On Testing

On Testing

To all the academics, scholars, philosophers, and professors. Once I thanked my high school teachers, because I never quite finished college. But I knew the value of having a good leader like these late in life as I lived vicariously through my close friends. You teach the future society how to live; fate will teach them how to be. Keep answering the call, even if that's the test in your own head. You're acing it. A reader's note. This piece moves through depression, anxiety, and a dark stretch of my own life, told in retrospect. If you are standing in that dark place right now, please don't walk it alone — in the U.S. you can call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. What follows is one person's way out, found slowly and by circumstance. It is not a map for anyone else, and it is not medical advice.

I

When is the last time you tested your own ability to be human? Is that too difficult of a question to answer? How about — when is the last time you felt human?

Sometimes the darkness gets so deep, it's as if the world is covered in a deep purple. But not the kind of purple described by musicians and artists. Or maybe it is.

Don't forget, what looks like purple to me may not be purple to you, which also isn't purple to the next person. You'll never know what it looks like to me. Maybe my purple looks like your red.[1]

Speaking of red. We all bleed the exact same color of blood. Not only that, they're the same structural cells of blood. Not only that, the very particles that make up blood are of a kind that admits no individual identity at all — not the same type, but indistinguishable in a sense the physics takes seriously.[2]

Zoom out.

Life can be extremely confusing sometimes, and that purple can turn to black before we know it. Dark is a feeling that we share, not a color that we see.

Every once in a while, it feels necessary to bring the blood to the surface so we see color. It reminds us that we're human on the days where we don't feel like it.

Don't ever forget what I said about pain, too — you're only simulating the feeling of it. That's true for physical pain, but what of emotional? That's true for emotional pain, too.

At least in theory.

II

There was a point during my studies where I struggled with my own existence, but I still stuck with Transcendental Meditation every day.

Practicing. Asking. Learning. Asking. Praying.

Being answered.

I stood atop the mountain of my own mind, and asked the universe: Why am I so depressed and anxious all the time?

The response I got was almost humorous in presentation, but mirroring in design.

"I don't know, why are you?"

"Because a doctor told me so."

Silence.

I had my answer.

I need you to hold a truth here. This was not a clinical cure by any scientific or medical standard. This was circumstantial, and took many years of practice and brain pattern analytics converted into repetition therapy to find my way out of the mess.[3]

I am very fortunate to have discovered that reality for myself. But this is not a call of possibility for everyone — it took me the better part of three decades to walk through that door.

But I know what a day looks like that has no sunrise afterwards. This much, I can assure you, because I'm human. But also, on some subconscious level, I know this is my last trip around the globe. My last sunset here on earth, in the grand scheme of things.[4]

Don't ask me how I know, I'm going to respond like a child. Shrug. "Because."

Be, cause.

Be the reason for effect, otherwise the time will leave you unremembered.

Sometimes we want to forget. Why? Because we fear we won't be remembered?

Why not?

III

What types of rigors and limitations have you actually tested yourself against to see what you're capable of?

Have you ever looked at a spoon and bent it like liquid with your mind?

Sounds crazy, doesn't it.

But it's easy — you just picture it happening over and over and over, and eventually it happens in every universe except this one, especially if someone is watching. But you just impressed a lot of other people you'll never meet, in a different universe invisibly layered under the one you're in.[5]

I've talked about how the brain makes you a time traveler; now you can add wizard to your résumé.

I know, I know. It's crazy.

But wait — is it crazy? Or does it just sound crazy?

We're going to do one more Quantum Lens experiment, and turn it looking towards your own phenomenology using the observer effect.

The bottomless cup theory.

I'm going to describe a phenomenon, and maybe it's something that's happened to you, maybe not. Maybe it's something you've heard someone else talk about in passing, but never gave it much credit.

Walk with me. No. Run with me.

You're exhausted, thirsty. You grab for your opaque water bottle, and you chug. Blindly. When you picked it up, you felt roughly how much it weighed, maybe a couple sips.

Gulp gulp.

Maybe a couple more than I thought.

Gulp gulp. Gulp.

Wait… there's no way there was that much water in there. Twist off the lid, and boom — empty. But you can almost swear you felt the swish of water as you went to check, and still nothing.[6]

A small part of me believes that the things we "need" are given to us from beyond, if the need is pure.

IV

Zoom out, and zoom back in time.

Let's sit with Jesus and the story of the feeding of the five thousand.[7]

Who actually knew Jesus only had the five loaves and two fish? The people who observed it before it was distributed.

What if he was able to "convince" the apostles that there was more than there actually was, in an unseen dimension he could reach to? What if he could convince the crowd in front of him that the food supply was sufficient, and then careful equation was applied to distribute, but it was done so rapidly nobody noticed that…

Hey, I swear we only started with five loaves and two fish.

I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm saying it's possible.

Turn the lens on the basket. Before anyone looked inside, the food was neither enough nor not-enough — it was both at once, the way anything unobserved holds all of what it could be. A few loaves and a feast lived in the same basket, superposed, waiting on a look to decide them. And what aims a look is belief. The crowd was not shown a multiplication; they were brought to the basket already certain it would be enough — and a reality observed that surely has only one way left to fall. He did not add to the bread. He chose, out of every basket that could have been, the one in which the hungry were fed, and held everyone's gaze on it until it was the only basket left.[8]

It lasted because that is what an aligned act does. The collapse was not spent in that field and gone; it was folded into the story, and every time the story is read with the same will behind it — feed them, it is enough — the same wave falls the same way again. The miracle is not kept like a relic. It is re-performed, downstream, by everyone who reads it and means it.

The ripple never reached a far shore.

Intent.

The fact that he wanted to feed the masses with an illogical amount of resources only allowed him to have just enough resources necessary to accomplish his philanthropy.

It's always the exact amount. Where we always live just one step short of divinity, somehow divinity always gives us the last step we need to stand up while we're here.

Call it God's plan, the design, fate, call it whatever you want. It's reality, and it's subjective.

But on the subject of testing, I'm no longer testing things I can't explain. As of today, I can't explain my own mind. So I'm done testing it.

Stop testing your limits. Reach for the stars.

Notes

1. The inverted spectrum — that my red might be your green with no observable difference between us — is Locke's, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xxxii.15. It remains one of the cleanest statements of why first-person experience resists third-person measurement.

2. Accuracy note: an earlier draft said the very electrons in our blood were "the same electron superpositioned in all of us." That is not the physics. Electrons are indistinguishable — identical particles with no individuating properties, so that swapping two changes nothing about the world — which is a genuinely strange and load-bearing fact underneath chemistry. It is not the claim that one electron is numerically present in every body. Wheeler once floated a one-electron universe to Feynman as a wild idea, and it was never a serious proposal. The strangeness the passage reaches for is real; it is just a different strangeness.

3. The author practices Transcendental Meditation. Register note: the account here is retrospective and personal. Meditative practice has real and measured effects on stress and mood, and it is not a treatment for a diagnosed condition; nothing in this passage should be read as a reason to change or stop a course of care. The essay says as much in its opening note, and says it again here on purpose.

4. A note on this sentence, because it sits next to another one. The line about a last trip around the globe is meant in the framework's own terms — a final incarnation, the last pass through a cycle — and not as a statement about the length of a life. It arrives one sentence after a description of despair, and read quickly the two could be run together. They are not the same thought. The author is here, sober, and writing; the resources at the front of this essay stand for anyone who needs them now.

5. Register note: a joke, and it should be read as one. Nothing in quantum mechanics licenses bending cutlery by concentration, in this universe or any other; the many-worlds interpretation does not distribute wishes across branches, and spoon-bending has a well-documented history as stage conjuring.

6. The bottomless cup is offered as a phenomenon people report, not as an anomaly. The likelier account is ordinary: weight estimation through an opaque wall is poor, and expectation shapes what the hand reports.

7. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle recounted in all four Gospels: Matthew 14:13–21; Mark 6:30–44; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–14.

8. Register note: this is a reading of a scriptural story through the framework's Lens, offered as interpretation and not as an account of what occurred. The measurement language is borrowed as figure; on no established interpretation of quantum mechanics does belief select an outcome, and the essay makes no claim that it does. What it claims is smaller and defensible — that what a crowd is brought to expect shapes what a crowd afterwards reports.

References

Locke, J. (1975). An essay concerning human understanding (P. H. Nidditch, Ed.). Clarendon Press. (Original work published 1690)

Nietzsche, F. (1997). Twilight of the idols (R. Polt, Trans.). Hackett. (Original work published 1888)

Popper, K. (2002). The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge. (Original work published 1934)

The Book of Job.

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