My mind jumped through some hoops last weekend. It was utterly bizarre. At one point I was wondering which movie I’m living in: A Beautiful Mind, or The Matrix / The Lord of the Rings. I literally went for a run, just in case some equivalent of the agents or the Nazgûl were coming for me. Yea… nuts. I was actually fully self-aware about the “madness”, but decided to just enjoy the ride. It was exhilarating and fun!
Oh, why that response, you ask? Because I felt I could see The Matrix or that I discovered “The One Ring”, figuratively speaking. I stared nihilism in the face and wondered if I was about to spontaneously self-destruct. As I said, bizarre, and remarkable. I’m now wondering what paranoid schizophrenia is.
I had some bread and wine on Sunday, because I wanted something “real”. Food and drink? That is real. As real as it gets. On Monday afternoon I got my brain back in gear, much more so than at any time in the past few years, and worked more productively than I thought possible. I had rediscovered the joys of being alive, and got my priorities straight again. And my thesis? Practically finished on Friday. I’m just waiting for feedback.
This morning I went for a cycle. 15km with 1180m altitude gain. And pain. Pain lets you know you’re alive. I actually enjoyed it, in some seriously weird sense, just thinking “it’s good to be alive”. (Yes, at one point I wondered if I’ll survive. However, having survived nihilism without going catatonic or Van Gogh, I now know I’m not going to die that easily. Hehe.)
I’ll explain the pain in the next post, and provide photographic evidence.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Clare // Dec 9, 2007 at 12:12 am
Glad to hear that you’re getting a chance to get active and away from thesis for a while. It feels really nice to click back after being depressed or stressed out. I’m having a domestic weekend with laundry, good cooking, getting round to things and getting excited by them again.
2 Who Knows? // Dec 9, 2007 at 12:22 am
Yea, reality. Reality is good. This stuff is all “reality”, rather than “the world inside our heads”.
With regards to the madness from last weekend, there were a number of catalysts. One was an eye-opening, world-view shaking “twilight-zone” experience that I don’t want to share on the internet, purely because it involves other people and their opinions.
The others? Well, stuff like thesis stress, yea, and thinking too much, around and around in circles, thinking in dichotomies and not realising there is always a third option, or something like that.
Thanks for the feedback, Clare.
3 gerhard // Dec 10, 2007 at 10:34 am
Reality is percieved via the world inside our heads , isnt this why its so easy to be in the matrix in the first place?
the matrix is just an expression of the world that consumes you, theology is such a thing and one can skip though those like tv channels ::P
(my 2c on the subject..)
4 Hugo // Dec 10, 2007 at 10:41 am
lousirr played with ideas like solipsism and nihilism. I’ll try and share more of what I learned from lousirr later. It’s tough though…
Are we ever not in a Matrix? Plug out once, and you don’t know if you’re still plugged in. 13th floor… So in the end? Give up on plugging out and just enjoy the game of life.
5 Hugo // Dec 10, 2007 at 10:51 am
Um, for certain ideas of plugging out. For other ideas, do plug out, please! Definitely worth it. Infinite recursion brings you to nihilism though, and that’s taking it one step too far. Or rather, get there, say “wow”, then dive back in.
lousirr wrote a “poem” about this as well. Maybe it can be published later… if there’s interest in that lunatic’s madness.
6 gerhard // Dec 10, 2007 at 12:08 pm
nihilism is as much life without science as theology is
science is about observation to form expectations of what isn’t part of the matrix
We’re not talking a physical matrix here we’re talking about a matrix of ‘thoughts’.
A generated reality to make up for the lack of understanding ….
breaking out of the matrix is about freedom.
freedom in this case means , liberty of thought , liberty of understanding , liberty of heart , without freedom to evolve we remain static, waiting for our deaths, slaves to life itself.
7 Hugo // Dec 10, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Yea, sounds good. Same conclusion lousirr eventually reached, even if he/she’ll deny it.
8 The Last Straw Drove the Camel Mad // Jun 4, 2008 at 10:47 pm
[...] detailed account of my interesting experiences late last year. The first post I made about it was Psychological Wierdness. Read that for the first take on this [...]
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