Today, as I was looking at the lake from my deck chair, I was sifting through the thoughts crowding my mind. Letting myself be carried by a slight current of melancholy across the calm surface of memories, I introspectively observed the long river of my life. While I looked back at the images of my existence, an idea gradually made its way into my conscious mind: "Probably the universe I’d like to live in is the one made of happy memories dancing in my mind."
Have you ever felt that strange sensation of understanding the plot of the universe? It's not a rational understanding, no, not at all; it's as if every synapse, every neuron in our brain synchronized with the mysterious frequencies that govern the mechanisms of the cosmos.
It almost seems as if time stops, leaving us suspended in a projection of our mind. It's a strange feeling, as though you’ve understood, dream-like, everything. The sense of peace that comes from such a state is similar to what is cited when talking about Nirvana. Well, who knows. But it’s like I’ve dived into the ocean of the memories of my being. I am perfectly balanced in a fluid of memory. All around me, disordered streams of images, sounds, emotions come and go, passing through me endlessly. I wonder what the logic is that governs such complex mechanisms: an image from my childhood takes me back in time, hearing the same sounds, perceiving the same smells, but most of all, feeling the same emotions I felt back then. In a moment, I find myself immersed in the currents of thoughts I once swam through. It’s as if the sensory components of memory are just a ridiculous pretext to hide the artificial nature of the human mind. For every moment of time lived and perceived, my brain has recorded all the variables of the world around me and recursively, in these strange moments, I relive the same sensations, chains of reasoning, and the questions that plagued me in the past.
The memory of a city full of people connects to the thought of the child who wondered: "I wonder what stories these people have, I wonder what they’re thinking, and I wonder how many connections they have with others, each one with their own thoughts and emotions." Trying to imagine the cerebral and human path of all these beings and the network that arises from their relationships is an unprecedented exercise in abstraction.
Returning to my present self, I wonder: "How many lives have unfolded in the history of mankind? How many people have laughed, suffered, cried, rejoiced?" Trying to mentally reproduce the various emotional states of man throughout his existence can only lead to a sensory overdose that our brain isn’t equipped to handle. These, for me, are some of the great mysteries of humanity, which probably will never have an answer.
In the meantime, I reflect outside my body in a vessel of mnemonic ether at the center of space. Perhaps certain events make us more aware. Aware of how complex everything is, but at the same time, useless. A microscopic joke, in the boundless and vainglorious universe.
Are we the first? For all we know, galaxies of thoughts, not necessarily human, could have sailed the dark ocean of the cosmos eons ago, with different conceptions of the self and other projections of minds perfectly aligned with the primordial frequencies of the most boundless darkness.
Sometimes, it really feels like we are infinite. Like the fractal: enigmatic and eternal.
When I am sad, I wish I could cling to a memory and go back in time, reliving those happy moments as if in a simulation.