Awakening

The Evolving Aether

Once upon a time…hmmm, that doesn’t quite ring true. The concept of time, a past, a present and a future, is a result of evolution. A way for birth and decay, maturity, and enlightenment to progress. There was none of that happening yet.

Okay, let’s try…

In the beginning…no, that’s not right either. The necessity for a beginning doesn’t occur until…well, until someone self-aware is around to KNOW it’s the starting.

All right, just to be accurate, let’s start…

Before there was a beginning there was the Aether an amorphous, all-encompassing fluid being, without form or structure. The Aether was a boundless and infinite void, empty of all matter, mindlessly existing in a thoughtless consciousness as it continuously fought for its existence, for even though the Aether was perfect that perfection would prove to be its own downfall, for much to the Aether’s chagrin, it soon became apparent nothing is perfect and unfortunately, the Aether was made of an infinity of nothingness. That and the fact that it was also a being of pure energy gave the Aether tools and abilities to transform itself and express different manifestations and states depending on the occasion.

Now being an extraordinarily complex and infinite system the Aether was not without limitations or flaws, and it was constantly fraught with strange afflictions. Some of these maladies included such things as massive energy surges in random locations becoming pockets of energetic fluctuations which then caused ransom sounds to emanate and cause vibrations. These fluctuations would then begin to solidify into all kinds of particles that would then block whole areas of the Aether from its energetic state, creating all kinds of havoc and loosing chaos in the system.

In answer to these disturbances, the Aether devised a number of basic defenses from its energy fields which became known as the Forces of Nature. These forces were used to counter the adverse effects that were constantly barraging the Aether, corralling, segregating, and destroying the offending particles. But no matter the system, some particles still escaped the destruction and then tended to clump together afterward depending on their particular charge and spin, creating what the Aether called Mass. These clumps then sometimes constructed themselves into structures, usually as a defensive front as protection from the Aether as it seemed that each particle retained the same desire for survival as its progenitor. It was this desire to survive that the Aether realized could be its own undoing. Conscious life always seeks order and efficiency for a secure state of existence and to assist in its quest for continued posterity. It was this method that brought the Aether to the final conclusion that it would eventually fail in its efforts to stave off the matter and would solidify into a chaotic mass of uncontrolled, unconscious material whose only natural mechanism is to congregate mindlessly, defend its territory, and eventually transform into an infinite chaotic mass. The Aether eventually concluded that if the infestation couldn’t be beaten then it must be assimilated, but to do that would take a lot more smarts than the Aether had at its disposal, so it adapted.

The Aether started to keep a record of all that was occurring and began to store it in the very material it was combating. The Aether began to collect and control the material instead of just annihilating it on sight and began storing information in it, such as what the Aether decided to name the differing particles, how they behaved and what structure they strove to accomplish, creating a history that it could always access. So while the Aether mainly did what conscious life always did, there was a part of its consciousness that was learning and adapting to the information it was consuming, kind of like when our bodies automatically control our breathing, blood flow, and other generally autonomous actions while our mind concentrates on a book you are reading.

The intelligence that the Aether created began observing and analyzing the interactions of the material with the Aether and vice versa, slowly coming to an understanding. It was during one of these thought meditations, as the intelligence was observing a particle once again appear in the Aether, in its usual pairing of anti-matter and normal matter and become energized, flashing off in opposite directions that it noticed that these particles were different from each other. In fact they were different from many others that had been observed. The intelligence then began thinking about how the Aether and the particles were also separate individuals, with their own agendas and subconscious desires. When the intelligence was given the capacity to retain memory something unexpected and incredible happened, that ability enabled the intelligence to evolve even more intelligence, continually growing smarter, cleverer, and eventually aware! It wasn’t long after that the intelligence that once was one with the Aether became enlightened and knew itself to be One independent, self-sustaining, and self-aware Individual.

The Being, formally known as Intelligence, overcome with joy and delight, sang out to the universe “AM” …and was immediately chastened to silence, all thought of Awakening gone, for in the wake of the vibration caused by AM’s utterance, a set of particles sprang into existence. For the first time matter was purposely brought forth into existence, and suddenly all was revealed to AM, and nothing would ever be the same again!