The Project Gutenberg EBook of Cogito, Ergo Sum, by John Foster West

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Title: Cogito, Ergo Sum

Author: John Foster West

Release Date: June 17, 2009 [EBook #29149]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_Are the Spirit and the Flesh one and the same thing? Or are they
separate entities, dependent and at the same time independent of
each other? Perhaps some great Cosmic Law holds this secret. But the
one Universal Element that we can depend upon, apparently, is The
Lucky Accident._

cogito,
ergo
sum

_by ... John Foster West_

A warped instant in Space--and
two egos are separated from their
bodies and lost in a lonely abyss.

I think, therefore I am. That was the first thought I had. Of course not
in the same symbols, but with the same meaning.

I awakened, or came alive, or came into existence suddenly, at least my
mental consciousness did. "Here am I," I thought, "but what am I, why am
I, where am I?"

I had nothing to work with except pure reason. I was _there_ because I
was not somewhere else. I was certain I was _there_ and that was the
extent of my knowledge at the moment.

I looked about me--no, I _reasoned_ about me. I was surrounded by
nothingness, by black nothingness, a vacuum. Immense distances away I
could detect light; or rather, I could perceive waves of force passing
around me which originated at points vast distances away, vast in
relation to my position in the nothingness.

There were waves of force all about me, varying in frequency. The
nothingness was alive with waves of force, traveling parallel and
tangential to each other without seeming to interfere one with another.
I measured them, differentiated between them and finished with the task
in a matter of seconds.

How could I do it? It was one of the capabilities I was _created_ with.

What was I? I perceived the waves of force. I perceived great quantities
of mass--solid, liquid, gas--whirling in vacuum, mass built up out of
patt