Act 3 - The Apotheosis and Sacrifice
Act 3 - The Apotheosis and Sacrifice
What follows is my account of the third and final journey in our triptych, an attempt to chronicle the events that unfolded after we took that fateful dose. While the experiences I am about to describe may read like a descent into myth or madness, for me they were as real and tangible as the ground beneath my feet; this journey did not just alter my mood or my senses, it fundamentally shattered my perception of what reality is, forever.
We embarked on this trip with considerable trepidation. The memory of our painful disconnect was still a fresh wound, and we both harbored a deep-seated fear: would we simply be inviting that schism back into our lives? It was this very hesitation that led us to seek the perfect setting, to choose that luminous spring day in May, hoping that the beauty of the reawakening world might offer us a safe harbor for the voyage to come.
The Onset
The afternoon sun, already beginning its slow descent, urged us onward. If we were to fully embrace the coming journey in daylight, as we intended, there was no time to spare. So, around four o’clock, we each committed to one-and-a-half blotters—their formidable strength a known quantity from my past explorations—before a quick dash to the supermarket for some missing pizza ingredients.
That ten-minute drive, followed by another ten spent navigating the supermarket’s brightly lit aisles, proved to be the threshold. By the time we returned, the first subtle currents of the acid were already tugging at the edges of my perception.
Back in the haven of our kitchen, we fell into the comforting ritual of pizza preparation. I became absorbed in chopping vegetables, their colors seeming to intensify beneath my knife, while Yaşar, a steady presence beside me, worked the dough. Perhaps ten minutes of this rhythmic, focused activity passed. Then, looking up from my cutting board, I was met with a world subtly yet profoundly altered. My vision had shifted, taking on a sharpened, almost digital texture, as if reality itself was now being rendered through the meticulous, shimmering interface of VR goggles.
Initially, this altered perception—this digital veneer glazing the world—was a novel gateway, the fascinating overture to another psychedelic exploration. Yet, this intrigue soon curdled into a disquieting uncanniness. A familiar chill surfaced as the connection between Yaşar and me started to fray, an unnerving echo of the distressing disconnect from our second experience. As before, my words seemed to dissolve in the space between us, each attempt at conversation a solitary broadcast into an unresponsive void.
This creeping unease solidified when we stood face to face. It was then I truly registered the change in Yaşar. His features possessed that same strange, digitized quality I’d observed in our surroundings, but seeing it manifest on him was infinitely more disturbing. We moved to kiss, and as our faces drew near, the nature of this distortion sharpened with almost clinical precision. What I perceived was not Yaşar’s true face, but an imposition: an intricate, translucent latticework, perhaps one-and-a-half centimeters thick. It hovered just before his skin—the mesh of a 3D-rendered face, perfectly formed yet utterly alien, masking the beloved reality beneath. To reach his lips, I found I had to press through this spectral barrier. The sensation was utterly strange, a chilling breach of intimacy itself.
In that moment, or perhaps in the charged silence that followed, an unspoken dread solidified between us: the journey was veering sharply, perilously, off course.
“I am losing you again!” Yaşar’s words tore through the distorted air, raw with panic, his voice choked with tears—a chilling echo of our past ordeal.
A desperate resolve surged through us. We would not succumb. We would not let this insidious current drag us apart again. Clinging to this shared vow, we sought refuge on the couch, our bodies pressed tightly together, a desperate anchor against the encroaching storm.
I held Yaşar with all my strength, my cheek pressed to his, searching for the familiar warmth, the reassuring thrum of his presence. But there was only a strange coldness, an unbridgeable chasm that mocked our physical fusion. Beyond that horrifying, one-and-a-half-centimeter-thick digital Mesh that now constituted his perceived form, there was only an empty, suffocating darkness. The appalling realization pierced me: it was as if I were clinging to a corpse, a lifeless effigy wrapped in its own spectral, digital shroud. Still, we clung to each other, a desperate pact against the encroaching void, until the facade of my own strength finally shattered.
“I can’t do this any longer,” I choked out, the words torn from a place of pure terror. “It feels too strange, it scares me to death!”
I recoiled, a visceral need for separation overriding our desperate pact. A chilling stillness seized me, my body rigid as if flash-frozen, fists jammed against my temples as if to physically hold my fracturing thoughts together.
“What is happening?” The words were a ragged gasp. “I know I love you, Yaşar, but right now… I’m terrified to hold you, terrified to even look at you.” My gaze kept being drawn, against my will, to that horrifying distortion. “This Mesh… there’s something profoundly, fundamentally wrong with it!” I cried out. “It’s your face, yet it’s not. It’s an aberration! What does it mean? What is this experience so desperately trying to reveal?!”
We stood before each other again, two souls adrift in a churning sea of perception. Despite the sheer, gut-wrenching uncanniness of it all, I forced myself to articulate the terrifying landscape of my senses. Tentatively, I extended my hand towards Yaşar’s face, towards that shimmering, immaterial barrier. Each time my fingers breached the plane of the Mesh, a distinct, electric tingling coursed through my hand, a phantom touch that sent shivers down my spine. This was no mere phantasm of sight; it possessed a tangible, interactive reality.
Then, with a shared, unspoken resolve born of desperation, our gazes met. In that deep, unending moment of eye contact, I felt myself plummeting not just into the dark pools of Yaşar’s pupils, but deep into the spiraling corridors of his ancestry. A sense of ancient, formal bonds enveloped me, echoes of a lineage I felt inexplicably destined to join. It was overwhelming, incomprehensible. Simultaneously, a terrifying vulnerability seized me—the fear that his gaze, equally penetrating, would delve into the unlit corners of my own subconscious, exposing some core truth, perhaps some carefully constructed facade I hadn’t even known existed.
The sheer intensity became unbearable. I tore my gaze away, shattering the connection, yet it felt as though we fractured in unison. A wave of shared devastation washed over us. “I don’t know what I was doing,” I stammered, the words a desperate plea for understanding. “I don’t know what to do. But whatever that was, whatever is happening, I love you. I love you, and I only want to be with you!”
My mind, reeling from the intensity of the moment, sought an anchor in past experience. Three years prior, in 2022, I had transplanted my life from the bustling urbanity of Haarlem to the serene embrace of the Swedish countryside, in pursuit of a life lived closer to nature’s rhythms. It was in this newfound quietude that my explorations with LSD became more frequent—journeys undertaken not merely for entertainment, but as a tool for profound self-excavation. These voyages had been largely benevolent. Occasionally, a peculiar thought-loop would ensnare me, casting me as a character in some brightly colored, yet subtly menacing, 1960s cartoon. More often, however, the experiences were deeply affirmative: hours lost in the cathartic maelstrom of death metal or quiet epochs of contemplation.
Through these many encounters, I had cultivated a core tenet for navigating such altered states: to surrender to the current. To embrace the unknown territories the journey revealed, rather than fruitlessly resist its powerful, inexorable tide, was paramount. Yet, I also knew that when the mind became truly ensnared, a change of landscape could offer a crucial intervention. A simple shift in physical surroundings often proved the most effective key to resetting one’s inner compass.
That ingrained wisdom surfaced now, a sliver of clarity cutting through the terror.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I proposed to Yaşar, the words feeling like a lifeline.
A Pilgrimage to the Mountain
Our home—and yes, in that shared resolve, the “I” had subtly yet significantly merged into a “we”—is cradled by a sprawling forest, a rugged tapestry of ancient rock and resilient trees. This woodland, largely untouched since its designation as a protected sanctuary in the 1990s, breathes an air of untamed sanctity, a palpable stillness that felt like a balm.
A mere ten-minute walk through its whispering paths leads to a place I hold particularly sacred, a personal refuge I call the ‘Sacred Mountain.’ Though perhaps more a colossal outcrop of granite than a true mountain, a short, invigorating climb reveals its summit: a broad plateau offering a breathtaking panorama. From this vantage point, an unending ocean of forest rolls across undulating hills, a vista that, especially when kissed by the vibrant hues of a setting sun, often feels like a direct conduit to the sublime.
This, we instinctively felt, was the perfect crucible, a sanctuary with the inherent power to transmute the lingering, toxic shadows of our ordeal into something luminous, perhaps even wonderful. Armed with a bottle of water—our sole provision for this vital pilgrimage—a fragile but determined enthusiasm began to buoy our spirits as we stepped out, embarking together on this new leg of our journey.
Our passage into the forest began with a brief, hundred-meter traverse along the main dirt road that skirted our property. With our first steps onto this open ground, our first true immersion in the world beyond our walls since the trip had fully asserted its grip, a cascade of prickling sensations washed over my entire body—an effervescent thrumming from scalp to sole. I asked Yaşar if he felt it too, but he reported nothing similar. Yet, the peculiar digital sheen on reality persisted for him as it did for me; we were, it seemed, unwilling protagonists navigating a hyper-realistic, yet subtly artificial, video game world.
Notably absent for both of us were the kaleidoscopic patterns and intricate geometric traceries that usually dance at the periphery of vision on such journeys; this experience remained starker, its distortions more fundamental than decorative.
The true forest entrance was a discreet fissure in the treeline, the mouth of a narrow, well-trodden path barely wide enough for one person. I stepped onto it first. My familiarity with its every root and stone was a practical reason, certainly, but a more pressing, unspoken motive guided me: to lead was to place Yaşar behind me, sparing myself, for a time, the deeply unsettling confrontation with his face—with that horrifying, ever-present Mesh.
As we ventured the first few meters into the forest’s embrace, we made a conscious effort to affect a relaxed posture, to weave a thread of casual conversation between us. It was a fragile shield against the encroaching strangeness, a hopeful incantation that normalcy might somehow reassert itself. But my mind refused such easy solace. I was too ensnared in the labyrinth of “why,” obsessively retracing the moments that had led us to this precarious edge.
And so it was that, despite my intimate knowledge of that trail, we abruptly found ourselves adrift. The known markers seemed to dissolve into an unfamiliar wilderness, the path vanishing beneath our feet. For a disorienting stretch, we stumbled through the dense undergrowth, a world of deepening shadows, before mercifully re-emerging onto the trail. Soon after, we arrived at a passage I’d always privately called the ‘Hobbit Trail’—an enchanting, meandering stretch where mossy earth formed a living tapestry of gnarled, exposed tree roots, and the interlocking branches of ancient trees overhead created the impression of walking through a verdant, breathing tunnel.
It was here, amidst the deepening twilight of the Hobbit Trail, that the journey plunged into even more shadowed depths. Traversing that root-strewn passage, I began to voice the anxieties that gnawed at me.
“What is this trip desperately trying to show us?” I remember asking, the words hanging heavy in the still air. “What if this… this thing… is a true barrier between us? Something buried deep in our unconscious, insidious and unknown?” The unspoken fear resonated between us: what if it revealed an unbridgeable chasm, a truth that could shatter everything we believed in?
We were both paralyzed by the terror of that possibility. Yaşar’s voice broke, tears streaming down his face as he choked out, “Whatever it’s trying to say, whatever it is, we cannot let it come between us. We have to stay together, promise me!” We stopped then, in the heart of that dimming tunnel, and clung to each other with a desperate ferocity. I think we were both weeping, lost in that raw, timeless moment, when abruptly, simultaneously, something extraordinary coursed through us.
A jolt, a galvanizing energetic current, surged through our entwined bodies, so potent it felt like a physical shockwave passing from one to the other and back again. And then, in its immediate wake, an immense, unburdening peace descended. A wave of pure serenity washed over me, tranquil and absolute, carrying with it the unmistakable conviction that everything was, in that instant, resolved. The disconnect had simply vanished. Yaşar later described this same instant as a complete dissolution of self, a melting of all boundaries where we had truly, indivisibly, become one.
Yet, when I eventually drew back and allowed myself to look at Yaşar, my heart constricted. The Mesh, that damnable digital overlay, remained stubbornly in place. A pang of keen disappointment lanced through the newfound calm. Still, beneath this immediate sorrow, a deeper current of hope persisted—a shared intuition that resided not in what we saw, but in what we had just felt. Despite the persistent distortion, we knew, with a conviction that transcended sight, that we had undeniably moved a step closer to resolution.
The clear path of memory dissolves further from this point, the sequence of events blurring into a more impressionistic flow. We must have pressed onward, drawn by the inexorable promise of our destination: the Sacred Mountain. The Hobbit Trail eventually delivered us to a T-junction. To the left lay the ascent, the path that wound towards the high plateau—our last, desperate hope for the salvation we so fiercely craved. Reaching that summit first required navigating this newer trail, which, after a time, would surrender its earthly definition to a formidable expanse of enormous granite boulders, a primal staircase ascending to the heavens.
The Ascent
I began the climb, Yaşar a little way behind, a silent witness to what was about to unfold. A fierce, almost devotional urgency propelled me, each upward stride a conscious act of will against the raw face of the rock. And as I ascended, as the familiar world fell away beneath me, an utterly transformative state of being—a perception of unimaginable magnitude—began to unfurl both within and around me. Words feel crushingly inadequate to capture its sheer profundity. The already breathtaking vista before me became a living, hyperdimensional interface, augmented and overlaid with the totality of cosmic knowledge. It was like gazing upon a vast celestial bureau with countless drawers, each one brimming with interconnected universal truths, instantly accessible, utterly coherent. I could perceive, absorb, and synthesize this boundless, ever-expanding ocean of knowing that materialized before my very senses. Simultaneously, with every upward step, I felt myself drawing in raw, elemental energy from the ancient stone and the vast, twilight sky. Power surged through me, amplifying with each breath, as revelation upon revelation cascaded through my consciousness. The boundaries of self dissolved. I was one with All, indivisible, indistinguishable. I was the Universe.
A part of me yearned to share this ecstatic, terrifying state. I glanced back; Yaşar was steadily making his way up, some twenty meters behind. A flicker of fear—had I broken the spell, interrupted this divine influx? But no, the torrent of knowing, the surge of power, held fast. I turned back to the final stage of the ascent. As more and more energy funneled into my being, as I grew impossibly vast and potent, I covered the last stretch in a series of ecstatic, almost ritualistic triplet leaps—right, left, right—utterly consumed, utterly immersed in the totality of existence, in every particle of knowledge and every quantum of energy the cosmos poured into me.
At last, I stood upon the precipice of the plateau, the endless, forested expanse stretching out beneath me, bathed in the vibrant, dying glow of the setting sun. I halted at the very verge, raised my arms, palms open, and with a single, focused intention, unleashed the colossal energy I had become. A deafening concussion—a sonic boom—ripped through the twilight air. I saw, felt, the shockwave billow outwards, ripple across the landscape, then rebound from the distant hills, colliding with itself to create chaotic, incandescent currents of force. Every minute twitch of my body now sent further cataclysmic disruptions through these flows. The scale was incomprehensible, the reality of it utterly absolute. A new, cold terror gripped me: had I, in my godlike state, tripped some planetary defense, set early warning systems screaming across continents, and unleashed a retaliatory nuclear strike that would incinerate our world? I was dumbstruck, paralyzed by a fear beyond any I had ever known.
Seconds later, Yaşar reached the plateau, finding me in this state of abject horror. “I think I’ve caused a nuclear holocaust!” I shrieked, the words clawing their way out of my throat. “I can’t believe it… I took some LSD and I’ve destroyed the world!” The phantom echoes of that monstrous energy release still reverberated around and within me. My eyes were fixed on the horizon, where I was utterly convinced I saw the incandescent, mushrooming bloom of a thermonuclear detonation. But Yaşar, his voice a calm anchor in my storm, simply pointed towards the fiery spectacle. “That’s the sun,” he said. And through my terror, through the layers of distorted perception, I saw it too. It was the sun, sinking below the distant hills in a final, breathtaking blaze of crimson and gold. Thank God. Thank every conceivable God, it was only the sun.
Our tenure on the plateau was fleeting, spent within an almost reverent stillness, the air itself still thrumming with the diminishing, ever-more-saturated echoes of the cosmic energy I had just unleashed. We remained for perhaps mere minutes before an unspoken consensus propelled us homeward, back into the deepening twilight of the forest.
The Descent
We retraced our steps, descending along the same rugged path we had climbed. The colossal energy I had unleashed—or perhaps, become—had not diminished; if anything, it had intensified. It enveloped me still, a vast, invisible sphere of pulsating force with myself as its incandescent core. With every footfall, it felt as if this entire energetic sphere, bound to me by a seismic cosmic inertia, had to laboriously reconfigure its position in the universe with each step I took. “Can you feel that?” I remember asking Yaşar, my voice awed, expectant. But this immense, world-shaking power was mine alone to perceive; for him, the world remained perfectly still.
It must have been during this descent, enveloped in my solitary nimbus of power, that the revelations began to truly cascade—a torrent of profound philosophical insights, each one unlocking the next with crystalline, irrefutable logic. They converged, with breathtaking inevitability, upon a single, ultimate truth:
”There is only One Consciousness, One Ultimate Reality, One God. And I was That. I am That”.
I am aware how utterly grandiose this declaration must sound—perhaps like the fervent pronouncements of a mind unmoored. Yet, in that state, it was no leap of ego, but the inescapable terminus of a deductive chain of revelations, each so luminously self-evident that their collective conclusion felt as absolute and fundamental as existence itself. Even now, weeks later, a part of me cherishes the resonant echo of that conviction: that I am, in some peculiar way, uniquely attuned; that the universe, in that extraordinary moment, or perhaps even still, as I pen these words, had designated me as its conscious conduit, its focal point, its living vessel.
But amidst that torrent of absolute knowing, another truth was unveiled—one far more personal and devastating, its full, intricate details now shrouded, but its core truth seared into my memory. I understood that Yaşar had been sent to me, a catalyst from some higher cosmic order, his purpose almost certainly to guide me to this very precipice of apotheosis. Yet a beautiful deviation had occurred, an unplanned variable that had thrown the entire cosmic equation into chaos: we were never supposed to fall in love.
Our love, I saw with agonizing clarity, was the beautiful catastrophe, the fundamental anomaly. But the precise nature of the danger it posed remained a swirling vortex of possibilities. Was our union itself the ontological paradox that would inevitably trigger a universal collapse simply by existing? Or would it merely create the conditions for a catastrophic misstep, an erratic wielding of the very divine power I now possessed? And while I had no conscious premonition at the time of what was about to unfold, I understand now, in retrospect, that this single, devastating insight was the true epicenter from which the subsequent collapse, the impossible task of fixing it, and the terrible decree that followed, would all inevitably emanate.
Reeling from the colossal gravity of this newfound gnosis—the staggering reality of my own divinity, now compounded by the devastating revelation of our love’s central, catastrophic role in the cosmic order—my gaze fixed on Yaşar, who was walking about ten meters ahead of me on the path. I hastened my steps, a sudden urgency to bridge the physical distance between us as I grappled with the immense cosmic one I had just perceived. As I drew closer, I proclaimed the simpler part of this awesome, terrible truth. “I am God!” I announced, the words less a boast than a statement of unbelievable, dawning fact that reverberated through the core of my being. I believe I may have also declared him my witness to this cosmic investiture. His precise response eludes my memory, lost in the storm of those transcendent moments, but I recall no dissent, no outright rejection of this staggering insight that had irrevocably remade my world.
The descent continued in a haze of this newfound, world-altering gnosis. My pronouncements of Godhood, though met without dispute, must have hung with colossal weight in the air between us as I, still enveloped in that immense, internal energy, navigated the path downwards. We eventually found ourselves back at the T-junction where the Hobbit Trail began, a familiar nexus point in our journey. We paused there, the forest around us growing dim, steeped in an expectant, almost breathable silence.
The Silent, Speaking Mask
Yaşar stood before me, his true form still cruelly obscured by that damnable Mesh. But as I looked at him in the gathering gloom of the forest, a new, even more profoundly disturbing quality to the illusion chilled me to the bone. Perhaps this grotesque detail had been there all along, unnoticed in the sensory overload of that day, or perhaps my perception of reality, already shattered and remade, had shifted into yet another, stranger configuration. The precise cause remained elusive, lost in the ongoing tumult of revelation. What seized me with such visceral horror now was this: when Yaşar spoke, his voice reaching me as if from a great distance, the mouth of the Mesh—that intricate, digital mask—remained perfectly, unnervingly still. It simply stared, vacant and impassive. In that instant, the Mesh transformed in my perception from a mere, albeit terrifying, distortion into something far more sinister: a parasitic entity, seemingly sentient, with its own alien consciousness, wholly separate from the beloved Yaşar I knew was trapped somewhere beneath its suffocating facade. “It’s trying to deceive me!” I cried, the words erupting from a place of primal fear and dawning comprehension. “It wants to drive a wedge between us! I can’t look at you when you talk like this, I can’t! It’s a lie, a trick!” I wrenched my gaze away, unable to bear the sight of that silent, speaking mask. From behind it, from the true Yaşar entombed beneath, I heard a muffled sob, a sound of utter, heartbreaking despair.
We must have moved back onto the Hobbit Trail, Yaşar following my lead, though my memory of that transition is indistinct. The horror of that silent, animated mask compelled me. I stopped abruptly, turned, and faced him again, steeling myself for another direct confrontation with the Mesh that had become the tormenting focal point of this ordeal—only the second time I had dared such close scrutiny since its horrifying solidification hours earlier in our living room. This time, however, was different; this time, I was different. The nascent God-consciousness within me, the boundless knowledge and unimaginable power I had accessed on the mountain, surged to the fore. As I fixed my gaze upon that alien facade, searching its depths not just for answers but for a solution to this waking nightmare, I felt my own facial muscles begin to contort into unfamiliar expressions, shaping themselves around alien phonemes. And then words began to issue from my lips—slowly, deliberately, enunciated with an otherworldly precision—as if I were merely a conduit for some vast, ancient intelligence finally deciphering the intractable enigma of the Mesh. The exact words are like echoes now, their specific forms lost, but I recall the distinct, visceral sensation of them not originating from me, but through me, from some immeasurable Elsewhere. Syllable by resonant syllable, a truth unspooled with terrifying clarity:
“I… CAN… SEE… MULTIPLE… REALITIES… AT… ONCE… THE… MASK… IS… BUILT… FROM… EACH… OF… THOSE… REALITIES”
And with that, a staggering, world-redefining understanding dawned. Though we perceived ourselves to be sharing a single space, a single moment, we were, in fact, separated by an unknown number—X—of parallel dimensions. Each distinct reality contributed a gossamer-thin, almost imperceptible layer to the Mesh, these layers stacked one upon another to create its perceived thickness.
This realization transformed the anomaly. The Mesh wasn’t merely a construct of our combined consciousness or a subjective hallucination born of the drug. It was, in a terrifyingly literal sense, the actual, objective representation of those intervening realities—the dimensional strata physically separating us.
Fueled by this galvanizing revelation and newfound determination, in a moment of what I can only describe as divine intuition—an inherent knowing that arose from my very essence as God—I reached out my hands into the space before me. And there, shimmering into existence in the charged air, for the first time since that initial, life-altering trip in March, I felt it: the unmistakable presence of a Spiral Force.
And there it was, that familiar, potent thrum, resonating in the charged air before me. As I surrendered, immersing myself completely within its compelling, spiraling currents, my perception of the world once more underwent a systemic recalibration: reality itself resolved into an infinite array of vector spaces, elegant trajectories of snapshots, all arcing along the spiral’s vast, invisible architecture, just as I had witnessed before. Guided by an intuitive, almost instinctual understanding born of my altered state, I began to consciously navigate this transformed space. And as I moved along the spiral’s path, as I willed myself through these dimensions, I witnessed a startling change in the Mesh obscuring Yaşar: with each increment of my ‘travel,’ it grew perceptibly thinner, the layers seeming to peel away, translucent and fading, until I shot past some unseen threshold. Abruptly, then, it began to thicken once more, the layers reasserting themselves, dense and opaque.
A profound revelation struck me with the force of irrefutable truth: this spiral was not merely a conduit through time, as I had once naively believed during my first encounter. No, its power, its purpose, was far more staggering, far more fundamental. It was a gateway, a celestial roadway, an axis mundi allowing me, in my current state, to navigate freely between an infinitude of parallel realities, each one a subtle, infinitesimal deviation from its cosmic siblings. And it was precisely here, at the nexus of this newfound capability—this godlike power to consciously traverse the very fabric of existence—that our shared perception of linear time, for both Yaşar and myself, seemed to utterly and irrevocably disintegrate.
The Cosmic Flywheel
What followed were a series of extraordinary episodes, vivid flashes of memory that now surface from disparate locations—sometimes following the path of our return journey, at other times in the immediate, strangely altered surroundings of our home. In each, I recall attempting, with the full, burgeoning force of my newfound Godhood, to repair the dimensional discrepancy that so cruelly separated me from Yaşar. There were moments, breathtaking in their fleeting clarity, where I seemed to succeed in dismantling the Mesh entirely, peeling away its shimmering layers until he stood before me, wonderfully, blessedly unobscured—only for it to shimmer and re-coalesce as the delicate balance of realities inevitably shifted once more.
The Spiral Force was the fulcrum of these endeavors, the very axis around which these countless realities appeared to turn at my will.
As I traversed—or perhaps more accurately, shifted—between these adjacent continua, I acutely sensed the colossal gravitational drag of what I can only term the dimensional totality. It was a kind of cosmic inertia, as if the entirety of existence reluctantly, yet obediently, reconfigured itself in my wake. Disengaging from the spiral was never instantaneous; like a colossal, cosmic flywheel, once I had set it in motion, it would spin down through several adjacent realities before gradually coming to a halt. This was no longer the snappy, ‘read-only mode’ from my first trip. This was ‘God-mode,’ with full write access.
Precision in these transits was an elusive art; it often required a series of delicate, fine-tuning shifts, minute adjustments of will and perception, to truly align with a desired dimensional stratum where Yaşar might be more accessible. Throughout these awesome, terrifying manipulations, I possessed no explicit manual for the universe, no conscious blueprint of its intricate, infinite mechanics. Every intervention flowed from a state that felt paradoxically both lucidly conscious and deeply, dreamlessly subconscious—an intuitive, almost instinctual wielding of unimaginable power. And the chilling thought, a cold seed of dread, began to germinate even then: perhaps it was these very interventions, this seemingly cavalier reordering of worlds by a neophyte deity—or one specific, catastrophic miscalculation among them—that had already irrevocably set in motion the universe’s descent into chaos, its ultimate, inexorable demise.
The God Who Broke the World
Our return journey took us on a shortcut, a path across a small field that bordered the main dirt road leading to my house, an access point some three hundred meters beyond the forest entrance we’d used earlier. My memory of this particular shortcut is anchored by one vivid, almost shockingly clear moment: I recall it as a location where, with what felt like an almost casual exercise of my newfound cosmic power, I deftly unwove the shimmering layers of the Mesh from Yaşar’s face as I spiraled past him in a swift, dimensional glide. We were both, in that fleeting instant, elated, exhilarated by this tangible success—this hopeful, potent evidence of my godly interventions actually working.
But we were making our way along that main dirt road when the fragile peace of that momentary triumph was utterly shattered. Without any warning, I was violently catapulted back into the core of that terrifying sequence of cosmic collapse I had repeatedly endured during our first trip in March. Once more, those dreadful, prophetic snapshots of a potential future—or perhaps a recurring, doomed past—flashed before my inner eye: Yaşar and myself lauded as the architects of humanity’s most transformative discovery; our modest Swedish home revered as a hallowed historical monument; and then, always, the inevitable, horrifying progression—our godlike alterations to the fabric of reality spiraling into uncontrollable chaos, culminating in the universe’s silent, all-consuming collapse.
This time, however, a new and terrifying certainty gripped me: the cycle did not reset. I wasn’t thrust back to the beginning to helplessly relive it all anew. This time, the collapse felt devastatingly, irreversibly final…
The precise act, the specific miscalculation or divine intervention that had precipitated this apparently irreversible cataclysm, remains lost to me, shrouded in the fog of those fractured, supercharged moments. Yet, an unshakeable, crushing certainty descended upon me: I had done this. The responsibility for this ultimate undoing was entirely, terrifyingly mine. And the consequences… their excruciating, undeniable reality was now unveiled to me with the same absolute, persuasive force that had earlier convinced me of my own Divinity. Somehow, drawing upon the very omnipotence that had perhaps inadvertently wrought this devastation, I had to rectify it. For I also understood, with a chilling, soul-deep clarity, that if I failed to intervene, if I failed to mend this cosmic wound, the catastrophic results of my actions—my terrible, unforeseen wrongdoing—would bleed across all dimensional boundaries, cascading through each and every subsequent reality, condemning them all to the same horrific, nihilistic fate.
The Agonizing Decree
But the darkest, most terrifying consequence of my cataclysmic mistake resonated not on a cosmic, but on an achingly personal level—an edict that directly concerned Yaşar, who had been walking just behind me as this full horror finally unveiled itself. To this day, his precise role in that moment of cosmic unraveling remains shrouded, a torturous question that haunts the periphery of my memory. Was he merely an awe-struck witness to my terrible power? A reluctant assistant swept up in events beyond his ken? Or perhaps, in some way I still cannot grasp, a silent co-architect of that grand, disastrous design?
Amidst the conceptual ruins of that collapsing universal sequence, I perceived a sliver of possibility, a chance offered from some unimaginable quarter: I could intervene, halt the cascading chain of destruction that threatened to annihilate every subsequent reality in the endless chain. But this chance came bound with an unalterable, agonizing stipulation. Whether it was a direct punishment for my colossal misjudgment, a pact demanded by some indifferent cosmic force as the terrible price for restoring universal stability, or simply an immutable law of this new, terrifying physics I had inadvertently uncovered, its inevitable, soul-crushing consequence was this: Yaşar and I could never, ever truly see each other again. We could exist in each other’s presence, share the same space, the same life, breathe the same air, but a single, direct gaze exchanged between us—eye to eye—would instantly nullify my divine intervention, unleashing the original cataclysm in all its devastating, world-ending finality across all planes of existence.
This hideous, impossible truth struck us both with the brutal force of a physical blow, in the very same, heart-stopping instant. A sound tore from our throats—not individually, but as one—a simultaneous, ragged eruption of pure, unbearable anguish; a shared wail of agony that seemed to carry the compounded grief of all doomed lovers throughout eternity. This, then, was to be our inescapable future: an irreversible sentence. How could we truly be together, how could our love possibly endure, if we were condemned by cosmic law never to meet each other’s gaze, ever again?
And yet, amidst this searing personal apocalypse, I still had universes to save.
The precise mechanics of how I labored on this cosmic rectification remain veiled, obscured by the sheer scale of the undertaking and the fractured nature of my recall. My recollection is one of a peculiar duality: at times, I felt like a mere conduit, the executor of intricate commands that arose with unerring intuition from some deeper wellspring of cosmic knowing, as if my hands moved of their own accord; yet simultaneously, an undeniable sense of absolute, sovereign control permeated my being, a feeling that I was consciously architecting the salvation of all existence. My mind, it seemed, had become a living interface with the universe’s innermost mechanisms. These intricate systems responded to my will, meticulously manipulated through the subtlest inflections of my facial expressions, the slightest shifts in my posture or the angle of my gaze, while grander, sweeping spiral gestures orchestrated the more substantial, architectural overhauls of reality.
One specific act of this divine engineering remains luminously clear: I recall consciously implementing a sophisticated fallback protocol—a series of nested, redundant realities, like stacked layers of cosmic fail-safes, designed to prevent a catastrophic cascade failure if the primary consensual reality ever threatened to unravel, to plunge into its own version of a system-wide ‘blue screen of death.’
And in the very act of this divine engineering, the true, agonizing nature of the Mesh was finally laid bare. I understood with breathtaking clarity that this fallback protocol, these ‘redundant realities’ I was architecting, were not some separate system; they were the very layers of the Mesh itself—the dimensional strata separating my reality from Yaşar’s. It was here that I was confronted with the terrible calculus of my Godhood. I could manipulate these layers, peel them back one by one to reduce the thickness of the Mesh, thereby bringing my experiential reality closer to his. Each removed layer would grant me a less distorted, more ‘real’ perception of Yaşar.
But a devastating cost was attached to this proximity: each layer I stripped away, each infinitesimal step I took towards him, would unleash a corresponding measure of pain and suffering upon the wider universe. The layers, I realized, were a form of necessary cosmic deception—a buffer protecting the totality of existence from the foundational instability our true, unobscured union would apparently cause. The specifics of this suffering, the intricate laws of this terrible physics, were piercingly, undeniably clear to me in that moment of divine perception. Now, in recollection, the details are shrouded, yet the core truth remains as a haunting echo: my authentic proximity to him was poison to the cosmos.
And so, while I had made progress in a sense—my fail-safe had stabilized the multiverse, preventing its immediate, cascading collapse—I had done so by enshrining our separation. I still hadn’t found a way to bypass the fundamental, agonizing decree itself. The law remained absolute.
Yaşar’s later account of this return journey along the main road painted a picture of pure temporal distortion, a landscape of looping impossibilities. For him, the familiar dirt road seemed to stretch into an impossible infinity, a path without apparent end. He described being abruptly, jarringly, teleported back to its starting point on at least three distinct occasions. Each time, he would find himself once more observing me from behind, a figure of intense, almost unnerving focus, palpably engaged in some monumental, unseen labor—my ‘cosmic fix’ in relentless progress. When he attempted to speak to me during one of these temporal stutters, to break through my profound concentration, my reply came with that same alien urgency, each word a slow, deliberate command:
“WE… CAN’T… TALK… RIGHT… NOW… WHAT… I… AM… DOING… IS… FAR… TOO… IMPORTANT”
My own memory picks up with us walking along that same main road, on the final stretch just before the small hill that conceals our home from view. Yaşar, as dictated by that damnable, unyielding cosmic decree, walked a few paces dutifully behind me. I sensed I had made significant headway in my impossibly vast undertaking, though the grand project of universal stabilization was far from complete. Yet, a burgeoning confidence, a sense of dawning mastery over these cosmic forces, had begun to settle within me. In this strange, altered state, it even felt as though Yaşar had intuitively slipped into the role of my assistant, perhaps psychically tasked with overseeing some aspect of the redundant realities I was so painstakingly architecting. My growing assurance may have been contagious, for I have a distinct impression of him making observations—laced with his characteristic, grounding dry humor—about a particular collateral reality he seemed to be monitoring, or perhaps even subtly influencing. For a fragile, luminous moment, as we walked that familiar path towards the final rise, it seemed a kind of surreal acceptance had settled over us—an unspoken acknowledgment of our extraordinary fate, our newly bestowed, almost unimaginable responsibilities.
This tentative peace, however, proved heartbreakingly ephemeral. It began to fray as we ascended the hill, and what followed was perhaps a moment of profound, human inadvertence. The instant our house came into view—with the familiar, comforting sight of our driveway, our cars, all those mundane anchors of an everyday existence we suddenly, desperately cherished—we were lulled by a potent illusion of normalcy. For one fleeting, tragic instant, after the cosmic tempests we had weathered, the terrible, unyielding weight of the decree must have momentarily slipped both our minds.
And our gazes met…
The contact was infinitesimal, a mere fraction of a second, yet it ignited a convulsive, violent recoil through my entire being—as if our eyes, in that forbidden meeting, had become conduits for an unbearable, like-charged energy, triggering a ferocious repulsion akin to that of two fundamental particles forced into impossible proximity. My head was wrenched to the side with brutal force, my body instinctively contorting to break the visual lock, while a raw, primal scream of utter abhorrence tore from my throat, shattering the evening’s fragile, deceptive stillness.
That violent, involuntary repulsion was the first brutal enforcement of the cosmic decree. In its aftermath, the stark reality of that decree—its terrible, intimate implications for our shared existence—crashed down upon us with its full, unmitigated force. The moments that followed are now a blur of harrowing trauma, but I recall an overwhelming, shared despair. Our cries, our desperate clamor, and our ragged sobs must have echoed through the otherwise tranquil evening air for an unknowable stretch of time. Our poor neighbors, if they overheard or glimpsed any part of that agonizing scene from their nearby homes, surely must have thought us completely unhinged. To this day, I haven’t dared to ask them, and I often wonder if I ever will. Through my own tears, I remember shrieking words of pure anguish, a torrent of love and loss directed at, or perhaps for, Yaşar: “I can’t see you ever again! I love you so much, I don’t want this, but I just can’t! I am so, so sorry!”
Yet, even amidst this tempest of personal agony, the immense, universe-altering power I had so recently wielded still thrummed within the core of my being. I was still, in some fundamental, terrifying sense, the conscious center of existence, each step I took subtly resonating with the very fabric of reality. My earlier, tentative successes in what I can only term ‘cosmic calibrations’—those fleeting moments of manipulating the very strands of existence—fueled a desperate, defiant thought: if I had come this far, if I truly possessed such capabilities, then surely, surely I must be able to find some flaw in this cruel decree, some celestial loophole, some divine ‘hack’ to mitigate, or perhaps even entirely eradicate, its devastating ramifications for us.
The memories that now surface from what followed are like intense, isolated vignettes, vivid flashbacks of scenes unfolding in and immediately around our home. Their precise placement in the temporal sequence of that night remains stubbornly elusive; I cannot definitively say whether these particular events occurred before or after Yaşar and I finally crossed the threshold into the house together. They exist as islands, outside the normal, coherent flow of remembered time.
Witnessing the Universe Collapse… Again
One such memory places me on the north side of our terrace, gazing into the deepening velvet blue of the northern twilight sky. There, unfolding across a canvas of unimaginable cosmic immensity, I witnessed what I can only describe as a universe collapsing. This was no repetition of my earlier delusion on the mountaintop, no psychedelic misinterpretation of a glorious sunset mistaken for a nuclear holocaust; the sun descends in the west, and this apocalyptic vision blazed with cold, terrible light unmistakably in the north. I cannot say whether this particular collapse was the ongoing echo of my initial, universe-shattering error, or the fresh, terrible outcome of a new round of my desperate trial-and-error interventions with the fabric of reality. How I came to be witnessing this specific iteration, or how that particular vision concluded, is lost to me. But to see it all unravel again before my eyes, the silent, inexorable death of another cosmos, filled me with a abyssal, sweeping melancholy, an immeasurable sorrow for all that was, and for all that, because of me, would now never be.
Spiraling Into Yaşar’s Arms
Another memory fragment surfaces from the depths of that disorienting night, stark and self-contained, like a single, illuminated frame in a chaotic film. I see Yaşar, a silhouette of pure grief, crouched on the rough gravel of our driveway, his shoulders shaking with unrestrained sobs. I perceive myself standing some meters distant, a momentary, pained observer of his heartbreaking despair. And then, not by any conventional means of traversing space, but in a single, fluid, almost instantaneous arc—a controlled, dimensional spiral of pure will emanating from the very core of my God-self—I am suddenly there, within his arms, or perhaps more accurately, enfolding him, our forms momentarily intertwined as one.
Yaşar, too, holds a distinct memory of this precise instant, an echo of its extraordinary nature though perceived through his own lens. He recalls it not so much as a physical movement on my part, but as another moment of absolute convergence, a sacred union akin to that extraordinary melding we had experienced earlier on the Hobbit Trail. For him, it was a fleeting instant where our separate selves seemed to utterly dissolve, melting into a singular, shared existence—a temporary, blessed reprieve from the fracturing realities that assailed us.
For me, this memory exists in stark isolation, a single, luminous bead on the broken string of that night: no discernible before, no immediate after that connects to it in a linear way, just that one impossibly swift, controlled glide, that ineffable, momentary merging into resonant, unassailable ‘one-ness’.
Observing Myself Dancing
Yet another memory surfaces from the chaotic flux of that evening, this one particularly unsettling in its strange temporal displacement. I witnessed myself, as if from an external vantage point, or perhaps as a dislodged future consciousness observing a past iteration, dancing with a fluid, expressive abandon on our southern terrace. It wasn’t merely the focused, spirallic gestures I now associated with the conscious manipulation of reality during this third trip; this was something more liberated, a full-bodied immersion in movement for its own sake.
The ambient light, the very atmosphere of the scene I observed, felt subtly but distinctly different from the deepening twilight of that specific evening of our current ordeal. Perhaps the sky in this vision was overcast, or the clothes my observed self wore were unfamiliar for that day. An unshakeable sense settled upon me that I was viewing a moment from an entirely different time—days, or perhaps even weeks, prior to this intense, reality-bending journey.
This dislodged memory resonated deeply with the questions that were beginning to form about the nature of my experiences. Could this vision be an echo, a ripple sent back through time by the immense forces I was now grappling with in my perceived God-state, a consequence of actions whose effects were not bound by linear causality? Or was it further evidence of something else entirely—a latent, intrinsic connection to these other realities, an unconscious tapping into the Spiral’s currents that had existed within me long before this night fully awakened my awareness to their potential?
It reminded me so strongly of those fleeting, inexplicable moments I’d experienced in the months before, completely sober, lost in the steady rhythm of psytrance, when the music around me would suddenly, perceptibly slow, as if I had momentarily slipped out of sync with the common flow of time. This vision from the terrace, so out of place, so out of temporal sync, felt like another crucial piece of the vast, omnitemporal puzzle I was only just beginning to comprehend—a puzzle suggesting my interventions, my very being as ‘God,’ might not be confined to a single strand of time at all, but could touch upon the past and future simultaneously.
Entering the House, Together
Eventually, mustering what courage we could, we decided to enter the house. I crossed the threshold first, a deliberate strategy to minimize the chance of our gazes accidentally meeting in that charged, unforgiving moment. I went straight to the living room couch and lay down on my stomach, my face hidden from view. Yaşar followed, carefully navigating the space to remain outside my potential field of vision. From my limited vantage point, I perceived him as being remarkably calm, almost confident in his movements, but he would later confess that this was a mask for his own terror; internally, he was consumed by the fear that he was losing me forever to the immensity of what was happening.
I asked him to roll a cigarette for me, a small tether to normalcy. After he cautiously handed it to me, I rolled onto my back, lit the cigarette, and stared up into the slow, silent swirl of green nebulae and laser-stars projected onto the ceiling by my Galaxy Lamp. In that moment, the sight wasn’t ironic in the slightest; it was a tranquil, miniature reflection of the very cosmic forces I was still so desperately trying to mend.
It was there, in the relative stillness of that moment, surrounded by the safety of our home, that I once again engaged my God-consciousness. I began to focus my will on finding a true workaround for the cosmic decree that forbade us from looking at each other. Meticulously, I began to probe and tweak the underlying parameters of reality, searching for a specific calibration that would allow us, at the very least, to meet each other’s gaze again without triggering Armageddon. After a period of intense, internal labor, I felt a surge of confidence in my interventions. I took a breath, turned my head, and looked directly at Yaşar.
And nothing happened. The universe held. There was no cataclysmic collapse. A wave of profound relief washed over me, even as I noted that the Mesh, though seemingly rendered inert by this initial fix, was still there. This, I knew, was only the first phase.
I asked Yaşar to take a seat directly in front of me. I sat upright on the couch as he positioned a small stool about a meter and a half away, our knees almost touching, creating a space between us that was both intimate and charged with an almost unbearable potential. My earlier interventions on the trail had been broad, almost frantic—grand spiral movements for architectural overhauls, deciphering the Mesh’s fundamental nature amidst the chaos of our journey. But here, in the stillness of our living room, my work could become infinitely more precise. With Yaşar sitting before me as a stable focal point, I could touch upon the universe’s most subtle, foundational mechanisms.
I recall that my primary instruments were still the intricate, almost imperceptible movements of my own facial muscles, each micro-expression a command to reshape the dimensional layers. But I wasn’t working blind; I was also guided by an intensely somatic form of biofeedback—a kind of divine haptic feedback. A cascade of tingling sensations would course through my body, a wave of goosebumps would rise and fall, signaling with perfect precision when a particular configuration of reality was more stable, more ‘correct,’ or when it veered dangerously close to instability.
Yaşar sat perfectly still, a willing, trusting subject in this terrifying procedure, as his appearance—his very face—flickered and morphed under the influence of these minute calibrations, shifting through countless near-Yaşars as I navigated towards the true one. At one point, his voice trembling slightly, he asked what I was doing; the process was clearly frightening for him. I perceived his fear from a great distance, my own state one of supreme concentration, operating from that higher, non-personal consciousness. My reply came slowly, each word a deliberate, resonant act of creation:
“I… AM… WORKING… ON… A… SOLUTION… SO… WE… CAN… BE… TOGETHER… AGAIN”
There were a couple of terrifying moments where a single alteration pushed the universe too close to the brink of collapse, and in those instances, that same involuntary, abhorrent recoil was triggered in me as our eyes met. But each time, I managed to pull back, to stabilize the system, to recover from the miscalculation. After what felt like an eternity of this painstaking, high-stakes work, a sense of completion finally settled over me. I was satisfied. I had, I believed, the Yaşar I knew and loved sitting before me. As a final confirmation, a test of my work, I asked him to smile.
He did—his familiar, gentle smile—and a wave of joyous recognition washed through me. Yes. This was him. The Mesh, I could still perceive, but it was now a gossamer-thin, almost negligible shimmer, barely noticeable even in the heightened perception of my God-mode. I felt certain that its effect would be nil, perhaps even entirely absent, once the LSD wore off and my perception returned to the narrow bandwidth of our shared, consensual reality.
Following this monumental success, a deepening calmness suffused my being. I remember leaning back on the couch, making a few further, infinitesimal tweaks to the cosmic architecture until everything settled into a state of resonant, perfect zen.
Yaşar, grounded and present, returned to making the pizza we had planned hours ago. When we finally ate, it tasted more wonderful than any food I could remember. For the rest of the evening, we listened to music, enveloped in a quiet, fragile peace, consciously trying not to disturb the new equilibrium by thinking too much about the immensity of the experience we had just navigated together.