To summarize the last two parts, on the night of December 30, 2017, I started to undergo a strange mental experience that came (seemingly) from nowhere. The sense I had was that my own reality and current sense of time were splitting apart, and I was becoming more and more confused and scared that I might lose all track of reality and not be able to return to my own current time and place, I.e. THIS reality… all of this was happening while in (actual) reality my family and I were finishing watching “I, Tanya” and I was starting to try to explain to them what I was going through, as well as trying (un-fruitfully) to get the experience to stop…
Now the question was HOW to “get off the ride,” how to stop the “reality roulette” I was experiencing and make sure it stopped on my own, ACTUAL reality. This began a series of mental “games,” in which I tried my best to think of things that only the PRESENT version of myself would know. Small details, facts about myself and who I was that only the exact version of me THEN AND NOW would know.
It was during this time that I also started to cycle through every bit of philosophy, astrophysics, and even any spare science fiction that I thought might get me off of this ride. The one little piece that seemed to resonate most with me was the idea of quantum suicide. While I am by no means an expert, the one part of quantum suicide that always stuck with me was that the existence that one experiences RIGHT NOW is unique to them and the path that they are on, and that any attempt to stop that existence, for example an attempted suicide, would ultimately not work out for YOU in that moment.
Just to be completely transparent to all potential readers, I’m all but certain that this is a complete misunderstanding of Quantum Suicide and the conclusions reached by the actual thought experiment, if not a complete and total fabrication of my own imagination at the time from beginning to end. Regardless, in the moment I became fixated on this version of the theory. So much so that I reasoned that this did not mean suicide was impossible, particularly since it is so very present in our world and mainstream living with the people around us – instead it was only a SPLIT in realities, in that when a person attempted suicide it would always appear to THEM in their own reality to not have been successful, but meanwhile in a second, alternate reality (perhaps a reality perceived by someone else, or maybe everyone else in that moment), you would die and cease to exist consciously from that point forward.
In a way it gave me an odd sense of extreme power, in that I could essentially never die (at least not by my own hand, and not in my own version of reality) and that any attempts to do so would always be unsuccessful for me, even if they may generate tragedy for others left behind in that alternate reality in which I had succeeded.
Controlling my ultimate reality
“This is not the one where I die, this is the one where I live…”
I began mentally telling myself this over and over again. Part of what was keeping me “sane” in the moment was an idea I fixated on that because of the “Quantum Suicide” thought, which was that ultimately this had to be MY here and now reality and present because in this moment I “knew” certain things about myself and my “destiny”… for starters, this is not the reality where I die prematurely. Exactly how I “knew” any of these things is beyond me and ultimately the rapid “conclusion-jumping” of a completely untethered mind.
Nevertheless I “knew” that this was not the one reality where I die… As the flashes of my alternate realities made themselves apparent in my mind, with horrible, “unimaginable” thoughts about what might happen in my near future flashing over and over again in front of my mind, I would say things to myself like, “no, this is NOT the one where I die,” or “no, this is not the one where I grab a knife and stab myself.” If there is anything positive that can be said about these terror-inducing thought process that I was going through, it’s that I learned that there are many, MANY things which I fear much much more than death… it also made me realize just how incredibly vulnerable I was, or rather the things that I cared about were, such as my wife, my family, my son, and how every moment I have with them is quite literally a gift.
It honestly made me more appreciative than I had ever been for my life than I had ever been up to that point…
It also started to get me thinking about ALL of the infinite versions of reality of ALL of the lives of humans that have been and ever will be, and ALL the infinite experiences that every person goes through in a lifetime, from one moment, however defined, to the next. And how some versions of “success” as we know it may have come for these people only after running up against the boundaries of existence, be it suicide or failure or despair or any of a thousand other hard “stops” we experience in life, and that “successful” person we see might only be THAT version in THIS existence, occurring equally and correctly along with every other version of themselves in some alternate versions of said existence.
It made me reflect in that time about my own existence, and the very careful and deliberate path I have been on my whole life…
Next, Me and my middle road experience…
The Absolute Center of Everything 