There You Are

Leinder’s addiction to post ancient self-help had recently led them to the last and most successful Earth One excavation of their life:

(1) You are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life

(3) How to Win Friends and Influence People

(2) You are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why it Matters

(7) The Alchemist

(1) I thought It was Just Me (but it isn’t): Making the journey from “What Will People Think” to “I Am Enough”

It was a certifiable trove of assurances, anecdotes, light hearted laughs, and simple truths. Leinder, high on the promise of exceptional joy, leafed through the brittle pages and gently traced the titles of each precious tome, a familiar electric rush sparking down their neck.

Through meticulous mapping, hacking, 7-D reconstruction, radiation scanning, and thousands of FOUNDER interviews Leinder had spent several eras narrowing in on a cache of this magnitude. When they located a mega Salvation Army in an ice preserved city once known as Peoria they had the feeling something big was on the horizon. Salvation Armys were almost always honeypots but no other dig had been as bountiful as this.

In the 100 thousand or so years since Leinder had learned that they were 27% Human, 65% Design and 8% Mycelium they were tortured by a crushing existential need to know themselves. A fateful moment it was when on a whim Leinder took the Percentage Test. It was trending and new so they decided they did not have a reason not to know. How could they have predicted that the milliseconds between not knowing and knowing would be the last milliseconds of peace they would ever experience again until the end.

27% human is one of the highest percentages one could have. The absolute max percentage calculated to ensure harmony, sustainability, and general survival satisfaction is 32%. Leinder would have guessed they were somewhere between 5 and 13% so the results came as quite a surprise. A surprise that would come to dictate their every thought, microfiber, and spore.

What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be 27% human? Who am I? What am I? Does this mean I’m special? Do I have potential? Potential for what? And if so must I do something with it? And most perplexingly: Does it even matter?

When Leinder shared these concerns with others, whose percentages were undoubtedly within the 1 - 10 range, they shrugged, stared blankly, changed the subject, or simply walked away.

Leinder didn’t know what to do with this new ache. They tried distracting themselves with various intergalaxy hook-ups, extreme solar deprivations, and long bouts of intense suit-gaming. But nothing could move the needle on their despair.

On one particularly low day Leinder found themselves in an area that was culturally understood as “off limits.” The landscape was a bare sheet of endless white salt with nothing and no one. They walked and walked in neither circles nor straight lines as the suns began to fade into a purple filter of still air. It was then that Leinder noticed the shape of something in the near distance.

It was a perfectly conical six foot pile of rocks the size of small fists each etched with the words “BE HERE NOW.” Rainbow Opals, Moonstones, and Florites glittered and bounced with what was left of the light.

Leinder plucked a glowing blue stone and caressed the lettering.

“Be Here Now. Be Here Now. Be Here Now,” they repeated to themselves, feeling a jolt of electric shock, the nihilistic dread melting away with each incantation.

Leinder stayed there light year in and light year out compulsively walking the pile’s circumference at a methodic pace, repeating the mantra with stoic determination. Every step, one nowness closer to the Truth of eternal self-knowing. This went on and on and on until one morning they woke to find a cross legged Being sitting beside the pile on a pink chair. The Being handed Leinder an ornate book. Be Here Now. THE BOOK.

“There’s more than this,” the Being said just loud enough to be heard as Leinder took the book into their arms and cradled it like a newborn babe.

An entire book of this infinite wisdom. Leinder could hardly contain themself. Centuries and centuries, trillions of gravitations and burnouts passed as they studied and walked and inserted their livelihood into every page, picture, and diagram; each moment a vibrational exegesis on the high planes of the Baba.

Until. The internal ache crept in between each and every word and line and suddenly all the lessons they thought they had internalized were moot and dull. The electric shock was replaced with an ever-numbing disinterest and again Leinder felt they knew nothing of their humanity, their world, or anything else. Leinder felt like shit.

They slumped to the ground and froze all but for a few finger wiggles and knee pops, staring into the void. What was this prison they had built for themself?

Before the Percentage Test they were perfectly content being exactly who they were:

Leinder, a __________ who ___________ and __________.

Leinder, reliably __________ and ___________, never one to ___________.

They like ___________ but not ___________ and would like to ___________ one day

Now Leinder was a no-one, a someone?!, an empty, irritable, unknowable, good-for-nothing abyss consumed with saturnine hopelessness.

Leinder’s affliction may have completely absorbed them once and for all if they hadn’t remembered the small voice of the pink chaired Being, “There’s more than this.”

“More Than This.”

These three words, perhaps more powerful than “Be Here Now,” catalyzed for Leinder a spiraling rabbit hole of bottomless obsession. They returned itchily to the rock pile and awaited the appearance of their book bearing friend.

What other option does a Being have when confronted with such extreme desperation other than to produce a glossy covered opus of sage advices, personal overcomings, and quotable one liners? Leinder was given a second bible, “The Secret,” and as it entered their grasp, they were hit again with that simultaneous jolt of electric possibility and evaporation of pain. Herein lied the answers they earned for hungrily and they braced themselves to be authentically seen.

Unfortunately even The Universe is unable to provide a quick fix for a problem of this enormity and for Leinder the intervals of cherished rapture grew smaller and smaller. They churned through one book after another and eventually their self help fairy had extinguished its library and was n’ere to be seen again, only leaving a small bag of burnt fortune cookies on its’ pink chair as a final benefaction.

Leinder, however, had predicted this and had taken great strides to mitigate the fallout. Through extensive anthrogeologic analysis, diasporic neuro-profiling, and forensic star-market research, Leinder was prepared to find their own panacea.

Earth One. It had it all. The motherland of self-discovery and personal fulfillment. Leinder found that thrift stores, mansion garages, and yoga studios had the highest concentration of the medicine he now subsisted upon. He visited often and excavated precisely, unearthing classics such as:

See You at The Top: The “How To” Book that Gives YOU a “Check Up” from the “Neck Up” to eliminate “Stinkin Thinkin” and AVOID “Hardening of the Attitudes”

The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure

The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-Create Your World Your Way.

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway: Dynamic Techniques for Turning Fear, Indecision, and Anger into Power, Action, and Love

and

As a Man Thinketh

They also began collecting something called a Jerry Mcguire DVD as they were often found in abundance and Leinder believed this phenomena was clearly a powerful sign from above. There are no coincidences.

Yet trip after trip, treatise after treatise the arch of Leinder’s emotional and spiritual well being remained the same: Abyss, Electric Shock, Euphoria, Disillusionment, Dread, Numb, Abyss. It was an exhausting and inescapable cycle further exacerbated by the growing sense that the end was ominously nigh.

Although Leinder had been open minded throughout the process and strayed at times reading books on astrology, divination, and philosophy (taking innumerable personality tests along the way) they mostly remained a post ancient self-help purist. But on this big final haul at the very last moment they threw in the title The Body Keeps the Score. At first it appeared more sciency than helpy and was about to be dismissed but a reviewer had written something about the author being a truth teller and into the coffer it went.

Leinder tore through their booty in less than a decade with just this one final book left. They were mildly pessimistic as they opened the blue cover, fueling their destructive pattern once more.

The Body. The Body. The Body.

Leinder had never really thought about their body before. It was just there. It did its thing and that was that. Nothing to fanatically pontificate.

But as the reading began to unfold Leinder started to pay attention to all its little doings: Sounds, vibrations, pangs, and temperature shifts. They noticed the emotions that welled up when a wind tickled their arm and how the night’s aura changed the shadows of their feet. There was no spark or euphoria, disillusionment or dread. Just curiosity and what was there.

They built themself a mirror and when they had examined every centimeter of their front side they built another mirror. Then another and another until they could get as much of a 360 degree view of themself as possible. They magnified, spotlighted, picked, and pinched, loving each and every moment of this glorious corporeal self. Hundreds of millenia zipped by as Leinder reveled in their beautiful body and they were content to look, feel, touch, and breathe.

There was however one part of their body they could not visually investigate to full satisfaction. It was on the back of the neck at the base of their skull. By touch it was small, smooth and seemingly covered in semi-reflective glass, encasing something they could not quite make out. They had seen this in others before but hadn’t thought much of it until now. Some had gold triangles or silver ovals while others had bronze colored squares encrusted with stones.

Leinder twisted and spun, torquing this way and that to get a crisp view but it proved impossible and they began to slip into old ruminations of wretched self doubt.

With a chest filled with lead bricks and a nauseating agitation coursing through each tendril of their hyphae, Leinder came to an extreme decision. They would break the glass encasement and rip the thing out. They had to know. There was no other way.

Surrounded by mirrors Leinder gently tapped the glass with a long nail and bent hammer until its shattered pieces fell into a sparkling dust upon the ground.

They looked at themselves as they placed their fingers around the thing and pulled.

They looked at themselves as their head fell from their body and bounced three times.

They watched as the thing revealed itself to be a heart shaped locket with a picture and strand of hair inside.

The human who was 100%.

“It’s me,” they said, “I’m me,” and Leinder faded, for the first time, into an oblivion all their own.