The Pattern In Reality
and how to go insane looking at it
So far, the funniest day of my life was when I confronted the mushroom in front of my bathroom mirror. I had been staring at other things in the mirror all my life, staring at everything and anything except me. Instead of looking at my face, or my flesh, my body or my soul, I decided to look at me. What am I? Who the fuck is that in the mirror?
I was standing there, staring. To the outsider looking in, I was a stunned, quavering human. But in my mind, in me, everything was beautiful. In those brief minutes, the thoughts kept rolling in, splashing through my consciousness. Looking truth straight in the face is more beautiful than I imagined?remember to breath? For every great thought I?m rewarded with the feeling of awe, the feeling of discovering the truth. The kind of feeling any bathroom philosopher loves to feel! But that?s just what I felt. What I thought is more difficult to put into words; any psychonaut can attest to that.
I looked at my own self, right there, right in the eyes. I challenged him to a staring contest. He didn?t play fair, because he had the advantage. He was just a collection of light beams, he wasn?t sentient. Not alive like me, he couldn?t feel wounded looking at himself. Or could he? That is me, right there. Yet? I don?t look like me! My face is growing, shifting, my skull larger than usual. My face a swirling vortex, sucked into some black hole. At times like this, I have no choice but to ask: ?Are you an alien?? Yes. No. That?s a hallucination. I?m looking at the expanded me. Look past preconceptions. Look at yourself. Not your eyes. Look up. Look at yourself, your brain. Yes, that?s it. You can see yourself now, can?t you? Isn?t it great? Come closer? closer?
And I went closer, and closer, staring right at my brain, threatening to touch the mirror, when my eyes moved for a better look: both up there, both looking directly at my brain. Perverted crossed eyes. A sight so shocking that I had no recourse to save my sanity except to explode in laughter! That?s it! I just got the joke of humanity! We are our brains, just look at your brain in the mirror to find out! The punchline got lost somewhere in that swirl of hilarity. One of those insane inside jokes. It was ball-bustingly funny, and I doubled over, holding onto my scrotum just to make sure it wasn?t being smashed to a pulp. These will create copies of my pattern.
Before I got up on the floor I had forgotten the joke, but I was still chuckling. I looked back at myself, brain. Even with my eyes in their usual position, my reflected eyes just don?t look the same. They are inverted, Thatcherized. While stoned I learnt how to shift focus slightly to make words float on the pages of books. Now I could add this to my repertoire: mushroom eyes. Kippered, smashed, mashed, destroyed! Completely geschtonkenflapped! The night went on for hours, and the notebook filled up with insane scribblings, nearly to the end. More writing than ever before; I was happy. Fulfilled, reconciled with reality. Ahhh?
The next day, panic! What if any of it was real? What if these visions that I had were real? Aren?t they? If I experience something, then it must be real. What kind of reference point did this reality have? My mind must be it, I thought. My mind right now, is sober. There are two types of facts about my past. One, what I experienced. Two, what occurred prior to that experience. And prior to the past, I had eaten a cubensis mushroom. This silly little fungi was consumed, sacredly, by me. And at the time that I began having the hallucinations, your honor, was one hour after said consumption! So, through a process of deduction, we can conclude that the mushroom had something to do with it. The culprit, the criminal catalyst of the whole organization, was a shy smiling psychedelic mushroom!
What did it all mean? Was my mind poisoned by this mushroom, causing me to go insane for three hours? Everyone says it?s poison. The government, the church, my friends, and probably my family if I had asked them. And what would I say if someone asked me: ?Why does a mushroom do what a mushroom does?? Well, I?d be perplexed, and, looking at the grim reality of nature, conclude that the mushroom is defensively poisonous, a common-sense result of natural selection. They?re poisonous because they don?t want to be eaten. Evolution, baby! But does that answer really have any truth to it?
I think so, but I think it?s just the first twist in the outrageous truth. The mushroom is a product of evolution here on Earth, and like any life, it would rather live than be eaten. Hence poison. Yet I get a little antsy when people degrade evolution so much by thinking of it only in terms of ?survival of the fittest?. Life is so much more than that. I can?t accept that this mushroom formed for the purpose of poisoning humans, especially with such a divine poison. A poison that can?t kill you unless consumed in outrageous amounts. Brilliant strategy, mushroom ? but I know you are smarter than that. A wide variety of mammals eat mushrooms and other psychedelic plants. They don?t die, and neither do we. On the contrary, we seek them out for consumption, we even raise them in colonies to be devoured. I ask: why do humans have more complex reactions to mushrooms than an ape? Why do apes have more complex reactions to mushrooms than a bear? And why a bear over a dog, or a deer over a squirrel? Clues to the pattern.
I understand the confusion of being asked so many questions at once, having too much information thrown at you. I?ve been through it enough. The answers are so easy to feel, to communicate them seems impossible. Stone, language, paper, computers, phones, satellites, internet? we?re getting better at communicating all the time. Yet we?re still unable to describe the mushroom. The only way to know the mushroom is to meet one, greet one, and eat one! You can?t hear the truth about the mushroom from your friends or on the news. You either know, or you don?t. You either had the pleasure of meeting one, or you haven?t. You live in knowledge, or ignorance. Enlightenment or bliss. Pick your paradise, or pick your poison. Are you in the loop?
My brain has looked at reality and brought back models of it. Patterns. Everything I see are patterns, and patterns are made of nodes. Each node is made of a pattern, which is made of nodes, which are patterns, and so on and so forth. The things we have created are based on this simple yet subconscious principle: things do not appear randomly, they are patterns created by combinations of nodes. If we properly arrange a set of wooden boards, nails, cement, etc, we can create a house. A house doesn?t appear instantaneously, it is bound by time and spatial arrangement. So to does this principle hold for the rest of known reality.
The human body is a pattern made up of nodes: two arms, two legs, a torso, a head, two hands, two feet, etc. Each node is a pattern: the arms are separated at a joint into the upper and lower arm. Same for the legs. Our hands have four fingers and a thumb each, our feet have five toes each. The fingers are patterns of joints, bones, skin, flesh. Our head has a brain, a skull, a face. A face has a nose, two eyebrows, two eyes, a mouth, two ears. A nose, an eye, a mouth, all made of patterns of other body parts. A mouth made of a pattern of teeth. Teeth made of a pattern of calcium and other minerals. Calcium made of molecules, made of atoms, made of quarks. Our brains, too. Made of segments, the neocortex, the hippocampus; it?s a huge list. Each segment made of a pattern of brain cells, neurons, axons and so on. Each made of chemicals and molecules, atoms, quarks, etc. What does it all mean? Do the patterns have any meaning? Of course they do. Those patterns make up our brains, they make up us. We are nodes. Nodes make patterns. So what pattern are we making?
Other brains must be noticing the same thing. They are learning patterns in reality and shaping their brains accordingly. Different people obsess about different patterns. This makes them individuals, unique. Every day we talk about the pattern in reality. We try to figure it out and understand it. We tell each other which patterns we like, which patterns we hate, and why. We ask others what patterns they know about. We try to create new patterns, improve patterns, destroy patterns.
If patterns exist, and they do, then what about their opposite, randomness? Randomness exists too, although I can?t prove it. Patterns are made of randomness, each one has a unique signature of randomness. Randomness, in some form, has been transformed into patterns, and now these patterns hold back randomness. From randomness was born our universe, our pattern.
The laws of the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, time, space, dimensions, etc. These patterns are among the very basic, shielding us from randomness. Our galaxy, our solar system, our sun, and our Earth are all patterns shielding us from the chaos of randomness. These patterns grow in complexity, from the beginning of the universe to our present time. Patterns, when in abundance, shield the center from chaos, allowing for more complex patterns to arise. The complexity of the Milky Way allows for the existence of the Solar System, which allows for the existence of the Earth. The Earth allows the existence of life. Single celled bacteria allows the existence of multi-celled bacteria, which allow greater organisms to arise. Plants, fish, insects, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals, apes, humans. Humans form societies, complex cultures, which allow more complex individuals to arise. The great scientists, philosophers, prophets, and other minds of genius are not flukes, they are born out of a stew of humans that allowed and helped these revolutionaries to exist. A complex culture is more likely to birth a genius than a simpler, chaotic culture. Our brains are growing more and more complex, mimicking better patterns, learning and passing on knowledge, picking and choosing ideas that best match reality. My brain can never understand reality, but I can make a model of it that makes the most sense.
If you think I am insane for believing all this, then you are half wrong. The real reason that I am insane is because I believe that randomness is the incomprehensible imprint of an infinitely complex pattern.
--------------------
=|) minds are growing
Edited by sunconscious (04/14/02 03:50 PM)
|
even though i've never had the so-called hallucination i wouldn't call that one, i see that shit every day man, i'm so used to my fucked up perceptions it seems normal to me now, I smoked weed last night, it was funny because i waited for the high to come on, well it never really did seem as how i was already high on something else, if i could tell you what i would. life story: born, verbally abused, shitty unfulfilling life, ate some shrooms a couple years ago, got high, hit a lampost at 170km/hr, didn't die, read some books on spiritual enlightenment a few months ago, got high, wait, something doesn't make sense here, how can reading a book make you high, fucked if i know, been meaning to eat some more shrooms lately, found god, found hell, found heaven again, tried to forget i exsisted, tried to forget the world, still here, why, i serve no purpose, i have become heaven and hell, can't handle it, going nuts, thought i gave a shit about myself today, realized i didn't, gonna smoke some more bud tonight, mybe i'll give a shit tomorrow, hope i do, god doesn't look to kindly on people who think like that, wish i could stop thinking like that but it's just so fucking hard sometimes, every time i feel the divine light i pray for god to take me away, but then he tells me, hey mike you can't leave yet, you have so much left to do with your life, oh shit thats probably just my ego talking, damn ego, once i thought god wanted me to be a healer, i said sure but then realized the impossible task of healing myself, so i guess the point of this all is that, exactly, there is not such a thing, we just live, die, and live again ( exsist ), but what about my weird high, that doesn't fit at all with there being no point in anything, now the question is, where do i go from here? fucked once again if i know.
--------------------
insanity with a plan, a plan to stop exercising truth as compared to breathing thin air, but to experience truth as all there is to experience, for what do i not already have that exsists? All i can do is enjoy the ride.
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
sunconscious 
cHeMiCaLbLuE 
Edit 
Reply 
1 2 all )
pattern
1stimer
Quatch
chrispc
manna_man
AbstractSoul
Lallafa