This Specific Moment in Eternity
Red carpets, psychedelic journeys, trauma, and awakening - the spiritual path in the 21st century looks nothing like you expected
This Specific Moment in Eternity isn’t a guidebook to enlightenment - it’s a raw, poetic, and unfiltered chronicle of what happens when life cracks you open. Kaitz Brebner, a journalist turned seeker, invites you on a deeply personal journey that weaves childhood trauma, media fame, psychedelic exploration, and spiritual insight into a mosaic of awakening. From a worn-out sofa in the desert to visions born of ayahuasca in the jungles of Latin America, each fragment pulses with the urgency of someone who’s seen behind the veil - and lived to tell. This is not the sanitized version of spirituality. It’s the messy, beautiful truth of waking up in the middle of your own life and realizing - you were it, all along.
A spiritual awakening doesn’t look like the way it’s portrayed in YouTube videos, with stock images of a woman doing “Namaste” on a mountaintop overlooking the sea. For me, it was a surprising experience-not necessarily filled with the kind of happiness I thought I understood before. No confetti, no bubbling dopamine cocktails in my brain, no vision of Buddha, no angels appearing. It feels more like a fleeting understanding of my existence’s essence. Like the moment I solve a complex math problem or a crossword puzzle: “Ah… so that’s what it’s been all along.”
My journey into consciousness began on a worn-out sofa in the middle of the desert. Or perhaps it started long before that-maybe even before I was born-possibly tied to the events of the Big Bang six billion years ago. But for the sake of clarity, let’s pin it to a specific moment of deep understanding about my relationship with myself and the world: during a festival, at age 28, after a childhood I experienced as a continuous hell, years of reckless indulgence, a glittering career, and a long period of depression.
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The moment of awakening is both a continuous present and a specific moment in time, simultaneously. It’s a moment you can point to and describe how it felt, but the experience itself defies words. It’s like trying to explain “space.” It’s a moment where everything connects-like watching The Sixth Sense and realizing Bruce Willis was dead the entire time. I had been everything, all along. I was it. Like those scenes we reinterpret in hindsight, I now understand Eckhart Tolle’s wisdom, A Course in Miracles, and Buddhist teachings: “Ahhh… that’s what they meant.” I thought I understood before, but only now do I understand that I understand. It’s like discovering I’ve been driving with the parking brake on this whole time, getting frustrated that the car wasn’t working, only to realize I just needed to release the lever. Like wandering around the house looking for myself, only to realize I am myself-that’s what I’d been searching for, and I’d been “here” all along.
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This journey continued into fascinating, bizarre, and even remarkably mundane realms where, for the first time, I could recognize the magic of creation. In the years since that moment of awakening, my life has seen significant upheavals-soaring professionally and fulfilling my childhood dream of becoming an entertainment journalist in the glamorous world of showbiz, only to abandon that dream, falling in love and experiencing heartbreak, embarking on a year-long journey through Latin America-ayahuasca, mushrooms, LSD, San Pedro, and many other psychedelic substances. Consciousness-expanding experiences played a central role in my journey, and these encounters are interwoven throughout the book.
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This Specific Moment in Eternity is a tapestry of flashes of consciousness, sudden insights penned at 5 a.m., reflections in mirrors showing me myself, impressions, and leaps across times, places, and experiences. I am not attempting to convey a cohesive narrative. My private life, the personal biography that can be pieced together from these sections, serves merely as a Petri dish where cultures of understanding and seeds of awakening have grown.
The book was mostly written during a period when I took another significant step on this path. Right after the outbreak of Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron,” I found myself, half-intuitively, staying at an ecological farm overlooking the Sea of Galilee, where I had happened to be that Saturday morning. I disconnected from the world, left my job in the media, barely ate, and surrendered to an inward journey. So maybe, after all, a spiritual awakening does happen with a view of the sea-the Sea of Galilee.
Selected Excerpts
Trumans Baywatch - How to Escape the Silver Cage
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Hollywood doesn't exist. Even Beyoncé doesn't look like Beyoncé. It's all illusion: severed from reality, representations of representations. What do they even represent? I used to live in a silver cage of my own making. Not even a golden cage; I wasn't wealthy or anything. But I lived a dream constructed in my mind, a dream that in reality belonged to the bank - a mortgaged fantasy. A dream of glamour, premieres, red carpets, and exclusive events that are neither glamorous nor prestigious. Just ten-dollar champagne in quarter-full glasses, and fancy toast with cheese. All painfully ordinary.
I lived in a silver cage, sold to me by glossy magazines and skilled Photoshop editors, by video reporters with their manufactured humor, and celebrities wearing sponsored dresses. My dreams weren't my own. They were sold to me by shrewd marketers before I even understood what marketing was. It all seemed glamorous to me: a twelve-year-old Russian-immigrant boy, trying to escape the mundane cruelty of life in a suffocating small town in Israel. The dream was close enough to touch, yet far enough to remain a dream.
I fired up my engines and took flight. The beginning was rough, but once I caught the wave, I rode with the zeitgeist. Gradually the waters deepened and the shore receded. Even as the sun began to set, I remained on my surfboard, because now I knew how to surf. It was the main thing I knew. Perhaps the only thing. With sun-bleached, cool blonde hair like the surfers on-screen and a dazzling smile stretching ear to ear.
There's always something more to chase - that's how the system is designed. A more talented surfer, a greater virtuoso. Running more gracefully in slow motion, in a redder swimsuit, across the sand of a studio set.
Because it's all one giant studio, really. I can even make out the lighting crew and the cameramen behind the palm trees. There are more cameramen and more lighting crews filming me as I notice the lighting crews and cameramen. It’s a massive reality show, and I'm both Truman and the cameramen, and the cameramen filming the cameramen, and the Big Brother.
Understanding Infinity: Me, Hitler, and Semen as Thoughts of God
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We are all one. Not as a metaphor, not as an idea, not as a hippie cliché, but physically. Metaphysically. Meta, meta, meta-physically. We are all the same consciousness, the same being, the same God experiencing itself in superposition, in all possibilities simultaneously. The same entity that can do everything, fucking everything. Everything that can be conceived by our tiny human minds, and everything that cannot be conceived. All possibilities at once.
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Michelangelo once said that the sculpture he carves in stone is already present within the rock; he merely reveals it, removing everything that is not "David." God is the stone, Michelangelo, and David. And also every possible sculpture that can be shaped from the stone simultaneously, because God doesn’t need to carve the stone to be David. Or Goliath. Or Buddha. Or Jesus. Or the writer of these words. Or you. Or a cat. Or a 16th-century nun. Or an actual piece of rock from which Michelangelo sculpted an actual statue. Everything is real. And everything exists in the "imagination" of God. Because God's stone is not "stone." It is reality itself, and its creative material is everything: glass, flesh, plasticine, thoughts, electricity, and flip-flops. It is the material, the creator, and the creation. And the observer. Who exists within the creation while simultaneously carving it. All at once.
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And He is bored. I, too, would be bored if I could create everything. Fucking everything, Without limitation. Simultaneously. Up, down, right, left, inward and outward and inward again, smaller and larger. If you have no end, you have no concept of end. You would simply be everything. But the word "everything" is so pale compared to the totality of all the unlimited possibilities of infinity that my human mind cannot grasp it.
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And He is bored. He wants a friend. If it’s even possible to speak in terms of “bored”, "want", "friend" or "He" or any word the human mind can use to conceptualize divinity. But it’s a little dull sitting inside a block of stone, being David one moment and Goliath the next, talking to yourself when you know that you are within the same block of stone. A one-man show.
So God had to forget - for a moment, for one specific moment in eternity - that He is not really David, in order to experience the creation He made from within. That is where He first struck the rock with His chisel, metaphorically, and a crack formed - a crack that is all of creation. And instantly, in that very moment, the entire human, canine, alien, and mineral experience was created. And that of the dental hygienist who treats my - herself - God’s - tartar. And then Goliath was created, so there would be drama, so there would be something to fight against. And He continues to experience Himself as David, as Goliath, as the one writing the story of David, of Michelangelo, of Michelangelo’s assistant who hands him the chisel, of the billions who gaze at this magnificent statue with their eyes, through an art magazine printed on 120-gram coated paper, or through a smartphone screen. But it’s all the same "stone." All the same divine material. The same consciousness playing with itself, experiencing itself as every person who has ever been born, will ever be born, or could have been born in a parallel universe. Because in God's block of stone, all possible sculptures already exist.
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Like a single point of consciousness, Of awareness, Of recognition at the center of the stone, experiencing "each time" - if it can be phrased that way - as every one of the infinite possibilities of what can be shaped from this stone simultaneously. As both the victim and the murderer, sitting in paradise over a cup of chamomile tea.
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The wholeness of existence is more radical than that. Far more radical than that. Infinitely more radical than that. Because when you can do everything with the snap of a finger - which you don’t really have - and which you do have in a million human incarnations, from the prehistoric man, through Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette, to Jeffrey Epstein - there is no such thing as "radical." Creating a grain of dust is as immediate and effortless as creating trillions of galaxies with billions of civilizations with seven or twelve dimensions. It’s like a thought. We are a thought of God. "I wonder what it would be like to be a 14-year-old girl addicted to her smartphone," "I wonder what it would be like to be a slave in a British colony, carrying sacks of tea on my back for fourteen hours a day," "I wonder what it would be like to be Trump." And it becomes radical because, in God's perception, there is no such thing as "radical": "I wonder what it would be like to be a serial killer who abducts an innocent girl, rapes and murders her in his car," and "I wonder what it would be like to be an innocent girl who is raped and murdered in a monster’s car." And divinity has no moral doctrine like ours; it has no concept of desire or need to avoid suffering or to bathe in golden tubs. It has no measuring tools at all. Even if God had an infinite ruler, an endless scale, a cosmic laser-measuring tape, and He walked across the universe, counting how many meters there were from end to end and reached a certain conclusion - "zillionquintillion meters" - what would that even mean? Because even the concept of a meter is part of that same universe, part of everything, part of the infinite block of stone. If God removed the ruler from His creation to determine its objective size, immediately, automatically, the measuring device would be included within the creation, because nothing can exist "outside of everything."
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So what is big or small? With one thought, all those zillionquintillion meters become a millimeter within a new universe. A speck of dust on the computer screen of someone trying to grasp eternity in his limited mind. Living within a universe where its scientists can estimate that the number of stars in a visible segment is something to the power of something, something, something. And then, this whole thing containing so many beings, places, pain, love and enlightenment experiences, turns, with a single thought, into a grain of salt in a salt shaker, on a planet, in a vast universe, filled with stars, creatures.
And if God has no external measuring device with which to measure His creation, if everything is relative, then there is also no ruler for suffering, or pleasure, or good or evil. The ruler exists and is "objectively" valid only in our limited perception. The serial killer and the girl murdered in his car are equally valid experiences. We perceive the Nazis as the ultimate evil only because we needed something at the extreme end of the scale to define as the ultimate evil. And in whose eyes is anything evil, anyway? A few different decisions by politicians sitting behind large desks, and today, the whole world would be watching German-language TV shows on the streaming service “NetzFlimmern,” and the Jews would have been considered the ultimate evil that was eradicated from the world in the name of human progress. It’s all a matter of perspective. But what if there was a guy named "Schmitler" who killed sixty million? Or what if there had been no Hitler at all, or if he had, say, been accepted into that fucking art academy and had spent his life painting, and there had been no World War II? Who then would be considered the ultimate evil? Genghis Khan? Osama bin Laden? Shredder? And if there were no concept of murder in the world, perhaps the ultimate evil would be cutting someone off in traffic? Or stepping on someone’s foot by mistake in a grocery store queue? Is the lion that devours the gazelle evil? From her perspective - of course. If there is no measuring instrument, there is no way to measure. Nothing can be measured.
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It’s not just a matter of scale - what’s “better” or “worse.” Our very definition of what’s “negative” or “positive” comes from the human survival mechanism, which sees living as good, dying as bad, pleasure as good, and suffering as bad. And these definitions are valid - but only from a human perspective. On the absolute level, there’s no real “good” or “bad.” If a ruthless virus were to wipe out all of humanity within two weeks - would that be good or bad? For humanity, extinction is a catastrophe. But for Mother Earth, it could be wonderful, and for billions of birds, fish, trees, and the moss growing on the ruins of our cities, it might be paradise. Do Mother Earth and humanity sit in a courtroom, making arguments before God?
When everything is one - it’s not just that all is the same consciousness, but literally the same particle. A tiny, massless quark, moving at infinite speed - so fast, in fact, that it seems to be everywhere at the same time, appearing as all particles, all at once. Like the blades of a fan spinning so fast that we can’t slip our hand between them, creating the illusion of solidity. That same divine quark creates the illusion of infinite universes, stretching across zillionquintillion meters - but it’s all just the same particle, taking on different shapes, different expressions. Different configurations of this divine fragment within itself create a tomato, or uranium, or a drop of semen.
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This is the ultimate game. The only game, the brilliant game God could play with Himself. Because if you have infinite time, infinite space, infinite parallel possibilities - you cannot afford to be bored forever. You cannot know you are Goliath when you are David, that you are actually the girl you are murdering in the car. You must forget. Only then can you experience it. And to us, it seems cruel, painful, unfair - but by what ruler are we measuring?
And maybe the purpose God set for Himself is to remember. To remember that He is God over and over again. To remember that He is Hitler, and Schmitler, and an alien, and Goliath, and Michelangelo. Maybe then He would be less inclined to kill, because whom is He killing if not Himself? And if I am a person, and you are a person, and we agreed to use a ruler as a measuring device, and I know that suffering is less pleasant, then maybe I don’t want to make you - myself - suffer.
A game. Of infinite forgetting and remembering.
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"I wonder what it would be like to try and capture the infinitude of the whole in limited words, and write about being a thought of God," thought God, scattering breadcrumbs, leaving signs to find His way back to Himself. "I wonder what it would be like to read these very lines."
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Editing: Sefi Kuperman, Jake Ratcliff
Guilt's Orgasm
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Guilt is good at chess and at arguments. Guilt is always polished, in a black dress with a calculated neckline and heels. Her eyes are framed with mascara, as black as death, and within them flickers a rich blend of disappointment, judgment, and delicate undertones of hope. Like wine from vines grown near a row of dark blueberry bushes, supposed to absorb their flavor.
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I have never tasted blueberries in my wine.
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It's frustrating to play chess with Guilt. She is always one step ahead of me. As if she has already watched our game through a hidden security camera and knows my every move in advance. When she speaks, she does so slowly and precisely, each word calculated like a brilliant move by Kasparov, and a single glance from her is enough to freeze me in place. Even when it seems she's not around, I feel her watching me with scrutinizing eyes.
Guilt wakes up early in the morning. No matter when I wake up, she's already awake. Whether I slept too much because my body needed it or too little because I wanted to enjoy the evening, she's already there, sipping steaming coffee. her eyes holding a disappointed look that seems to ask, "Waking up now?" No matter what I do, Guilt is ready with an arsenal of weapons and will always find something to throw at me.
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When it seems she has no new tricks, that she's out of ammunition, she pulls out the ancient swords from the cherrywood cabinet of my teenage years: the exams that i had to prepare to, the people I hurt over a decade ago, the times I wasn't sensitive because I was too drunk, the words I said to hurt, the words I said because it hurt.
Sometimes I catch her sneaking a glance at me through the heavy curtain, while I'm chopping wood in the yard. Her eyes quickly wander to the barn and the chickens jumping on the hill, but before she leaves, I think I see a hint of lust. She enjoys watching my muscles strain with effort as I swing the axe repeatedly. Sometimes I wonder if it's just hunger, and she actually wants to cook my flesh in a giant pot with wild mushrooms, cinnamon, and wine scented with blueberries, or maybe both. To fuck and eat, or eat and fuck.
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I don't know how long I've been living with Guilt. Sometimes it seems like forever.
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The furniture in her luxurious mansion changes according to the current fashion. Sometimes we're a successful journalist with a golden mane, and Guilt's living room is filled with posters of celebrities. On such days, paparazzi wait for us at the entrance around a red velvet carpet. And I feel guilty for having worked only 11 hours today, with 3 articles still waiting, while wasting my time on a meaningless evening with friends. It's funny, because in the distant past, we both lived in a dirty park in Jerusalem, and the goal in the chess game was to sit and drink cheap vodka on the stairs, and she called when i was too lazy to go out and stayed home watching a stupid tv show.
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These days, Guilt's living room is designed as a spacious hall. It is filled with golden statues of Buddha three meters high, yoga mats, and the constant smoke of incense and sage. She comes to visit, looking a bit tired with clumpy mascara, when I'm eating a cholesterol-filled snack or nurturing a grudge. She multiplies, and in a warped, twisted, intrinsic contradiction, I am guilty of being guilty.
Guilt has no real values. Despite the serious facade she wears, she's an opportunistic player, always cooperating with the leading side in the war. Sometimes it's the career, sometimes the spiritual development, and sometimes "living life to the fullest" with as many drugs and alcohol as possible. She has no real agenda of her own, but the neckline of her dress makes me forget this very quickly. She is so collected and confident in herself it’s impossible to believe she has no purpose. That for her everything is a game. That she is a slut who fucks everyone.
I want to satisfy Guilt. To penetrate her with power, to see her eyes close and feel her nails scratch my back as she forgets all the strategies and moves. To do her roughly, so it hurts her too. To make her explode in a heavenly orgasm and disappear forever.
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What will happen when she disappears? Will she leave me her luxurious mansion and the giant hourglass whose contents are constantly spilling (God knows when she manages to turn it)? And what about the bed with the satin sheets? The satan’s sheets.
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If not to fuck her, at least I would like to make her smile. Even though her smile is usually cynical, there is something pleasant in the sight of her beautiful green eyes closing. I would like to watch her as her head falls back on the rocking chair, and instead of focusing on the pieces on the board, just listen to the burning wood in the fireplace.
At times, it becomes clear to me - I will never be able to satisfy Guilt, or win an argument. The mechanism is designed in such a way that I will always be guilty of something, and perhaps it would be wiser to relinquish the attempt of control. The very encounter with Guilt feels like a punishment, a substitute for true responsibility, locking me in a position that prevents me from seeing other angles of the situation and the full consequences of my deeds. Stuck in a loop. I will never be able to bring Guilt to the longed-for orgasm.
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Suddenly, I gaze at myself with compassion and see the beauty in imperfection—in flaws and wounds, in small mistakes, in the things I have said and can never take back, in the tiny cracks I have left in hearts, both mine and others', scars that will remain there forever. Even in that, there is something beautiful. In being human.
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The game continues as usual towards the inevitable loss, but this time I don’t wait for another sophisticated move to bring me to my knees. Just when it seems like I have the upper hand, I stand up and turn around.
"Where are you going?" Guilt asks, but I don’t respond and start to move away from the table. "What do you think you’re doing?" The restraint peels off her along with the remnants of makeup. "Who would you even be without me, you are nobody!"
Fuming, she grabs her queen and throws it at me. The pain is sharp, but I keep walking. It seems to me that blood is dripping from the wound, but I don’t check, I don’t want to give her the satisfaction.
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It seems I don’t know what really lies outside the mansion, as if I’ve never left it. What’s hidden behind the high fence, among the trees of the forest, where there is freedom, and no promises.
I wonder, maybe I created Guilt, and her mansion, the marble fireplace, the satan’s sheets, and even the hourglass that somehow manages to tick. That they all exist in my head. That I am the one chopping the wood for Guilt's marble fireplace, that I am the one slaughtering the chickens for her plate and harvesting the grapes in the vineyard every summer, and there are no blueberries at all.
I Love Multifocal Lenses and Supporting Battered Women
We stand in line, one after the other, waiting our turn with microphone clenched in hand. One by one we push the device into her face, not even granting her a proper break - at most, a glass of water.
"What really happened there?"
"Who broke whose heart?"
"Did you go through a period of depression?"
Hungry for a headline - who will ask the boldest question? Who will strike the rawest nerve? Who will draw a tear from her eyes on camera? In just moments, our clips will be sent to the editor and turned into clickbait for the masses, gracing the gossip sections of the country’s largest news sites. Mothers from the suburbs will comment that she’s a whore—they always knew it, ever since Big Brother.
I stand there in line, waiting and watching her crumble.
"Enough! I can’t take this anymore," she says to the publicist. But it doesn’t stop. The PR rep has obligations - to me. She specifically mentioned in her email that the fragile model would talk about her fresh breakup, and I didn’t come here for nothing - not for the glasses, not for the coupon offering a free pair at the mall, and certainly not for the fundraiser event for battered women.
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"Hey, hon," the publicist chirped when she called me a few days earlier. "I’ve got a fabulous new exhibit at a Pretentious Gallery, about strong women and their worldview. Through the glasses of a major brand, of course. Tons of C-list celebs will be there, maybe even a few reality-show winners-to-be, posing beside their black-and-white portraits wearing glasses. All for a good cause. Oh, and here’s the kicker: the most talked-about model in town is making her first public appearance since the breakup, and she’s willing to do interviews about it."
Hon’, you can call your friends, I wanted to reply to this woman who’d clearly forgotten about WhatsApp’s existence. I have no desire to be in some distant gallery at 10 a.m., drinking cava from plastic cups. Instead, I settled for a polite, "Thank you, dear. Send me the details, and I’ll check."
It looks like a glamorous cocktail fundraiser event, but it’s actually a war zone. Like territorial battles played out with wooden ship models on giant maps, where beefy, high-ranking generals in a poorly ventilated bunker push the pieces around, plotting scenarios over sheets marked in red with cities filled with millions of lives. That’s how I’ve learned to survive, like a prickly pear turned inside out: soft and pink on the outside. But inside the cannons roar, the shells whistle, militant deep in the bunker of my soul... On the surface, I seem laid-back, friendly, and smiling. But beneath the sequined armor, the blazer, and the perfect hairdo, I’m a combination of Otto von Bismarck, Ribbentrop, and Genghis Khan.
The world of glamour appears wrapped in sparkly dresses, rolled out on red carpets, dipped in cava—a seemingly feminine, aesthetic, meticulous realm. But anyone who gets close sees the militant masculinity bursting from within.
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Why do people even call these days? I wonder. Just like that - no scheduled Zoom, no calendar invite, no chance to mentally prepare. They just press the little green icon with the phone receiver no one’s touched in decades and expect me to drop everything to talk about a glasses campaign. Why is she calling me hon? We met once at some launch event and exchanged maybe three words. When did I get promoted to hon? Have the safety pins she used to attach my rank insignia pricked me, like the needle on an old sewing machine? Or am I Sleeping Beauty, dreaming this entire thing?
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Just like a military system, it’s unclear who this whole spectacle serves: the "people" it’s meant to protect? Or in my case, as part of "the media," to provide information? The "home front"?
We’re all fighting against each other – for a headline, for a few words from the model about her breakup. I see her standing there at this eyewear launch, somehow, ostensibly, for a good cause – supporting an organization against violence toward women.
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The publicist continues to press. "Just one more interview," she pleads. "He’ll only ask you about the campaign, I promise!"
She looks at me, seeking affirmation. Something in me breaks. I can’t lie anymore. Nobody cares about this campaign. I can’t send my editor a headline like "I Love Multifocal Lenses, and Supporting Battered Women Is Important."
"He won’t only ask me about the campaign! That’s his job," the young, savvy model says through teary eyes, glaring at the publicist, who shoots me another look, silently begging me to agree.
We’re all caught between a rock and a hard place. The starlet got orders from some agent sitting behind a massive glass desk to show up at this glitzy event, post-breakup, to flash a bright smile and act like everything’s fine. The publicist needs to deliver what she promised me. I need to deliver a headline to my editor, who needs to report clicks to the site manager, who must justify everything to the CEO.
The machine is well-oiled; the lubricant drips onto the carpet, and I’m just a tiny cog. A cog that thousands of others would gladly replace to fit into my slot.
But what if all the cogs realized they were just cogs - not unique snowflakes, or maybe both, but in this system, just cogs? What if we all set aside, even for a moment, our urge to climb higher, land the next headline, take the next step? It would be the most glittering rebellion ever staged.
"You’ll only ask her about the campaign, right?" the exhausted publicist asks, not even sure herself what she wants me to ask anymore. All she really wants is to return to her tiny city flat, light up a joint, and binge Netflix.
I can’t lie anymore. I can’t say I’ll only ask about the glasses. I lower my eyes. I lower them proudly, and this time I choose not to lie. No, I won’t just ask her about the campaign. I look into her reddened eyes and realize I don’t want to ask her anything at all.
Let the multifocal lenses burn.
The God in the Ant:
How I Was Spat Out of the Consciousness Press Machine of the Matrix
The system distorts people; it bends identities. I like those videos where a hydraulic press crushes objects - plastic toys and electronic devices - until they explode. You can't look away, fascinated by the tiny parts of the phone flying everywhere, by Barbie's eye popping out of place. There's something satisfying about witnessing the breaking point.
In this case the press is the system, the city, the matrix - or whatever I choose to call it - and the objects are human beings. It presses souls until they burst. For some it manifests as anxiety; for others it explodes into cancer or an ulcer. Some release the pressure by yelling at subordinates or their children.
Somehow, I was lucky enough to roll out of the press machine - like a small marble that, instead of being crushed, was flung out by the pressure intact. Now I stand outside the system, gazing at this massive and monstrous machine. I sit on a green farm, slightly outside of time and the spider's web. I don't buy Nike shoes and I don’t drink Coke. I eat little; I make soup from mallow leaves and a few leftover vegetables from guests. I don't consume, I don't need, and I could live like this forever.
I don't know how I won this lottery of consciousness, how I was flung so cleanly out of the system. I was deep inside it, after all - running after a paycheck as scrawny as a cow in a drought year, trapped within a giant hamster wheel just to pay rent for an apartment close enough to that same job. Pedaling on a bike because I couldn't afford a car. Chasing fame as an Entertainment journalist, interviewing celebrities, hoping the masses' recognition would give meaning to my hollow existence. Chasing sex to grant my body fleeting moments of satisfaction that might help me forget the pressure. Maintaining a smiling persona on Facebook, almost believing it was really me. I lived on dreams sold to me by the media, of which I was a part, continuing to buy them just to keep functioning as another cog in that massive consciousness-press machine.
I was reborn. Any connection between me and the person I was a decade ago seems nonexistent. We are two entirely different people who happen to share the same biography, but give it entirely separate interpretations.
This morning, I woke from a dream about Eurovision, about an irate producer tormenting his workers in that grand spectacle. It felt like a reflection of my past life and a deep understanding that I don't want to return to it. I barely recognize the character I was, the role I played in that game. The wrapper is almost the same, but the surprise inside the Kinder Surprise egg has changed. Surprise!
Is it chance that somehow, I was spat whole out of the machine? Maybe some good karma from a previous life played in my favor, a chain of events: the fact that I achieved my big dream and wasn't satisfied, which pushed me to embark on a journey; the encounter with psychedelics; a global pandemic that made me want to escape the lockdown and buy a ticket to Latin America; a war that drove me out of the city; and hundreds of smaller events that brought me to this wooden deck from which I now gaze at the Lake.
Maybe it's me - brave, wise, and resourceful, more than anyone else? Or maybe I'm just a character, a small player on the chessboard of creation, in a battle between "good" and "evil," between the enslaving system and conscious freedom. Perhaps my personal journey was designed so I'd write these lines and someone would read them, just another move in this cosmic game.
Maybe I represent humanity's consciousness waking up, breaking free, exiting the matrix. Perhaps all consciousness will eventually reach this stage - in this lifetime, or in 500 years, or in 2,732 years, in a time that isn't linear at all. Maybe I'm just in an advanced stage of this game, while the people shouting in the office are in an earlier stage, but we're all present on the same board simultaneously.
Maybe I don't remember all the lives of enslavement and filth I experienced in previous stages. Maybe I'm the only person who exists, and this is my game. Or maybe you, the reader of these lines, are the only person who exists, and they were written by an artificial intelligence system designed to give you a push to awaken.
Maybe we're all the same consciousness - the boss who humiliates and the employee who cringes, Mark Zuckerberg and the monk meditating in the Himalayas, the writer and the reader.
Maybe it's all true at once - that I'm a meaningless tool in a giant game and a kind of messiah and a line of code in a computer, existing and not existing. Maybe I’m a fragment of divine consciousness and also a tiny ant in a vast universe that thinks it has great significance. Or maybe I'm God, experiencing itself through an ant that thinks it has meaning.
And maybe none of this matters.
I look at the thistle flowers drying in the spring sun of April, at the birds circling above the fields, at the white butterflies gathering nectar. All these grand ideas collapse without making even a decibel of noise, dissolving into existence itself, fading into this very moment.
Everything is Upside Down: a Distorted Selfie of Existence
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Everything is upside down. We were deceived. They made us believe that we need more to be happy. More money, more success, more sex, more muscles or Filler in the lips and silicone in the breasts, until we stop looking like humans and start resembling Barbie dolls. We always have to chase and achieve something, and when we achieve it, we move on to the next thing, whether it’s another digit on our paycheck or another notch on our bedpost. The same pattern, the same simple formula to the point of stupidity, which makes us all even dumber.
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We live in a simulation, a selfie of the world, where everything looks almost like reality, but reversed. Right is left and left is right. And we need some caption in the frame to understand that something here is upside down, that we can't read it, that everything is distorted. But instead of breaking the screen, we learn to read mirror-writing.
People around me are running from place to place, crying about not being able to make ends meet with a family income of 10,000 euros, and then going to the mall to alleviate their frustration, packing it in thick plastic bags with logos of big companies, sports shoes they won’t use for sports, or new jeans that, to fit in the closet, require getting rid of another pair. The jeans they bought just a year ago are placed on a bench in the street, to feel that maybe it’s not really a waste, to ignore the absurdity of their actions, because someone will take them, but even the homeless don’t need more jeans. Nothing bought with money will help. Even another vodka with a pink drink and lots of ice for 10 Euros in a dimly lit club won’t fill the inner void.
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I was there, on that endless running track. More titles, more success, more vodka. When everyone around me was running, I had no choice but to understand that this is the game. Run. Run. Run. Until you die. They told us that this is life, and we believed it.
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Humans are social animals. If our whole pack is doing something, how are we supposed to think there’s any other option?
Coolness, what a powerful tool. Everyone wants to be cool. To climb the social ladder. If you wear the right jeans, maybe you'll be as cool as Margie. They take people, turn them into stars, and tell us that if we want to be like them, we need to dress like them, eat like them, and use the same phone as them. Why does a technology company that makes chips and rear cameras need a team of celebrities to be photographed with their device? And we buy the stupid phone, just to watch clips from that reality show that crowns sixteen-year-olds and turns them into stars who again sell us a new series phone. And when there's nothing left to innovate in the phone, they explain that it’s cool that the screen folds or bends, and we really need it, and our selfie gets even more distorted.
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Deep inside, even the strongest mice in the race know they live in a distorted selfie of existence. That the whole system is built from millions of small pixels, and if we just get close enough to each component of the system, focus enough on each point in this artificial image, its building blocks will be exposed, control systems will be stripped. It starts with the education system that turns us into loyal consumers, through the health system that insists on treating only symptoms and not the lifestyle that makes us sick, and ending with psychiatry that drugs us enough to be happy to function and blurred enough not to feel we are trapped.
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Money is the simplest fuel for the system. But to create an illusion of complexity, a book is thrown into the air explaining that "money isn’t everything in life". The more sophisticated members of the pack decide to chase more fame, more experiences, a more perfect relationship, or even more enlightenment. But here too, always with the aim of filling some endless black hole, and we all fall in to it.
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In the distance, a small light shines. Some strange story about spiritual awakening and a giant gold Buddha statue, ideas about love and inner perfection that need nothing. Along with spiritual gurus driving Ferraris, explaining to a hall of people who paid seven thousand dollars for a weekend that they too can buy a Ferrari if they just let go of their fears and pay ten thousand dollars – the price of their VIP coaching program. Even the spirit has become a tradable currency: who went to more retreats, who read more books? False lights and leather jackets mixed together in the washing machine of the matrix. Silent meditations were thrown into the same container with exercises for “creating reality” and “attracting money”. And everything has a heavy smell of pink fabric softener. How are we even supposed to know where to go within this spinning drum of ideas, which only speeds up with all the thousands of self-help books that come out every year, explaining that this is exactly how, and no other way, we should live.
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***
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I, even after seeing the glimmer of light, kept running. In one hand a wallet and in the other a yoga mat. At night, after twelve hours of work, I got off the hamster wheel to go to bed and read another chapter of "The Power of Now." As I read,And I wondered what the bearing of this gigantic hamster wheel is connected to. Is there some kind of turbine there generating electricity? Who profits from our running on the hamster wheel? Who benefits from this enslavement? The people at the top of the pyramid don’t seem particularly happy themselves, not Trump, not Zuckerberg, not Bezos, nor the Rothschilds.
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Illuminati? Lizard people? Bodiless dark entities from the fourth dimension? Celebrities extracting adrenochrome from the bodies of small children who were kidnapped and sold into prostitution? Even if I tried, I couldn’t come up with a more demonic story. Is it possible that we invented all these horror stories just to have external enemies, pure evil? And maybe there’s nothing suspicious here: it's just us who simply got confused and entered a spin we have no idea how to get out of. The Illuminati and lizard people are nothing more than a story we tell ourselves to justify the way we enslave ourselves. Someone sets a bait for us, and we eat it eagerly, while we hang on the hook and complain that it cuts into our flesh. It doesn’t really matter who holds the rod, maybe, just like the fish, we don’t have the tools to understand, and we just need to stop jumping at the bait.