I find my thoughts racing, resulting in my inability to sleep. I’m thinking about my Crisis:
- At the core of the event was the realization that I had built my life on a bed of sand, and it crumbled when the tides of uncertainty came rushing in.But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. Matthew 7:24
- I think that I gave myself electroshock therapy, which sounds insane to write out, but it truly felt as if my nervous system was being reprogrammed: I felt shocks down my legs and arms and the nerve endings at the tips of my thumb and index finger turned black. Sensory stimulus afterwards, especially sounds and music, felt as though I was experiencing them for the first time.
- As a result, a depressive fog that has loomed over me for years and years was lifted. In the months leading up to the climactic event, I had incessant feelings of “strangeness” — something was amiss. I knew certain concepts and themes were important (e.g. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems) and was attracted to them, but I just couldn’t connect the dots. I’d try to write about it, but my cognitive pathways were blocked. The Crisis somehow unclogged these pipes.
- This all culminated in a moment of awareness and revelation, the seeds of which had been planted throughout my whole life. I experienced feelings of lucidity and control over self, whereas prior to this, I felt as though I was moving through life as a zombie.
I’m also thinking about the desire for truth. I sometimes burn with the desire to know the truths of the universe: what was the beginning of it all? What will be the end? Are we hurdling towards some cosmic teleological attractor? Is the desire to know what is fueled by one’s existential dread and a need to know what comes after death? Is there hope for salvation? Is there universal truth? Is there something everlasting and wholly immutable?
In Logicomix, they mention that logicians tend towards madness. This makes sense, when one realizes that we’ve built our reality upon sand. Does a rock on which to build our house even exist? The (likely) undecidable nature of this question is enough to drive one insane.
I’ve also been thinking about thoughts. I’ve recently realized how much of my cognition relies on visual or spatial constructs: it’s as if there is a visual “overlay” upon most concepts that I hold in my mind. For instance, when I think about months, I envision a calendar, and this calendar has a specific circular orientation (I’ll draw this later). When I think of weeks, I envision a calendar week, which is why my “week” begins on Sunday (rather than Monday, which is the most common answer amongst people I’ve queried about this). It’s the same with my slight grapheme-color synesthesia. Even less visual concepts have (subtle) visual associations: Christianity is an amorphous dark blob on the left of my internal visual field. I have no idea why.
Why is the human psyche so tormented? Why does it have to be that so many people crave what they do not have? How is it that we can come to better cherish that which we have? How can we, as Thich Nhat Hahn asks, embrace time with both hands and slow it down?
I read this quote from The Miracle of Mindfulness recently:
Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole earth revolves — slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.
Upon reading this line, my heart overflowed. One of my favorite songs (and will always be, until the end of time) is “For the Good Times” by Al Green: the first time I heard it, I couldn’t articulate nor understand the emotions that overcame me. I played this song on repeat and bawled for a solid 30 minutes.
But this quote — there is no more perfect textual encapsulation of my love and attachment to the song. Listen to the swelling of the synths and the soft, steady beat in the first opening seconds: does it not feel as if you are swaddled within a slow, constant, heavy rotation?
Even before reading these words, whenever I listened to this song, I felt an image of two people laying down together, stretched across the whole Earth as it slowly turns as if it were a vinyl on a record player. I think that this image captured the feeling of cherishing another as if they were “the axis on which the whole earth revolves.”
The lyrics, too, embody Thich Nhat Hahn’s reminder that “only this actual moment is life.” Al Green, with such weariness and bittersweet cadence, begs: Let’s just be glad // we have this time // to spend together // There is no need // to watch the bridges // that we’re burning… It’s no matter now: let’s just join in one last tender embrace, even as our world crumbles apart. It hurts my heart to even write this. The thoughts aren’t really fully coming through, and I’m not happy with how the words have come out, but this’ll have to do for now, at the very least to record the ideas.
Part of the reason that it makes me so irreparably sad is that it reminds me of the accursed human condition that is: only when we know that there isn’t any future are we able to fully come to the moment. We only are reminded of how good it is when it’s about to be gone. These thoughts remind me of loss and death.