The Hallway

This is how it feels. The result of mania twisting into an agitated depression mixed state, colliding into dissociation, leading to insomnia, and tumbling down into major depression, all in a 48 hour period.

It's not simply positive or negative. Both endlessly swirl around me like an infinite hallway through existence. A library of all that is, was, or ever will be. A realm where infinity dispels all notion of time, and the singularity of all existence stagnates. No longer is the painting being painted. Completed, the process all over, it simply is -- in its entirety, never changing.

Excerpt - Science, Spirituality, and the Brain

Cognitive dissonance arises when different parts of the brain are active, but struggle to communicate with one another. Inevitably, reality and perception clash. One’s perceived reality becomes like a disjointed blending of mutually exclusive narratives, as though trying to reconcile To Kill a Mockingbird and Moby Dick as the same book. In this analogy, the individual tears out various pages from the two books and tries to bind them into one book which haphazardly shifts from one incoherent narrative to another. Eventually, you loose both narratives in the process.

Polarisation happens when different parts of the brain act in opposition to one another. A person may reject all emotion in favor of logic, or they may reject science and reason in favor of religion. Certain parts of the brain become much more dominant than others. In some ways, parts of the brain may become atrophied, whether from lack of use, damage, isolation from the other parts, or some other cause. This results in very specific areas of the brain becoming heavily fortified and mutually exclusive from the ‘weaker’ parts. The weaker parts continue to fade due to a lack of incorporation. Using the previous analogy of To Kill a Mockingbird and Moby Dick, polarisation would be like asserting that To Kill a Mockingbird is a book, but because Moby Dick is not To Kill a Mockingbird, it is somehow not a book. Polarisation is black-and-white, binary hyper-categorisation.

When a brain incorporates the entirety of its functions and parts, one can finally realise that To Kill a Mockingbird and Moby Dick are both books, that there is no false dichotomy of one book being ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong,’ and that they can coexist without being melded into a single, incoherent text.

Ants

As a kid, I used to just sit outside in the spring and summer in the early evenings, right around when the sun sank beneath the hills and tree canopies. The sprinklers ærosolised the pollens and dust, filling the air with the smell of suburban nature. Soon after, the smell of barbecues would waft from yard to yard. I'd sit in tranquil solitude, watching the ants marching, transporting, and constructing. I imagined the lateral dissection of their seemingless endless, interwoven tunnel systems. I brought myself down to their scale, viewing their societies, their languages, their politics and wars... I imagined their daily lives, their hierarchies, their struggles and accomplishments. I did this until the sun faded, and the lighting became a softer, dimmer blue.

My whole life, I've seen patterns that seemed to zoom in and out infinitely. Human, ant, bacterium, molecules, atoms, subatomic particals... Humans, governments, planets, solar systems, galaxies, the universe. Whichever way I zoomed, be it larger or smaller, I saw the same patterns repeating and repeating: fractals.

It was order. It felt natural.