Poem:
AtmosphericMultithreadedHemispheres

***

I’ve begun to notice, while sittin’/meditatin’, that Thought is not a monolithic process. Which is to say: there are at least two tracks murmuring away most of the time.

The process of my knock-off version of TM is simple. Stick to the (meaning-free) mantra. For twenty minutes. That’s it.

If you stray from the mantra, come back to it. If it happens again, come back again.

That’s it. “Effortless” just as they promised in the electronic brochure, although in no way “easy”.

The thing is, I think my brain is, at least, stereophonic, if not sometimes … quadraphonic?

I’m trying to stay singularly focused on the white noise of a pair of nonsense syllables, and most of the time, I am, just not singularly.

There’s another track full of ambient and ‘meaningful’ noise that consists, variously, of hearing the noise of the train or the birds or the cat-scratch at the door, and things that sound more like regular thoughts: “This is multithreaded, multitracked”, was one I had today.

The way I think (while attempting to not-think) about it is: turning the volume or gain on the meaning track way down; while cranking up the amplitude on the meaning-free mantra. Not necessarily trying to eliminate the meaning, but radically de-emphasizing it and prioritizing the white noise (which may or may not be the sound of the ground of being–that’s what the experiment is about).

It may be that the nominal meaning-constructs come from the left brain (logos) and focusing on the mantric background hiss is being done by the right brain (mythos), but that’s just a (veryleftbrained) chunk of theory, and one that doesn’t help, with the task at hand during those twenty minutes.

***

Unrelated?

I heard someone say that the fully autistic try simultaneously to avoid outside stimuli (they being hypersensitive to it, so it can easily overwhelm them), but also engage in a lot of “self-stimming”. I think the classic rocking motion of this type of person is a kind of selfstimming or selfsoothing or self-medicating.

And …

I also typically avoid outside stimuli and then self-stim in a variety of ways.

Does that mean I’m autistic or at least a little bit spergy?

Maybe.

I care so little about this kind of label now though, care so little about precise diagnosis and inevitable treatment based on it.

I’m averse to the outside stimuli of treatment especially, maybe!

I’d rather treat myself based on my own diagnoses.

***

Meditating might well be a part of that, too.

***

Kastrup mentioned the other day that they did this study where they autopsied the bodies from fatal car crashes, specifically looking for any kind of cancer.

He said that 50% of all cadavers had some cancer, and that, most significantly, it didn’t matter at all if they were young or old, male or female. or anything else–it was just 50% of everybody, no matter how you sliced the data.

Intuitively, it seems legit to me, especially in this horribly toxic modern world.

The ‘moral’ of the story is, first, as Joe Jackson once sang, ‘EVERYthing gives you cancer’, and secondly, that most people never have a clue about these rogue cells growing within them routinely. Why?

Because (K’s idealist position answers), mostly, the body just handles the foreign cells, rather than trying to kill them all off completely, OR let them run wildly out of control, threatening the whole organism.

Just as with the autism, I don’t quite see the practical usefulness of knowing that. But …

It’s interesting, and, possibly, useful to the grand theory, whether we’re calling that physics or philosophy or some other name (like: ‘Volitional Resonance’).

Lumo came up with that one.

I miss her, but that is a whole different topic for some other day.