Universal Mind Bend
There he stood, in front of the colossal metal gate, waiting to enter. The fifty foot doors rapidly swung open. The vast jungle of darkness that lay ahead was intimidating. Yet, the darkness was yearning for him, testing him, tempting him, pulling him in. The thick fog of black caused him to feel fearful, but the yearning to explore into the unknown was too tempting to refuse.
With his first step past the gate he felt a cold, and he could not distinguish it between his emotions and the temperature. The cold was followed by a vicious shiver throughout his whole body.
The fear was too great. He quickly turned around to head back, only to find a thick darkness in front, behind, under, and beside him. He had already crossed a point beyond return. Now his only option was to wander through the darkness.
The air felt dirty. It felt as if it was stripped of its oxygen. Each breath was inhaled with hesitation, and exhaled with the fear of death. He did not know how long he had been wandering. It could have been minutes, hours, or days. Time didn’t matter. At this point all that he felt was apathy. Movement felt pointless, so he sat down and thought.
Now that his movement had ceased, he could examine his surroundings, as infinitely simple as they seemed. His eyes gazed through the blackness, as if searching for an answer. After much concentration, he noticed small, infinitely faint white spheres.
Due to the contrast from the blackness, these simple figures filled him with excitement. As he continued to concentrate on the spheres, they became bolder and more defined, as if his eyes were adjusting to see them better. As he concentrated further, more figures began to appear. The spheres were becoming bolder and more densely packed. There were so many spheres, he was no longer able to keep track. The Fog of black that once dominated was beginning to be challenged by a swarming mass of white spheres.
The complexity was overwhelming to him. The white mass swarmed around him and roared in his ears, but the sensation was all in his head. It made no sound. The white mass was engulfing his very matter, engulfing his entire body. The swarm moved with such speed that his vision became a white chaos. He could not move. He could not breathe. He could not think. The many spheres were beginning to swarm into a densely packed single sphere. The denser the sphere was, the brighter it became. Eventually, the swarm became so dense that the movement became unnoticeable. All that was visible was a bright glowing entity. He discovered this to be a star.
He then noticed that what he was viewing was from an extremely far distance. There was no ground beneath him. He could not breathe and he did not need to breathe. All around him he could see stars and planets.
He was unable to move. He then discovered that if he concentrated on a mass in this space, then he could pull himself towards it, using his concentration as a form of movement. He made the decision to travel the universe and see as much as he could see. He zoomed through the cosmos at speeds inconceivable. Once again, he was searching. Searching the cosmos for an answer. He knew that destiny would land him where he needed to be. A place where intelligence exists.
Before he realized his movement had ceased, He found himself in a place he had never imagined. A place he had never even dreamed existed. To try to make any sense of where he was was pointless because it was all incomprehensible.
One thing he recognized that existed in his former world was motion. Dark figures of seemingly infinite complexity moved towards and away from him, vanishing and reappearing.
As before in the dark jungle, the darkness was the dominating element. Though where there was light, there was intense color. The colors were so densely placed that they would meld in and out of focus.
The aliens were beyond any conceivable idea of what an alien should look like. The creatures blended in and out of each other, separating and becoming one again. When these beings confronted him, his body would disappear and his brain would be directly bombarded with information that was again, incomprehensible. These creatures were attempting to communicate with him. An effort that was futile.
If a central emotion could be conjured from the vast spectrum, the dominating emotion feeling at the time was fear. Utter terror. Blood-curdling terror constricted itself around his heart to the point of bursting. He wanted to scream but couldn’t. This alien world was evil to him. He could not distinguish between the ground beneath him and the landscape in front of him and the creatures that manifested. If this strange world of overwhelming complexity were to break down the components of his consciousness then his journey would not be able to continue. Slowly, this world was stripping him of all that he had once held on to. In this alien world, there was nothing he could comprehend that could pertain to himself. He had no comprehendible information to hold on to.
He then looked up. He could see the sky where he had once been, which seemed so long ago, and it was beautiful. He felt determined that he could escape this intolerable world and once again exist in Space. He concentrated on the sky and tried to separate himself from the alien world that was rendering him powerless. Eventually, as his concentration moved away from his surroundings and towards the cosmos, the alien world began to disappear. Finally, he had escaped the wretched alien world and was once again in Space.
Flying through the universe, his goal was to reach his next destination. The next plateau. His field of view was a consistent pattern of floating masses flying by him in a symmetrical tunnel. Then suddenly, the stars and planets he had been passing by were warped. They were all bending in to a single point. Coming closer and closer to this point, he began to realize the center was a black hole.
Eventually he moved very close to the black hole, but not close enough to be sucked in by its gravitational pull. If he were to approach the black hole to the point of no return, what would happen? Would he be torn to shreds? Would he disappear instantly? He would soon find out, because this was his last step. The final stage of his journey was this ominous swirling vortex in front of him.
As he moved slightly foreword, he no longer had to rely on his mental concentration as a form of movement. He released his tension and glided gracefully towards the center of the black hole.
With his eyes locked firmly on the center of the spinning vortex, he was getting closer and closer, while his speed was picking up consistently. Closer and closer he glided until soon, he was at its center. He was inside the black hole.
He was not ripped to shreds. In fact, he felt no pain at all and had no recognition of his body. All he knew was that he was still thinking. His vision existed only in his thought processes. It was the closest thing to a white empty nothing. Though there was clearly something. He could feel the powerful energy flowing through him. He had slipped into a place between space and time. He could not see himself. He was a part of the black hole. He was a piece of its entirety. He understood all of its components because he was now a part of this new universe. The black hole was an entity of star dust and all the components of everything that is anything. At last, he had reached the end of his journey. At last, as once a sole being in the universe, he was finally a part of this entity.
