Theory of Everything #2

 Theory of Everything #2

The sun was low and red over the Serengeti, the kind of sun that doesn’t just set but bleeds into the horizon like a gut-shot lion—slow, inevitable, beautiful in its ruin. I had just come back from hunting the big cats, the barrel of my rifle still warm, my hands steady despite the gin. There is a purity in killing that men don’t like to talk about, the same purity you find in a well-executed verónica, where the cape swings just so and the bull’s horn misses your ribs by the width of a cigarette paper. You are alive because you understood something in that moment—something about angles, about fear, about the way the world bends when death is near.  

Now, I am heading to the south of France, where the sea is the color of a Rolls-Royce’s hood under a Mediterranean noon, and the hotel rooftops have jacuzzis deep enough to drown a man’s sorrows if the cocktail waitresses don’t get to him first. And between the lion’s roar and the salt on my lips, it occurs to me: there are only two ways to understand this goddamn existence, and I think I’d like to drop a few words regarding this “theory of everything.” So anyway, the two modes:

The Outie and the Innie…..

First, there’s the outie version. This is the one the scientists and the grim-faced materialists love. In this version, you are a bag of meat and electricity, a temporary arrangement of atoms that will one day collapse like a poorly built burladero. The universe is a cold machine, and consciousness? A flickering illusion, a byproduct of neurons firing like cheap Roman candles. Quantum mechanics tells us that particles pop in and out of existence, that time is relative, that entropy is the only god that matters. Fine. But explain to me why, then, when I drink absinthe in Havana, the green taste of it feels like the first time I ever saw a woman naked in a brothel in Pamplona—like the world had cracked open and shown me something true.  

Then there’s the innie version. This is the one you feel in your guts after the third bottle of wine, when the stars aren’t just burning gas but the eyes of dead friends watching you. In this version, you are a soul, a thing that cannot be measured, only felt. The five senses are just the beginning—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—but there is a sixth, a knowing without knowing, like the moment before the bull charges, when the air itself tenses. To understand this sense, you must imagine a dimension beyond this one, a place where the word of God is not a sermon but a spear, where meaning is not deduced but revealed. 

We build our world on light. Photons hit the retina, the brain decodes them, and suddenly you’re staring at a Parisian sunset or the curve of a woman’s hip. But what if God had said, “Let there be flavor,” instead? What if the first law of existence wasn’t electromagnetism but the sweetness of a ripe peach, the bitterness of good whiskey? The devil, of course, would be the one stealing the taste, turning wine into vinegar, love into habit.  

Science tells us taste is just chemistry—molecules binding to receptors, signals firing. But tell that to the Spaniard weeping over his grandmother’s paella, or the soldier who dreams of his mother’s soup while crouched in a trench. The tongue knows truths the mind cannot prove.  

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you in the textbooks: consciousness is a higher dimension than reality itself. Reality is what you perceive—but change the perception, and reality bends. If your eyes saw only infrared, the world would be a fever dream of heat signatures. If your nerves were dead below the chin, you could press your hand to a stove and feel nothing. The body is a liar. The soul? The soul knows.  

I once met a man in Tangier who had been burned so badly in a fire that his face was a mask of scars. He drank rum like water and laughed like a man who had already died. “Pain is just a rumor,”he told me. “The body screams, but the soul listens to better music.”

The sixth sense is not ghosts or premonitions—it’s the part of you that recognizes a truth before logic confirms it. It’s the way a lion hunter knows, just before dawn, that today is the day he’ll miss his shot. It’s the way a matador, if he’s good, feels the bull’s intention in his bones.  

Quantum physics hints at this. Entanglement—two particles linked across space, instantaneously reacting to each other—suggests a layer of reality where distance and time are illusions. The spiritual realm might just be the dimension where these connections live, where every life is a thread in a tapestry too vast for our eyes.  

So here we are, drunk on a rooftop in Marseille, the stars above us, the sea below, the waitress with the green eyes pouring another glass. The outie version says we’re doomed—entropy wins, the universe cools, all stories end. The innie version says the story never ends, that the soul is a thing that outlasts stars.  

I don’t know which is true. But I know this: when the last lion is hunted, the last bull killed, the last bottle emptied, there will still be men staring at the sky, wondering. And that, amigo, is enough.  

Now pass the whiskey. The night’s not done yet.

ATILA