A visualization of a tachyon particle. Because the particle moves faster than light the viewer would see 2 images of it moving in opposite directions as it passed nearby.
A few months earlier my journey (which led to that first meeting between me and the swami I refer to as “edgi”) began at an independent laboratory in Berkeley, California.
Before I proceed I want to let the reader know that there is much about the brain I neither understood nor was aware of at that time. Over the course of the last few months I have been exposed to a wealth of knowledge that has changed my views on the human (and indeed non-human) mind and what it is capable of. Although the experience I described earlier may seem, to the reader, fantastic, I can assure you it did happen and was quite real (or as real as the life experience gets). Furthermore, the tales I have yet to tell you are equally as fantastic, and they are quite real as well.
Most people do not know what they want from life until they get it; or at least a taste of it. I definitely fall into this category. You might say that, as far as life and behavior goes, I’m still in the “Beta Testing” stage. The things I always believed I wanted from life have crumbled away before my eyes, revealing tantalizing hints as to what my purpose here is really about. This story is about my experiences and this journey I am on and the strange things I’ve experienced and equally strange people I’ve met. There are those who often say about their real life experiences: “you couldn’t make this crap up”. That is how I feel about much of what has happened to me in this last year.
Professor Hephaestus (of whom you will learn more later) once told me that there are those born of this world who display such advanced and enlightened human characteristics that they are the human equivalence to “tachyons”. In physics the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) is considered a speed barrier. No particle created at sub-light speeds can travel at or faster than light (as it approaches this speed limit, it’s energy is converted to mass, requiring more energy to accelerate, causing a loop that prevents the particle from reaching 100% of the speed of light). There are, however, theoretical particles known as tachyons, which are created and exist at a state faster than the speed of light. Tachyons are not able to travel at speeds slower than the speed of light; a “slow barrier” if you will.
While the actual existence of tachyons is debatable in the scientific community, the metaphor Professor Hephaestus uses here is clear. Some human beings are created at, or manage to achieve, a higher level of consciousness and ability than the rest of humanity. Historically these individuals are put into the classification of “genius”. He defines this as follows: if the average of all human achievement (what anyone can achieve with a fair amount of hard work and discipline) were regarded as the “achievement barrier” (in the same way the speed of light is considered a “speed barrier” in physics) then a human being regarded as a “genius” would be one that is in a constant state of achievement above this barrier, and incapable of achievement below this barrier. This means that a genius is always creating and achieving at levels that far exceed the human average.
A good example of this metaphor is exemplified in Benjamin Franklin. In 1786, at the age of 80, while en route back to America from Europe, and as a way to occupy his time aboard ship, Franklin became the first to accurately map and define the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean by measuring wind speeds and taking the temperature of the sea at various depths. He did this only to assuage boredom and because he was curious as to why it took 2 weeks longer to return to the Americas from Europe than it did to make the voyage in the opposite direction.
As a trifle, a means to occupy his time while traveling to the Americas, Franklin mapped the Gulf Stream in detail, a route that has been used by trade ships ever since, and is used to this day. This sole achievement of Franklin at the age of 80 (enough to satisfy any average man for a lifetime) came as only one of many extraordinary achievements, some of which includes the inventing of the lightning rod, bifocal lens glasses and the urinary catheter (inventions all still commonly used today, almost 300 years later). Furthermore, Franklin never patented any of his inventions because he had already made his fortune as a printer decades earlier and wanted these inventions to belong to the people.
Once you factor in his revolutionary writing skills (his autobiography has inspired those from Daniel Boone to Dale Carnegie, is read to this day and has never been out of print), his work with and “discovery” of electricity, and his extraordinary contributions to the founding of the United States (for which he is most known), this concept of the tachyon human becomes all the more clear.
In essence, the most trifling and inferior achievements of a tachyon human (those who are beyond the achievement barrier) are leaps and bounds above the greatest achievements of ordinary individuals (those who are at or below the achievement barrier). It is as unlikely for tachyon humans to create below average work as it is for tachyon particles to travel slower than the speed of light.
So why this elaborate explanation of an abstract concept? Mainly as a way to describe the swami I call edgi. This individual is a tachyon. I have tried to learn from him and I shall attempt to describe as much about him as I was able to find in the text that follows. Mind you, he is not the only tachyon I’ve come across in my journeys, but he is of paramount significance to me.
It is through him, and the riddles he gives me as instruction, that I am trying to answer the question: can an ordinary guy like me become a tachyon like Franklin, or like the theoretical particles, must one be created at that level? In other words, is the achievement barrier impenetrable?
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