I carried a notebook with me everywhere I went from a young age and wrote down everything that came to mind. My “notes” as I called them, were a collection of ideas, preferences, insights, reflections, and mundane details. At any given time I was fixated on a few “projects” that had grown into larger-than-life creative or aspirational pursuits. My first such project was a Tolkienesque fantasy world in a land called “Maracia”.
By the time I was 10 I had grown beyond fantasy characters and began to imagine a vast online gaming world where players could roam a massive universe, explore, and fight. I invented a new chart of elements with hundreds of combinations of fantastical chemical elements to create compounds that could be used in magical potions and salves. I would be the super admin, looking down on all the players, intervening as I chose. I was “God”. We were barely into 1990s and it would be another decade before such virtual worlds could exist, so I refocused my efforts on a low-tech game I could actually publish: an epic board game I secretly created throughout high-school.
In all these worlds I created I was the author, the rule-maker, and the administrator. I was God.
When I started university, I put away the games and turned my attention toward explaining the nature of my existence. My first personal philosophy centered around the idea that the world was a tree grown from a seed I called the “mothernut”. I wrote hundreds of pages on this but eventually abandoned the concept and turned my attention toward the practical sciences and took up physics at the university. I spent two years buying and half-consuming books of popular theories by prominent scientists, physicists, and mathematicians. I wanted to contribute and solve the problems they could not.
That is when I began using the phrase “theory of everything”. I believed I could know the theory of everything, and I fantasized about finding it. I believed the answer would be secular and scientific. But my lack of credentials in the hard sciences and mathematics weighed heavily on me, and the politics of the entire establishment seemed insurmountable. Why would anyone listen to me? Many of the most well-respected scientists of our day were routinely condemned to death in their own lifetimes, only to be resurrected as heroes long after their deaths. I did not want to fight to be heard posthumously; I wanted to know right now.
That was the beginning of an important distinction that would emerge in my evolution. While all my actions were oriented toward the approval of others, the root of my search had nothing to do with them. I wanted to know the truth, and other people were incidental. So I began to directly struggle with these two competing desires: the desire for social approval and the desire to know the truth of my identity. As I proceeded along my journey it became clear to me that they were incompatible desires and would lead me in divergent directions.
I chose the truth and began to make choices that directly contradicted and even impeded my efforts to gain social approval. I dropped out of university and suffered years of second-guessing, shame, and regret when things did not go as planned. I then left my homeland for a rural mountain village in a remote, underdeveloped part of India. This decision disconnected me from everything I had known and began to experience deep anxiety, rootlessness, and the sense that I was missing out.
Yet it was precisely in the serene, rustic setting of Kumaon that I found the peace I needed to contemplate without interruption and rediscover the first step of my recovery: control. It was the beginning of my clawing back control from a life in which I was small, powerless, and insignificant. In America, I was trapped in a violent, turbulent ocean struggling to keep my head above water. Naturally, I gave all my desire to that which would theoretically help me in that struggle: money. And not just a little bit of money; I desired an obscene and excess of it. It was a crude, but understandable calculation.
But in India where I could stretch a dollar, I did not need as much effort to achieve the peace and freedom I had missed in America. I did not need to toil for hours a day just to break even. And though I had less, my environment demanded less from me. I began to see that my earlier desires and ambitions were a product of an unhealthy environment. Removed from that environment, my desires changed. The constant was not the avarice, but the desire for peace. In America, peace was an elusive dream reserved for the wealthy, while in India it was achievable right now.
During this period of newfound freedom, I began to see the edges of a new perspective. It was incomplete, but the general concept was sturdy: I could decide whether I was a satellite observer of some enduring world, or if I was the central source of the world I experienced. I termed the former “extessential”, and the latter “intessential”. Many years later I would redefine this concept as “origination”, but my early peek was enough to convince me that the truth I sought was not some static idea that I and millions of philosophers and scientists throughout time were trying to explain. The truth was a decision tied to my direct experience. The theory of everything was an artifact of the “extessential” perspective.
I ultimately gave up on a theory of everything rooted in a science and mathematics owned and dominated by an abstract establishment. I decided a true theory of everything must be rooted in my direct experience, rather than an imagined set of rules decided by an imagined set of people and their imaginary experiences extending throughout an imaginary history. I realized that I only need to account for my direct experience and not the imaginary. The theory of everything is experiential: I can know it right now without relying on things I can never know and only imagine. And with those decisions, I began my transition from an extessentialist to an intessentialist.
In literal terms, there is a theory of everything. But the nature of that theory will reflect my belief about what is at the center of existence, and where I reside in relation to it. As an extessentialist, believing that the center is outside of me, the theory would be based on the sciences. But as an intessentialist, believing that the center or existence is within me, the theory is based on my own direct experience.
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