The Day the World Ended

John Carter

One of the earliest science fiction stories I remember reading was in a ten-cent paperback I picked up at a garage sale. I suppose I was in the second or third grade at the time; it was the late 1960s. The story had been written at least ten years earlier and was called "The Day the World Ended"; there were several other stories in the collection I liked much better because I simply did not understand this one. It began with a feeling of apprehension, as all daily routines had been voluntarily suspended. The whole town was feeling; some watched their televisions, others the sky. The tension is finally relieved when a loud noise is heard - a sonic boom - and a blinding light flashes across the heavens. It is indeed the day the world ended, though it would be years before I would understand why. All the commotion had been about the first manned rocket flight, and what the people were watching for was its successful return. The story ended with the words, "It was the day the world ended, and the universe began."

The world ended for me in September 1985. I had spent the summer living away from home, working as a surveyor in the woods and fields of the southern part of the state. The company I worked for had won a large contract with the government, and we were all rewarded with a pay increase and per diem for the duration of the summer. Being rather young and foolhardy, it didn't take much to persuade us to spend that extra cash at the local bars every night. Up by 6 AM, we were too hungover to eat breakfast. When noon came it was too far back to town for lunch, so all we could do was find some shade and take a few swigs from our canteens. When evening finally rolled around, we got back quite late and often resumed drinking as soon as we got in, effectively killing our appetites before supper. Often we skipped the evening meal altogether, drinking until the bars closed at 2 AM.

All good things must come to an end, and as the summer wound down and my mind started to turn towards my final year of college, an odd change came over everything. My world-view did a flip-flop as reality shifted just enough to let me know things weren't exactly what they seemed. I had been an avid reader of Philip K. Dick's for five years, and now I literally knew what he had been referring to. For the next six weeks I lived in a Hell-world superimposed on the everyday landscape. Time, I realized, does not exist independently because it cannot be observed from a vantage point outside itself. Past, present and future all exist in an eternal now, their unfolding being an illusion of our three-dimensional minds. The universe is solid for space does not exist. Certainly we move from place to place, but the universe I saw was a solid object that acted as a single machine. Arbitrary definitions like "tree" were meaningless because everything we perceive as distinct entities are in fact part of a much larger whole that always was and always will be. Eternal, because it exists outside of time (which is not real); finite in space, because there is only here and now.

I had read The Tao of Physics some six years earlier, and had been an avid student of Hinduism and Buddhism in the meantime. This seemed to me a direct experience of the Dance of Shiva without the joy or the beauty. Instead I was almost paralyzed by fear at the eternal and unchanging universe, a view which was totally at odds with my previous belief in the Big Bang, Einstein's relativistic views of time and the second law of thermodynamics. The universe is neither good nor bad; it just is, as is the Tao.

Throughout all this - six weeks or so - I dimly saw (or perceived in some way) a dark machine city always present on the horizon. At the time I was reminded of Dick's vision of first-century Rome described in VALIS, and now I can see the parallel to Aleister Crowley's City of Pyramids from his The Vision and the Voice. Like the city I could almost see out of the corner of my eye, the universe is a machine. Trees breathe in carbon dioxide, giving off oxygen as waste (which we, in turn, breathe). Nothing changes, only the appearance. Below the ground, the roots take in water and nutrients, and the worm sees this as we see the top of the tree. There is no difference, only a change of perspective. The universe is solid, like a potato, for all is part of this cosmic interplay.

The year following my recovery was a creative flurry. I turned my attention from music to writing and produced a ream of material even more abstruse than the above. Some very bad prose and poetry was written; thankfully, it will never see the light of day. Rather than embodying Bob Black's definition of a mystic who "had an incommunicable experience he won't shut up about", I'd like to turn now to what this experience has meant to me.

Immediately following the initial trauma, I saw the parallel to both Dick's pink-beam experience and India's Dance of Shiva. Though not as intense or exactly described as either, it may have been just as enlightening. I first ascribed the events, which eventually included a spontaneous out-of-body experience, to a mild case of delirium tremens, though I never had the shakes. Now I see it as a combination of vitamin deficiency caused by near-fasting (a classic method of inducing apocalyptic visions), alcohol withdrawal and lack of sleep, though I never seemed to suffer any physical effects. If I learned anything at all from all this, it was the subjective nature of what we call reality. The universe is not as it seems.

"What is the sound of one hand clapping?" asks the Zen Master. It can only be the thought of the sound of one hand clapping. Likewise the sound of two hands clapping is also nothing more than a thought. Who is the Master who makes the grass green? As far as I'm concerned, it is I.

Across the dunes and into the sun, white-robed Africans walk with water-jugs balanced on their heads. Eternal, unchanging; primordial man. There is a slight breeze in the cool evening air, as the desert comes to life again with the approach of night. There is no continuity from one moment to the next; all is now, time and change are but illusion. We exist outside of it, and we know it not. What we call real is but a passing on the plane of existence. What is real is only what lasts; ancient history is no further gone than the last fleeting moment.

I seriously contemplated suicide during the lowest part of this experience. I was afraid to do it because of my vision of eternity - if the universe were finite but eternal and unchanging, to leave it was also forever. Did I stare into the Abyss on this occasion? Perhaps, but lest any should think I claim to have crossed it, be aware that I fought desperately to return to the normalcy whence I came. I don't think I ever quite reached it.