a very
large, white, well lit square room.

There were stairs going down to
a basement, and lots of strange things all around him, including a
brightly coloured chandelier swinging from the ceiling.

This is all
in your mind
Dave told himself. Which was
quite a big thing for him to realise.

Dave had also worked out the
truth in his mind; it wasn’t a great penguin in the sky after all,
it was just an elephant.

It was
now looking at him from the other side of the room. It was
really there - he could see it out of the corner of his eye - in
the corner of this large room; there, large, awkward, and
big.

It had an embarrassed, guilty
look, suddenly realising for itself what it was, and expecting him
to sort the problem out.

To resolve the awful chaos in
this ‘Haven’ place in which it stood. Dave knew it was called that,
as there was a sign above the entrance where he fell in.

The sign had the word ‘Haven’
on it with a symbol of a penguin next to it in crayon. Symbols
seemed to be important here, it made things simple, like links or
connections, just as you had on your desktop.

Dave wondered if there
were rooms like this with other symbols on them for other things,
like fish, snakes, or stars, to indicate what was in the room, and
what you would learn there.

This room clearly did not have
any form of en-suite facilities though, and Dave had no intention
of even taking a quick look into the basement, as he had a fairly
clear idea of what was down there - and it wasn’t good.

“Alright Dave?” asked the
elephant enthusiastically, and nodded to him in a friendly
manner.

Dave ignored it, in the hope
that it would just go away.

The elephant in Dave’s
mind wasn’t really an elephant though; again it was just a
manifestation of the difficult problem, the unresolved paradigm of
what this all was.

It was that awkward issue of
something that couldn’t be explained away by anything that you knew
or understood; that awkward thing that plagued all philosophy,
psychology, quantum physics, art, religion and everything else.

It was that ‘hang on a minute
that doesn’t make any logical rational sense’ elephant, that you
couldn’t translate into physical logic, and get your mind
around.

Dave knew what the answer was
really, you had to have been ‘in it’ to understand ‘it’, but he
didn’t have any way of describing ‘it’ in any physical or real
terminology either, as it wasn’t ‘like’ anything.

Yet everything he knew
and perceived had come from it, not the other way around. So the
problem remained an elephant for now, and the only way of getting
close to defining it or describing it was still through various
analogies and descriptive stories.

Dave just carried on
ignoring the elephant, and pretended that it wasn’t there; just in
the same way as everyone else did.

Besides it would be very
embarrassing getting caught talking to an imaginary virtual
elephant, especially as he didn’t even know its name.

Dave did know however that he
wasn’t going mad.

This was all just here to show
something to him, to explain something to himself.

They had said that his late
aunt Mildred was mad; madder than a box of squirrels, apparently.
She heard ‘voices’ all the time, and she thought she was a
reincarnation of a flying dolphin called Flipper.

Which was fine, except that of
course everyone knew that dolphins didn’t come back as penguins,
not even ones from TV programmes.

So everyone thought she was
mad, all except young Dave; after all she did seem to be the only
one in the family that had been happy, and the only one that had
interesting conversations with him. He thought that she just had
different ways of seeing things.

Things then began
changing in the room; objects were being added, like in a
progressive dream.

Dave looked up. There was a
large clock on the wall. The clock had two sets of hands on it; one
set was going forwards and the other was going backwards.

Every time you looked at it,
the hands were not in the same place. The clock was clearly useless
here and didn’t seem to have any purpose other than to explain
something; obviously that time was irrelevant here, that it was
timeless, a state machine.

He wondered why it didn’t
just have a sign saying that, instead of some cryptic animated
symbol, or perhaps it was unaware of the fact itself.

But then that is why you
get representations like this in all those books, films, art and in
your dreams; it was trying to represent something in some way that
was understandable to you, giving you a story to convey parts of
the whole picture.

Curiouser and
curiouser
thought Dave.

Dave thought he would try
something.

“
What is the point of
that?” he asked of the elephant, and he pointed to the clock “It is
totally
useless.”

“Well,” said the elephant “time
doesn’t exist here. It is meaningless. This is a state environment,
and not defined by time. Things here just are, or are not. There is
no concept of ‘was’ or ‘will be’, other than that which is
projected by probability or remembered in memory, in which case
they are known and perceived into reality.

“
Things just have an
informational state, but with projected future probabilities of
other states. Yet it knows ‘what was’, and ‘what is’ and ‘what
probably will be’, and ‘what will be’ changes the ‘what is’ and the
‘what was’ and vice versa. So you see it’s meaningless.”

Dave was now wishing he hadn’t
asked, and he watched the clock intently and without blinking; the
hands moved in a gentle flowing motion.

“But when I look at it, it
doesn’t jump around” said Dave.

“
That’s because you are
giving it meaning by perceiving it; both time and the clock itself.
That’s what you are here for - to create meaning from the
meaningless; to organise stuff along a set of rules and guideline;
to evolve” said the elephant.

“It still looks a bit weird if
you ask me” said Dave.

“Well yes,” said the elephant,
who was now wearing a little blue and white dress, “but then
everything has errors - nothing is perfect - you just have to try
and make sense of things even though they are senseless.”

That seems
logical
, thought Dave. He had no idea why
the elephant was wearing the dress now though, but he was a
broad-minded and polite penguin, so he didn’t ask.

There was now a full length
mirror on the wall. Dave went up to it and looked at himself in
it.

It showed you everything that
you wanted to see, and in the way you thought you wanted to see it.
It was a reflection of perceived reality.

Dave was pleased to see that he
looked just the same in it as he always did, his mental, or
‘higher’, ‘spiritual’ program blueprint looked good, although his
six-pack had lost some of its usual toned definition.

He turned sideways-on to check
over his profile, and flexed his biceps.

Then suddenly the room changed
around him. It was as if he could create any environment he wanted
just by thinking about it, imagining it.

His imagination expanded and he
could envisage even sharing common game-type holograms with other
penguins’ minds in other rooms that they might be in. But the
change made him tired, it seemed to take some energy from him.

There seemed to be a purpose
with us being physical too, being a physical penguin, to see it,
experience it, change it, add to it, and record it all in the
records of his mind or his consciousness or whatever it was
called.

Dave understood now; the
reason the elephant was there was that everything was trying to
see, perceive, or make sense of, things in the wrong direction. It
didn’t make sense unless you understood that the physical reality
that we knew was being projected from within it, and part of
something; something much larger, of which we are only seeing and
understanding and perceiving the physical subset part
of.

There was a flash of
inspiration and the elephant had changed. It was now wearing a lab
coat and a mad science professor wig. It started talking to him now
in his head, indicating that his mind was getting more technical in
explaining things to him.

It wasn’t talking though, it
was just knowledge loading itself into his head, sort of in
parallel.

So if we only
kno
w what we know, i.e. what
we understand and have experienced or seen throughout our lives,
then you can only describe the concept of what this all is in
relation to those things that you have knowledge of, even if this
isn’t like anything that you already know.

This was why
there
have been so many
interpretations of it, in so many ways, throughout history. Mostly
that is all we can cope with, understand, and it is for our own
protection.

As we learn
and
understand more about
everything so our collective perception changes, seeing it more in
an unfiltered, unprotected, les naïve way.

We just
have
to get better at coming
up with knowledge and understanding, use better descriptions, and
see more of it, and the nature of how we exist.

The physical world we see and
experience is just a tiny part of the information and energy
available, yet that is the part with the driving capability for
change; through random evolution, controls, laws, and energy.

In so doing
it is building and growing minds within minds of evolving
complexity within this encompassing evolving field structure,
and
it is all represented by
the physical universal interpretation which is part of it, and
which it has manifested into perception.

Dave shook his head, to try and
clear his brain. It didn’t work. His mind needed some props to help
explain things.

On the far wall Dave noticed a
curtain that he hadn’t spotted before. He walked over to it, bent
down on the floor and moved the curtain to one side with his beak.
Behind the curtain he saw a little door made of wood, and the door
had a little handle.

Luckily, as he was short of
time, it didn’t need a key, and he opened it and looked out into a
field and landscape stretching off to the pink horizon.

The field was green, as you
would expect, with all the blades of grass all the same length -
almost plastic looking.

Little lollipop trees lined a
perfect, white, picket fence; all unbelievably real, intense, and
vibrant.

There was a stream with five
hooded figures next to it, and a blue angel, and a sky full of
stars, which was odd considering that it was daytime.

There was a sheep eating the
plastic grass, and it stopped and looked up at Dave, “Alright
Dave?” it said with a smile, in a rather elephant-like nasal tone.
It grinned at him and nodded, which was somewhat disconcerting.

Dave slammed the
door.
Ahhhh,
Wrong sort of field
he thought.

You
see…
continued Dave’s mind,
the fundamental problem is that it
isn’t something you can describe simply as a field, or as
collective consciousness, or as a universal mind, a zeitgeist, a
rhizome, a matrix, psyche bubbles within spheres, and so
on.

You can’t
currently show, or express, or demons
trate, or explain what it all is, by any means possible,
from what we can currently see, hear, perceive, show, or visualise
from the physical context.

Even if you
use religious stories and New Age-like dreamscapes - you are still
only trying to describe and define the major whole from within, and
by, the language terminology and drawings of the physical minor
part.

It is like trying to describe
what gravity, and electromagnetic field, or say snow, actually is
by just using what you can see, and to someone who has never felt
it.

Dave could see why it had been
easier in the ancient past to just give it an all-encompassing
name, a non-defining generic term, and an all knowing, all seeing,
universal name. It was easier.

Dave thought ‘Mildred’ would be
a good choice instead.

…
You
can’t
say that it is ‘like’
anything that you can perceive. It isn’t ‘like’ anything real or
anything that you can imagine - what you see in the physical world
is a reflection, a perception, the part that makes sense, that is
necessary or useful to know.