“We are, each of us and collectively, co-creators of reality, and this is not a metaphor. This collaboration is as real as it gets.

We are not mere passive apertures by which an active universe perceives itself — we are fractals of that prime activity, by which the universe stages dramas that are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the Great Story we call reality. To miss or disavow these subjective aspects of the Story is to admire a forest while giving no thought to root structure or photosynthesis, and to abdicate our co-creatorship only assures that our contribution will be dull and derivative.

Any perceived form of the divine Presence, be it a unity or a multitude — a white man in a robe, the Tao that cannot be named, mathematical language speaking itself into being, a pantheon of jealous gods and goddesses etc — is always part of our contribution, and it frames the story we will tell, winnowing the infinite possibilities of “I am” into something conceivable. That conception is never immaculate truth — it takes a form by being born here now and not there then — but it was also never meant to be otherwise. That maculate gem is a fractal of divine Presence; it is a story to tell, on a stage of its own choosing (the choice preceded its coming), and in league with the Presence that brought it forth out of pure potential. You are a star of your own production, and your story will reveal something unique if you let it.

People like to speculate about multiple objective universes outside our own. They’re missing the fact that every subject, each person (and there is no reason to limit personhood to humans), is a verse within our universe that opens inwardly. The multiverse is an inside job.

—from “When I Woke Up: Excerpts from the Notes of Estelle Perdue After the Vince Lombardi Service Area,” featuring ideas derived from the novel UNLESS,