A Genre-defying Narrative Explores the Nature of Reality 

What if Socrates had read A Brief History of Time? The result might look something like J. Joseph’s Kazden’s TotIs, which Kirkus Reviews calls “a learned, bold journey to the limits of human perception and beyond.” In Kazden’s debut, the father of Western philosophy explores big questions with characters who pay homage to some of history’s greatest thinkers, from Leonardo da Vinci to Max Planck.

The word Kazden chose for his title is one he invented to capture the ideas at the heart of his work. A totIs phenomenon exists outside of time and space as a unified whole. This is reality. Humans are encompassed by this reality, but we cannot comprehend it. What we think of as reality is an illusion, a product of our limited senses and our experience of time. The only reality we can truly know is the one we create in our minds, what Kazden calls “ant Is reality.”

As the friends Kazden has assembled converse, their discussion touches on a variety of complicated scientific topics. But in one of the story’s most arresting moments, Socrates blows his friends’ minds by telling them that even the most advanced scientific theories are—like everything else humans are capable of knowing—built on illusions:

“The one and only common denominator in every experiment ever produced is a human observer, yet the act of observation, we’ve come to see, is an illusion whose foundation is the acceptance of a past, present, and future as real. We bend and twist the observations to make sense of the data as existing ‘out there,’ when in fact it’s all ‘in here,’ in our biology and our sensory processing system.” 

“But what about all the proofs provided by amazing physics and mathematics?” asked Neatono.

“Scientists looking through the lens of human experience believe in the process of nthe universe becoming manifest in a now via an unknown future and into an unchanging past. The mathematics we have developed has become excellent at describing a universe that works in such a manner, but, if time does not flow, it is describing an illusion,” I said.

Socrates goes on to explain that we can only experience what our biological form allows us to perceive, which is to say the universe that our senses are capable of comprehending. This is heady stuff. Speaking from his home on Bainbridge Island outside of Seattle, Kazden says that he struggled to find an engaging way to present it. Early drafts were, he adds with a laugh, “just pitiful and unreadable.” Then he thought of Plato’s Republic, and he realized that Socratic dialogue might be the best way to share his thoughts. “This form allows the ideas to come out in discussion….Dialogue can show people having doubts, people wondering.…I just started writing it out to see how that would work, and lo and behold, all the characters were there, all the questions were there, all the answers were there.”

It was a brilliant move. By transforming what had been a monologue into a conversation, Kazden was able to turn his characters into proxies for a diverse audience. Socrates’ old friend Neatono, for example, is able to speak knowledgeably about the theory of relativity and quote Stephen Hawking, while his sons ask questions and voice reservations that create a space for the narrator to clarify his ideas. A reader with a working knowledge of quantum mechanics will likely come away from this text with something different from a reader who is encountering advanced physics for the first time, but both can find a guide through the narrative.

Kazden himself is a compelling character. He’s built upon the ideas he introduces here in a second book, Gita, and he has also authored Tao, a new interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. These days, his primary occupation is writing, but his professional life has included stints as a cabdriver and short-order cook. Work in construction—including running his own business—led to a career in art.

In a free-wheeling chat that touched on everything from the 18th-century mathematics used to park the James Webb telescope to the metaphysics of playing solitaire, Kazden expanded on the ideas he presents in his book. He explained how his thinking has been shaped by an Albert Einstein quotation he uses as an epigraph—“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”—but he also added, “Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, many Indigenous cultures….They all have an understanding of the illusion of the duality of reality.”

Time doesn’t exist in the totIs universe. Everything that is and everything that can be exists all at once—and we are part of that totality. When asked what this means for free will, Kazden responded, “When we look at separate things occurring in space over time, that’s cause and effect, which is something that we create. What I like to say is we think that stuff happens to us and that’s how cause and effect work. But there’s another way to look at it. Stuff doesn’t happen to us. Stuff happening is us.” 

From this perspective, “To worry that we don’t have free will misses the point,” Kazden continues. “We’re still going to live the lives we live because we are conscious human beings. But at the same time, we can live it all. We are so inextricably linked to reality, to the universe, that we’re here for the duration, from the Big Bang till the Big Freeze. The universe can’t exist without every single one of us, or we wouldn’t be here. That’s pretty liberating to me.” 

To understand all this, for Kazden, means to live without fear. “Why should I be afraid of what’s going to happen to me? It’s my life, and I want to experience the whole damn thing. I don’t want to just experience the so-called good parts. That doesn’t make any sense. I have one life, and it’s composed of a gazillion different things. I want to experience every single one of them.” 

Jessica Jernigan is a writer and editor who lives and works in Central Michigan.