My Life, the Universe, and Everything

I stand with feet spread apart, straddling two different realities. To some, my life looks as if I am on a downward spiral, a nose dive; that I’m lost in obsessive thought about myself and the nature of reality. To me, I have seemingly unlocked some major secrets of the universe, helped myself reconnect to humanity, and found a kind of love I thought was only true in fairy tales.

At great cost.

This duality of viewpoint is “the thing.” This is the white and gold or blue and black dress. It is the particle or the wave.

My name is Cory Caplan. I’m 38 years old, a professional and a father, and my life has turned upside down. Three years ago, high on marijuana and short on sleep, I broke with reality. The revelations I unleashed on those around me led to the end of my marriage, drastic life changes, and a strained relationship with my son. Despite this, I believe I am finally becoming the person I always wanted to be.

It’s a difficult journey made harder by my inability to reconcile my new understanding of myself and the universe with those who knew me before.

This very personal document might seem like self-indulgent gibberish to some, a long diatribe; but I’m betting all my secrets that for a select few, there’s some something here, assuming the reader is willing to at least question everything he or she believes in as well as the very nature of reality. No big deal, right?

This is my theory of everything.

From the particle and the wave that form the basis of quantum physics to the idea of a body and soul, the underlying pattern in these dualities ultimately point to one terrifying and beautiful idea:

The only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth; there is only the [shape/flow] of the thing we call time.

I’m not saying anything fundamentally different than philosophers and prophets have been saying for thousands of years — that’s the point, and it’s also the problem. The power of the idea fades the more you try to lock-in the definition, because context changes over time.

There’s a metaphorical reason humans identify the Sun with God — And we can’t look directly at either one. There’s a reason the Jews spell their deity G-d. There’s a reason that Muslims won’t allow depictions of Muhammad. Eastern religion’s clever “yin and yang” represent this unknowable, recursive duality as “the thing” itself.

There is “the thing” and we all see it differently. It is undefined. It both 0 and infinity, and neither. The answer lies somewhere inside Zeno’s paradox, Descartes’s duality, and the latest unified field theories. We are living in multiple, perhaps infinite realities simultaneously.

We can’t see this directly. Like we need two eyes to see in three dimensions, individual humans only see our part of it, and our combined reality is shaped by the way we see it as an ever-evolving group perception. Others always see things you can’t. That’s the nature of “the thing.”

We are, as always, arguing over the definition of “the thing.”

We are, as always, killing over the definition of “the thing.”

We are dividing into factions that are forgetting how to talk to each other based upon our definitions of “the thing.”

The story of the Tower of Babel is a metaphor for a real physical process, and right now, it’s happening at rocket speed. Ironically — because of the nature of the way it works — we cannot see it happening. And it took a mental breakdown and the end of my marriage for me to see my part of it on both a personal and a global scale.

One of the reasons marijuana is so controversial is because it can facilitate questioning things you have always “known.” It can also help you look at things that were too painful to see. But when I did exactly that, when my perspective shifted dramatically, and I saw many things that I was doing that I didn’t like — I had a break with reality.

One night in May of 2012, a rather simple concept took on tremendous personal meaning when I saw it just a little differently:

I realized, as an agnostic atheist, I could see “God” and “the Laws of Physics” as the same thing. I realized that my evangelical Christian parents worship the universe and the Laws of Physics but use different words to describe similar ideas. And I had hated them for thinking about these very natural processes the same way.

Both religious texts and physics books are attempts to describe the nature of reality, and neither are complete or perfect.

It was like my brain had reversed polarity, and in doing so, caused a cascade of reassessment of my entire worldview. I had experienced a “metanoia.” Carl Jung described it as a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form.

In other words, I was “born again.”

Unfortunately, when my brain switched over, many words lost their meanings for a little bit, and my thoughts kind of got a factory reset.

I told those closest to me that I was about to win the Lottery, and then I would die.

I said reality is not what we think it is, awash in all kinds of apocalyptic and literary metaphors.

At the same time, I also admitted all kinds of devastating real-world things I had been hiding from my wife.

Saying such things got me a few days in a mental hospital and a lifetime of mistrust from my closest friends and family.

I look back and realize that I was seeing real events on steroids. My great realization felt like winning the lottery — because it was like hitting the jackpot, sinking a hole in one. Suddenly the world made much more sense, but I now had to reassess my context for every relationship, past and present.

Because I did leave the mental hospital a kind of different person, I died metaphorically. The previous version of me ceased to exist.

I really did begin to believe that reality is “more” than we think it is. Three years later, I’m still trying to explain what I saw. I feel like I got a momentary glimpse “behind the curtain.”

I saw that fine line between genius and madness that the Newtons, DaVincis, Van Goghs and Nash’s of the world straddle. I don’t belong in their club; it’s more like I got a peek through the door. For a moment, I stared directly at the sun.

Needless to say, my ex-wife had a hard time seeing me as anything but sick after that, and speaking of such grandiose ideas didn’t help. Not only was I not the man she thought she had married, I had also literally had a sudden personality change and a fiery reentry that would create a ripple effect through every aspect of our relationship.

Back in the real world, admitting all of these things allowed me to actually uncover the underlying insecurities and shame that compelled me do them in the first place, it also created a divide between my ex-wife and I we were never able to repair.

I felt like I could finally connect to the person I always wanted to be, and as my marriage deteriorated, I was able to connect to the parts of myself I’d never been able to access.

On the outside, I sometimes looked like a lunatic; I was angry and alone. I would literally run around the back yard, sometimes crying, making realizations, playing barefoot; finding new connections to muscles I never knew existed. I’ve lost about 60 lbs in the past eight months, I’m down 120 lbs from my all time high, and I’m the thinnest and fittest I’ve ever been. These things happened with the help of marijuana.

It is literally helping me rewire my brain.

But my process has been messy — I’ve had so much to unwind, and the ride was too intense for my marriage to endure. I realized this had always been the problem — so many things are about frequency and tempo, and I’ve always functioned at a very high frequency. Attempts to alter that with prescribed pharmaceuticals always resulted in me feeling “not myself.”

Last year, at the end of my marriage, I was able to step outside myself enough to examine this inability to see each other across the divide, and in doing so I think I have been able make some connections to more global processes.

Here is my own, subjective viewpoint:

Humans are becoming more and more isolated in our personal lives, in our own echo chambers of communities connected through the internet. These groups create validation loops that allow us to always feel like we’re ultimately right and “the others” are wrong.

We find validation by way of upvotes and likes. We argue about the smallest details in pop culture, and in doing so, create rich new languages of metaphorical references for smaller and smaller communities.

Religious texts use stories of the day to create a common worldview — The internet lets us create our own fractional wikiworldviews.

Language is a patchwork of metaphors. As we continue to rapidly form sub-communities with their own memes and dialects, we can “sort of” communicate to those outside our community, like foreigners who know some phrases of the native language when they travel, but would be unable to have deep conversations with the locals.

This has always occurred, but as we are now hyperconnected, we have made the jump to lightspeed, and we haven’t fully realized it, because we’re right in the middle of it.

We can exchange niceties, and talk in general terms, but we’re actually losing the ability to have deep, robust conversations with humans outside our groups. We just think those other groups are “dumb” or “jerks.” Each side says the other group is “worse.”

We have learned from mass media how people work, and create models of them in our minds rather than actually listening to the people in front of us.

With personal devices, we carry our impersonal sub-communities with us, even as we sit next to our families at home.

We miss physical cues. We don’t notice a complete lack of eye contact. The here and now is becoming fuzzy, as our brains spend more and more time “out there.”

Because of this, we are literally losing the ability to connect and understand the people sitting right next to us. We are validating our individual insular world-views, rather than trying to learn from each other. We are obsessed with scoring points and being right and validation of “our truths” rather than taking active steps to negotiate differences in a productive manner.

I’m even doing this very thing right now, and I don’t know how not to.

Washington DC is a reflection of us. They are not broken, WE are broken. On a person-by-person basis.

We can’t even see our own selves. I realized I had been unable to see myself for who I really am. I literally had to learn how to look at myself in the mirror without wincing, and love myself for who I am — and it has been a hell of a journey.

In the process of forgiving myself and ridding myself of shame and regret, I have begun to really appreciate others, and I saw how awful I had been to many.

The more I work on my inner self and relationships, the more I learn to communicate with my body, the clearer I see myself — and I still have a very long way to go.

We humans like to blame others for our unhappiness, especially if it means the shame of having to admit we’re wrong; we must always “save face.” But why, really? In the words of Marcellus Wallace, “That’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts. It never helps. You fight through that shit.”

We medicate and avoid rather than look at why we’re unhappy. We use drugs, both prescription and illegal. We devour food, meaningless sex or consumer goods to summon neurochemicals in an attempt to feel good about ourselves .

Evangelical Christians do it just as much as the angry atheists. More, maybe, because they can’t stand the shame they’d feel if they really saw how un-Christlike Christians behave towards each other, and un-Christlike Republicans behave in the world. The Bible Belt keeps gaining weight and watching porn in spirals of shame, because they are blinded by judgment. They can’t see the beam in their own eye.

Blue states have plenty of mental blocks, too. Plenty of arrogance — I know I exude it, but I’m trying to figure out how not to. That’s my next project.

We are taking ourselves to the brink of utter destruction as a planet and we really can’t see it because we literally can’t understand each other anymore, while we refuse to question our own assumptions.

Some of us see these things and much, much more, and it makes us crazy, literally. “Mental health issues” are not chronic diseases. They are recursive spirals of mismatches in understanding that cause isolation and pain.

Because we are isolated in our own private asylums in our minds, we can’t find the words or the guts to say these things to the people around us. And, as outsiders, we see that the world could be better- we could really improve things if we could just admit our faults as people and as a country.

Could we, just for a moment, forget all the past, look at the now and ask ourselves the question “How can we make life better for everyone involved?”

Fundamentalism on all sides keeps us from doing this, though. Our opposing worldviews have already locked in “how to make things better.” And because we can’t betray our respective “team” we are blind to answers.

But I’m the crazy one for thinking that humans could be capable of something that we demand from our 5 year olds — to play nice, communicate openly, and forgive each other.

At the end of my marriage, I was borderline suicidal. I was trapped in my head; no one could fully understand me until I met a woman who simply said the words “keep going” to me when I was going down a long rabbit hole in my mind. She not only wanted to hear me, but she could understand most of the crazy things I was saying. Only they may not have been as crazy as I had always been taught.

We were both high on marijuana at the time, but the more we connect on marijuana, the more we connect when we are sober, especially if we are totally, brutally honest with each other. Marijuana, like confession, helps with shame.

The Truth shall set you free, indeed.

Stripping these layers away with a partner who wants to do the same has allowed me to find a new relationship that is so profound, it’s like years of psychotherapy and education have been crammed into a few months.

The “peace pipe” isn’t a joke. It’s a real communication tool. Smoking marijuana with others makes it far easier to see each other as people. It alters your perception enough that you kind of “step sideways” for a moment to see something from a slightly different perspective — like an artist taking a step back from his work to see the bigger picture.

In groups, it seems to move everyone’s point of view in a synchronized way, and creates common ground to re-triangulate difficult roadblocks in conversation. The trick is learning to remember these things, and using them when sober.

Being high all the time won’t help you connect, it will keep you separate.

You also have to make the decision to be open and honest about everything you feel. You can’t hold back or it doesn’t work. You have to listen to the others or it doesn’t work. You have to continue to look for and admit your faults. You can’t let shame prevent you from sharing or hearing.

This is the same idea an inspired human named Jesus was promoting when he described small gatherings of friends. They got a little tipsy on wine, ate a good meal, and really talked to each other. It’s not that hard, really. That’s what church really is.

Communion is not some silly liturgy where you pay homage to a tradition — it’s getting together and really talking openly and honestly with your friends, dummies. Jesus used wine. Weed is better. Some people don’t need either.

Groups of humans bond and grow together over time, and when we reach a point of too much discord or competing objectives, we split. This is evolution in action, ironically visible even in the branching of religious denominations that deny it’s very existence.

In times of great struggle, when the discord and divisions in humanity are most pronounced, there is an upsurge in public interest in drugs. It is a direct indicator of how unhappy the country throughout history. In America, we can see it with the moral battle over alcohol in the great depression. You can see it in the hippy movement in the 60’s, and you could see it start in the 90’s, and it was interrupted by the post 9/11 vengeful hivemind. That resulting pent up discord, and exploding global societal imbalance is turning the marijuana tide at this very moment.

There is a divide in humanity that is hard to see, because it’s not as simple as political parties or religions or gender. The divide is between fundamentalism and pluralism, the particle and the wave. Is there absolute truth, or can two realities exist at once?

I believe we are moving from a time of fundamentalism into a time of pluralism, and this is a mathematical cycle of cycles — the interacting fractal noise that is the shape of the universe.

But something is different right now — we are reaching a “meta understanding” of the shape of the universe — we can see the math behind reality in greater resolution every day. We are truly coming to know “the face of God.”

Just like the Tower of Babel story, a biblical fable of humans trying to build a tower to heaven. The workers at the top forgot how to talk to the workers at the bottom. It’s a metaphor for an actual evolutionary process — and if we can still see new patterns in the Bible, what else are we missing because of literal, rather than metaphorical interpretations?

If the workers of the Tower of Babel had been able to keep the lines of communication going, maybe they would have been able to reach heaven after all.

I think “The Tower” is a metaphor for the shape of the universe in that story, and also in Stephen King’s magnum opus.

Together, we are building a metaphorical tower through time towards “heaven.”

We could actually be observing ourselves falling into the event horizon of what Ray Kurzweill called The Singularity — but what if this is the same exact thing as the apocalypse described in Revelation? When you look at everything as metaphor, greater patterns emerge.

As far as I can tell, humans are on the verge of an evolutionary split — if not in my lifetime, really really soon. Between AI, advances in nanotechnology, genetic modification, robotics, medicines and everything, we’re going to become a different species. We might even live in the cloud. You know, the same way Christians describe heaven?

At the same time, there will always be humans who don’t connect — distant tribes that want no contact, like the Amish, or those who won’t vaccinate their children.

We’ll be at least two different species. Pretty damned soon. And that science fiction narrative sounds like a pretty good fit for the metaphor of rapture — the species splits in half along ideological lines. The sheep and the goats, indeed.

But that’s the thing — just like my blowing the lottery out of proportion, we are looking at this fractal pattern of human evolution as some kind of magic — but it’s just another view of something we’ve already seen for thousands of years. We just keep changing the words around the same basic mechanisms.

This has always been the case — The unseeable duality at the core of reality happens because the geometry we experience as the flow of time constantly changes our perspective, and if we don’t update our worldview to fit the new information, we lose our connection to greater understanding.

Disagreement about “the thing” is the mechanism that fractured ancient cultures and causes humans to split in the first place — each developing their own literal language based on ideology and knowledge of the known world as they migrate, build histories, and learn new things. The context of our understanding of the universe is constantly evolving. It can’t stop by it’s very nature.

The internet has poured jet fuel on that fire — we have become learning machines in the blink of an eye, part of an interconnected pop culture web often referred to as “The Zeitgeist.”

Silicon Valley startups are rapid evolution in action. Successful ones disrupt existing fundamentalisms, and create their own new ones. Let’s all truly hope that Google really believes in the whole “don’t be evil” thing — cause if not, we’re all pretty fucked.

We all google our individualized branch of the Zeitgeist and find an array of of pop culture, religion, sports and politics that suits us, aligns us perfectly with like minds. We are mini armies marching in ideological lock step, creating inefficient coalitions, causing gridlock and malfunction.

Through algorithms, we’re starting to realize humans are all different specialized “models” like cylons or different positions on a sports team, and it’s obvious to see when you go to an online forum for something you like, and everybody thinks, acts, and often even looks like you, even though you haven’t ever met.

We’ve gone from churches and baseball games, where the homogenized local communities were forced to navigate interpersonal differences, to video games and social media where we can connect with individuals who share exactly the same interests.

For some of us, especially those who are stuck amongst “the others,” our differences are more pronounced. And this causes great mental anguish.

But our isolation also gives us incredible perspective. We become the writers, the creators, the mad scientists — and all of those types have a strong historical association with marijuana and other drugs.

This is not a coincidence, it is a correlation.

The “stoned ape” theory is real. It may or may not have contributed to the last major human evolution, but there’s no question it has already had a dramatic impact on the next one, and will continue to do so, exponentially.

I think we are at the demarcation point of an amazing new phase of human existence, if we can manage to avoid destroying ourselves in the process.

Can we try our best to share our versions of “the thing”?

This is my attempt to show you you mine. I know I come off as self important, but I really feel the opposite — I feel alone. I don’t quite understand this dichotomy, but I think that’s the nature of “the thing.”

Though I have spoken here with such forceful certainty, I have learned that absolutely anything I think might be different from other’s views. Hopefully acknowledging that will allow you to hear what I was saying.

I have shown you my version of “the thing.” Will you show me yours?