An origin story gives purpose and meaning to our lives. It matters little the specifics of the story; it matters most that we have one; that it makes sense to our soul. It is our personal myth… our own private mystery, our mythos. Our mythic origin story acts as a polestar in our lives. It is, literally, the point of origin; the place from where all things began, and from where all things were spawned. It equates to a deeply personal Genesis. An Origin Story begins to answer the question, in a very deep and primordial sense, of “Where did I come from?”

My own origin story was first described to me by my best friend, Anthony, when we were both still teenagers, still forming our ideas of the Universe, and staying up late late late at night debating and exploring the deep philosophical questions that occur to all boys (and men) at one point or another in their lives. 

Later, decades later, another spin was placed on the story — yet to me it seemed, the *same* story — by my dear friend and acrobatic mentor, Christina.

With that long lead-in, here is the actual story:

[as per my recollection of a late night conversation that took place 4 decades ago with Anthony, c. 1986, around 1:00 am, in the sleepy suburbia of Bethesda, Maryland]

Hello World: a Mythic Origin

In the beginning,

there was a singular entity.

The entity just so happened to take the form of an unfathomably massive, intergalactic, trans-dimensional Cube, absolutely perfect in every respect. Crystal clear, floating all by itself (for there was nothing else), in the midst of the great void… the nothingness. All was in the Cube, and the Cube was All.

Suddenly, a flaw appeared. The flaw was infinitesimally small, absolutely invisible to the naked eye, and yet it was there. Like a microscopic nano-scale flaw in a perfect diamond. And as with the diamond, the flaw — the “imperfection” — defined the character, the essence, and in fact the perfection itself of the entity.

Yet this flaw went far beyond mere aesthetics. This flaw was structural. And though it began as an infinitesimal crack, it spread, and spread, and spread, like a spider web across a windshield, becoming unstoppable in its relentless cascade.

And just as suddenly as the original flaw appeared, the Cube shattered. It shattered perfectly into 8 smaller cubes, in fact, each precisely. 1/8th the size of the original… the fault lines running straight through the center in perfect symmetry. Just as quickly those eight each spawned another 8, each one eight of their parent, thus each 1/64th of the original. And the cycle repeated. Fractal infinity. In the end, there were an uncountable number of cubes, all mirror images of each other, and yet all curiously manifesting a unique facet of the flaw that started it all. So no two cube children were alike… though they were in fact remarkably similar.

And as these cleaves occurred, simultaneously, each cube propelled outward, as if a great explosion had rocked the Cube, shattered it into a trillion trillion quadrillion mini-cubes, and those children spread, rapidly and randomly, throughout the emptiness.

That was the First story of origin. And as you may have come to suspect by now, those Cubes are within us. Not literally, but energetically. Because those infinitely numbered, uniquely flawed cubes are our spirits… our spirit selves, our souls. Literally, our star seeds. They speak our truth: that we are all very similar. That we all come from the same source. And that one day, we will return to that same source, from which we came.

Our job in life is to identify our unique impurity, our personal spiritual fracture, and to see it clearly, and to, if possible, repair it. And once repaired, to re-unite with our neighbor cubes, once they too have purified themselves. And once we find our eight, to re-unite, as a single spirit. And thus to re-unite with other eights. And so forth. Until, in the end, in the End of Days, all the individual cubes are purified, all the fractal divisions have been re-united, and the original Perfect Cube of Being is re-constituted.

And it will be… Complete.

And, perhaps, at that time,
in no time, in all time,
the cycle will begin again…