m i r r o r s

Introduction

Hey, I hope you're having a wonderful day today. There are a plethora of reasons as to why you could've stumbled upon this book, one in which I hope is positively influenced. Nonetheless, it's your reason alone and I am thankful to have you here. Besides, it'd be kind of rude to try and snoop around in your thoughts when you're here to snoop around in my own.

To be completely honest, I can't give you a synopsis of what to expect past this point, excluding this introduction. This is a book meant to project my consciousness and literate my ongoing thoughts as I experience the wholesome of what we call "life". Some of these chapters you may read will probably be as boring as watching paint dry. Some of them may have your nose coiled from it being pancaked against your screen. Hell, some of them may trigger you towards a point in which you never read this book again. Who knows?

Regardless of the way anyone reacts to it all, it's bound to be a very "different" experience.

My name is Adrian Anthony Lee II, and I was born in Jackson, Mississippi on September 1st, 1999. For your sake, I'm gonna spare all of the depressing clichés that I'm sure many of us have had to endure in the past. My dad wasn't around for a good portion of my life, my mom busted her ass to support my sister and I, hard times came and went, tears were shed, so and so forth. That's not what this is meant for.

I guess you could say everything relevant to this book started around eight grade when I underwent my existential crisis. For those of you who don't know, an existential crisis is an episode you undergo in which you question life, death, and your reason for being who you are. Existential crises are pretty much the foundations for the religious, scientific, and philosophical beliefs that define our species.

During that time, I understood that everything started with a question and a desire to uncover the mysteries behind said question. However, we also must sacrifice something in order to discover, in order to do anything really. Yeah, I know what I'm about to say is quoted from an animé, but the message still applies the same:

In order to receive, you must give something of equal value in return.

And no, that doesn't restrict itself to purchasing store products or sprouting metal polearms from a sea of sand either. In fact, it's almost identical to the actual laws that we abide by today. Energy in its entirety cannot be created nor destroyed, but rather converted into various forms (well, it technically can be destroyed, but that's for an entirely different story). From the cells in our body to Man industrializing the world in order to make the impossible possible, everything sacrifices something to get something in return. It isn't complicated, I promise.

Returning back to the point, I entered this existential crisis months after I got baptized. Growing up in a religious household, I was never really interested in religion...nor believed in it. Even as a child, I saw the contradictories that tied to Christianity, and the ego-fueled violence it stirred on a day-to-day basis. The other children around me in school would bully others for being different or having ideas that opposed theirs. It never made sense to me, and my mom had always lectured to me about the values of being a goodhearted soul, so I stayed away from everyone. I was antisocial. I had no friends. If it weren't for my mom, I would've had nobody.

Now, I don't know if I was born with ADHD, but the only friends I had were the ones that didn't exist. I would go outside everyday and play by myself until I was absolutely exhausted, which is what I believe developed my issue. I can't sit down in one spot or focus on one thing once my brain gets going, and I'm a very imaginative person. To this day, I live in my thoughts. It's my escape route from reality.

Well, that and the drugs.

The middle school I went to was in Michigan due to some racial conflict that happened in my old school. It was populated by Atheists, Agnostics, Christians, and the Undefined (those who didn't know what to believe, or just didn't care for that kind of stuff during the time). It didn't take long for me to denounce "my" Christian values and convert to Atheism. Hey, science was a big thing, and if anything I was pleased that people were stepping out of tradition and finding their own paths (even if you had your bandwagoner who would pop up every now and then). I compared bibles to the books, and I chose the books. It made much more sense than walking snakes and a boat capable of fitting the entire animal kingdom inside of it.

As time passed, more shit happened. A lot of more shit. This obviously caused my depression to transcend from Kaioken to Super Sayian, and a void formed inside of me. There was a bleak, empty, and lifeless feeling that I couldn't overlook, no matter how hard I tried. The more I researched and the more Atheists that I interviewed, the worse I felt. It was the thought of nothingness, being nonexistent.

Going nowhere.

I've never feared dying, but rather death itself. There are very thin lines that separate dying, the state of being dead, and death. Dying is the process, being dead is the absence of life, and death is the absence of existence. If death is what to expect as a result of dying, and nothing is eternal, then what was the point of life? Nothing I did anymore brought life to my eyes, and there was only so much reassurance I could gain from Humanistic ideologies. Some part of  me, regardless of how large, was not okay with accepting death. And soon enough, I renounced my Atheistic / Nihilistic beliefs. After that, it was Pantheism, then finally Panspychism. I believe that we all exist as minds amongst minds and are the center of our own realities. When we die, our souls ascend into a higher state of awareness and our realities manifest in response to the philosophies we embedded during our stages of physicality. Death does not exist, life is a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

As for my name, Omnism, it's another philosophical belief I have in which no belief is the truth, but every belief has truth within it. It expresses the idea of the subjective reality being the objective reality, and that we are the primordial features of all existing things, both concrete and abstract. If you need an example, research the well-known but hardly understood phrase "As Above, So Below". You'll be surprised how the evidence ties up.

I live my life one step at a time, observing and reflecting my surroundings, stepping back and seeing life through multiple point of views. No one knows what happens next, and we organize beliefs that help us direct our moral compasses in life. We live by our own structured codes in hopes that our decisions will grant us passage towards our own ideal realities.

You and I are different in so many ways, but it's those differences that make us similar in more ways than one. Don't you think?