The Sun

The sun’s thoughts are strewn among its magnetized plasma whirlpools. Chiefly, it worries about paying bills and taxes, for the solar mind has by chance accreted a set of experiences and perceptions that is much like that of a low-class, partially employed, personal trainer down to his last three clients. He drinks a cup of coffee in his dingy apartment as he stares at a pile of bills trying to come up with a strategy to pay the most pressing ones while ignoring the others. He is interrupted in his strategizing by the distinct notion that he is in fact a tremendous ball of fusing gases releasing untold amounts of radiation, much like the one that has recently risen to be framed quite nicely in his window. He takes a sip of coffee and meditates on that idea for a moment, and decides he doesn’t know how he should act on that information, should it actually be the case. As one current of convecting plasma that constitutes his reality converges with another he is presented with the thought that this notion of his is at best a kind of psychotic solipsism and doesn’t help him at all. It’s worse than that even, because the notion that he is a sun is slowly becoming stronger still, despite that he knows it is decidedly not in his best interests to have this belief as it will not pay any of his bills or taxes, which are already overdue. He takes another, longer sip of coffee, trying to ground himself on something concrete before him and while that coffee has its characteristic warmth and stimulating effect, the notion continues to reverberate in his mind loudly. It deconstructs itself and reconstructs itself in a variety of convincing and logical proofs until suddenly it is not just a strange notion, but an obvious truth that he had never quite comprehended until this odd epiphany when he finally put everything together. Unfortunately for him, he had not divined this truth by somehow perceiving the surging plasma that did actually constitute his every thought and perception, because there was no way for such information to be transmitted to him, as he was just a pattern within that plasma. If, somehow, he was able to perceive the very stuff that held within its vortexes the information of his mind, his mind would cease to be a mind at all and return to being ordinary, un-self-reflective plasma. No, he was just psychotic. Soon, after he had neglected to pay his bills and taxes, authority figures came to his door and, quite reasonably judging him to be insane, since they found him gazing transfixed at the blue flame of his gas stove, emaciated and naked, talking about stellar fusion cycles, they took him to a state psych ward. After many years of therapy and a number of different medications, he was finally disabused of that original notion that he was the sun. He was transferred to a halfway house and got a job in a machine shop that didn’t pay too well. He still had to worry about his bills a lot of the time, but not as much as before, maybe. Otherwise he was OK. He worked that same job for a trillion years, at which point the convection currents in the sun that generated his mind destabilized, but when that happened, he never knew it. Not even the slightest notion.