Our Big Story

Big history presents an overview of all that we know in a loosely chronological order. It presents human knowledge from a scientific and anthropocentric approach, and tries to include all that we know about how the universe around us came about but also how life begun and how culture radiated from life. It thus presents an intensely humanistic approach to the history of everything. This metanarrative is extremely powerful, and it has been slowly integrated into the collective unconscious of humanity since the beginning of culture but has greatly intensified over the last 100 years. 

Big history could soon become the prevailing metanarrative, and it could be the metanarrative that could lead us into transculturalism. History would have to be understood as an active process and not just a mere recording of past events. Just like modern historians look at the different ways history can be interpreted, so do big historians study the plurality of perspectives of big history. Physics and science similarly evolve as new discoveries and new theories are assessed. Big history is therefore not static, but an ever evolving multi-perspective narrative, whose students actively seek to redefine it, reinterpret it and refine it.

Language is based on archetypes that arise from biological drama such as the influx of sense data, birth, parenthood, sex, survival, nourishment, grooming, social behaviour, object interaction etc. These archetypes act as the basic units of symbols, based on which a primordial grammar arises. Symbols are put into order according to this grammar, creating larger congregations of meaning and thus more complex symbols and abstractions. Elaborate formulations of these symbols lead to stories largely based on observations of social relationships and natural phenomena, creating human drama. These stories evolved into myths that sought to explain various aspects of reality through an extremely imaginative and creative rethinking and reordering of symbol based language.   

A very obvious connection can be observed between nature, language and culture (human stories). Besides that one leads to the other in a linear manner, it is also self-reflexive in that human stories essentially are about understanding nature. (Human stories and culture are themselves extremely self-reflexive as illustrated by post-modernism.) Nature in this way can be seen as essentially creating the means to observe itself in ever more efficient ways, and potentially dramatically altering itself in the future through the abstractions of these observations. Myths thus provided a platform for intellectual contemplations that evolved into philosophical thinking. Both western and eastern philosophy, reinterpreted the myths and formulated a new level of understanding, that of the metanarrative. In the west, competing philosophies were like mini-metanarratives fighting for space and the shaping of consciousness. In the east, grand integrated metanarratives arose that were extremely comprehensive and complex. 

Big history could become a conscious metanarrative that includes all previous metanarratives into its own scheme of things, viewing them all as part of this bigger evolutionary process that stems from linguistic and genetic archetypes. This is how big history should be told, a story about a never ending story of stories, a story of all stories, but nevertheless, merely a story.

Breakdown:
metanarratives - religions, philosophies, sciences, big history
myths
stories - memes - human drama
symbols - language - code
archetypes - biological drama
instincts - a priori knowledge - neural patterns

Love-Life

You gave me life
You gave me love
You took your life
You took my love.

I say love,
I have no love.
It’s just a metaphorical,
Linguistic love.

Sick to my stomach,
I look at your pictures.
I am making a selection,
Of your happy moments.

Your smile makes me cry,
Your life makes me die.
What have you done?
What could have been...

I say you,
There is no you.
Just a fictional imaginary,
Literary You.

Plain vocabulary,
Mutually constructed pain.
Chemically induced,
Symbol-based strain.

Comforting grammar,
Aggregations of words,
Signals with no meaning,
Perpetuate life.

I say life,
This is no life.
Just a compulsory,
Involuntary absurdity.

Post-meta-paradigm

I’ve reached a state of psychological pluralism and post-structuralist psyche. I recognise the many meta-narratives that define me and I have constructed a post-meta-narrative (PMN) that includes these many meta-narratives. I recognise the fact that one can never be aware of all meta-narratives as they are simply infinite, and any attempt to do so would probably lead to schizophrenia. It’s the flip coin to absurdism. All is absurd because it is equally complex and chaotic. Chaos is synonymous to complexity.

If every paradigm is a local metanarrative, there is no way to achieve a state of that ideal all-encompassing post-metanarrative, but only create a metnaarrative that recognises and integrates a plurality of metanarratives. This post-metanarrative continuously evolves, absorbing and assimilating new meta-narratives as well as refining and evolving existing meta-narratives. I as well recognise that the metanarrative I have constructed for myself is highly personal and subjective and almost impossible to communicate. I also recognise that the very concept of meta-narratives and post-meta-narratives is also based on my own perspective and may not be recognised by other perspectives. But my personal concept of a post-metanarrative leaves room for other people’s narratives, and accepts them as entities in themselves that may or may not be assimilated by my own meta-narrative, nevertheless they are as valid as any of the meta-narratives that I have collected myself.


Still there seems to be an inherent need in me to organise these meta-narratives in a hierarchical structure and group them within a larger ever-growing post-metanarrative. There always needs to be an organising monadic force. Is this because of spiritual/scientific/genetic/linguistic conditioning or is there a natural movement towards a coherent singular post-metanarrative? It is very possible that it is a genetic defense mechanism to ensure there is a consistent understanding of the world. There is also the modernist conditioning which could be argued that it stems from the western Christian-Aristotelian metanarrative. Because of its post-structuralist/post-postmodern nature, the post-metanarrative (or more accurately the post-structuralist metanarrative) is not teleological, and cannot be a totalising, all-encompassing, categorical entity as understood in modernist terms. The PMN does not pose as a teleological entity as the modernist meta-narrative, but recognises the fact that is merely a progression of the meta-narratives that came before it, and that it is a pastiche of these meta-narratives in the postmodern sense.


Meta-narratives clearly have their own evolutionary game, they cooperate and compete to create complex networks and systems of meta-narratives. They can be thought in the flowic categorisation system of body-network-system. Their smallest units, simple narratives, can be likened to Jungian archetypes, archetypal myths and primal memes. As meta-narratives evolve into complex systems, they engulf each other increasing in sophistication. A fully grown meta-narrative is a cultural entity that defines the reality and understanding of millions of people. Examples of meta-narratives include, Christianity, Buddhism, Science, Modernism, Post-modernism, Platonism, Spiritualism, etc. A meta-narrative poses as the one truth, and people following (consciously and subconsciously) these meta-narratives are often unable to recognise the validity of other meta-narratives. But also as meta-narrative sophistication increases so does its integration of other meta-narratives grows, increasing its validity. Christianity assimilated Aristotelian (and others) metanarratives just like modernism assimilated Christian-Aristotelian-Industrial metanarratives, posing as a new all-encompassing narrative. The post-structuralist and post-postmodern metanarrative goes a step further to integrate all possible metanarratives including the seemingly opposite modernist metanarrative. At the same time it refutes any teleology or modernist totalising nature and replaces that with a multiplicity and plurality. Thus the post-structuralist metanarrative becomes a paradoxical all-encompassing totalising MN, by rejecting a teleological state and by accepting all metanarratives, or the possibility of integration of all metanarratives.


Because of its pluralist outlook, the PMN hints at the existence of more than one PMN. Many PMNs can arise starting a new evolutionary play, leading to post-post-metanarratives and so on. There are personal PMNs and there are communal, societal PMNs (eg. The Flow is my personal PMN which borrows from other people’s PMNs and MNs). They are inherently self aware of their intertextuality and composition of many metanarratives, that is their very definition and identity and that is what gives them a status higher than simple multinarratives. They are the evolved metanarratives that recognise personal truth as well as multiple truths. PMN integration leads to the formulation of truth entities. These are post-cultural paradigms that include many PMNs both personal and societal. In fact in a post-cultural state, personal and group truths are one and the same. In the post-cultural word, people converse in PMNs, they are the currency for understanding and constructing truths. This communication can only be achieved by an evolved meta-language whose grammar is able to grasp the complexities of multi-metanarrative intersections and PMN construction and deconstruction.


References:
“narrative lifestyle”

http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/blf10/Links/stories.html
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/blf10/Links/structuralism.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism
It holds that the idea that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules is unrealistic, pernicious and detrimental to science itself.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_pluralism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(philosophy)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-narrative

Replacing grand, universal narratives with small, local narratives
According to the advocates of postmodernism, metanarratives have lost their power to convince – they are, literally, stories that are told in order to legitimise various versions of 'the truth'. With the transition from modern to postmodern, Lyotard proposes that metanarratives should give way to petits récits, or more modest and "localized" narratives.[citation needed] Borrowing from the works of Wittgenstein and his theory of the "models of discourse,"[5] Lyotard constructs his vision of a progressive politics that is grounded in the cohabitation of a whole range of diverse and always locally legitimated language games. Postmodernists attempt to replace metanarratives by focusing on specific local contexts as well as the diversity of human experience. They argue for the existence of a "multiplicity of theoretical standpoints"[6] rather than grand, all-encompassing theories.

Is poststructuralism a metanarrative?
Lyotard's analysis of the postmodern condition has been criticized as being internally inconsistent. For example, thinkers like Alex Callinicos[7] and Jürgen Habermas[8] argue that Lyotard's description of the postmodern world as containing an "incredulity toward metanarratives" could be seen as a metanarrative in itself. According to this view, post-structuralist thinkers like Lyotard criticise universal rules but postulate that postmodernity contains a universal skepticism toward metanarratives; and this 'universal skepticism' is in itself a contemporary metanarrative. Like a post-modern neo-romanticist metanarrative that intends to build up a 'meta' critic, or 'meta' discourse and a 'meta' belief holding up that Western science is just taxonomist, empiricist, utilitarian, assuming a supposed sovereignty around its own reason and pretending to be neutral, rigorous and universal. This is itself an obvious sample of another 'meta' story, self-contradicting the postmodern critique of the metanarrative.[citation needed]

Thus, Lyotard's postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives could be said to be self-refuting. If one is skeptical of universal narratives such as 'truth', 'knowledge', 'right', or 'wrong', then there is no basis for believing the 'truth' that metanarratives are being undermined. In this sense, this paradox of postmodernism is similar to the liar's paradox ("This statement is false.") Perhaps postmodernists, like Lyotard, are not offering us a utopian, teleological metanarrative, but in many respects their arguments are open to metanarrative interpretation. They place much emphasis on the irrational, though in doing so apply the instruments of reason.[original research?][citation needed].
But of course, that is only from a modernist perspective, since such an argument against postmodernism is an attempt towards making a totalizing metanarrative of postmodernism, an attempt to deconstruct postmodernism using totalizing criticisms of a supposed a priori of postmodernism, assuming that postmodernism follows the linear categorical logic of modernism, when postmodernism really uses the categories of logic in a contingent fashion, in an incredulity while taking in account of the multiplicitous nature of language-games and their limitations in ascent to a discovery of a higher truth of paralogy.[original research?]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-postmodernism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideation_(idea_generation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspectivism
This means that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgment of truth or value can be made. This is often taken to imply that no way of seeing the world can be taken as definitively "true", but does not necessarily entail that all perspectives are equally valid.

Perspectivism rejects objective metaphysics as impossible, and claims that no objective evaluations can transcend cultural formations or subjective designations. This means that there are no objective facts, and that there can be no knowledge of a thing in itself. This separates truth from a particular (or single) vantage point, and means that there are no ethical or epistemological absolutes.[1] This leads to constant reassessment of rules (i.e., those of philosophy, the scientific method, etc.) according to the circumstances of individual perspectives.[2] "Truth" is thus formalized as a whole that is created by integrating different vantage points together.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_scheme

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)
pluralism, multiplicity

post-post-modernism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic
Some chaos magicians like to operate in what is sometimes called a meta-paradigm. This is much akin to syncretism but with the consideration that flexibility of belief is a means of personal power and freedom. A more or less syncretic reality tunneling. Even more removed from this, being a post-meta-paradigmatic view, or an abstention from the notion of any view being absolute, compare Nietzsche's Perspectivism.

http://technoccult.net/archives/2010/02/18/hypersigils-reconsidered/

mrk: hypersigils are in effect personal meta-narratives, (similar to the multi-narrative concept of that book metaphors we live by? is that where I read that from) the difference being that the hypersigil adds a manifestation dimension to it, so it is not just a mere re-interpretation and clarification of a personal meta-narrative, it is a conscious re-ordering and transformation of the narrative that leads to conscious manifestation of will. It is manifestation of thoughtforms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtform

The flowic model

The flowic model is based on what we perceive as conflicting forces and paradoxes. Duality is thought of as one singular entity, so wherever we may encounter forces that appear as opposing each other, or complementing each other, we are in fact witnessing one congruent force that is split into two by our perceptions. That is probably the most basic tenet of the flowic model.

The flowic model is a both a continuum-based and categorical system. The flow can be thought of as non-teleological as its very principle implies that there is no ultimate state, but a continuous never-ending supervenience of categories. Entities can be thought of as categorical continua, which means that they are whole seamless continuous patterns which are made out of an infinitude of categories. Again here we see the dualistic perception of these entities where on one hand they appear as made out of many categories but on the other hand they appear like continua. This dualistic nature of things obviously can be seen everywhere, notably the dualistic energy-matter state of particles.

The flow is both a continuum and a set of categories. It is the continuous movement between every possible category. Each possible category is a continuum itself containing every possible category within the parameters of the parent category.

A continuum can be thought of as a seed code, the initial parameter that gives rise the every possible expression of that code. Each expression then becomes a seed code that gives rise to every possible expressions within that code. This can be thought of as an infinite tree of degrees.

Spectra or continua can be thought of both as finite and infinite. This duality seems to be all pervasive, but it is also important to note that it’s a human perception mechanism. The duality of finite and infinite is one singular state, just like the duality of a particle’s energy-matter state. The perception of two seemingly complementary or opposite forces is purely humanistic. It is very hard to conceive of non-dual states as we are literally wired to perceive everything as such, but at least we can conceptualise that dualistic expressions are in fact singular expressions of the same force.

A hyperverse spectrum includes all possible spectra of multiverses.
A multiverse spectrum includes all possible space-time continua.
A space-time continuum includes all possible complexity spectra.
A complexity spectrum includes all possible energy-states.


In the horizon we can conceptualise the space-time continuum, the one compound entity that includes the whole of space from its beginning until its end.

It’s a nesting doll of infinity. Infinities within infinities ad infinitum. That is how we ultimately perceive everything, as infinite spectral entities.



The self appears to be finite within the space-time continuum, but it goes across through the hypertime continuum, the infinite iterations of the same self across the multiverse. This spectrum of selves is what is symbolised in cultures as reincarnation, multiple lives, karma etc. The hypertime self is what some people call the higher self. The higher self experiences hypertime like we experience regular time. She is the spectrum of all possible space-time continuum selves, each self similar to what we experience as the infinitesimal moments in time. To the higher self, a lifetime is as infinite and as fleeting as the present moment is to us. Communication with such an entity is only achievable through focusing on the concept of the existence of such an entity. The higher self can be thought of us the continuous spectrum of a pattern that expresses itself as a self across hypertime.
In this vain, we can further conjecture the existence of a hyper self, that includes all possible higher selves within a multiverse, or the spectrum of higher selves. The hyper self experiences a time as made up of infinitesimal moments of higher selves. And so on.

Each level works in its own discrete way, yet all levels share the same pattern. This pattern is thought to be communicated from level to level, reiterating itself in more complex iterations. This complexity reaches a threshold where the entropy needed to sustain it is surpassed. At high levels of entropy, complexity collapses onto itself and iterates the pattern in reverse, what might be called de-complexification or devolution. The levels at this stage decrease in complexity until they reach the primordial pattern that spawned them. The movement from low-complexity/entropy to high-complexity medium-entropy to low complexity-high entropy is a temporal entity, or a universe across all time. Clusters of temporal entities, or multiverses, include all possible outcomes from the primordial temporal pattern. This spectrum of outcomes can be perceived as hypertime, where the movement of time and being from past to present to future is understood as one dimension. Hypertime even though infinite, implies a sense of time across parallel universes, the movement from simple universes to complex universes and back to simple universes. There are infinite temporal entities within multiverse clusters, and an infinite number of clusters creating the spectrum of all multiverses, or the hyperverse. A hyperverse simply includes all possible multiverses, each of them containing every temporal and meta-temporal outfold.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_divisibility
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(theory)

Detachment

Attached with detachment
Engrossed in non corporeal being
Removed from mundane existence
Averse to colloquialisms and sheepisms
Post moral, post liberal, post-post-mortem
Disconnected, second guessing, preempting, unemotional
Not present in the present
Absent from the past
Disillusioned with the future
Metastasis, metallaxis, meta-metamorphosis
Pointlessness, futility, numbness
Cynicism, tiredness, vagueness, ambiguity, confusion,
Powerless against the forces of plurality, causality, complexity,
culture and physics.
Complete and utter loss of innocence, hope and faith.
Complete loss.

Home

A newlywed couple was
Brought together by a force
Bigger than them.
A force that was controlling their
Every action,
Programming, ordering, demanding.
They were brought together in a house,
Bigger than them.
A house that swallowed their 
Whole being,
Imposing, domineering, burdening.
Lifelessly, they created new life,
Bigger than them.
A being cursed to see the 
Reality of its makers,
a being doomed into silence, for
It could not fathom or utter
The harsh words of awakening and understanding.
The being was destined to flee,
Unable to accept its makers' unreality.
And so the married couple perpetuated their own prison,
Took comfort within it, embraced and protected it.
They grew deep roots in its foundations, became one with it, and
finally surrendered their last breaths to it.
The tails of their ghosts would forever be attached to the grandiose house,
Invoking the same destiny on any couple that would tread within the
guts of their beastly home.
And their doomed creation
Would remain lost, forgotten, unforgiven,
Floating in the void of its solitary freedom.

Multi-narrative

(this is a trail of thought in a sort of Kerouac-like automatic way of writing)
I was born in a family of intellectual and spiritual people. My mum was always there being a mum but my dad’s absence was felt. As a child I was angry at my dad, I felt like we didn’t have a good relationship although he kept telling me I was his best friend to which I sort of unwillingly nodded to in order not to hurt him but also because I did not believe that to be true. With my mum we were really close, I used to tell her everything and I felt safe with her. My sister who was five years older than me seemed to not get along as well with my mum and leaned towards my dad. It seemed they had more in common while I felt more affinity with my mum. I was a girly boy, playing with girly toys and had girly mannerisms, and my sister was a bit of a tomboy or a tough girl. I was also clearly introverted spending a lot of time playing by myself or making stuff or drawing while my sister liked to play with the neighbours and was generally more sociable and extroverted. It was obvious to me as a child that my parents didn’t have a close relationship, I never saw any intimacy between them and I somehow knew that divorce was discussed as well as my dad’s unfaithfulness and promiscuity, gambling and alcohol problems. He was also visibly not very into her always commenting about how much she ate or about how fat she was (he also did that to us) and she was also very obviously affected by it by binge eating, secretly eating junk food when he wasn’t around, but also emotionally distraught about his absence and cheating. They were not happy. We very early knew about how she accidentally got pregnant and they had to get married. We were too young to know about these things, but we were thrown into all of this adult world problems at a very early stage. We were definitely not protected from these things, or it wasn’t possible for them to hide these things from us.
School was immediately hard from me, I was introverted, shy, girly, weird and artistic. Kindergarten was ok but primary school was  a nightmare. The other kids would make fun of me for being a “girl” and for not playing sports with the boys and preferring to hang out with girls. I was very affected by this and I used to go home crying every day. Going to school was an absolute nightmare. I felt prosecuted and not accepted. My mum tried to talk to the principal of the school but he said there was nothing he could do. Being such a girly girl it must have been hard for my dad, not knowing how to deal with it but also perhaps a little disappointed that his son was so feminine. He did make some minimal effort to connect with me in a dad-son sort of way but he completely failed as he chose the wrong activities and I was very rejecting of any effort from his part. He also gave up too quickly. We connected on intellectual stuff though, as I would ask him a lot of existential or philosophical questions to which he always had some answers. I enjoyed those moments we had together when he would enlighten me and explain things to me. We would geek out together on science facts and encyclopedias, and he would give me history and geography lessons which I found interesting but a bit boring. Science was more my thing.
With my sister we were really close and we kind of bonded on the fact that our family wasn’t normal. Feeling as a part of a not normal or ‘special’ family was kind of a recurrent theme, something that we all felt and agreed on. We were all a bunch of weirdos, two parents that were not really together that were having some really serious issues in their relationship and two children who were forced to mature before their age to deal with things and who were quite idiosyncratic and so different that neither was accepted in school. Although my sister had probably a better time in primary school than me, secondary school was a huge nightmare for her. She was not accepted at all. We were all too different, natural outcasts of society or our parents were outcasting themselves and we were just mirroring them. Our parents were into their Hindu gurus, and their vegetarianism, and intellectual endeavours really set them apart from other people, especially in meat-eating, strictly Christian, conservative Cyprus of the time. Both of them also felt completely different from their families they had drastically separated themselves from them. That’s what probably got them together in the first place. What they had in common was their outcast and existential tendencies, which Irini tried to completely rebel against striving to fit in and be normal while I completely followed their footsteps. I naturally ended up being an outcast because of my girly, introverted, artistic nature which I finally embraced, while Irini ended up being an outcast for being weird and physically not very feminine and probably for trying too much which she finally came to terms with as well. All in all, we were raised to be different but we were also also inherently different. This tendency to separate myself from the mainstream remains until today, and it sometimes becomes a compulsion. I can’t seem to fit in anywhere, nor do I want to. I remain lonely, introverted, artistic and intellectually driven – but I have also managed to integrate these traits enough to be able to function within society while not really being a part of it. Irini’s rebellion against her outcast nature has led her to a loveless marriage, having sex with only one person in her life, and a large circle of shallow friends.
*
Dad did always secretly see the potential in me, and he pushed me to pursue my talent. He did believe in me although he rarely showed it, I’m sure of that. He is a deeply emotional man, but very few see that side of him. He is also a very introverted man, who has always been an outcast in his family, in society and his social circle. He has and had many vices, smoking, drinking, gambling, women, extraordinary, some would say, arrogance. But he is also a very deeply explored person, having literally sucked volumes of western and eastern philosophy, history, religion, spirituality, psychology and sociology. His outlook in life is esoteric, and although he is a nihilist he has a deeper understanding of reality that he has constructed and revised. Writing this now I can see how much in common we have. Even though I haven’t even read a fraction of what he has read over his life, we definitely share the same outlook, partly because of our genetics and partly because of our experiences, common and separate. We are incredibly similar, and we are fighters and free spirits. We have shared spiritual perceptions of each other and have felt that old soul, long history thing that you feel with some people. We love each other, and we understand each other although most times we might not be fully conscious of that. We have a deep connection and it is time it has been cleansed. The mistakes he did in his life were enormous and fatal, he has lived an incredibly intense life, he has been through war, poverty, revolution, pain and anguish. He has been blown by life to bits, and he has been desperately trying to construct a new life for himself, a new beginning. What he did was incredibly wrong but it is partly because he is a child of his generation and partly because of his free spiritedness, rebeliousness and idealism.
When they met they must have had an infatuation, especially from my mothers side, and the pregnancy just complicated things. Did she keep the baby in order to keep him? That can’t be sure, maybe abortion wasn’t an option. Either way they took the decision to go through with it and so already didn’t start on a good note. Irene was a difficult baby and they had a bit of trouble raising her. They were clearly under a lot of stress at the time. He liked to sleep around. He was a new lawyer living the life of booze and money, we weren’t rich but he earned quite well for the time. She was left at home worrying and being upset whenever he was out while she had to take care of the kids. The letters she was writing to him while she was breastfeeding alone in Greece studying for university, while he was in Cyprus starting his lawyer career, are just devastating. She had a tough time and she had postpartum depression. She went a little bit bonkers at the time and there is this story that she was taken to the psychologist at the time and he said that she might have bipolar disorder but I’m not sure which story to believe any more on that front. There is a chance that she exhibited some disorderly function at some point or another but I cannot think of a time that I even suspected a personality change or something weird going on with her. That’s why I’m a bit dubious on the subject, although again there is a chance that as a child I wouldn’t have been able to perceive strange behaviour (especially when it happens gradually like with bipolar disorder with its peaks and downs). So yea, not sure on that. Either way the reaction she had when my dad left was huge. It was of course a tremendous shock, and any person would have been devastated to find out that their spouse was going out with another woman for 14 years secretly and that they might even have had an illegitimate child together. It was a lot to take in and it was only natural to get depressed. But to go into so much darkness, and suicidal thoughts and manic incidents was not normal behaviour. It shows such great weakness that it can only be fundamentally chemical. Maybe the great shock was a trigger for some imbalance that was already there, at least that’s the theory. But that shock was definitely the spark. It sparked something that perhaps could have stayed hidden forever or something that could have sprung up by itself anyway, again nobody knows. It was definitely an extreme reaction. I can’t even go into the other part of the story where she had met this man in the park and they had started an affair but then she thought she had aids from him and other scary stuff which I’m not really clear about because most of what I heard from it was during her fits. Something weird happened there, but it was all this conglomeration of things that she might have done during a manic state, or so people seem to think. I did perceive a personality change during that short time before they separated where she was very excitable and started going out and getting dressed. It was a bit of mid-life crisis sort of thing that went on for both of them at the time. And then he said he would leave and live with Stalo and then bam, she went nuts.
She was such a sweet person though. It is really hard for me to think of positive or negative things for her. It’s hard for me to describe her. It’s like I lost the ability to visualise her in time, and in memory. She remains ethereal, a lost concept, a mirage in the past. I can only remember the deep love I had for her. I absolutely loved her, adored her. She was so comforting, and loving, and sweet. She was a cool mum and we loved her even though she made us eat extremely healthy stuff. She was such a sensitive person, so sensitive and frail. Yet she was also pro-active with many interests and projects. She would get excited about stuff and start new ventures and even if someone would say those were hypomanic incidents they were still meaningful and productive. Again I’m talking about her various activities because I seriously can’t say anything about our relationship besides that is was a mother-child relationship. It was just very intuitive, intimate, almost primal. We didn’t have to make an effort to ‘connect’, we were already inherently connected. Although she didn’t raise me to be a mummy’s boy and she never smothered me, we were really connected. It is virtually impossible to describe this connection in words. And although with my dad I might have felt that old soul thing, with my mum it was different. We were like kindred spirits, a different kind of spiritual connection. A connection that I feel has been severed, a part of myself that still feels lost. A part of myself that I still keep looking for in my subconscious every night when I go to bed, searching for that missing piece. I can’t let it go. I’m calling her name every night. Missing her. Writing long texts about her. Going to the counsellor because of her. She left me a part of myself that I need to deal with, a scarred, troubled and confused self that is trying to make sense of it all. What is there to make sense of? They had a complicated life, created a complicated life, complicated children, complicated outcomes. They have created this jumble of interactions, this giant knot that seems impossible to untangle. A network of cascading events that has led to tragedy. It is such a movie. So here I am broken in pieces, interwoven within this spider nest, not seeing a way out. So perhaps the best action would be just to embrace the complexity of life, the supervenience of experience, and this giant game of chess. Take it as it comes, the whole thing is a game that plays out one way or another. We can only do our best to build on our experiences and be as conscious of our actions as possible, but also be able to filter, decipher and make balanced decisions to the best our abilities. Just let go and accept. Intellectual and experiential information is infinite and we just live out a glimpse of it, so just enjoy the ride while it lasts and take it with a grain of salt.  This is my big wisdom. I cannot right now make any other sense of it. I do not know how to make of it. Yet.
I am indeed a product of this process, the inevitable, inseparable, seamless, continuous outcome of the flow of time and evolution. Whatever happens is part of the intricate pattern of reality, and is thus true. True in its ontological existence, although the way it is perceived can vary greatly. Is there a way to tap into the foundations of this pattern using merely our minds? That I would like to know, how to decipher the existence of everything, of complexity, of existence, of perception, of language. I can see the bigger pattern, the pattern of my life, my parent’s life, the relentless chain of events. The connections that remain eternal in the crystalline mirage of timelessness. I can find my lost self in the pattern, the greater pattern that produces everything. Or I can lose myself in it. I am part of it. So momentary, so eternal. So otherwordly. So penetrative.
Things are far too complex for human understanding and thus life appears largely random or chaotic. Yes there is order to be observed, and order begets order, but chaos is the other side of the same coin. It is the beauty of existence, and doom of the human to only be able to perceive a tiny fraction of reality. It is like a molecule of water looking at the ocean. It is awesome and mind-bogglingly impossible to comprehend. Thus I let go myself into the unknown, I accept the unknown, the meaningfulness of randomness, and the inherent meaning within everything. This ‘supreme’ meaning is beyond perception and understanding but can be at least conceptualised. I am sad to let go of faith and of focused, safe understanding but I am happy to embrace complexity, and the vast horizon of the unknown. There’s just so much to be discovered and understood, so many facets and dimensions. I am ready to enter a multi-dimensional appreciation of reality, an open-ended, everchanging understanding. Instead of looking for the holy grail, the one truth, and just going from one truth to the other, my outlook becomes multi-truthful. There is no one answer, one perspective, but infinite appreciations of reality. Pluralism. It is what I’ve been doing all my life anyway, but now I am becoming conscious of it. There is no room for stagnation, no resting point, but continuous flow and evolution of consciousness.
*
Responsibility versus justification. It is very hard for me to separate the two. How much personal responsibility do I have in this story? I have covered the genetic factors, the nurturing factors and the external factors, but I always tell the story as if things are happening to me externally and I am in a somewhat shifted dimension where I am not directly interacting with the situation, only observing it and being internally affected by it. That is my main Piscean trait. When things happen around me, I disconnect myself and let things happen by themselves with the least possible intervention from myself. It is my tendency to observe the flow of events as an external entity that I just let happen and then view the results, that is how I lead my life entirely, letting things go with the flow and unfold by themselves. This tendency allows me to relinquish responsibility and always appear as the victim of a situation, it is easy, having had minimal input in things. I am afraid of the results if I do intervene, because intervention can go both ways, but non-intervention can be equally harmful as I learned with Polz. Not doing something is still doing something, and is probably worse than actively doing something. At least if you are active you know you did your best. I think my main responsibility in everything that has happened was that I disconnected myself. Yes it was a survival mechanism, that I wasn’t fully conscious of, but it still is my personal responsibility in all of this. I was not an active part of the action, I was a bystander letting things affect me internally but externally being unemotional and avoidant. I wish I was strong enough, or just less introverted, to be able to make an active change to things.
What decisions did I take, what were the actions that I took besides inaction? Am I guilty of excessive minimisation and rationalisation and avoidant behaviour? Well perhaps not excessive, but I definitely have a tendency to rationalise and justify my behaviour but also the behaviours of others, which in effect leads to minimisation and levelling, and that is how I have always lead my life. Again this tendency leads to the relief of responsibility from me and from others, meaning that I can never blame anyone or myself. But that is just my general outlook in life, I believe everything can explained through the complex interaction of human relationships, causality and chaos and humans are inevitably not responsible for their actions. I see free will as arbitrary and temporally bound. I see humans too powerless to be able to command time, the complexity of the universe and the complex network of causality they created between them. A hermit may manage to escape the grasps of the human interaction network but can never escape the flow of nature. Only a Buddha can momentarily escape the processes of nature and time, but not beyond the quantum world, and so on.
**
Fear. I have progressively been discovering how much my actions or my general outlook in life has been moulded and guided by fear. Fear is such a strong, primal emotion that seems to be easily suppressed by the psyche and hidden by denial. After the years of terror had finished, I had nicknamed the fears that I had developed as the “same old fears” from the Pink Floyd song, but quickly hid them well back in denial thinking that I had dealt with them satisfactorily. I am afraid of loss, of impermanence, of decisions that could lead to extremely negative results. I am afraid of the unpredictability of the world, of the chaotic, uncontrollable force that creates and destroys. I am in awe of this massive process, and completely at its mercy. I feel I have no control over my life or over anything under the shadow of this force. It is the complete lack of free will. I do not believe in free will, or whatever free will an individual might have is completely inconsequential to the grander scheme of things. Things lose their significance and point in this completely chaotic world. Human relationships, emotions, feelings, creations are so incidental and insignificant. Even this constant analysis that I put myself through has no point. The pointless musings of an imperfect conglomeration of chemical processes. This is the loss of faith. Faith in the process of life, faith in the significance of human interaction, faith in higher order meaning. Meaning has been reduced to semiotics between physical processes. I believe meaning is part of a deeper understanding of the universe, an understanding that is beyond any human processing. I am returning back to miserabilia and the futility of human existence. My world has become random and sinister once more. Absolutely no trust and faith in the system. The system is beyond any understanding. It is massive and endless. It can only be understood through imperfect human-centred metaphors. Things are incomprehensible and appear pointless. I am unable to derive any meaning from my experiences besides the fact that I have lost the ability to derive meaning. I am unable to say anymore that whatever has happened has made me stronger, or has made my faith stronger, or that has improved me as a person. Quite the opposite I feel I have deteriorated as a person. I have left myself prey of the unpredictability of things, and vulnerable to seeing life as so inconsequential that suicide becomes as much an option as it becomes irrelevant. It is exactly the notion of absurdism. Things are absurd and sinister. I’m constantly wavering between absurdism and nihilism, and my only way ‘out’ is atheistic existentialism. I have the need to construct personal meaning, but the only meaning that my experiences will allow me is absurdism. And I cannot fully accept absurdism. It is safe from the aspect that nothing can touch me as everything is absurd, but it is inherently unsafe since it proclaims that everything is unsafe. It is a paradoxical way of being and that shows mental instability. I want to believe in something yet I have stripped myself from every possible string of belief and faith. The world I constructed for myself does not allow any room for that. My world is a negation of things, it is the lack of things. It is the lack of love, the lack of belief in love. The lack of any beautiful, soothing human construct. Yet my chemical constitution insists on torturing itself with mental jumbles, it is still trying to find the balance. It cannot accept this cynical, sinister, lifeless world it finds itself in, as it is detrimental to its survival. So it will continue to fight it until it finds some kind of balance between the experiences that have created it, and the inherent need to resolve them. Or it will die trying to. I am tired of trying to find meaning. I am tired in general.
*
Still in limbo. More confused. More lost. More alone. More fucked up. More sad. Less faith. Less trust. Less understanding. Less wise. Less feelings. Not depressed. Just numb.

What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection.[6]

— Kierkegaard, Søren, Journals, 1849

Paradoxically again, the absurd is the lack of faith, yet acting on the absurd is an act upon faith, faith that an act can be taken, from the myriad of choices only one is taken. Can the absurd be resolved by the idea of multiple universes and that every action is taken?

What, then, is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal truth has come into existence in time..

I gladly undertake, by way of brief repetition, to emphasize what other pseudonyms have emphasized. The absurd is not the absurd or absurdities without any distinction (wherefore Johannes de Silentio: "How many of our age understand what the absurd is?"). The absurd is a category, and the most developed thought is required to define the Christian absurd accurately and with conceptual correctness. The absurd is a category, the negative criterion, of the divine or of the relationship to the divine. When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd — faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd — if not, then faith is not faith in the strictest sense, but a kind of knowledge. The absurd terminates negatively before the sphere of faith, which is a sphere by itself. To a third person the believer relates himself by virtue of the absurd; so must a third person judge, for a third person does not have the passion of faith. Johannes de Silentio has never claimed to be a believer; just the opposite, he has explained that he is not a believer — in order to illuminate faith negatively. Journals of Soren Kierkegaard X6B 79[7]


The absurd is negative faith, yet faith is absurd. they are the same thing.

According to Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. If the absurd experience is truly the realization that the universe is fundamentally devoid of absolutes, then we as individuals are truly free. "To live without appeal,"[13] as he puts it, is a philosophical move to define absolutes and universals subjectively, rather than objectively. The freedom of humans is thus established in a human's natural ability and opportunity to create his own meaning and purpose; to decide (or think) for him- or herself. The individual becomes the most precious unit of existence, as he or she represents a set of unique ideals which can be characterized as an entire universe in its own right. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy, gradually developing his or her own meaning from the search alone.

Creativity is all I have left. And my personal meaning that I express through that.