He’d always been interested in mind expansion.
He’d experienced voices and chimes as a child and more intensely so as a teenager. He’d read up and around the literature. He understood that he was not communing with spirits, that what he heard was created within, inner voices he was misinterpreting through their clarity. This did not faze him, it was fuel.
The very fact that it was his mind that was producing this phenomenon was the intrigue. He’d studied psychology and read case studies and examples of people who’d experienced intense hallucinations. He’d categorised them himself, in to destructive, harmonious, agreeing, consoling, benign.
He’d experimented with hallucinogens. LSD had proved just too powerful, too overwhelming and ultimately too scatological. Mushrooms had been more revealing, with practiced dosing he’s had an epiphanic moment when he’d seen his own mind not only in action, but in the action of perceiving itself. Later he’d encountered a side of his mind that had seemed hell bent on destroying him. That was the end for mushrooms.
Other drugs with hallucinogenic affects soon went by the wayside too, as jobs, and serious relationships, friendships with people he respected and then family life took him away from his investigations in to his own mind.
But he never forgot. He just put things to the way side and kept abreast of what research he could through popular science magazines and less mainstream media on the internet.
Over all this time, Jay formed a theory of his own mind, he didn’t care about anyone else’s.
He’d formalised it in to a serious of propositions. In moments when he could afford enough levity he called it his Four Propositions of Jaynamics.
- My mind is modular, with each piece able to operate in isolation from or in conjunction with other parts.
- Modules may communicate to my consciousness as part of a choir or as individuals.
- Consciousness functioning well pays heed to the loudest voices, normally the choir.
- With training I can listen to those single, isolated voices.
The joy of the psychedelic experience for Jay was not that it suggested some otherworldly experience, or communion with a great sea of noumenal souls. The joy was that his own mind contained a litany of voices, visions and experiences he could commune with.
At the age of 38, one day after his birthday, Jay’s children were in bed. His wife sat at the kitchen table doing a cryptic crossword. He excused himself and went to their room with a table tennis ball and a box cutter to try a Ganzfeld experiment.
He’d recently been promoted to a position that allowed him ample income and less clear deliverables. His children were in high school and far less needy of their parents. If ever there was a time to play with his mind, he thought, it was now.
He turned off all the lights but one, which he shone across the room towards the comfy chair his wife had long ago used for breast feeding but which now operated mainly as a clotheshorse.
He sat on the armchair in their bedroom and carefully sliced the ping pong ball in half and coated the rims in blue tack to make them slightly adhesive.
Crossing the room, he turned on the radio, tuned it to static, adjusted the volume to just above audible and sat back down in the chair, affixing the half-ping-pong balls to his eyes.
At first he saw nothing but the shaded white of the interior of the ball. The inner coating was something acrid, perhaps antiseptic. It stung his eyes a little, but not uncomfortably so, the medicated smell was in itself relaxing.
He understood the experiment was designed to take advantage of the brain’s natural tendency to fill in the gaps. He understood that anything he would see would be merely the brain’s perceptive attributes trying to make sense of a vague signal, as it would when it conjured faces in patterns, figures in the shadows, shapes in the clouds.
He understood that early human brains had developed abilities to spot danger even where there was none, to be ultra-alert as they walked in the plains, out of the trees, perceptive for the many creatures capable of harming them, ready to run, utilising the long distance, sweat and panting supported abilities that upright man had developed, the ability to outrun a predator far faster than they, as long as they had enough head start, enough to ensure the chase became a marathon not a sprint.
He considered these facts and noticed that his visual field had darkened. His retinas or brain was compensating, altering the size of his retinas, altering its receptivity to certain wavelengths, cones shifting their responsibility.
He understood that some animals saw colour even in the dark. Others saw colours invisible to the human spectrum, colours without names.
Purple waves filled his view, shoddy rings condensing in and out. He felt calm and relaxed, the anti-septic smell, the feeling of floating. Suddenly his field of vision was a pockmarked expanse, as if the moon was all he could see, concave above him somehow, evenly battered by rock strike.
This dissipated. The light field had become lighter he noted. His brain had given up on that tactic.
A flash of something appeared in the centre of his view. It was subtle, a perturbation only, nothing solid, like the fleeting glimpse of a figure disappearing through a door. As he contemplated it, tried to remember it more clearly it was replaced by another image, the corner of a white car, a clear detail of a bumper.
Images came fast and lurid. Whilst the colour remained bleached, vague, the clarity of the images themselves became sharper. The bulbous belly of a peach, sand dunes shifting in the wind, a rustling tree, a person’s face looking emotionless. Each came and went, fleeting but substantial enough for him to do his work, to test his laws.
After thirty minutes Maria interrupted him and asked, with some humour in her voice, what he was doing lying on the bed with ping pong balls on his eyes. He told her he was relaxing.
*
As the weeks went on Jay mastered the Gendtfeld experiments. He found he was able to easily lapse in to the state necessary to bring the images in to view and that he could will specific images in to view.
He found that when conjuring a memory, what he saw was not a replica of the things remembered but an idealised simulcram. His wife’s face was at best an artist’s sketch based on a good description. His childhood home was always from the same angle, always in the same conditions, like stock footage.
He found that he could trace the paths back to the memories. He did not believe that he was physically tracing a path through his brain, but that the illusion was heuristic, a metaphor he’s managed to overlay on his brain processes.
It allowed him to improve his performance on these specific tasks, on any task. As his ability to conjure specifics increased, he found the randomness of images disappeared. He could force a visual hallucination on himself but he’d lost the ability to use this technique to explore his mind.
The next logical step appeared to be an isolation tank.
He supposed that he could transfer this mastery of perceptive functions from the visual to all sensation. A modular mind should allow that.
*
Life got in the way as it does. His work underwent significant changes but ultimately he came to the other end in a better position with more responsibility, but surrounded by a smaller team with less temerity. He turned fourty, then fourty one.
His son broke a leg, a bad break caused by a trampoline he was too old to bounce on. He was placed in a full leg cast that limited his movements so significantly that they required a full time carer to look after him for the first two months of recovery.
The nurse was expensive and a godsend. Jay knuckled down at work, putting in long hours and pushed through a major transformation project that set his company up for a profitable next year. His reward was a new position with more responsibility again and more senior reports.
His outputs became them completing there’s. His son completed rehab and the nurse left. His son returned to full mobility. The spare room became an office again instead of a carer’s quarters. He used it for working late in to the night.
Jay booked himself in to an isolation tank session on his fourty third birthday in a moment of calm. He had not experimented on himself for almost four years.
*
He lay in the warm, senseless pool for thirty minutes, identifying what were recognisable eye-tricks that represented his optical sense pathways reorganising a lack of available data in to problem solving images. He ignored them, focussing instead on sound.
He felt weightless and peaceful but fretful too, too eager to get something he considered of value out of the process. Jay forced himself to relax. He breathed deeply, holding it, exhaling slowly. He could hear his heartbeat slowing, could feel the throb of the lessening pulse rate come out of his body, bounce off the sides of the chamber and connect with his skin again, a distinct syncopation.
Jay counted in his head.
He wondered why he was wasting his time, thought about work, thought about a bad conversation he’d had with his son, thought of a message he hadn’t responded to, thought of an opportunity he had missed to further his own position, thought of a missed detail in his main focus project, thought of the shelving that was in need of some repair and whether he could do it or call a tradesman, he imagined the conversation with the tradesman, imagined himself articulating himself deliberately to ensure the tradesman understood that he could do the job himself, but was simply time poor. He told himself that time poor was an illusion. No one is time poor. You’re not time poor he said, and there it was. A tone. The tone was speaking. It was deep down there, triggered by a lie he told himself. He focussed in, using the skills he had mastered, imagining the part of the brain it came from, sensing it to be somewhere to the rear, to the left.
‘Time poor is a phrase used by people that don’t accept that prioritisation is all. No one is time poor who binge watches reality TV shows with their wife. No one is time poor who reads the paper and does the crossword. Time poor is a myth we all tell ourselves to let ourselves off from tasks we don’t feel like doing.’
How do you know that, he, his active voice, asked.
The inner voice replied, his but distinct, passive, in his tone, but driven otherwise than from his focussed intent.
‘Because the phrase time poor is another way of neglecting obligations on account of work commitments. You’ve only heard it in corporate contexts and it’s always code for we pay you enough to focus on what we want you to focus on it’s never a literal statement of fact. We all sit there and say yes, we are time poor but really we’re saying Yes, we will focus on these higher value monetary tasks and we will be willing to ask for help and we will not let money be sacrificed for preferences.
Jay knew all this as it was said. It was his own thoughts, thoughts he’d had, but this time he distinctly heard where they came from within him, not a single unity consciousness but from a hyper-critical and hyper-rational sub-consciousness that lived somewhere, spatially, in the far rear right of his skull.
Since he now knew where this voice lived he found it increasingly easy to reach this sub-personality within him on subsequent flotation tank experiences, never confusing the sub-personality for a split personality.
This voice sometimes wondered if he’d created a convenient fiction. He thought that may be true but three months later he identified a second voice that lived somewhere in the middle of his skull and mind. It was a happy voice that seemed to sing songs endlessly. The songs were rarely songs he’d heard recently. They were often joined by the hint of the melody.
After another six months Jay had no further success beyond hypercritical Jay and Jay.FM.
His visits to the flotation tanks decreased in frequency and stopped as he looked at other alternatives. His big project had had a major roadblock and had been abandoned. He found himself working hard to find alternative projects that could realise his companies vision, as well as making up for some of the lost capital he’d sunk.
His efforts were not successful, although a peer eventually found a suitable project and he was seconded to that, but not as a lead. His status took a nosedive in the eyes of his superiors and he realised he had no future there and would need to move on. A year later he had not and was paddling to survive.
*
When Jay’s endless urgent tasks dried up he found himself with more time. He was fourty seven. His children were at university and finishing high school. He started documenting some of his mental finding and his efforts and searched on the internet for other people who were doing likewise. He found a forum for people interested in self-experimentation and on a thread about consciousness expansion. It seemed largely preoccupied with illegal drugs but included a link to a magazine from Europe he had never heard of called Mind State. He ordered a copy and one month weeks later it arrived.
The editorial was new age mysticism, the articles largely about self-healing and altered states of consciousness written by religious and spiritual practitioners. He read it all, fascinated at the subculture he’d uncovered. Hypercritical Jay occasionally lobbed in his two cents worth about the well-known power of the placebo and the basically unverifiability or many of the claims about achieving ascendance to a transitory astral plane, the only criteria for access being to be able to claim that one had accessed it.
In advertisements at the back were various products offered. One was a modifier for a basic VR set that claimed to be able to allow the user to experience a resonance frequency feedback loop with one’s own mind, allowing the user to access areas of memory otherwise hidden. The company was German. The purpose of the product was to aid in certain forms of therapeutic courses Jay was not otherwise familiar with, many of them targeted at early-life scars and suppressed mental injuries.
The price was exorbitant but no more than a good meal in a good downtown restaurant. Jay went to their website and ordered the product.
*
Jay lay on the bed in the spare room. It was a single bed, and comfortable in the way a spare bed that is rarely used can be. The room was warm, but the covers her lay upon were cool.
He place the chip from he had received in the post in to the VR set’s port. It had taken a month to come, and two more weeks for him to find the time to use it. A series of mildly demeaning business trips had left him tired and guilty about not being present with his family.
He placed the sleek set on his head, adjusted the straps to make sure they were comfortable and lay back. He could dimly feel the pressure of the elastic around his skull but the set was barely heavier than his sun glasses, covering his eyes, slotting down over his ears.
Before he flicked the switch he could just sense the outside world, no sights, the soft cuff his heartbeat in his ears. As soon as he switched it even that was gone. He swiped his hands through the air, moving deftly though the OS start up and selecting the correct program, selecting the correct language.
Are you ready?
Floated in the centre of his field of vision, hazily centred. He said yes out loud, or thought he did, the disassociation of his voice, the alternate frequencies being directed to his ears, made his own voice distant and remote.
He touched the unit one more time, felt the chip he’d added was correctly fitted, not coming loose. Based on the diagrams and a quickly scanned visual translation it focussed ultra-high frequency pulses in to the brain, activating specific regions related to memory, to emotion, to sense of personal agency. The program simultaneously transmitted bland sounds and images the brain was unable to process meaningfully.
The diagram demonstrating this had shown a series of blue triangles emanating from the chip in to the cross sectioned brain of a diagrammatic man. He understood enough about this was not a literal illustration.
His mind had wondered so he refocussed it and called up Jay.FM. He found the channel easily, as he now could whenever environmental conditions were correct, but he noted how quick it happened, how strong the music and song was, and how it was, newly, preceded by and accompanied by a mild light show in time to the music.
He was listening to The Love Shack by the B52s and his visions were of spotted lights, diffuse and separated, pulsing in time, marching and gyrating. He could not tell whether the device was reading his mind and creating the images, creating the images independently or whether the images were entirely the creation of his own mind. Perhaps, he thought, this was induced synaesthesia.
He briefly, and unwisely, checked in with hypercritical Jay. Again, it was quick, sudden, accompanied by some visuals, incredibly focussed. He did not appreciate what hypercritical Jay had to say, but he was impressed by the device, by how it supported his self-trained focus.
Disengaging and floating, he started skirting around his mind, imagining the brain, imagining his mind inside it, moving his focus of perception routinely through it.
The device, or him and the device properly, created a vague simulacrum of what he himself was imagining and he was able to build a mental model of his mind to support his search, peering down in to the far right, rear when he felt something odd and out of place that he did not recognise.
He was able to hover his perception over this spot, zooming in until he thought he could, then actually could, hear a small voice. He recognised it quickly. He engaged with it.
‘Hi.’ Said Jay. ‘I know you. You’re my idle side, you’re the part of me that does little, wants less, that sits and is and avoids action and is maybe sometime lonesome.’
‘Mmmm.’ Said the voice. ‘Hey.’
He engaged the voice, knowing that what it said was what he said and that they were the same but able to distil its tone and attitude quite purely.
The lonely idler was not, truth be told, an interesting voice, but it was an inner voice he knew well, who ended conversatons in his mind rather than starting them. He made a mental map flag and left that area, listening in on Jay.fm and then back to the lonely idler again until he was certain that he could find it again whenever he desired.
Jay continued his search with no success until his leg was being shaken. He reached up and took the VR set off, saw his wife, accepted her offer of a glass of wine and a catch up downstairs so they could talk, again, of the much planned vacation.
*
Now enhanced by the VR set and the technology Jay found himself able to quickly find his other voices. He had a courageous spirit who mentored him in how to overcome his fears, embrace reality as winnable and become fearless. This voice advised Jay, earnestly, to punch life in the neck.
He had a deep philosophical ponderer given to meandering contemplations of reality and Jay’s place in it. It suggested to him that his very quest to distil the different voices within him presupposed a reality where the very possibility had to exist. Could he not be, it wondered, creating this reality as a means to fulfil his own expectations of what it meant to be conscious. Jay didn’t know the answer, but was comforted by the concept somehow.
Along with hypercritical jay, Jay.fm and his present consciousness these five voices appeared to be the sum total of his internal voices, and he found himself able to hear their influences, their parsed sentences, even in his non-focussed life, a snatch of music, a meta-question, a terrifying consequence imagined, a burst of bravado that pushed him to make a decision. These were fragments, stitched together within him.
He found with practise that he was increasingly able to access these voices without the device, although never as clearly or as intently.
After weeks of futile searching he eventually found one more voice, a voice that praises his singular uniqueness and was his biggest fan. A voice that validated all he is. He found that voice comforting and familiar, although of all the voices it remained the least clear.
*
Jay found less and less time to pursue his internal investigation. Being sent around the country to do work that was beneath him had crystallised one day when he’d calmly handed in his notice and been unsurprised that no one asked him to reconsider.
His family supported him, and he knew they’d built a sufficient nest egg that he was in no rush to find work. He kept himself busy, socialising, playing tennis, attending seminars and conferences. He found that he was often the most experienced person there, offering guidance and friendship, no more.
A chance conversation saw this grow in to an engagement with a technology start up looking to have their nascent leadership team mentored. Growth was leisurely, but consistent. Working for anyone else faded from his thoughts.
*
Maria had been cleaning the spare room when she found the packaging for the VR module. She’d been aware of what Jay was doing, but not exactly certain, he’s been private about his hobby so she’d given him privacy.
The image on the cardboard didn’t so much concern her as confuse her, blue lasers targeted at the brain. She’d studied some German in high school, but didn’t recall enough to decode it. She put it in her bag.
Weeks later, she was in the city. She’d taken the train in with Jay who was speaking at a breakfast seminar. They would have an early lunch later, but until then she was visiting the travel agent to discuss the final plans for a trip through South America. She’d shown him an itinerary and suggested it was missing a Uruguayan beach element. He’d told her to create that then and book it.
Whilst at the Travel agent she’d asked if there were any German speakers there. Justine had been bought out after her business was finished. She was a native German speaker.
Justine read the packaging. “It’s funny.’ she said, laying down the packaging, her accent light. She had not encountered a product like this before.
‘It’s new age I think yes? For sufferers of grief, or no, someone who has lost someone. It says literally…’ she picked up the packaging again. ‘When you did not have a chance to say goodbye, then this allows you to do so, you imagine the conversation and it brings it to life, or no, it brings it to reality.’
Maria thought about all the people he’d lost in the previous decade. She hadn’t considered he was in pain about it. She felt bad that she had not supported him and angry that he had not come to her for support.
As she waited for him in the café, she resolved her feelings. She would say nothing. She would be there for him when he needed her, but until then he seemed in a happy place, as happy as he’d ever been in fact, relaxed and comfortable and doting.
She thought of those last few weeks in the hospital, as he sat by his brother’s bed, the cancer slowly destroying him, the two of them singing together, always singing. And just a year later his dad had passed too, without any of their issues resolved, Jay still feeling as if he’d never done anything right. Within weeks his oldest friend Stefan, a car accident, and gone were their long rambling talks, taking the universe apart.
Then there was Jason, always coming back from his indomitable adventures, all stories ad bravado until a simple kidney infection in Namibia had done for him. Her cousin Phillip, who Jay had been so close to, one of the few people Phillip had ever let in to his wayward life, who had lived with them for all those years before they’d had kids and he’d gone out on his own, but not coped. They’d blamed themselves, maybe fairly. And, of course, going further back, his mother who he’d lost so young, who he barely remembered.
When she thought about it, she conceded he’d outlived too many people from his inner circle. Beyond Phillip she’d lost almost no one but some acquaintances, friends of friends and elderly relatives even as she approached the downward slope of her second half.
She saw him coming to the door, and straightened up at the table. When he saw her he smiled widely, delighted to see her.
Adoni Patrikios 