Matthatter

Imagine that you suddenly “Come to” (not that your body itself was sleeping or unconscious, but suddenly your mind “awakens” to realize that you are in a certain foreign situation without a clue as to how you arrived there).

Everything is novel, unfamiliar and new; there are no comfortable elements to latch onto for support in the comfort of a more peaceful, secure existence. Your adult mind, accustomed to operating by certain rules, finds yourself in a world where you know nothing aside from innate, unconscious, very natural/accustomed/learned ways of locating oneself in temporal space. There is an up and down and a side to side and the environment, for the most part, seems to abide by rules of physics that keep us walking upright along the earth’s surface, but there is no harmony here—no signs of past negotiations between two minds; no one would approve of this and strive to built a bridge of language for others to cross.

There is no cultural influence here, no evidence of any aesthetic natural selection. The space-configuration is revolting: elevations stiffly suspend over nothing. There are no grand columns, craftily formed to support a necessary space; there is merely a superfluous bulge—a cube shaped with mega-computer precision—popping out from the wall.

This closet of God’s old workshops—a forgotten task, an exercise that was crumpled up and tossed backwards—is lonely inside creation’s waste-basket (Shiva shakes his head disapprovingly at the sight of such unconstructiveness).

Your reaction to this environment tells you that this place is not meant for you; this design, the essence (or complete lack thereof) is not human and your mind does not belong here.

This is a mistake.

Are you sitting on the top of a hill, looking down into an underground tunnel? Are you staring into a television? Is it a poster? Are you stuck on the ceiling of some bizarre museum?

Are you able to get up? Do you have to sit there and wait all this out, hope it goes away?

You know you are there, though you don’t feel the ability to remove yourself from this situation.

Something has to change. Your mind has to change.

Your body doesn’t shake with fear, there is no pounding heart; no fight or flight reflex—that happens when you have the choice to do something.

There’s no choice here, just waiting it out.

Numbed terror, learned helplessness, utter apathy.


Hell?

Imagine this.

Here is where my story starts.


CHAPTER 1: A Time Out

I was stuck there.

There were others around me, walking behind me. I could feel their shadows, and it was with their imprint on my back that I heard shrill screams, desperate pleas, angry shouts and manic laughter. Yet I felt so alone, looking away, carrying out my sentence staring at this useless picture show. The scene was so uneventful, nothing to be afraid of, no danger. This was the start of a psychological—a spiritual—crisis.

(Little did I know, I had the power to paint over that horrible picture; for brewing inside me—and everyone for that matter—was the ability to constructively alter any situation.)

I had no idea how long I’d be there, but I was immersed. Horrified, but obsessed with the cosmic messiness, the solitariness, the repulsive drive to escape that begins to smell sweet as you have no choice but to inhale the stench and eventually associate its vile with cognitive-comfort.

This is introspection on steroids: everything one knows so focused into the processes of one’s own mind that the outside-fantasy disappears and one delves deeper into their dream-world; tossing away rules that govern the shared universe makes one’s self-creations, projections—their output of information given the input, the acting out of a deterministic universe through this self-conscious stem cell—further from culturally-accepted language-controlling collective interpretations of “reality”.

One can either keep their grip on these rules, and continue functioning in the shared physical playground, or finally move so far inside to have snapped the rope leading them back up the well.

I had dug too far you see. The roof of the tunnel collapsed.

How to get back?

Of course, the first constructive action that came to mind was when I finally asked myself “Why go back?”

What was I so attached to?