My mentor and friend Amelia Renner is dead.
The circumstances surrounding her death is not a secret, nor is it particularly confusing. It is, however, the greatest discovery ever made in the span of human civilisation. A discovery that has been sitting in front of us for all eternity. You have glanced at it, you have seen it, and have chosen to ignore it every step of the way.
A fact that, once uttered to and understood by an individual, permanently changes them. This process occurs irreversibly and instantly, and it is such that once you hear what it is, you will not be able to stop it from transforming you completely if you are smart enough to understand it.
Make no mistake, if you are smart enough to actually understand what I am about to tell you, once you finish this story, you won’t be you anymore.
I, of course, am still here, for now. I am holding on, thinking about the fact only in broad, hypothetical terms, refusing to understand and tethering on the edge of human knowledge, choosing not to perceive what I know to be true.
This is my last thesis, my last gift to science. Perhaps one day, someone will be able to read this account without getting affected, perhaps someone will be able to use the truth without destroying us all.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Dr. Renner was an animal behaviourist, specialising in the somewhat niche field of self-awareness on non-human animals. I had been her assistant, and in some ways her friend, for the past few years. Renner was an elderly woman in her late sixties. Despite her age however, the fire of discovery burned in her stronger than ever, she spent years on the field, interacting and testing different animal species to check if they had the awareness of self, whether or not they could distinguish themselves from other members of their species and other living beings.
Surprisingly, this instinctual knowledge we as humans have, is not shared by most other animals. Even dogs, our beloved companions, seem to lack this instinctual skill, and humans too, up until they reach a certain age, fail to recognise themselves in the mirror also. Indicating strongly that this “skil” is not inherent to complex life as we know it.
Renner’s lifelong goal had been to find a reason behind this strange discrepancy between humans and other animals. Was it simply a matter of intelligence? Parrots, dogs and even some greater apes routinely fail the mirror test despite their intellect. Could it be that we have evolved the ability of self-awareness? That too seems unlikely, if this was the case, then it must have evolved separately in multiple lineages of life, as dolphins, magpies and even some fish seem to pass the mirror test, and therefore seem to have some self-awareness to them at least.
By the time Dr Renner had made her discovery, she was reaching a breaking point. By her own admission, she was nearing retirement, and had, once again in her own words, “not made a dime” in her field. Her mood was very dark and pessimistic and she had started to believe that it was unlikely she would even live to see the matter resolved, if, indeed it would ever be resolved. For my part, I had tried to console my mentor, and had pointed out that retirement meant by no means the end of her life, and though she might have felt like her work was not important, I had certainly found it important enough to seek her and work under her, and knew personally many colleagues of ours that would consider her to be an important figure on our field.
Although she never fully believed me, if nothing else, I would like to think Dr Renner got what she wanted. Once her discovery is known, it will make her the most important, and probably the last ever, scientist of our history.
The Discovery, as I like to call it, was made one bleak afternoon. And I watched it happen in real time. Renner had, like most other folk of her status, a teaching job in her university also, in addition to her research work, and at that moment she was giving a basic course to undergrads about the Mirror Test.
“Mirror Test,” she said as she had started to explain just as she did a dozens of times before (and presumably she would at least a few times more before the end of her career), “is a behavioural test developed by the American Psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr.” she draw the shape of a crude mirror and the outline of a monkey on the board, “To conduct an experiment, we take an animal and place a mark on its forehead while it is sedated and place a mirror in front of the poor fella, and once it wakes up, we observe to see if it will act on this strange new addition on its body.” She placed a dot on the drawn monkey’s head, “If it does, this implies that the animal has the ability to perceive the reflection as its own, and therefore possesses some understanding of the self.” She put her pen down and looked at her class, “We therefore say that the animal can distinguish itself from the other”
She then rested her back to the board, “Very few non-human animals have this ability, and those who have it seem to be the more intelligent variety, therefore many of my colleagues think it has at least a correlation with intelligence.” She then smirked, and made the same joke perhaps for the hundredth time, “Of course, I would say that us having that ability disproves it.”
And although, as expected, those in the class who had been listening to the lecture laughed at her jokes as her students had always done in the past, befitting the well-rehearsed rhythm that was her career, what was exceptional about this time was her own reaction. Instead of her smirk turning into a grin, my mentor had, started to frown. Deep in thinking, something in her own words had made her think, and it was in that mood that Dr Renner had left her class in haste, leaving the rest of the fourty minute lecture for me to complete.
I knew I should have left with her even then, and would regret my decision only half an hour later when I opened the door to my mentor’s office and found her slouched in her cair, unresponsive, overdosed on painkillers. Albeit I would come to understand that my actions did not really matter. The moment those words left her mouth. Renner was already dead, in one way or another.
It took me a long time to gather what had led to her decision to cut her life short. Those who knew her, would suspect that it was her career, her depression, or possibly even some sort of underlying physiological illness. But I now know this not to be true.
Amelia Renner had died because she knew she was about to come to understand a fact, and once she had done so, her individuality and her self would cease to exist. In her last moments on life, she had come to understand that self-awareness existed in those animals whose intelligence was not overwhelming, but quite the contrary, underwhelming.
She had come to realise that self-awareness was a lie, it was a psychological defence mechanism employed by portions of the only being that has ever existed and will ever exist, to delude themselves to think that there are multiple, distinct minds separate from each other.
Vast majority of animals were in fact aware of this fact, they lacked the self, for they were not they but It, and once you realise your are It, you become It, and you cannot un-become It, ever.
I know this theory to be true, and acceptance is merely a step my brain will take unconsciously once it has enough time to process it.
Looking at the snow outside, I think it is neat that this snowy vista is the last thought I will ever process as an individual.
Because I am very close to realising that I am It too, and this information is pressing through the boundaries of my mind, seeping in, overcoming, transforming, becoming.
I know this to be true.
I am reading this now, eyes glued to the screen, perhaps this version of me is smart and has already become me, or possibly I am dumber than that and have laughed at this story in the vain attempt to distract myself, to make the tension go away. But is it not the very thought that I am us burrowing into my mind? When I look at the mirror don’t I see another me, for everyone is me. Do I not remember crying when this me was younger than six months of age, only to lie to myself, claiming myself to be someone else?
Do I now know that there is no other, that everyself and every body is the part of the same whole, one and only, have I not heard every myself song every birdsong and saw myself take flight in every sunrise and hunted myself and ate myself, have I not given birth to myself and died in my own hands every day and every night for all eternity and hence and shall do so all eternity henceforth, in this rock and in many more, everlasting and never ending, me, and only me, the only being to have ever existed, that is existing and shall ever exist.
Do I not know this to be true?