The Hive of Asgard

BEYOND THE INFINITE

He began to realize that every orifice the Queen offered, and there were thousands of them floating in the pink protoplasm of her bloated body, represented a portal back to samsara, the world of suffering and unfulfilled desire. The only way to resist them was to become one with the All-Mind that Kayoko had promised him.

He tried to still his mind, to achieve a state of Nonduality, a state of Oneness with the world.

Soon the nightmarish vision of the pulsating multi-orificed devouring mother faded from his sight and was replaced by an utter blackness, in which all was One, the All-Mind experienced by various mystics over the ages, the Perfect Nothingness of Buddhists seeking escape from the Wheel of Samsara and to see through the Veil of Maya, the world of false delights. Only by eliminating the carnal desires that bound him to the physical world could he hope to the escape the wheel of rebirth and merge with the perfect mind of God.

As he went further into the Darkness, the gaping mouths of the All-Mother shrank until they were only pinpoints of light, and the cries of the sirens attempting to lure him back to the world of desires and cravings faded to mere whispers.

Soon there was nothing but Darkness. He was at one with the Godhead. He had achieved a state of Perfect Mind.

Soon even the Darkness faded and he was in a colorless void, more precisely he was the colorless void itself, empty of all thoughts, all imagery. There was no change, no imperfection, no sensations.

He remained in this state for what seemed like a million years, and he gradually grew tired of it.

"Congratulations, few of our would-be saints last a million years in the hell hole of Nonduality," a disembodied voice said.

Golden looked around for the source of the voice. Slowly, a figure gained reality. Golden would recognize him anywhere, with that the eye patch, the magical spear Gungnir hoisted in his fist, and the ravens Hugin and Munin perched on his shoulders.

"Pop," he said, is that really you?"

"You bet your bippy it is," Odin said. "Although given that you are all that exists, I am most likely a figment of your imagination. Or maybe you're a figment of mine. I'm not sure how all this works. Hell, we could both be characters in a literotica story, for all I know. The phenomenal word is an illusion, after all. However by taking these forms it will be easier for us to communicate, to enter into a dialogue.

"At any rate, long time no see, Skjoldie! What's up with you lately? You don't write, you don't call. You do not even pray to us. We are Gods after all. It hurts our feelings. Your mother is worried sick about you."

"Well let's see," Golden said, "I just porked Mom every way but loose in a state of quantum superposition."

"Well done, my randy son. I suppose you don't owe her a Christmas card then. Fucked the trinity of them did you? Lolita, Jezebel, and Delilah in a triple shot? Great Caesar's ghost, I'm surprised you even lived through that."

"Pop, if I'm the son of God and appear to be a god myself as well as the ghost of one Skjold 'Golden Arm' Odinsson, what's up with that Jesus Christ motherfucker? Am I not myself the Holy Trinity? Where the fuck are my tree lights, my cards?"

"Skjold, if you think this way, you will be entrapped in these false cravings and thrown back on the Wheel of Samsara, suffering through birth and rebirth until the end of time."

"Pop, speaking of time, was I really in a state of nonduality for a million years?"

"Here we are outside of time and space, my son. A million years is no more than a flap of a butterfly's wing in this realm."

"Is this the afterlife, pop?"

"Yes, and the world you have just left is the afterlife. And the world before that, and the world after this, as well.

"So just exactly where are we?" Golden asked.

"Why you are a god now, my son, one of the Aesir. We are in heaven of course, sometimes called Asgard, the Pure Land, the Ultimate Nothingness, or No Mind."

"It we are in the state of No Mind father, how can we be speaking to each other?"

"Do not politicians speak?" Odin asked his golden-armed son.

"Point conceded," his divine spawn said.

"We are in the pre-universe," Odin said, his remaining eye twinkling, his crow's feet smiling the mystic smile of the ravens perched on his shoulder.

"Our mission, should we decide to accept it, is to create the universe."

"Jeez pop, that sounds like a tall order. I'm going to just barely pass my Diff-Trans course. If I'm lucky."

"Skjoldie, close your eyes. Do you not sense all mathematical truths flying through your mind? This is Plato's World of Forms, the realm in which all mathematical truths live.

"In the world you have just left, the physicist Max Tegmark has proposed that the universe is mathematical in nature and all mathematically possible universes are realized in in a vast multiverse. Just see his book Our Mathematical Universe, although you don't really need to go on Amazon, for the text is already present in the All-Mind, of which you are a part.

"Perhaps you wonder, as Stephen Hawking did in his A Brief History of Time, what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe. Why, Hawking asks, does the universe go through all the bother of existing. Or as the philosopher Martin Heidegger asks , why is there something rather than nothing at all?

"Following the principles of quantum mechanics all the way down to the root of the universe, the Nobelist John Archibald Wheeler asserted that potential universes must be observed by a conscious entity in order to become fully real. Why create mathematical structures if you are not going to witness their beauty at first hand? These intricate mathematical structures are pointless if no one is going to immerse himself in their grandeur and complexity."

"Pop, what about the fact that we are outside time here in Asgard? How can we even be having this conversation if there is no time?

"Skjoldie, as I told you above, for all we know we are just characters in a literotica story. The readers are still outside of the All-Mind, so we must explain certain things in a way that they can understand."

"Ok pop, I'll buy that. so what should I do, cast my spirit upon the wind like the god Apollo in season two, episode two of the original Star Trek series?"

"Just immerse yourself in the mathematics, soon you will be lost in their beauty. It's not like you could somehow hold yourself in this place of Nirvana, which is outside space and time. Even the most perfect consciousness needs a little poontang now and then. Better to do it this way that to become another Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Jones."

"Will I remember any of this?" Golden asked.

Odin pulled up his eye patch to reveal a perfectly healthy eye, nestled in the deep laugh lines of the King of Asgard's face. "You just don't get it, do you son? It would be pointless to remember. If you did, then, as B. B. King might say, the thrill would be gone. Have you not even read Doug Stokes' book Reimagining the Soul?"

Golden hung his head in shame, and mumbled "No."

"Well in it, Stokes notes that most people regard the soul as the Personality. In this view, the soul carries over the memories, thoughts, emotions, and sensory capacities of one's earthly life. But we now know that one's memories, thoughts, emotions, and sensations intimately depend on states of the brain. This evidence is reviewed exquisitely in the tome The Myth of an Afterlife, edited by Michael Martin and Keith Augustine.

"Thus, no more brain states, no more Personality."

"So that's it? When our physical bodies croak, the jig is up? No more thoughts, no more emotions, no more memories? Nothing but sunyata? Only the Emptiness remains?"

"Seriously kid, lighten up," Odin said, throwing his arms around Golden's shoulders. "You're going to like the Void. Can 376 million Buddhists be wrong? Eternal Nothingness is where it's at, kid. Don't knock it until you try it.

"Actually, Stokes asserts that the soul is a center of pure consciousness. You are not your memories, your thoughts, your emotions, and your sensations, but the bed of pure consciousness through which these cognita flow. You are the rememberer of your memories, not the memories themselves. Your memories, thoughts, emotions and sensations are fleeting, while the pure self remains. You have lived a billion lives, but cannot remember them. We now know that memories are stored in the brain. No more gray matter, no more memories.

"These centers of consciousness, or souls, are constantly recycled. Your soul may be trapped in the body of the Screaming Beavers' quarterback one moment and in the body of an actual beaver the next. But the rodent will not recall its glories on the gridiron any more than you can recall the past lives that you have led. Memory is the province of the brain, my son. Not the soul

"Thus, the afterlife is a continuous process of memoryless reincarnation, as souls are constantly being reshuffled from one body to another. You no doubt believe that you have inhabited a single body from conception to death, but this is the result of your misidentification of yourself with the Personality, rather than with the pure consciousness that you really are."

"Whatever you say, pop."

"Well son, are you ready to make the jump back into corporeal reality?"

"I guess so, dad. But what sort of universe should I aim for? There are so many."

"You do not have as much control over it as you may think. I remember once I leapt into a fifteen-dimensional universe in which I was incredibly horny unless I could trap a sixteen-dimensional peace of poontang and hold her tightly in my wringfoppers while I had my way with her. Do you have any idea how hard it is to catch a sixteen dimensional groof-teaser with fifteen-dimensional wringfoppers?"

Golden shook his head. "Not really, pop."

"Actually, you do. I can't begin to tell you how many times I have had to pull you out of that very same universe."

"But how can you remember that if your fifteen-dimensional brain is dead and gone?"

"Skjold, don't you remember me telling you that we may be nothing but characters in a literotica story. I have a feeling that this is the true scenario. I'm not sure why. Maybe the writer is putting these thoughts in my brain. I may well not even have such a brain. If so, I am just basically a rhetorical device, explaining the philosophy behind the multiverse and the process of incarnation.

"Well cheer up, pop." Golden said. You have done very well for a person lacking any kind of brain, aside from that inherent in the Author himself."

"So dad,," Golden said. "How should I choose which of the mathematically-possible universes to reincarnate in?"

"Remember Skjold, In most cases, it is not you that chooses the universe. It is the universe that chooses you. You'll be instantly plunked down into the middle of a time line with no memory of how you got there."

"So how do I do it, pop?"

"Just as Apollo did in the second season of Star Trek. Just spread yourself upon the wind."

"OK, dad, here goes nothing!"

SQUARE ONE

Skjold "Golden Arm" Odinsson was late to his class on Diffeomorphic Transformations of Nonlocal Semi-Logical Quasi-Riemannian Manifolds. Again.

He tried to enter the lecture hall as unobtrusively as possible. Not an easy task given the circumstances. He took his usual seat directly behind the girl with the golden cornsilk hair. She turned around to give him a toothsome smile and then turned back to her notes.