The Water Cooler In Heaven

One day, God is hanging out in heaven by the water cooler, when he catches a spirit entity floating nearby. God offers the entity an invitation:

God: Hey spirit! I wanted to run an idea by you.

Spirit: Oh, hey God! Whatsup?

do you mean, born on Earth?

God: What do you think of being born on Earth?

My plan is to put you inside a human body.

Spirit: A human body? What’s that?

God: Yep. It’s essentially a vehicle for your consciousness that carries you around places and let’s you interact with the physical world.

Spirit: A body, huh? What’s it made of?

God: Basically it’s just a bunch of meat and water.

Spirit: Sounds interesting… how will I move it around?

God: Good question! My design for the human body was a funny one. Basically, your body will have two stilts, called legs, and you move around by heaving all of your weight from side to side between the stilts. Each time you catch yourself, you move forward a little bit. It’s called walking.

Spirit: Sounds a little burdensome.

God: I’ll be honest, it does have its drawbacks. Your body will often experience complications; certain parts will stop working, liquids will eject from certain holes, and sometimes you’ll excrete noxious gases involuntarily.

Spirit: *gulp* Anything else?

God: Oh yes, many more. But perhaps the greatest challenge is that your body is also going to be paired with a voice inside your head that doesn’t stop talking. Nonstop chitter-chatter. Some humans have found ways to make it stop talking temporarily, but it’s essentially going to be speaking nonsense until the moment you die.

Spirit: Alright then. How will I sustain my body?

God: Throughout the land and sea will be a rich and colorful diversity of other life forms. To fuel your body, you will collect these dead plants and animals and shove them into a hole in your face.

Spirit: That’s terrible!

God: Quite contraire! These plants and animals, called food, will generally create a magnificent sensation in your consciousness that is exploding with pleasure. Different combinations of foods create different types of pleasure sensations. The opportunities to fuel your body in creative ways are endless.

Spirit: So just to make sure I understand, I consume other forms of consciousness to provide sustenance for my own consciousness, and it actually feels good?

God: Indeed! Unfortunately, though, most humans are so busy and distracted with other things that they forget to enjoy the process.

Spirit: Oh… so anyway, tell me more about this Earth place?

God: Gladly! It is one of my proudest creations in the universe. The Earth is a sphere-shaped rock that hauls through space at an unfathomable speed, circling around a giant flaming ball that’s exploding unto itself.

Spirit: Golly gosh, that’s horrifying!

God: Yeah, and it gets even weirder. Each time the Earth spins in a circle, your consciousness takes time to enter a deeply relaxed state, where your mind will create a limitless number of immersive visions and hallucinations called dreams. And you’re going to be the main character in all of them!

But, when your consciousness turns back on, the flaming fireball will do something magical — it will appear to rise from below the Earth’s surface, sprinkling glimmering light particles onto everything, painting a mosaic of colors in the sky and making beings throughout Earth come back to life.

Spirit: Holy shit!

God: Dude, right?! There’s only one catch. Eventually the fireball is going to explode, and all life on Earth will be destroyed pretty much immediately.

Spirit: *taps leg* How about that…

Nate Macanian is a mindfulness teacher and psychedelic guide from New York. He mostly writes about meditation and consciousness, with sporadic attempts at poetry and other whimsical things. You can see more at https://www.natemacanian.com/writing