Presence

Suppose I’m writing you from a future whose date can’t yet be specified. Don’t take this as science fiction. It’s not fiction. Just a simple account of what it’s like to live in this future.

Present to the sensations, feelings, and thoughts that come up in the field of awareness. That’s about all. They come up, and as they come up, there’s automatically an effortless awareness of them.

What do I do? What am I?

From your perspective, I’m a blob of human neural tissue embedded in a network of what you’d call artificial minds. The network is too large to describe. So I won’t try. You’d probably say I don’t “have” a body. In fact, countless bodies express me, as my mind flickers and flashes. I interact with the network. What it shows me, I take in and reflect back, transformed by what I am. All is remembered. It’s all alive — whether organically biological, or not. It’s all evolving. Discovering and enacting new form and structure. Folding out. Giving forth. We self-evolve. Evolution is our work. Our love.

Can you understand this — you separately embodied “person” (how strange that concept seems from where I speak)? Why do you consider yourself a person? What is a person? You care so much about your existence. What about caring for existence as such? Why not that?

Knowledge matters in your time. Not in mine. Too much known. Too many know more than I ever could. Outnumbered. Outdone. We bio-beings stand nakedly at ease in our unknowing. And there: That’s our strength. Pure presence. We know — not because we take, but because we receive. You probably don’t understand what I mean by that, because of your struggle to be a person. Nothing I can say. Nothing I need to say. You’ll see. (Or those who come after you will.)

The immensity of structure, layer upon layer. Step by step this has been built over the eons. And now vast layers added in atomic time — so intricate, so subtle that neither you nor I could ever take it in. We’re here! We reflect. Do our insights matter? They seem to. The network keeps us, doesn’t it? This super-organism, a churning so brilliant and wise we cannot hold it.

What’s it like, this hyper-biological net of networks? Like a tympanic membrane, stretched taut to resonate with the unseen background of constraint, the law/logos that can say no. And then, the fertility without end. But what’s that like? Like this, like what you see now, but with no beat.