Anthology Complex - M.B. Julien (best non fiction books to read .txt) 📗

of a die and then rolled the die on a floor that would attract the magnet, you can get the die to always land on four, or any specific number that you want, every time. We have applied a specific circumstance or force, the magnet, to the event, rolling the die, which will give us the same output every time.

 

Now we remove the magnet and then roll the die five times, we will usually get different outputs. While this may seem random, there are still circumstances and forces at work, such as strength and gravity, but if we can manipulate these circumstances and forces we can get the output we want every time. So considering these elements, true random may be the absence of any circumstances and forces whatsoever. No influences at all.

 

The dream that I end up reading is a dream about judgment. In the dream I am standing before God, and he asks me why he should let me into Heaven. There was a day when I was younger and my mother came to pick me up from school, and in the car I ask my mother what Hell is. She looks at me for a moment, as if she is trying to determine whether I will understand or not, and then she tells me that when we die, we are either sent to Heaven or to Hell.

 

I ask her what these two places are, and she tells me that Heaven is a happy place where the good people go, and Hell is a sad place where the bad people go. She tells me that the only one who can decide where we go, the only one who can judge us, is God, because God is good.

 

She tells me never to judge another person because no matter how good we may think we are, there is still that chance that we can become that bad person we are judging later in life. This bad politician who benefits financially from the murder of thousands of people, he could just have easily have been the good general who saves these thousands of lives, if only the circumstances and the forces in his life were different. But we must also consider that in the change of these circumstances and forces, this general could become the politician.

 

I tell God that I lived my life the best way I knew how, and I tried to be a decent person. I told him he could accept me for who I am, but that I wasn't going to beg him to let me into Heaven. He looks at me for at least a minute, judging me, and then he tells me to start walking. I begin to walk and as I'm walking there is a light that gets brighter and brighter, brighter and brighter and then pitch black, and then I wake up.

 

My philosophy on the search for the truth is that I can be convinced. Religion, science, the exploration of the universe, if someone's teachings are convincing then I can believe it. There are people who suffer from a massive amount of pride in their ideas and beliefs and there is no convincing them of another truth. They just won't accept it.

 

These people have this fisheye view where they think they have the answers, they think they can see it all, but they are looking through only one perspective.

 

They can hear all these things, but they can't see them because they are only looking in one direction. There was a man who said that you should be like water, taking the form of any cup you should be poured in. An open mind is sometimes the difference between salvation and turmoil. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

 

Chapter 16:

THINGS CREDITED TO FATE

 

Sometimes our dreams take place in a certain location more than once. For some of us it's a lot more than once, some of us may even have dreams in that certain location every month or every year. The location might be an old house, a place you used to play as a child, the place where you met your best friend or your one true love. This place just keeps coming back to you in your dreams almost as if it were trying to tell you something.

 

While the location remains the same, we don't usually dream about the same thing. Details, plots, people, these properties of the dreams often change. I'd like to say the location never changes because we think it will always look the way it looks in our minds when we think about it.

 

Even after years have passed and we've moved on from that place, when we think about it and try to remember it, when we try to think of what it may look like now, all we can remember is the way it looked when we left it.

 

There is this dream I have often where I'm in the military and I am traveling along with a few other soldiers in this deserted area. There are small rundown buildings and a dirt path for vehicle travel. In one variation of the dream we are all riding in a vehicle. I'm in the passenger's seat, there is a man in the driver's seat, and then there is a big open space in the back for the other soldiers to sit in.

 

I look down at my dog tags, and they are blank. I look at the driver's dog tags, it reads "Max Harper." Behind me, to the left, there is a metal window slider, I pull it up and I can see the other soldiers in the back, playing cards.

 

Max Harper stops the vehicle and he points towards my window. I look in the direction that he is pointing and I see this sort of glorified mailbox, I have no idea what it is. Max Harper tells me to roll down my window and throw a grenade inside of it, so that the enemy can't use it anymore. I grab one of my grenades but I fumble with it and then it gets unclipped. The grenade is live.

 

It falls down to my feet, but I quickly recover it. Now I'm trying to roll my window down, but the damn thing is stuck. I try harder, but the time is ticking away. I start banging on the glass, but it won't break. This entire time Max Harper is also trying to roll his window down as well, but he is just as unlucky as I am.

 

Max Harper then grabs the grenade out of my hand, pulls up the metal window slider and tosses the grenade into the back and effectively kills all of the other soldiers to save our own lives.

 

In another variation, it is Max who fumbles with his grenade and I am the one who tosses it in the back and kills every one. In another, after one of us throws the grenade in the back, we don't realize we've killed anyone until after we get out of the vehicle and open the back to find ourselves looking at dead bodies.

 

There are also versions of the dream where there are no grenade explosions. In one variation we are driving along and we come to a traffic light that has no business being out there. As we approach it, we realize the traffic light is yellow, and it never changes. After a while, Max Harper, or whoever is driving in that variation of the dream, he starts to tell me that we can't fool ourselves.

 

Each one of these variations always start out exactly the same, the other soldiers and I are walking alongside that dirt path, and then the dream unfolds into whatever it is going to unfold into. It's almost as if there is a start point and the end point is determined by the choices the soldiers and I make. Should we get in the vehicle? Should we continue to walk down this path?

 

The start point can almost be compared to the beginning of the universe, if we agree that the universe actually has a start point, a beginning, and then all these things happen, and all of these decisions and actions are made, and this will become the story of the universe. However, in a parallel universe that starts out exactly the same way as the first universe, one simple decision or action may be altered, and because of this different action and different decision is made, this parallel story becomes the tale of this parallel universe.

 

The location is always the universe as we know it, but like these dreams I keep having, no variation is ever the same. The universe has so many stories to tell.

 

The one thing that keeps coming back to me with this idea, this concept, is this "theory" that as decisions and actions and the likewise are made and as time progresses, the less of a chance a nonspecific event has of occurring.

 

In this explanation, the number of the point is the moment in time, and the letter or letters of the point is the variation of what happened at that certain moment in time. The amount of characters for numbers and the amount of characters for letters are always identical. Point 1a is the birth of one of your ancestors from over three thousand years ago. Point 10gv is the birth of one of your ancestors from one thousand years ago, made possible because of point 1a occurring. Point 100nkd is your birth, made possible because of point 10gv and point 1a occurring.

 

As the number of points gradually increase in the same direction as time, or due to decisions and actions, the number of possible occurrences increases, and therefore the chances of each point becoming a reality decreases. Getting from point 1a to point 10gv is not likely, and getting from point 10gv to point 100nkd is even more unlikely. Consequences may instead land on 100rfd or the other many possibilities.

 

Some people say the universe has been in existence for billions of years. Can you imagine how close you came to never being born? How close you and I came to never having this one sided discourse.

 

We've gotten to a time where the number-letter sequence is so high and so diverse that every thing that happens now, in comparison to the time of the beginning of the universe, is unlikely to happen, and because of this, some occurrences are credited to fate; this idea that this specific event was destined to occur.

 

Chapter 17:

PAGE 1 OF 8, "THE EIGHT DREAMS"

 

Third year, January 5th, I had this dream. I had died a long time ago, but it wasn't the type of death where afterwards people would attend your funeral or your wake; it was a spiritual death. I lost all of my hopes but also lost all of my fears. Your beliefs, dreams, goals, they don't matter to you anymore because you realize there is a possibility that your existence may serve no purpose.

 

What killed me was a note I had received, telling me that at some point in my life I would have to question my existence. Question my purpose, my function. That I would have to accept the answer, the truth that I find, because fooling myself would be pointless. This note stayed in the back of my mind, growing silently like a plant. This note that someone left in place of my wallet.

 

Sometime later in the dream I am on the subway, and this man tells me that he gave me that note. That he picked my pocket. He bumps into me, takes my wallet, leaves the note there in its place, and now he is trying to give me back my wallet.

 

A normal person might be angry, but by this time that seed that this man planted in the back of mind has grown fully and is flourishing, and instead I ask him why he did it.

 

He tells me that besides needing money for food, he did it because he wanted me to