Patterns From The Collective Underground

So long as you feel the human contact, the atmosphere of mutual confidence, there is no danger; and even if you have to face the terrors of insanity, or the shadowy menace of suicide, there is still that area of human faith, that certainty of understanding and of being understood, no matter how black the night.

“These associations place hallucination in contrast to “normal“ perception, which is assumed to reflect things that actually exist out in the world. On the top down view of perception, this sharp distinction becomes a matter of degree. Both “normal” perception and “abnormal” hallucination involve internally generated predictions about the causes of sensory inputs, and both share a core set of mechanisms in the brain. The difference is that “normal” perception—what we perceive— is tied to causes in the world, whereas in the case of hallucination, our perceptions, to some extent, lost their grip on these causes. When we hallucinate, our perceptual predictions are not properly updated in light of prediction errors.

“The immersive multisensory panorama of your perceptual scene, right here and right now, is a reaching out from the brain to the world, a writing as much as a reading. The entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous, making and remaking of perceptual best guesses, a controlled hallucination. You could even say that we are hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.”

The titles of the Gospel of Thomas and the Book of Thomas the Contender (attributed to Jesus' "twin brother") may suggest that "you, the reader, are Jesus' twin brother." Whoever comes to understand these books discovers, like Thomas, that Jesus is his "twin," his spiritual "other self." Jesus' words to Thomas, then, are addressed to the reader:

As little as we would accuse Christ of fraternizing with evil, so little should we reproach ourselves, that to love the sinner, who is oneself is to make a pact with the devil.

The way is not straight, but appears to go around in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic it is to define a center.

The passage of the mythological hero may be over-ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward-into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly under the terrible mutilations of ubiquitous disaster, battered by time, hideous throughout space; but with its horror visible still, its cries of anguish still tumultuous, it becomes penetrated by an all-suffusing, all-sustaining love, and a knowledge of its own unconquered power. Something of the light that blazes invisible within the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth, with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an immanent, imperishable eternity; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike.

Only birth can conquer death– the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be– if we are to experience long survival– continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified– and resurrected; dismembered, totally, and then reborn.

“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”

“Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.”

"How do you move on? You move on when your heart finally understands that there is no turning back."

“Synchronicity is like a waking dream in which we experience the point of intersection of the timeless with time, where the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual, and where what is inside of us and what is outside of us is unseparated. Like a dream, synchronicity reveals something we dimly grasp, glimpses of the underlying Tao.”

I have just realized that it is by no means a sign of weakness to be overwhelmed by the current state of our world. It is a sign that you are conscious. It is a sign that you are alive, and that you are not willing to believe that what we see in our world today is normal. If you feel radically uneasy at the current state of affairs, you are not broken or skewed. You are alive.