Jules was wrong. The vortex isn’t in Zaire. That fairytale—that she loves—never happened. There were never three guys in a truck that stopped and saw those orbs of light. That never happened. There’s a river basin, there—but you can drive right through it. The sky looks strange there, but just because you’re used to the skies over Manhattan, over Dayton Ohio. Not because there’s any vortex. There never was. It’s just a story we tell because we have to have something to believe.
Because we want there to be something to fear.
Because if we fear it, then it must be powerful.
And we want there to be something more powerful than ourselves.
Because the truth—that there isn’t—is too hard to take.
That death meant nothing? That it wasn’t caused by some powerful force? That there was no need to suffer, from any god’s point of view? That nature, that everything outside of us and everthing that is other than us..doesn’t care—just doesn’t care—about us, the way we do.
That we don’t matter, to the universe. The universe doesn’t care about us—that’s the truth. It doesn’t love us and it doesn’t hate us it’s just hosting us for a while. And when we’re gone, the universe won’t shed a tear. Not because "it doesn’t care", not because "it’s cruel"..but..because..it doesn’t have tears.
Now that you’ve seen that, what do you do? Do you come back and become a Nazi? No. Do you become some hard-ass who doesn’t cry at funerals? Or some zen master who doesn’t cry at funerals? Is that enlightened? No. You get back inside your body and you remember temperature and you remember clothes, you remember time and your job and your particular value system. They come back like memories when you wake. Every morning, you remember who you are. Every morning, for an instant, right when you open your eyes, you’re still dreaming, and the dream rules still apply. Then you remember. You remember that the watch you were looking for in your dream didn’t really look like the watch you lost in waking life, in "real life". You remember that that school, that you went to in your dream, doesn’t look like the real school you went to, in your waking life. You call your sister..and she isn’t dead.
You come at this story with consciousness. This is how we come at all stories. Like a frog—who comes at a story with frog consciousness. A frog might dream of his own sticky tongue—but sticky in a different way. The consciousness gives the story meaning—it’s how you understand. You can’t tell a frog story to a human—and it goes the other way. All stories—all stories—are moral. They’re there to please us—to convince us, to present a convincing argument for why the world should be some particular way.
Jules’s story is there—her story about the vortex—is there why? It’s a story about knowledge that can never be obtained—or knowledge that changes you. Knowledge that changes you so much that you can never be the same..so much that you can never even return. The vortex, the black hole, is her way of representing the idea that there are some things, that once you touch them, consume you, like fire. That not every door lets you back in, once you’ve gone out. That for some red pills, there is no matching blue pill.
The vortex is Jules’s way of saying you can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding. That you can’t be awake and then pretend to be asleep. There’s a road that leads to life—which I call the unraveling—and there’s a road that stays in death (which is like staying tightly wound). Once you unravel a tightly-wound ball of string so much..it doesn’t go back. It’s ok (it’s scary, but it’s ok). But it doesn’t go back.
Why do they say there are vortexes in Dayton?—or Zaire. I don’t know. I think sometimes when people think of vortex they think they’re going to get something out of it—like it’s some power center that’s going to benefit them, once they figure out how to control it. I don’t think you get anything out of a vortex (I don’t think that’s the best metaphor). I think Jules is right: you don’t take from it. It takes you, and you go in, and in, and in, and if you go in far enough, you never come out.