The Chaffinch

This is a cross-universal story of spirituality. To write it, I had to assume you are not a chaffinch. But that, as you will see from my story, is not so far-fetched.

...

I am Derek Turton, and I come from a version of Earth where chaffinches evolved to be intelligent six-foot bipedal creatures, the dominant species as it were. As we progress through my story, you will see how I can be so aware of something that (ordinarily) I shouldn’t be aware of – namely, that you, a creature in another universe, exist, and could be reading this.

The fact I have consciousness of other worlds is almost an impediment to my storytelling, as I don’t know which world my reader inhabits. But to give you an anchoring point, we have a city here in the UK called ‘Kull’. Now it might be that you are from another universe where Chaffinches evolved on Earth in the same way, with the only differences being slight name changes; perhaps your UK city is called ‘Mull’, or ‘Rull’. Alternatively, you might reside in a universe where lizards became the dominant species, and the city is still called ‘Kull’.

Whatever the case, if you are only a ‘few’ entanglements over (or are in a universe tied by conceptual synchronicities), you should be able to decipher what the city is called on your world, in your universe.

I must start by offering a few details about myself, which leads us nicely into my adventures. I studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Tancaster in the North of the UK in the year 2005 (when I was 19 years old). I have been interested in discovering esoteric secrets since I was 13, which became a greater and greater focus as the years progressed.

I developed an interest in Zigmand Fraud at 17, and I always enjoyed the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers. As for slightly more modern philosophers, I became interested in Kunt, Bitchenstein, and Shittenhauer while at university.

But my real experiences didn’t come until long after I had studied the work of Yarl Lustav Dung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist. Fraud’s sexual theory had really intrigued me, and University provided me with a strong basis of knowledge, during which I tentatively approached Dung’s work. But it wasn’t until my 25th year, while finishing a rigorous psychoanalytic training course, that I began to move into deeper numinous territory.

By this time, I was quite familiar with Dung’s work, and I was also breast-deep in spirituality and physics. It was apparent to me that my dreams were events from other universes in the multiverse. The correlations were foolproof.

If a nearly infinite variety of universes exist, as taught by Stew Tetherlet in his ‘many worlds interpretation’, then the dream in which I chose to buy butter from the supermarket (having forgotten to buy it the previous day) was naturally an entangled universe. This was thrilling, but what does it serve? I wanted to go further.

In retrospect, I seemed unable to go too much further with my intellect alone; I was bestowed a greater level of creativity through my dreams and visions; by grace, my spirit was granted further insight.

I had seen myself in other universes as a chaffinch, I even knew now that these were other universes, but the dream teacher opened my eyes to the craziness of God — to what I refer to as the ‘completion of individuality’.

...

I have a friend of 14 years called Jack Mack. He’s a musician. He plays in a band called Tenacious C and has starred in movies like ‘The School of Wok’: a film about a class of students who end up learning how to cook, before competing at ‘the battle of the pans’, a national cooking competition.

I was lucky enough to be an extra in a few of his movies, we started talking on set more often, and eventually, we became casual friends through our love for both music and childish antics. Aside from psychology, I have always been interested in acting; I started as a runner when I was at university, and then I moved into part-time work as an extra.

Anyway, Jack is a slightly larger-than-average gentleman, with a big bushy grey and black beard. You may know of him if he happens to be famous in your universe.

One night, after intensely going over some course materials, I decided to meditate into sleep (something I often do).

As I focused my attention on the darkness of my closed eyelids, a voice and image appeared, it was Jack. But he was different. I recognised his facial features immediately; it was definitely him. But he wasn’t a chaffinch. He looked like some sort of evolved monkey.

He wore a white robe as if he were a Hindu saint; his words to me were as follows, “You’ll see God in my eyes.”

That was it. Nothing more that night. But this was the start of the numinosity; this showed me the breadth of being. Nonetheless, I still didn’t get it.

You see, through experience, I was now open to understanding the depth of our being. I knew ‘I’ lived in other universes, as with the butter. But those instances were still limited to my peculiar anatomy (that is, my distinctive physical body) being a chaffinch. Now I saw a greater bandwidth of being – my peculiar anatomy being other evolved animals too, and the billions of entangled universes (based on various possibilities of their experience) split off from them.

I might have 17,678,788,956 different versions of myself as a chaffinch, each sporting the sculpture of what could be conceptually defined as my peculiar personality and anatomy, with these living out all the combinations of experience possible within that peculiarity. But there are also 17 billion versions of myself as an evolved monkey, an evolved cow etc with a peculiar anatomy and personality that can be (in certain complex and less-than-satisfactory ways) synchronously verified as being at one with the chaffinches. But I thought I was clever; I hadn’t seen anything yet.

It is one thing to imagine a set of possibilities, it is another thing entirely to imagine the weight of those possibilities. My relationship with monkey Jack was to teach me this weight.

...

It was Tuesday morning, I was walking down the street, and monkey Jack (as I now seemed to be referring to him) entered my mind. I can’t explain this. It was simply the presence of a deep feeling conflated with a hazy image of him.

He spoke to me, “That man in front of you will pull something from his back pocket.”

Seconds later, he did just that. The man walking about 20 metres in front of me retrieved a vape pen from his pocket. Ironic that it was a vape pen and I was being schooled in the heights of the spirit.

I think of that quote from Mary Louise von Frinz, “Smoking is extracting spirit from matter.” Here I was having the magic of the spirit extracted from the material so that I could recognise it; so that I would see Guru, Self, and God are one.

Naturally, I was drawn into both self-importance and scepticism.

As soon as it happened, I felt as if an excitable, video-game voice had said, “You Levelled up!” It was incredible; it was as if I was on the verge of attaining a great spiritual power. But I was also pressed with the mild feeling that this retrieval could have been coincidental. I didn’t think so, as it was such a clear experience, but as I was interested in the scientific method, I wanted to validate my experience through repetition.

I blasted some Hindu chants through my earphones and continued to walk, focusing my mind solely on the image of Jack, watching to see if his image moved. For a while, it remained frozen in my mind, but suddenly it awoke from its slumber.

His image moved out of my mind and imprinted itself onto a car driving down the main road that was about 30 metres to the right of me. I was walking through a park with thin metal railings, so I could watch the car as it was moving along the road.

As I walked closer to the side road I would be crossing, that exact car turned down it, and by the time I got to the crossing point, it whizzed straight past me. I was certainly intrigued by this.

I stayed at the crossing for five minutes, watching to see if any other cars on the main road also turned. Dozens upon dozens of cars drove past, but none turned. It was interesting to me; I felt that it was meaningful. But the final happening (there were a few other strange things too) was as powerful as the first.

My walk took me to the high street; I was walking past a charity shop when the frozen image of Jack in my mind moved again.

This time it placed itself on the door of the charity shop and uttered the words, “There’s something in here for you.”

So, I decided to enter the shop. As I walked through the door, a guy from my course walked past me. I immediately understood. I rarely saw anyone from my course out and about – at this point in my life, I lived in a small city; therefore, it was reasonably difficult to bump into people.

After these synchronous experiences, I was high in the sky. During them, I experienced a deep sense of relaxation, and this continued for a little while after. I felt that Jack was completely real and immediate in my life. I knew there was a dimension to life that I hadn’t previously been aware of. Nonetheless, my eyes hadn’t awakened fully to the depth of what I was seeing, to that ‘completion of individuality’.

...

Several days went by and I had enjoyed only minor points of contact with Jack, then, in a rather interesting dream, he came to me.

I was first in a moving tunnel that looked like Hyperspace in Star Wars, except this tunnel was rainbow-coloured rather than blue.

Despite being in motion, a static trap door opened to one side of the tunnel and Jack popped his head through, he said, “Come with me.”

I moved toward the trap door, and once I entered, I was pulled through various spinning tubes. During my trip through these tubes, a set of astral bodies (immaterial bodies unrestricted by space and time) split from (and recombined with) my actual body through several stages of what seemed to be a singular process.

This process occurred as follows: I observed as one by one, six ever more subtle astral forms of myself emerged from my physical body and then collapsed back into it with mounting force. The first was only slightly less material and transparent than my actual body, and paradoxically, its collapse exerted the least force; whereas the sixth was light and extremely translucent, and its collapse into my physical form produced enough force to send me rocketing out of my current tube and right into space-time.

I landed in a ball pit of a children’s Jungle gym. I didn’t know what was going on, or why I was there. I was disoriented, to say the least. I clambered out of the pit and onto some rough blue carpet.

I heard a voice, “Don’t hit your sister again.”

This voice was familiar. I turned to the right and saw monkey Jack, he was with a family, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt.

I ran over, bowed before him and said, “I don’t know why you have sent me here, what is the spiritual significance of this place?”

Jack turned to me, quite confused, and remarked, “I’m sorry mate, I don’t know who you are. I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

It immediately hit me – I was in a universe where Jack was a normal man. I said, “I’m sorry, I think you’re right, I’ve got the wrong guy.” I walked away, and as I did so, the dream faded.

But before long, I remember observing another scene.

I was looking at a white Mini Cooper. A couple with a small child went over to the car, the woman said, “You’ll have to make sure the baby seat is secure.”

I looked at the man and once again, it was Jack. Then, still in the dream, I had another realisation. The Jack in my universe, who looks like the monkey Jack, must also be a ‘normal’ version of Jack.

Shortly after, I awoke from the dream. But I wasn’t satisfied, so I pondered on both the dream and my recent experiences.

It slowly occurred to me that monkey Jack had to be an astral being who also had a physical form in another universe as a fully enlightened Hindu saint. I soon realised that he was sort of like Jesus, as he could perform miracles (some of which I had experienced first-hand). But these miracles, rather than being limited to use in his universe, obviously extended to other universes through his ‘astral’ use of the imagination. These ideas clicked, as I had witnessed in the dream how this might just be possible.

Further philosophising revealed to me that it could be conceivable that the earlier words I heard from monkey Jack were in fact just words he had already used in an event from his universe, and simply by way of his omnipotence as a fully enlightened saint, he planted those words in my imagination.

After understanding these things, I felt refreshed. My experiences showed me that ‘the completion of individuality’ lay not only in the fact everyone’s individuality is completed by all possible actions being fulfilled in other universes (as I had already considered) but also that everyone is a fully enlightened saint in another universe. I realised that the soul was a completed fact when considered from a transcendent point of view.

Here I had found something beyond any chaffinch; a unifier of all my passions on a cosmological scale – psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. Suffice it to say, I was only visited by monkey Jack one last time.

In a dream, I saw him sitting in meditation, he smiled, before saying, “We are never complete.”

Now I find most of my solace in the senses and the heights of spiritual beauty in my client's issues. I needed to understand the extraordinary before I could appreciate the ordinary.