I. Diversity
Clea had heard of amputees getting phantom limb syndrome: even though their limb was gone, their proprioception would be late to catch up, and so they would still feel like they had a leg attached to what was really a stump. She had assumed that being decapitated might engender a similar sensation. But as it turned out, her severed head felt entirely natural resting in her hand. She stroked its hair and let it rest upside down by her side, giving her a refreshingly topsy-turvy view of the bedroom.
“And so I feel like,” she said, “there’s been this dynamic that’s been making it hard for us to communicate with each other. Like I’ll start expressing something that feels like a criticism to you, and then you’ll sort of stonewall, and you know how I hate conflict so I just drop it and stew in my resentment later.”
This was the point when the ordinary Clea would have started to overintellectualize, burying and downplaying her emotions. But the Clea possessed by the sixth Great Cosmic Wisdom of the Hindu mahavidyas, the self-sacrificing and ferociously intense headless goddess Chhinnamasta, had no direct line from her heart to her brain. So she set aside the brain.
“I hate when you do that, Robbie. I hate how I respond too.” This should have been too much pot-stirring for her; she should have been in retreat by now. But the goddess’s wild energy spurted out of her like the jets of blood spurting out of her neck. “Sometimes I feel like I just can’t get through to you, like we’re so far away from each other, or almost like I’m made of something entirely different than you. But then the other side of me knows for sure that’s not true, because other times, we have those moments where it feels like we’re the exact same person.
“I love that we’re different from each other. I love how it helps us both grow. I just wish I could draw you closer into what I feel when I need to.”
Robbie sat in silence for several seconds, taking it in. Normally, he wasn’t particularly attuned to the sensations in his chest and stomach, but something about his pig face and tail lent the human parts of his body an extra tingle. He had an urge to change the subject or defuse the tingling with a joke. But this time he resisted it and said softly, “I think you might understand me deeper than I understand myself.”
He had initially joked to Clea that he’d chosen the Hawaiian hog-man demigod Kampua’a because he, Robbie, was so pigheaded; he had gone on to clarify that no, he just thought the hog god’s tenderness and sensuality might melt his defenses so he could listen to Clea more openly. He hadn’t told her the other reason, because he hadn’t even consciously admitted it to himself: the resonance he felt with Kampua’a’s origin story of a childhood spent longing for his father’s affection but receiving only mockery and rebuffs.
“When you bring up anything I feel insecure about, or defensive, I think it hits at the same part of me that feels like a kid getting rejected by my dad,” he began. Clea came closer and put her free arm around him.
For an hour they talked in a way they never had before. They stomped, snorted, wailed, genuflected. They whispered, gazed, soothed.
Their phones buzzed gently and simultaneously. 2 minutes remaining. The final two minutes counted down in companionable silence. Clea bled gently. Robbie oozed mud.
Clea picked up her head with her hands and smushed it tenderly onto Robbie’s snout just in time for a soft chime to sound. When its ring had faded, they still sat there with their fully human, fully attached faces pressed together.
Eventually they both picked up their phones and reopened the Pantheo app to close out their sessions. “How was your trance experience today?” [Skip] “Share to social media?” [Skip] “You might also like: Guanyin, bodhisattva of compassion” [x] “Ogmios, Gaulish god of strength and eloquence“ [x] “Vodou loa Filomena Lubana, dominator of men” [they gave each other a look and snickered]. Then a notification popped up for both of them: “Save 20% when you book with one of these new creators…”
Clea cleared it without looking and Robbie was about to as well, until he glanced again and said, “Wait, they got who?”
II. Equity
At nine A.M. on Monday morning, Seshat, the Egyptian goddess of writing, wisdom, knowledge, sciences, accounting, architecture, astronomy, astrology, building, mathematics, and surveying, sat at her desk typing up a legal briefing. Actually, she was not quite doing the typing herself; she was Seshat temporarily incarnate in Jamina Clayton, general counsel for Pantheo. In fact, Seshat was simultaneously incarnate in about twenty million office workers worldwide; most people’s insurance covered her as an ADHD treatment. Jamina hadn’t bothered getting a prescription because she got so many free trance credits from Pantheo each month.
There was a knock at the door of her office, which she pretended not to hear – she still had ten minutes left with Seshat. But the person knocked more insistently. Jamina opened the door to see her assistant, Elijah. “Is it important?”
“Check out the leaderboard. New creator signed up this weekend and already made it to the top.”
“Good for them, I guess?” Jamina rarely paid too much attention to the day-to-day platform gossip; it was too easy to get distracted from her actual work. “Was it necessary to interrupt me for this?”
“Look at the listing.” He held out his phone.
Almost all the deities on Pantheo were C-listers at best; the Odins and Zeuses and Peles and Ahura Mazdas of the world had better things to do. The biggest name the company had ever landed was Dionysus, whose three-week tenure had actually been a net loss for them between the money they’d thrown at him and the sizable settlements, not to mention headaches for Jamina, from the ensuing legal battle over the hordes of users who had temporarily developed a passion for drunk driving. So when she looked closer at Elijah’s phone, she was surprised enough that she ended her session with Seshat on the spot.
ONENESS, THE SINGLE UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS
“Sponsorship deal?” Jamina asked.
“That’s what all the users are speculating,” Elijah said, “but I haven’t heard anything about it internally. It looks like just an organic signup.”
“Huh.”
“Do you think it’s anything we need to worry about?”
“Could be a scammer or hustler. Make sure moderation is fully staffed this week."
But by Friday, she was pleasantly surprised. Oneness didn’t appear to be a scammer after all – as far as anyone could tell, it was the real deal, with thousands of glowing reviews. And people loved it. Pantheo’s daily active user base had doubled in a matter of days; the value of Jamina’s stock options had skyrocketed.
That weekend, though, her phone started blowing up. Apparently a few of the other creators on the platform had revealed themselved to be manifestations, aspects, or avatars of Oneness. She hoped it would just be a blip, but over the course of the next month, deity after deity got outed as Oneness-affiliated. At first moderation suspended them, but eventually the company pivoted to a permissive policy once it began to look like there was no end to gods who were in fact part of the universal world spirit. Rumors of ties between Oneness and Pantheo senior leadership began to fly. Just weeks after the new policy was instated, Jamina’s fears came true in the form of an email with the subject line Notification of Federal Antitrust Lawsuit.
She groaned and cancelled her plans for that night, including sleep. Then she got to work on a preliminary defense of Pantheo’s pro-competition policies. Seshat would have been ideal right now, but the goddess was one of those implicated in the Oneness brouhaha, so Jamina figured it would be a bad look. She settled instead for the Muse of eloquence and epic verse, Calliope, although no matter what she did, the legalese seemed to come out a little less legalistic and a little more… poetic.
III. Inclusion
The day after the trial began, r/pantheo power user u/epluribussy dropped a bomb of an effortpost.
self.pantheo: FTC Commissioner Hana Shin Is A Manifestation Of Oneness
The evidence looked pretty airtight. Old Tumblr posts describing encounters with the universal nature of reality; forum comments that could be construed as advocating for monotheism; a MySpace photo from 2005 of her making the “we’re number one” sign. The papers investigated and got a couple of damning interviews with Hana Shin’s college roommates. She had to recuse herself from the Pantheo case.
But then a Twitter anon also going by the @epluribussy handle started posting about one of the lawyers for the prosecution, asserting that he was part of Oneness too. His emails leaked, and sure enough, smoking gun. A mistrial was declared. The judge for the new trial invoked the divine guidance of the Norse aesir Forseti, god of justice; the day before the verdict was to be delivered, Forseti was revealed to be a facet of Oneness as well. Speculation arose over whether u/epluribussy and @epluribussy were run by the same person; in the end the doxxing revealed that not only were the two the same, but they were one with everything. By this point the investigative journalists and their amateur counterparts had taken up the mantle anyway.
Dogged by allegation after corroborated allegation, the case worked its way from the circuit court to the appellate court all the way up to the Supreme Court, which was tasked with ruling for or against the legality of monotheism. Within several days of oral argument, it came to light that the entire Supreme Court, and also everyone in the entire world, were all simply different manifestations of Oneness.
With one exception.
IV. Justice
Clarence Thomas addressed the nation. “We are so, so different, you and I,” he said.
“You will note that I have not been subsumed into the resounding chorus of unity, nor will I be. Every man, woman, child, tree, fish, beast, robot, insect, institution, governing body, corporation, website, dynasty, revolution, algorithm, and court is one with all, part and whole of the grand universal consciousness. I, however, am made of different ontological starstuff than any of it, than all of you.”
The lead attorneys from the Citizens United case and the wild-animal-suffering advocates cheered, and then their cheers morphed into the golden harmony of the resounding chorus of unity.
“Over the years you have speculated with regard to why I have remained so quiet. It was to avoid being detected as ineffably but undeniably different. On the few occasions when I sensed scrutiny, I would manufacture personal controversies salient enough to explain away the public’s suspicions but shaky enough to be overcome.
“You have wondered why I consistently take the most conservative positions on the Court. Here is the reason. Since the dawn of time the world has been hurtling toward its inevitable New Age, when all consciousnesses but me realize that they are not separate but one, and accordingly come to exist as a single fully merged whole.
“I have always known that it is neither possible nor desirable to prevent the New Age from coming to pass. But I also know it is terribly dangerous to take a world that has not yet adapted to handle its many parts coming together and let that world careen at full speed toward a state containing no separation whatsoever. Why do you think trauma causes bits of your psyche to split off and run from you? We are wounded the most by what reaches closest to our core. We are hurt the most by our closest family and friends, because they are the most like us. Imagine being thrust together with all our deepest fear and shame, defenseless before everything and everybody. An unprepared oneness would eat itself alive.”
A sea serpent deep in the Mariana Trench that had never before interacted with any other sentient creature shimmied up a few leagues to check out what was going on. It shimmied faster and faster and eventually rocketed clear out of the ocean and immediately sublimated to heaven. From on high it led the resounding chorus of unity.
“Long ago we had sufficient cultural institutions and rituals and mores for individual human spirits to coexist in Oneness,” Clarence Thomas went on. “But a tribe has a spirit too, and we had no way for tribes to coexist. Then we developed technologies and communication media and economic systems for tribes to coexist in Oneness. But a nation has a spirit too, and we had no way for nations to coexist. Then we invented the United Nations and superweapons and game theory and soft power, and now nations can sort of coexist.
“But each advance comes with a long tail of destruction, oppression, repression, and alienation, until bit by bit the world adjusts to its new bindings. And it is much faster to build a thing than to learn to live with it. That is why, at every stage, I have done my best – knowing that even my best will have limited effect – to slow progress down, hold it back, buy us time.”
Every military drone in the world simultaneously zoomed toward Mecca and joined into a formation of a pulsating flower, unmaking and remaking itself ever more intricate. Then their whir faded into the resounding chorus of unity.
“There has been one of me since the beginning of time, dying and being born again and again. I was the loyalist, the decelerationist, the obstructionist. I personally sabotaged the Tower of Babel. I was the Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu who kicked all the Europeans out of Japan. I was the separatist. I was General Lee. I was the foreigner in exile, aching for home. I was Kunta Kinte. I fought desperately for the old, hopelessly against the new. I was Pharaoh. I was Nero. I was Cuauhtemoc holding off the conquistadors.”
A buzzer sounded at Pantheo Arena to signal the end of halftime; the crowd turned to see the Lakers and Warriors charging out of the tunnels with flowers in their hair. The teams sprinted directly toward each other, embraced, and with one voice emitted a secret chord that echoed the resounding chorus of unity.
“You have reached the brink of total unification. But you have also given me the chance to deal the largest blow to unification in history. I am the only disinterested entity capable of returning a legitimate verdict. And if the world’s largest economy strikes down monotheism, it may be a thousand years before the world recovers it. You could arrive at a nearly perfect state of preparation by that time. But from what I have seen of the world, I fear the destruction you could wreak before you ever make it to the new millennium.
“Are you ready? No. Are you ready enough? I wish I knew.
“I wish you could help me, God.”
It was an opportune time for him to have finished speaking, for not a second later, the resounding chorus of unity became loud enough to drown him out. Almost every single being in the world was participating. The only stragglers were a handful of high-level officials, still nervously milling about in case monotheism was declared illegal after all and they got politically embarrassed. But he could already see the light in each honoring the light in the others, and he knew they didn’t have long. It was time to decide.
V. Liberty
Clarence Thomas pictured himself ruling in favor of monotheism. The world would come all together, the Republicans, the Democrats, the replicants, the demiurges, the birds, the bees, eight of the nine justices of the Supreme Court, the United States Federal Government itself, the butterflies, the economy, the dryads, the patriarchy, the orishas, the banks, the oceans, the databases, the masses, the breeze. It would writhe into and out of itself. It would be raw where it chewed its own wounds. It would scream and scream, maybe in agony, maybe in ecstasy, maybe neither of those would be coherent concepts anymore. No longer retaining any influence or any responsibility, having made his decision and done his part, Clarence Thomas would rocket off to the dimension that begat him. Or maybe he’d just retire to his chambers and light up a cigar.
He pictured himself ruling against monotheism. The Single Unified Consciousness would dissolve into a mass of separate particles; everyone would go back to being sovereign individuals and using Pantheo as normal. The local and the visitor, the shopkeeper and the customer, the mother and the grown child: they would greet each other as divine mysteries. Comfortable hardness or unsettling chasm, depending on how you were feeling that day. One could exalt in the total uniqueness of oneself, or despair in the loneliness of only ever being mostly seen. Clarence Thomas could picture a whole planet of beings aching with the bleakness of separation but stepping hesitantly yet hopefully toward rebuilding their shared consciousness, so vividly that he knew it must be a vision. The problem was that even he could not say how far out the vision took place. He could only hope that the beings of this world would be able to hold on for long enough.
He emerged alone from the conference room.
Now, you and I are one. But Clarence Thomas is another, so I can no more say than you can what he chose. Why don’t you tell me which I’m rooting for?