The world is swirling with coincidences and the faces of famous people. Bill Nighy is my only real life celebrity sighting and I can tell you he does the same gesture with his hands in real life as he does when he’s talking sweet nothings about art.

Another coincidence, or an idea in the ether. I played a video game the other day. In it, you progressed through the six paths of reincarnation - were shown and forced to chose between material goods and sensations. To pass through one level, I had to accept that heaven, or the ideal of constant pleasure was incoherent or at least inconsistent with actual human desires, and choose to leave. In the next, I was asked amid flames and grotesque, twisted limbs to reconsider fear of hell as fear of embodied pain, and to relinquish this as well.

In one ‘world’ that I passed through, the monsters kept reappearing and I kept slaughtering them and the voice kept booming in my ears through the headset, telling me that the game itself was calculated to make this experience seem real and it would go on for as long as I kept believing it was real but just as the images and noises were merely information presented on a given wavelength, so too was what I perceived as the material world outside of the game. In order to move on, I had to stop slaughtering the monsters in the way, and instead fight the only remaining barrier, my own ego. Which I then did, in a manner reminiscent of the final fantasy games of my youth.

I emerged from the building feeling elated.

I’ve spent time in the past, hanging out on the edge of groups that reject material things: in houses where the food is the same budget curry most nights, where galleries and brunches are dismissed as being poor value. But of course, these aren’t the first social groups to embrace asceticism. It’s also not a co-incidence that that so many of the millenarians did too. What I think the modern ones miss, at least, is the value of environmental change on the emotional state. It seems ignorant of how the mind builds the self: by keeping emotion stored in sensations. From the sight of an object to a sound or a taste or a movement, the set of memories associated with that build, over time, our patterns. To live the ascetic life, to purposefully remove the variety of sensations one is exposed to, reduces the likelihood that these emotions will be recovered. It smooths the path of experience.

In the height of the personality test fad (where Myers-Briggs and Enneagrams were popular choices for dating app bios), I thought it would be funny to invite a guy I was chatting with to come get the ultimate personality test: the Scientology one. So we met for the first time in the foyer of the local church and were obediently led to the corner of the visitor’s room where we filled in our tests at our separate school desks. Mostly it was full of the usual, self-reporting social behaviours. The only unusual feature was there were a bunch of questions about how often one thought about the past. I thought about it a lot, I said. Because I did. I’d moved away and hometown faces kept floating into my vision, both incorporeally and attached to strangers’ bodies. Gestures and habits and vibes in these new foreign places seemed borrowed from moments in my previous life.

My date got his results back first. He did pretty well, he could be successful in the church, it would help him to read Dianetics.

My turn.

The woman who was explaining my results was genuinely concerned. She told me my results showed I was terribly, dangerously depressed and needed their help immediately. She asked me if I was on any medications, and seemed relieved that I was not. If I wouldn’t buy a copy of Dianetics, would I at least go to get it from the library? The church could help me, and I really needed help.

While we were waiting for our results we’d watched some of the explanatory videos that were set up on display screens around the visitor’s room. Scientology, it turned out, teaches that traumatic memories are stored differently in the brain to normal, day-to-day memories, and the way to remove their traumatic power is to fully bring them to mind in every detail, with a guide, at which point they will be remembered neutrally and harmlessly. Dwelling too much on the past is a sign of deep and troubling unresolved trauma. All of which boiled down to: one rather awkward debrief with my date after we left.

Imagine now a map of ideologies. The intersections (between, say, Jesus’s ‘love your enemies’ and the fourth stage of metta bhavana, or the hippy and Scientology’s shared distaste for pharmaceutical interventions) and the divergences. The odd chasm, where ideas almost but do not meet (compare L. Ron Hubbard’s theory of memory and Proust’s). Then there are the parts of the map marked ‘Beware’, no matter which route one takes to them.

One of those is apocalyptic threats.

I defer, of course, to the experts on the timelines. But deferring doesn’t seem to equate to believing it in my bones, and at this moment I’m not on the street in my robes, in the crowd of flagellates and hangers-on, crying out the end is nigh. Crying out the end is nigh changes everything about how one ought to live, and what one should be willing to do. I wish the DANGER lights could flash faster and brighter.

In the short term, sure, we will drown in ‘content’. But I’m convinced the real struggle at our core will still be between seeking sensation and turning away from it. I mean, human sensation - which perhaps is Midjourney or ChatGTP as a lover, but we’ve put up a fight against pokies and heroin and all the other cheap ways of getting high in the past. It might just as well be ordinary love.

There is a void, near to us always, which comes into view when I think of the boundaries of the known world: the mystery of something rather than nothing. I can call upon that vertigo more and more easily these days, although it’s still impossible to convey it effectively to others. Everything we’ve built is as vulnerable to that void as buildings on a fault line.