Breach the strata.

The concept of simplicity is a universal translator for all concepts, theories, and ideologies. The Universe is a ridiculously complicated mechanism, a complexity infinitely wider than the maximum girth a human intellect can wrap itself around. This is a universal facet of all sentient life in existence.

The Universe itself understands its own inner workings no better than we do; after all, do we truly understand our own inner workings? Do we have a grasp on the meaning of life, or the substructure of an atom? The Universe moves amongst other Universes and exacts its own science upon its own scale, and the complexity of that much larger existence is very much the same. Life, after all, scales infinitely in either direction, and there is no way within reason for most of us to understand it.

Some of us are, for whatever reason, seen fit to know. We are granted a torturous bane of an existence where we understand the true scale of all things. It is breathtaking and it is terrifying and it drives most of us mad. The rest stay quiet, and composed, and calculative. We live out our days unable to share the truth with the human world, since the burden of proof is impossible to bear.

We watch as our race simplifies the inner workings of everything to better understand them. Abstraction is an ideal for sentient life, but arrogance comes along with it - humans see their sentience as a step up from other creatures, but they cannot consider that other levels of awareness exist above it. Indeed, the human race comprises multiple stratifications of sentience in and of itself.

The vast fields of chemical reaction that form consciousness and memory are reduced to subsets of classifications in textbooks. The imagery that flows from those fields onto a page or canvas is picked apart by the words of those who cannot understand their creation. The most fleeting and impossible to contain of human emotions are assigned a few mere letters for their common conveyance.

Simplicity. It speaks to the human neuron. A common language for a common level, one to be used by us and observed by the invisible ones.

If only the planet had a neighbor with a cure

Pond scum is a common analogy for the lowest classes of Americans. Perhaps it's best taken as part of a broader symbol - human society as a pool teeming with life. There's the scum at the bottom, the tadpoles feeding on it, the lily pads floating on the surface, the flowers grasping desperately skyward, and so many other layers.

You wait in line at the supermarket. It's nine at night, and you're a lone warrior, collecting an array of drinks to refresh the supply at a gathering. Your gathering. You arranged it, and you did the leg work, and therefore the mindshare taking place is your property. There is one express lane open, it being so late at night, and you mingle amongst bachelors in its cue.

A couple has dammed it, though, with their girth and their slow minds and their glut of products that clearly violates the twelve-item limit. Why doesn't anyone enforce these things? Why are these pustules allowed to breach the terms of the honor system? As if they have any honor anyway.

They buy cat food, and diapers, and Hot Pockets, and beer. They have a packet of food stamps and coupons with which to obtain all of this material at an immaterial cost to them. Meanwhile, your personal mindshare, which you spent so much time and money meticulously organizing, is fluttering away back home. The bachelors stare and mutter. The blockage is aware of what it is doing, but it doesn't care. How dare this pond scum break the rules in such a vile manner?

This system works better than you might perceive with your feeble, selfish mind. There is no pond scum, there is only a disease, but not a disease upon you or upon society, but a disease upon the Earth. We are the natural order, but in the same sense of a pox.

What if we all experience time in the same chronology?

Meat. Naught but meat. Gazelles who turn around themselves searching for a purpose that isn't there. They spend their days obsessing over themselves, for they are their own perceived world. They sense the lion - an intruder in their conscious environ - and they escape into the dunes that envelop the oasis.

The lion simply waits, taking the chance that his meat may reason that it will die out in the dry sands if it does not return for the precious water and vegetation - the meat of the meat - that it needs to live.

Ice cold wind, one pure adjective of this desert, does not provide relief, or shelter, or sustenance. The meat performs some sickening form of cryptozoology upon the ragged, fiery dunes. It discovers that which it did not believe could truly exist: A way of sustaining life on a long, dry journey through this arid world. A thing of legend living beneath the sands. The meat creates a way to fashion itself shelter from this wicked environ. The meat lives on.

Meat of the meat is not enough for the lion. It is one link in the chain, and it cannot skip the next step down. The vegetation can sustain the meat, and the meat can sustain the lion, but the vegetation does nothing for the lion. A simple, efficient machine would have been impossible to build in this existence, and instead, complexity reigns. One piece of the chain falls, and the rest must adapt. If too many pieces fall, the machine chokes, sputters, and dies, and life ends.

The lion ends. The meat finds a place in another chain. One machine traded for another.