The Grand Synthesis

In my fourth decade as a subject of the most powerful empire on earth, I was struck mad and committed an affront against the Empire, a crime for which I was to be held captive indefinitely in an institution for deranged criminals.

After twenty years of captivity, I was offered my freedom in exchange for a statement proving that I had regained soundness of mind. I embarked on formulating a grand synthesis, a credo of redemption based on all the great religious, scientific, and philosophical principles.

I began by scouring the tomes of the world religions for purposes of creating a universal doctrine of social inclusivity. My aim was to reconcile all animosity previously caused by religious dissension and disagreement. While I had transgressed against society and been thrown in with those considered deviant and insane, my rehabilitative statement aimed at uniting all of humanity in the pursuit of the common good.

I first studied the scriptures of the Ultimate Savior, who in his youth spent time amongst the bellicose, yet aesthetically appealing, warring city-states to the West of the lands where he was born. The Ultimate Savior strove to unite the fates of his monotheistic people, who believed they were elect, to the fates of the neighboring pagan city-states, whom the monotheists considered heathen.  The Ultimate Savior offered both his people and the pagans a peaceful kingdom on Earth if they chose to live under the auspices of a loving, paternal God.

While the Ultimate Savior’s tenet of neighborly love and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you were relevant to my rehabilitation, I found that his observation of unconditional pacificism was unacceptable. Within the confines of prison, I sometimes needed to make recourse to violence to survive, and the Empire’s militaristic interventions to protect vulnerable ally states from rapacious enemies indicated that aggression was sometimes justified. 

The poetic verses and life of the Final Prophet addressed the unavoidable need for violence in the service of self-preservation and in the protection of the weak or oppressed. The Final Prophet witnessed the incivility of the polytheistic tribes of the desert and considered armed conflict against them indispensable for purposes of enacting both social justice and spiritual liberation. Because the Final Prophet believed unrelenting enemies will continue to strike you on both cheeks until you have renounced your moral convictions and submitted yourself to their oppressive whims, he doubted the divinity of the Ultimate Savior, and considered belief in his godliness blasphemous. 

My study of the Final Prophet allowed me to concede that violence, when used to protect the livelihood of imperial subjects, was not condemnable, and that when a citizen of the Empire caused injury while rendering unto the emperor what is the emperor’s, his or her actions were pardonable.  

Finding myself amongst a gamut of social discards including maladjusted vagrants, violent ruffians, pedophiles, murderers, even cannibals, whom I felt deserved carceral punishment, but whose humanity I could neither judge nor morally condemn, I was not satisfied with the afterlives offered by the Ultimate Savior or the Final Prophet, the option of an eternity committed to either damnation for sinners or bliss for the virtuous. Fraternizing with those deemed to be mentally unsound and criminal, or both, taught me that no one is either wholly good or wholly bad, and that good and bad behavior are relative to the circumstances of the person judging it to be so.

The judgment inherent to the Ultimate Savior’s and Final Prophet’s views on salvation was resolved by the teachings of the Mindful One, who had walked the earth five centuries before the Ultimate Savior, and twelve centuries before the Final Prophet. The Mindful One’s thoughts and religious edicts also found their way into my grand synthesis.

The Mindful One was a child born into nobility whose sheltered upbringing prohibited him from acknowledging senescence, sickness, and death until he recognized that all phenomena were impermanent and that existence was primarily characterized by suffering. Escape from the cycle of rebirth and suffering was only possible if one became free of all earthly attachments and thereby granted eternal solace in the non-being of the Warm Glow.

According to a certain denomination of the Mindful One’s followers, however, there was no higher spiritual calling than renouncing the Warm Glow and choosing reincarnation for purposes of benevolently stewarding successive generations of sentient beings on Earth into afterlives that would allow them to experience the fullness of earthly existence. Reincarnation did not guarantee a better or worse life, merely a different one, one with sharp contrasts to the one previously led. As a result of a balancing principle inherent to the cycles of life and death, those who were rich for a lifetime, could, in a next incarnation, possibly be impoverished for the duration of their stay on Earth. A black person could be reborn white, a dullard, intelligent, or vice versa. This law of karmic justice reigning over the Mindful One’s doctrine concerning the succession of afterlives on earth seemed much more sensible than the judgment inherent to afterlife according to the Ultimate Savior and Final Prophet. The Mindful One did not require one to believe in the option of eternal reward or punishment, but in the faith that successive lives allow one to experience a more complete existence as a vital being.  Moreover, if the faithful consciously choose rebirth, they are always reborn on Earth and therefore should assume responsibility for its protection and survival.

After resolving these issues concerning faith and the afterlife, I needed to confront finitude as proposed by contemporary science. The foremost scientific problem I observed was that of the Earth’s conditionality. As a result of its ever-diminishing distance from the Sun, the Earth is bound to cease existing due to the simple cause of heat-death. Additionally, the Disabled Scientist, who had theorized space and time were indivisible, had also posited that as surely as all the matter and energy in our universe commences in a violent and sudden explosion, all matter and energy cease to exist in a suffocating and universe-ending contraction.

I was not satisfied with the astronomical observations of the Disabled Scientist, nor with those of the scientists who succeeded him. The emissaries of the Empire who had offered me my freedom were not comforted by the Disabled Scientist’s theorization of universal termination either, and would not grant me my liberty if I could not produce a compelling argument for the indefinite longevity of the Empire, and, further, of humanity. 

I despaired of producing this argument. I yearned for my freedom, and could not see a way around the theories of the Disabled Scientist. If I could prove my own immortality, I could prove the immortality of the Empire, of humanity, as well as that of the universe.

Having much time on my hands, but eager to find the answer, I read the arguments of ancient and modern philosophers in search of the truth of my, and by extension, of the universe’s fate.

The first tenet that put me on the path to finding the answer to universal finality was that of “know thyself,” a maxim from the pagans, whose ancient texts the Final Prophet’s descendants had preserved during the Empire’s dark age. What struck me as curious about the phenomenon of “knowing oneself” is the phenomenon of the “already known” peculiar to humanity, the fact that many people of different social and ethnic backgrounds report that they sense they have already lived a fragment of life they are certain to never have physically experienced before. 

The Mad Philosopher, who prematurely announced the death of the Ultimate Savior’s omniscient and omnipotent God, possessed the answer to why humanity frequently experiences the phenomenon of déjà vu. The Mad Philosopher was a prophetic thinker who, despite believing the will to power governed human existence, was institutionalized after intervening to protect a horse being cruelly flogged by its owner. The Mad Philosopher died a catatonic syphilitic and now has posthumous celebrity and a devoted secular sect of followers within the lecture halls and musty libraries of academia. 

Unlike the religious doctrines of afterlives posited by the Ultimate Savior, the Final Prophet, and the Mindful One, the Mad Philosopher announced that all existence was characterized by the principle of Incessant Repetition. According to this metaphysical postulate, all existence interminably recurs. The same always returns. One does not experience heavenly or infernal perpetuity when one dies, rather, one is simply reborn to flawlessly re-enact one’s life from beginning to end again.  

In the Mad Philosopher’s metaphysical tenet of Incessant Repetition, I had found the solution to the Disabled Scientist’s theorization of the finality of the universe! I had also found the answer to the Empire’s demand for immortality, and therefore the immortality of all heretofore known existence. How could science prove the Mad Philosopher’s concept of timeless reiteration?  I saw the answer to this question in an apple I was served for lunch eight days before I finalized the Grand Synthesis. The apple was bulbous on one side, and from stalk to calyx had an arc. If I were to have eight of them, I could form them into a segmented circle. Like the peculiar apple I was served, the universe we inhabit follows a slightly curved path. The universe may commence in a grand explosion and end in a cataclysmic contraction, but if it is in the shape of a lop-sided apple, and a conclusive contraction is followed by another explosion that initiates the space-time of another universe, after seven explosions and contractions, the series of universes will end where it started. If space-time is curved, and all physical and energetic phenomena occur in a cyclic succession of eight universes, the Mad Philosopher’s observation of Incessant Repetition and of existential infinitude could be proved scientifically! Even after I have gone through all the limited reincarnations this universe allows, once the succession of universes catches up to itself, I will exist again as myself, Theophilus Pangaea.  My consciousness nearly dissipates into oblivion as a result of the seemingly interminable duration of time it takes for Theophilus Pangaea to exist again, yet my awareness of self persists tenuously enough to allow me to relive the experience of the already known, the phenomenon of déjà vu.     

The Grand Synthesis earned me my freedom.

The immortality the Mad Philosopher’s notion of Incessant Repetition allows one to conceptualize is imperfect and requires radical acceptance. The intransigently imperfect and endless repetitiveness of one’s life is what needs to be accepted for purposes of living a full life, a better life, a life that does not fear death. I have been granted my freedom, but I still have choices to make. Choices that have been made countless times before and will be made countless times again. I will love my neighbor as I love myself. I will no longer denounce violence when the Empire uses it for the wellbeing of its citizens and for the sake of justice. I will expect to live many incarnations on the Earth, and as a result, I will respect the Earth. Due to the circuitousness of multi-versality, my past life was my present life, which will be identical to the next appearance in the flesh and spirit of Theophilus Pangaea. Now that I am content with my fate, I will honor my parents and make every effort to possess their love timelessly. I will again commit my offenses. I will be imprisoned and liberated again. The pains I have tolerated, I will tolerate again. I will preach that it is never to late to reform oneself. These very same words I have been writing for the infinite and infinitesimal duration of forever, (if forever has the form of segmented ring, with an unimaginably long, yet calculably finite circumference) have been written eternally before and will continue to be written, eternally.