Shattered Crystalline Matrix

This is more of a “dear diary” or “note to self” post; go read something else if that’s not what you’re looking for. It follows on from an earlier post, but isn’t nearly as introspective, so don’t look for any deep insights here. I probably wouldn’t have posted this at all, but the words were flowing, and lately I’ve been trying to take advantage of that whenever I can. So, don’t say I didn’t warn you…

I was the one who would not abandon you;
even in death I was the one who would not leave you.
I used my freedom to protect you,
and all the while direct you;
do you remember me this time?
Even in death I gave you life,
I gave you life.

– Dream Theater, The Ministry of Lost Souls

For the past few weeks (actually, past couple of months), I’ve been rather busy on the work front. I don’t want to go into too much detail, because the detail is mostly irrelevant, but suffice to say that it’s been enough to consume a substantial amount of time and attention. I tend to work best under pressure, and so I’ve been operating at much closer to my maximum potential than I’ve experienced for a while; coupled with my relatively newly unlocked emotional intensity, this has made for a rather extreme ride, although it has also been immensely fulfilling.

There’s one aspect I’m having to adjust to right now, though. I’ve been drawing much more deeply on my emotional strength to keep me going; this was necessary to avoid burnout, but since I’m still not really used to these levels of intensity, I’ve been experiencing again something I had completely forgotten about until now. Somewhere back when I first took control of my emotions after flaring out of control for so long, I recognised that while certain situations might threaten to overwhelm me with negative emotions, turning away from these situations would be just as fatal in the long run as suppressing the emotional responses would have been. Turning away means isolating myself from parts of the world, while suppressing the response leads to a mental callousness or numbness that would prevent me from empathising with others. I knew I could cope with the emotion no matter how intense, so it was just a matter of exerting the willpower to endure the experience.

Over time, I became used to the process; the experience never became any less intense, but the willpower required to avoid turning away became second-nature. Now that things have escalated to a much higher level, I’m suddenly having to deal with this temptation again. When confronted with pain, suffering, sorrow, anger, and other negatives, I’m finding that a much higher level of willpower is required. Intellectually, I know this isn’t something there’s a mental limit to; no matter the intensity of the emotion, the mental capacity will be there to cope with it; if not, the mind automatically filters the intensity down to manageable levels. However, knowing this, and actually practicing it, are two completely different things; so, I’m having to learn all over again to consciously suppress the urge to turn away from the situation at hand, or suppress the emotional response.

Anyhow, that’s all for now; I’ve got some other stuff floating around, but it’ll have to wait for another post, since nothing is concrete enough yet to put into words.

And I,
want to tell you;
but words so clumsy are not my friends,
they starve these thoughts when they begin.

And I,
still need you to know;
but my lips are tightly holding back,
the sentiment inside is lying trapped.

— The Crüxshadows, The Sentiment Inside

So, you may be wondering what's up with the weird prose I've been posting here lately; hopefully this post can shed a little light on something that's not so easily put into words. We're going to be heading into some of the deeper regions of my mind here, so if none of this makes any sense, it's probably either because your mind is wired very differently to mine (which is true for most people), or because I'm just a raving lunatic (I certainly hope that's not the case, but there's obviously no way for me to tell).

I have a relatively high degree of meta-awareness of my mind's functionings; I've recently discovered that it doesn't actually go as deep as I thought — or rather, that my mind goes deeper than I had previously thought, but nonetheless, I suspect this self-awareness is above normal levels. I am also a concept user (this may, in fact, be the source of my self-awareness); as a high-level concept user, my mind tends to make associations and take note of isomorphisms across concepts drawn from completely unrelated areas. One of the results of this process is what I have sometimes referred to as my "inner fantasy narrative".

At a certain level, all concepts are simply metaphors layered on other metaphors; if I use a word, such as "red", that word is simply a metaphor for the aggregate concept attached to that word; that concept is an aggregation of the individual conceptualizations of thousands (or millions, or billions) of people, and yet every person will have a slightly different mental representation or conceptualization of that concept, since mental concepts cannot stand in isolation from other related / dependent concepts. What I refer to as my inner fantasy narrative is a surreal blend of fantasy, imagery, and metaphor. On one level, it serves as an outlet for my romantic approach to life; on another level, it serves as a mental tool for manipulating concepts that are not fully formed — particularly concepts that simply cannot be put into plain language to be communicated to others. The source of these "partial" concepts is, of course, my intuition; for all my scientific-mindedness, on an operational level I am a highly intuitive being. I rely almost exclusively on my intuition for decision-making, and my intuition is almost never wrong; that's not to say that my intuition always provides the "right answer" in any particular situation, but the answers it does provide come with an associated degree of certainty; so when my intuition suggests a particular answer with a high degree of certainty, I can be highly confident in that answer.

So, what the heck *is* this fantasy narrative? In one way, it's like a work of fantasy fiction; I draw on concepts and images from works of fiction by many authors, as well as other media such as music, movies, TV series, games, and so on, along with images of my own creation. In this narrative, I am, of course, the hero of the story: the wizard battling the power forces of his enemies, the spy slipping quietly through society leaving no traces, the white knight in his shining armour riding to rescue the damsel in distress, the dark demon leaving carnage and sorrow in his wake. These aren't delusions of grandeur; the whole point is that it *is* fantasy, not something I truly believe. It's not meant to be a concrete representation of reality, and in fact, it cannot be a representation of reality; it provides a way to mentally represent combinations of concepts that are not necessarily reified in real life (say, a conceptual overlap between business and music), or even concepts that are incoherent or inconsistent.

This is the source of the writing I've been spewing out here of late; in some sense, it's a biographical / autobiographical story, but certain aspects are dramatized / fantasized, and in other places I've deliberately changed the facts of the story, either for effect, or because I cannot adequately describe the true facts of history.

Where am I going with all of this? I'm not entirely sure; I've mostly been writing simply for the sake of writing. If you find it enjoyable simply for the sake of reading, that's great; if you identify with some of the fuzzy concepts embedded in the writing, even better. Just don't take any of this too seriously; in some sense, there are deep truths buried here, but only in the same sense that the alphabet contains every possible concept. This is not Zen Buddhism: any deep truths you discover will be drawn from your own experiences and wisdom, not through some deep wisdom that I've cleverly hidden in my writing.

There's probably more to come in this meta-expository vein; in particularly, there's more stuff I'd like to say about emotion and empathy, but I'll stop here for now.