In writing the story “Jackal“, I was finally able to describe the solipsistic trap into which I fell as a 13-year-old. It’s odd that I was unable to ever explain or describe the terror of that predicament until I finally let a “character” who is not me embody it for himself.

I don’t want to make this about a supposedly real “me” and draw all that attention into this false face, this red herring (this personal story.) I don’t want to take this drama of myself too seriously. It’s just a story, one of billions.

I mean, I didn’t suffer more than you. Much less, perhaps. But we’re all in some portion of Hell, as far as I can tell. But my understanding of hell is that it’s a mirageof deceptive thoughts obscuring an inconceivable and (therefore) sacred mystery, which exceeds the goody two shoes moralities of every imaginary heaven.

But any report exposing the delusional landscapes of hell is (from my point of view) helpful to everyone else who is stranded there.

We’re differently the same, I suppose. Not isolated at least. But we embody nuanced vantage points of the same, unified undivided whole. It grants us a creedless faith in what exceeds us. Our own ignorance is a palpable proof, in that sense, of the sacred and profound.

But this somewhat different and somewhat peculiar behavior (writing) is the only way I found to extricate this ganglion of thoughts from this peculiar spot in hell. Or, you could say, the only way to get my head out of my ass was to write. It’s not for everybody. Other people have other methods applicable to other locations in hell. The shape of their own escape from hell is their own requirement.

But that’s why I’m writing about it. I can’t help it. It’s what the slow unfoldment of sanity requires of me.

And, until now, I’ve been hesitant to attempt anything that comes this close to the actual terror itself. When I was 13, I briefly tried to describe the solipsistic predicament to my mother and older siblings. But I could feel them dissolving into distance as I spoke, because their own empathy prevented them from confronting such an unreachable (and ludicrous sounding) pain in someone they cared for.

But it was also partially that I myself withdrew from them, because I could not want anyone (especially them) to feel a horror of that sort. So, all I could feel in trying to reach for help, was a widening cavern in our relationship.

And what good would it do them or me? It would only ruin them too. It was impossible to want anyone to feel such terrorizing isolation. And I couldn’t make sense of it anyways.

But now, I have an incentive to share it more vividly, because the trap is sprung. I got through the terror part of it (like you did, or you probably wouldn’t be reading). And we can see from our different perches that this solipsistic problem — which can be dismissed easily as an absurdly selfish perspective — is also the secret terror underlying the whole human culture, at least as seen from a certain slant of light. But that slant (like all honest slants) provides valid information. This information goes unnoticed in other slants of light (which have their own peculiar channels of information, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum).

This implies that we’re learning to see past the need to compete, because you I and everybody else (when we’re not lying to ourselves) add unique vantage points to the human vantage point as a whole. An honest person (even if only honest at this moment) is inevitably idiosyncratically weird and insightful, as far as I can tell. And whatever they do will carry that stamp of a genuinely authentic and good human being, who is inevitably — helplessly — helpful. That’s all that anything of quality really amounts to, a virtue-spreading action.

Skills are less profound than a genuine human being in action, whatever that happens to be, even if it’s only writing.

After all, this isn’t actually showbusiness. This isn’t about writing. Or making something that others should admire and applaud. You can keep your thumbs to yourself. It’s about facing my own (our own) pretense (from a certain slant), which is my Self as a mere drama, not as something real. Every self-image is unreal in that sense. We’re weirder and more unique than these static, repetitive habitual dramas of ourselves, these surrogates of reality, these strawmen, these avatars, these Egregores, who we mistake for ourselves, these original Bots gone rogue, these false fronts. These identities are confinements of whatever it is we really are.

And this is the very half-insight I half-glimpsed as a kid but couldn’t understand until now. It scared the shit out of me.

Yes, in fact, I am not real just like I feared (and no longer fear). The others I picture (you all, for instance) are also unreal. I’m sorry to break the news. All these beliefs about myself are not the reality of myself, nor of you. There are no ultimate boundaries to our existence that allow real definitions to form. And we merge with one another if thought isn’t imagining itself in isolation. Without that thought we merge. And this means no summaries of us can stand as anything but transient (and therefore useful and helpful) fictions.

Therefore, being “unreal” is freedom from any finality of form, or any known limits, with their dull routines of perception. We exceed these small certainties of self. Our roots are inseparable from the whole mystery of the universe itself.

—

And as we learn to distinguish between a false or virtual “self” and this undefinable and infinite authenticity, we’re also discovering a similar problem in trying to distinguish the limited infinities of AI virtuality from unlimited infinity of reality itself (whatever that may be).

And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the cultural impacts from a shared solipsism (a universal tendency towards the particular). Culturally expressed solipsism is a corrosive force that doesn’t necessarily lead to social terror (but fascism or any autocracy would be one example of that). More often, it leads to this familiar numbing disinterest in our own survival — a depersonalization and derealization crisis, which severs our trust in reality, and our love for the earth and its creatures, which includes ourselves. From here, it looks like the human mind (the general flow of meaning, its fashions and changes in tacit beliefs) is suffering a mad indifference to its own survival. And I feel this is a direct symptom of a “shared solipsism.”

I’m not trying to be an activist, exactly, and I don’t think my Messianic delusion is the problem. I think you and I are merely beginning to emerge from a virus of the mind (or perhaps we’re finally being forced to grow up). So, we’re starting to recognize the symptoms of his virus in one another, or at least in the broader culture. And it’s a natural empathetic necessity that arises when we realize we’re not separate. We can’t help offering one another whatever assistance we can provide.

Not assistance, exactly. But maybe it’s like a mating call or something. We start bellering essays and songs and poems and gardens and carpentry and good neighborliness and whatnot into the world, into circulation. Every virus-free moment of human life is a healing frequency, is a call of unity (not for unity, because it already exists). Or, it’s a reminder. A siren call reminding us to wake up from our illusions of self-importance and rejoin the dance.

The honest life plays in the sandbox of this material world; flinging futile offerings or unrequited love letters (controlled follies, as Castaneda might say) to a world emerging from its coccon.

—

So, the story, “Jackal”, is the closest I’ve ever come to re-experiencing both the terror itself and the way out. (And how this relates to the culture as a whole). But very few of us have the motivation to read such a long “short” story without some kind or preparatory introduction (or afterword) such as this. I know I wouldn’t be inclined to read this if I hadn’t written it. So, I sympathize with your reluctance.

And I know that the various themes in the “war story” can only make sense if the reader has some trust that this is not merely a war story, and not simply pushing some agenda that is simplistically (aggressively) “anti-war”. That is has some meaning or relevance. And the catch-22 is I can’t tell you it does until you read it. And you can’t read it until you feel it does.

And the reader would have to trust the sanity of the writer as well (which you probably don’t by now). And you’d have to trust my capacity to draw together themes that are both personal, cultural and cosmic, which seems too grandiose for such an anonymous, unproven or perhaps even failed human being to pull off. I can’t engender much confidence. (I wouldn’t have confidence in me if I were in your shoes).

And in fact, I did not pull these themes together by myself. The story itself pulled them through this voice, in my (so to speak) absence. I know it sounds high-falutin’ or just plain weird. But it’s a basic human experience. When we act whole-heartedly, we’re not in control. Something larger than us works through us all.

The human being is individually creative, but universally so. It’s the universal that plays the individual cord. Otherwise, the individual is just grandstanding for his own sake.

It’s a human birthright to have the good sense to see through our own web of deceit and clear this instrument of a brain from its incoherent and off-tune delusions of isolated grandeur.

This isn’t about becoming great, in other words. We’re all getting ready to fall off our high horses together. Then there’s nothing distracting us from enjoying one another’s genuine company in the common mud. Without the need for creating dramas like war to distract us from the terror of our delusions of isolation.

It means seeing through the story of my self without — this time — freaking out.

And the reader would also have to retain an almost old-fashioned confidence in the potential of stories (in general) to transform the world (which is almost too earnest, non-ironic and naive (or perhaps arrogant) for this cynical and reductive age). So, I know this story is swimming against the current. And I know this note will not “do anything” to change that. I had no objective in writing it other than to make the thing visible, to blow this pollen seed far and wide and go to rest.

The passage below doesn’t provide the story’s full resolution. Here the undistorted nature of the shared problem is being confronted by this character.

And yet I have to admit. From a certain slant, this story might be no fun to read. It’s a lot to ask of anyone.

Nevertheless, it heals. It is my own healing. It might hurt, but it is the medicine of my own life. A little pollen seed, that’s all. It’s all I got to offer.

---

“…What they didn’t know was how desperate his psychic condition actually was. And he was very afraid (reasonably so) that he would end up in an asylum, just like his uncle and aunt before him.

But what he didn’t know was whether he was hallucinating, or worse yet, not hallucinating, for there was nothing solid in the world against which to measure the deviation of his perspective. He believed that his perspective was not hallucinatory but (unfortunately) true, and that the blood-draining terror he felt was a reasonable (and uncurable) response to what he’d discovered, and which nobody else seemed to notice, mainly because they didn’t exist (that’s the ludicrous part, but chilling, if believed).

Simply put (or as simply as he could put it), one November morning in his 13^th year of life he realized (realized!) with the ferocity of revelation – arriving like a high-voltage jolt — that everything was hallucination, and that neither he himself, nor his now obviously fake friends, nor illusory parents, nor even his formerly beloved dog, nor the crisp fall air, nor the smell of bacon in the morning, were real. This deflated the pleasure of everything instantaneously. They were revealed (revealed!) to be projections of an inexplicably isolated singularity of awareness, which invented every sensation of sunlight and love in a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness of its eternal and claustrophobic isolation. And it’s impossible to disprove. (Oh, he tried, he tried!).

How would he know this, you might ask? Because a figure appeared in his room that morning at 8:10am, and he instantaneously realized that this figure was a reflection of himself, but monstrous. And there was no way to peer past the mirror into any reality that wasn’t already this self. Thus, it was a figure that reflected the entire universe.

This was an insight, for sure. And it occurred to him in a quick succession of shocks. If there is no way for an awareness — for any individual — to arise on its own, then this individual consciousness is a singular phenomenon, meaning he alone existed. Others were merely projections of himself. After all, other people only appeared when he was conscious of them in his mind.

And this is also a surprising insight, well beyond his years. In fact, so far beyond his 13-year-old understanding of things that it didn’t land as a unifying vision of wholeness, as it might for a more mature individual. But it landed as a terrifying contraction of experience to a single rootless awareness without connection to anything or anyone else, as if you woke up in an MRI machine, from which there was no escape, no outside world. And this insight also revealed the imaginary nature of his own reflected existence as well. A reflection without a source. A world without any being at all, only the illusion of being.

So, this didn’t inflate his consciousness into the more typical mania, which asserts, “I am God.” Here there was no space for a God, and there’d be nothing for Him to command. So, it didn’t enlarge his sense of Self, but squashed it into a hellhole of non-being, a mere beheaded consciousness floating in a waveless sea.

In effect, one morning he woke up in an empty universe; a waveless sea ten feet deep, with just enough space for his head to stick above water to remain conscious of his predicament. In other words, the problem seems too outlandish, unless you experience a claustrophobia of that sort as a persistent reality (the only reality!).

So, he was forced to keep paddling day after day with no hope of getting anywhere or being saved. But he kept paddling because he was convinced that if he surrendered to drowning, the drowning itself would never end, because consciousness of his predicament could never cease. In fact, suicide might make his suffocation even worse. So, he had nowhere to turn accept to heartlessly pretend he had heart and continue with the charade of living as long as he could hold out.

But the difficulties of trying to live with persistent, draining terror, while going through the motions of life, had initially caused – from 13 to 17 –enough collateral social issues to raise eyebrows. These secondary social symptoms were worrisome to others, but not the actual perspective that haunted him, which was too ludicrous for anyone to take seriously.

Therefore, he paddled through life with a heavy, tense, lethargic, hopeless, manic indifference, but not enough indifference to sink, punctuated by irregular eruptions of adrenaline to keep afloat.

In other words, he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. But it was the ordinary world he was hallucinating. Otherwise, nobody else would exist. He hallucinated them to hide from his own isolation.

To call this “lonely” would be to make it sentimental. It produced a blood-draining coldness that no warm touch could penetrate.

When he told his closest friend what he was suffering, the friend said, “how cool! You can do anything, just like a lucid dreamer!”

And that was the last time he ever tried to mention it, or ever again believed in the notion of a “close friend.”

For he was far more lucid than the most lucid dreamer. Unlike him, lucid dreamers remain blessedly duped into dreaming that they exist as a reality over and above the dream, which only means they are unconsciously asleep in a way he was not. And thus, they hallucinate being able to “wake up”, which he recognized in his non-hallucinatory insight as a delusion. For every sense of Self is only another dream.

Thus, his hallucination and his insight became hopelessly entangled and unable to resolve themselves. He was a prisoner of infinite regression, which is why he remained a boy, no matter what he did.

So, he had to keep paddling with uneven enthusiasm from one inevitable mirage to another in order to distract himself from the real nightmare that nothing, nothing at all, exists, except this claustrophobic emptiness clustered around an unshakable illusion of himself as a paddler without end.

And thus, he remained stuck in a hell too absurd for anyone to notice. But he was trying not to think of all this while sitting on the plane, because he needed the intoxication of adrenaline to believe in the situation enough to survive, allowing himself to get pulled into the dream with enough passion to keep afloat a while longer.”