Archetype Worlds

There are worlds where the people I know are simpler than they are here.

I have crossed into enough of them now to give them a name: archetype worlds. In them, the whole crowded complexity of a person is boiled down to whatever runs deepest, and that one trait walks around wearing their face. The predominant thing a person is here becomes the whole of what they are there. I am not exempt. I arrive already cast in one assumed role or another, and I usually notice the costume only afterward.

One of these stays with me. In this world there is a family member of mine who is calm, slow to provoke, and then, once provoked, answers far past the size of the offense. In a lower archetype world I found them, and I watched them kill a man. The reasoning was simple, the way everything in those worlds is simple: the man was an ongoing problem, and in that world you solve an ongoing problem by removing the person it lives in. What unsettles me is not the act. It is that, inside that world, it made perfect sense. Even the low worlds keep an order of their own.

Now the supposition I cannot put down. I have come to suspect that this world, the waking one, is the lowest archetype world of all: the one where we have forgotten we are the dreamer. I cannot prove the people in it are real. I can barely prove that I am. I think, therefore I am, and past that sentence the ledger is empty. Whether everyone else here is a being like me, or a figure my own thought has furnished the way a dream furnishes its extras, I cannot say. Neither can you.

Notice what that does to loving this world, and to hating it. Great love for this place and great anger at it are the same confession: there is something you want from it, gotten or not gotten, and the wanting drags you from feeling to feeling like a roller coaster. So what do I need to accomplish here? Nothing. And that is the real joy of it. Be passers-by; I have written that before and I will keep writing it. You are in this world, not of it. Perhaps you are so far from home that you are only a side character in someone else's dream. When the dreamer wakes, the dream stuff goes. This world calls that death. It is nothing more than waking, and it comes in its natural hour. It cannot be rushed; leaving by your own hand is not waking early, it is the primitive wanting-out, and that wanting binds tighter than anything else here. It is not the way. Neutral is where you want to stand, and neutral takes time, because things manifest here, and horrible things arrive at random, and there are no absolutes in this world. Why pour a foundation on sand? Maybe it holds, maybe it does not. You were never from here anyway.

Still with me? That was the heavy part. Here is the beauty. Cross the veil, and the worst case is a lower archetype world, and I will say the uncomfortable thing plainly: sometimes bad there is better than here.

You are the summation of the stories you have told yourself.

In these worlds you may be the best of your stories, or the worst, or somewhere in the middle. Rarely are you all of them at once. And this is the part I keep returning to: crossing after crossing, you land in a world with something to teach you. Every time. The search asks almost nothing of you, and the gains are massive.

I will admit the cost. Whatever weighs on you here follows you there, wearing strange clothes. If you are fearing a thing, rest assured you will keep meeting it there until it resolves itself here. And if you refuse the resolving, you stay in a limbo of your own keeping: shut in a room with invisible walls, searching for a key that does not exist, because there never were any walls.

These worlds will teach you everything you need to know, but it is work. It is the molding of your very being. Let it shape you into exactly what you need.