“Socrates states that mania is not always evil, but can be a blessing, when it is sent as a gift from the gods. This divine gift of mania is inspiration, of which Socrates distinguishes four different kinds: prophecy, telestic madness, poetic madness and madness of love.”
Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece
Following is the sentence I wrote down in my notebook:
“Selfish meme has taken over me and it’s using me as a host to write these things down.”
An archetype?
Let me elaborate.
When the voice inside of my head explains an aspect of my past experience, it usually refers to an event known as the “neurochemical disaster”, or when it tries to be funny, sometimes it says “nuclear disaster”.
Most of the times it’s just The Thing.
Funny part about The Thing is that while “I” was observing my brain processing what happened, it was embedding this “trauma” everywhere, making hundreds of associations so that there’s no chance for me to forget about it. Even a neutral street corner would remind me of The Thing just because I thought about it once while standing there. By trauma I simply mean a sudden, impactful, unforgettable experience, a very strong impression, or abnormal neuronal firing that creates a footprint. It was like PTSD, only very nice. Like, MDMA-cocaine nice.
At the same time while being invaded by The Thing, I was consciously aware I never could have even expected such a brilliant thing to happen to me.
Why?
First of all, I didn’t really believe something as such is possible. I’ve had regular expectations of life, and a divine frenzy was not one of them.
September 2020. My head keeps on repeating: “What the fuck?“
Fried brain (in a good way?)
It took me around half a year after the onset of the nuclear disaster to stumble upon the term “limerence”. I was googling symptoms of what I’ve been experiencing because it was clear to me that it wasn’t “normal”, or at least not usual. I thought limerence was finally something that will explain my condition.
I declared myself as crazy although none of my friends and acquaintances perceived me as such. It was all happening in my head and it transformed me into the most healthy, disciplined and productive person I’ve ever been. There was a sense of direction.
Since the suspicion of insanity of some sort kept on coming up, I’ve cut all of my addictive guilty pleasures, from beer to sugar. Subsequently, I’ve never been healthier, more productive, and also accepting. I had so much energy that I’d sometimes have to go to run while feeling like a hyped gorilla.
I’ve started to respect life in a strange way that I haven’t before. Food tasted differently. Better. It felt almost like a sixth sense — getting familiar with something previously imperceivable, and now having it as a part of your world-model from the moment you open your eyes until you go to sleep.
I don’t wish to sound arrogant but I feel elevated and like I know what a catharsis, epiphany or apocalypse in a sense of revelation feels like: it makes you go through a psychiatry textbook thoroughly.
This meme hits the spot, although I didn’t look as upset as this lady:
Eventually, I’ve found a community on Reddit where around 11k people were sharing their experiences on limerence. Common topics were personality disorders such as borderline personality disorder, childhood trauma, abusive parents, and also a constant transfer of this love obsession from one person to another. This was about addiction. Essentially, it is impossible not to think about limerence once you have it. It is very OCD-like — a constant state of arousal, repetitive and intrusive thoughts, an obsession, essentially. However, I was euphoric and not anxious. Hyperfunctional and not paralysed. Limerence was a somewhat satisfying explanation while I thought of it purely in terms of neuroscience and Western psychology.
But then:
What is a positive psychosis, and is it still a psychosis?
Limerence is a sudden onset of intense romantic infatuation with an LO. LOs (“limerent objects”) are often emotionally unavailable, apparently also narcissists, and you feel like if you were to see them again, well, you’d faint from excitement. It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to ask why there’s a bunch of people suffering over someone who is unavailable. There must be a trauma!
I was accepting of this interpretation at the beginning but as time passed, I realized this wasn’t about possession but about beauty that was opening. The only “negative” feeling I would get is when I would question if there’s something wrong with me. I became fascinated with whom I have become, fascinated with my brain — with brain’s capacities in general. Suddenly, there was this little cannon at the bottom of my stomach, randomly shooting some extraordinarily nice chemicals that made me smile, and additionally wonder about the nature of reality. It had to because the concept of causality broke down. As mentioned, I didn’t know who this person was, all that I knew is what I have to do, and this was coming from the heart.
There is a layer of my being in which the feeling of them is always present at the very back of my mind. Like it’s lurking. It rises from the stomach, randomly spreading bliss around my body — into my fingers, chest and head, like a drop of healing ink spreading through water. It gives energy and euphoria, curiosity, and a strange conviction of being on the right path, or “knowing” something deeply hidden. I thought I found myself in the afterlife.
All in all, life became a sort of a lucid dream and gained childlike joy and curiosity. I gained interest in obscure esoteric texts such as “The Secret Doctrine“, arguably the most famous, and perhaps most influential occult book ever written. In the introduction it says:
The reader who is not a Theosophist, is once more invited to regard all that which follows as a fairy tale, if he likes; at best as one of the yet unproven speculations of dreamers; and, at the worst, as an additional hypothesis to the many Scientific hypotheses past, present and future, some exploded, others still lingering.
William Butler Yates, alongside many other poets at the time, was a member of theosophical society which draws its philosophy somewhat upon the culture that arose around this text written by Helena Blavatsky in 1888.
While speaking of divine madness, further-on, I have never been sad because of this irrational love, I never had anxiety about limerence, nor do I bother my friends with this topic — unless something related comes up theoretically, such as for example double subject fallacy — a scientific problem in psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, treating the brain and the self as two independent subjects who can simultaneously occupy divergent psychological states and even have complex interactions with each other.
Something inside of me knew something before I did.
This is actually neuroscientifically correct. My friends, I fell in love with an Idea, a Memory, and it changed my life profoundly. The fun part is that it had a biography, there were a few things that I knew about who she was. It guided me from within, but I could never really know if it was made up or real.
Unconscious perception is common and this is proven by semantic priming — “brain” knows what it had experienced by influencing a certain decision, but you as the storyteller have essentially no clue why you’re doing what you’re doing. Unless you are Robert Sapolsky and you think you do. Or enlightened, maybe.
This statement triggers a discussion on free will, that essentially there is none and everything is determined by an interplay between particles, strings, or chemical relationships. Optimal combinations will have best chances of propagation — I ask in another essay, will they also have the strongest visceral, gravitational pull?
I refer to aforementioned phenomenon known as double subject fallacy. The storyteller creates a stream of their unique, linear experience — storyteller as “The Observer“ of the world, the first person perspective. The other “Voice”, the one that permiates subconsciousness, is “The Observed“:
A timeless system of all combinations of happenings that constitutes global consciousness existing outside of our subjective timeline.
In many ancient cultures The Thing is known as The Knowing.
Awakening of the Watcher
So I wondered, has this “Thing” woken up inside of me, and how, and why? Is it a subagent, (self-)awareness, or something else?
“Om” comes from old Dravidian language where it simply meant “it is so” or “let it be“. In Buddhism it refers to the Aatman (self within) and Brahman (knowledge, ultimate reality). Although I was never a religious person, not even particularly spiritual besides having a casual interest in Jung and mythology, here I find one simple, substantial truth that explains the alteration which happened in my body and in my mind. Once I understood it/came across it, as a former more-or-less materialist, I was in a state of shock, which is, I guess, the realization that comes with an “apocalypse” (meaning also purification). I felt as if I’ve “seen” the big picture and my eyes filled with tears.
One of my favorite explanations is kenshō:
Japanese term from the Zen tradition. Ken means “seeing”, shō means “nature, essence”. It is usually translated as “seeing one’s (true) nature”, that is, the Buddha-nature or nature of mind.
Kenshō is an initial insight or awakening, not full Buddhahood. It is to be followed by further training to deepen this insight, and learn to express it in daily life.
The term kenshō is often used interchangeably with satori, which is derived from the verb satoru, and means “comprehension; understanding”.
“Kenshō” is commonly translated as enlightenment, a word that is also used to translate bodhi, prajna, satori and buddhahood. Western discourse tends to use these terms interchangeably, but there is a distinction between a first insight and the further development toward Buddhahood.” [wiki]
As I’ve gradually become slightly obsessed (passionate!) about astrophysics and cosmology, I’ve become more pulled towards a sort-of panpsychist perspective and in particular black holes – an eye in the sky, one of many, and The Thing “behind eyes” which contains unconscious knowledge about everything. Also, that’s why the design and name of the website:
Brain as a musical instrument
Further-on, allow me to contribute to previous thoughts by referring to my suggestion that evolution of consciousness is a geometric evolution (a Platonic sentiment).
In my other essays I offer a perspective on why it seems necessary to include consciousness as a wave function and/or EM field in contemporary physics. The idea is that the function of consciousness is physical and I suspect it is something like perpendicular to quantum gravity (attention parsing through the space of possibilities), just like time is to space. Perhaps QG, the hardest problem in physics today, might be addressed by switching perspective from materialism to an ontology that may correspond to something like property dualism (didn’t David Chalmers do this already?) or dual-aspect monism.
I am more than positively encouraged by the fact that Joscha Bach has recently explicitly contested the dogma of materialism on Twitter by challenging physicist Sean Carroll with a question:
“Interesting question: Which subset of real-existing scientists would arrive at dismissing magic and spirits if that was not prescribed by their institutions? How much of scientific epistemology results from empiricism/first principles reasoning vs. institutionalized groupthink?“
Michel Foucault wrote extensively about this idea how initial sounds, phonemes, actually represent the shape of what they represent, that is, how they appear to look like to us. Like for example the letter “O”. Many languages have “O” in their words for describing a cloud. While thinking about “om”, I see “O” as representing a circle of time. This is when a timeline connects to itself and stops being a line: when it transcends, our consciousness transcends, and we can feel it. I wrote about this in another post with visuals of divergent fields connecting with the Ruliad, and how I connect these multiple perspectives might explain the rise of time. (Here)
Once a stream of consciousness finds itself, it forms a circle. O[m]. Timelessness.
Btw, Roger Penrose describes consciousness as non-computable, because it is an understanding about mathematical rules, and not a rule itself. Here, he is being sweet and old in a good interview with J. Peterson, who generally annoys me.
Know thyself : the first of three Delphic maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo. The link is to the theory of geometric, Platonic evolution of conscousness.
“In his explanation of the term “turning the wheel of Dharma”, the Theravada exegete Buddhaghosa explains that this “wheel” which the Buddha turned is primarily to be understood as wisdom, knowledge, and insight (ñāṇa). This wisdom has two aspects, paṭivedha-ñāṇa, the wisdom of self-realisation of the Truth and desanā-ñāṇa, the wisdom of proclamation of the Truth. The dharmachakra symbol also points to the central Indian idea of “Dharma“, a complex and multivalent term which refers to the eternal cosmic law, universal moral order and in Buddhism, the very teaching and path expounded by the Buddha.“
Even Robert Sapolsky in his neurobiological masterpiece “Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and our Worst” agrees and states that there is a certain force (!) involved in our decision making besides our brain – it is something that steers us away from the neurochemical software. This is a matter of debate whether to include neurobiology and determinism in courtrooms. Sapolsky writes, “It is not brains that kill people. People kill people”. The brain can be a pedophile, but the person doesn’t have to be a child molester.
True nature of love / nature of true love:
What happens on a physical basis?
I didn’t just fall in love with someone I didn’t know. I simply realized a love that was there. It was a feeling, a pure embodied experience, like a memory of a distant song that you loved and forgot about, and I didn’t understand anything about it.
Would a Hindu person say that this is normal to them, because of, duh, reincarnation? I don’t know what to think. There was no time to fall in love, everything happened in a millisecond after reading a few sentences on a Tinder profile. You don’t have to believe me but at that moment, it wasn’t particularly sexually charged either, although it wasn’t non-romantic. I was infatuated, on the border of pure madness with a “broken” euphoric brain and a mending heart, experiencing a sort of phase transition somatically — moving from one state of being to another without going back.
Although I was interested in physics before and was already reading Brian Greene on holidays and drawing graphs of time dilation, at this point I truly became obsessed with understanding consciousness and the nature of time. How is this possible, am I insane, making it all up? Where and when did it come from? What is it? Who is it? Are those the wrong questions? I wondered daily about this, how is it possible to have such intense, overwhelming feelings of love for a stranger. It’s like I miss a person I don’t even know, but in a happy, deeply fascinated, well-wishing kind of way. It felt like unconditional love came into me to guide my future steps. I was educated and meta-cognitive enough to know there was something off to this whole situation but there was no way to deny that I was changing. My life took a different turn — like a quantum leap.
“If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?“
Honestly, I am not sure, and I plan to extract all my creative and intellectual capacities to explain how love might indeed be physical (a simple geometric rule!) and absolutely relevant to the evolution of consciousness. Not necessarily biological one.
Still, both are natural selection!
Two sides of the same coin, yin and yang. I see it as a dual-aspect:
Real AND imaginary, materialism AND idealism, both necessary to describe our world.
It is a dance between genes and memes.
When advising Stephen Wolfram on his future career, one of the greatest physicists of 21st century, Richard Feynman, told him, “Yo Steve! As man to man, I advise you to fall madly in love“. Well, not really in these precise words, but the point is there. Now, how is this connected with a succesful career in physics? Let me say, what I imagine is that Richard, consciously or unconsciously, prescribed Stephen with a state of positive psychosis. It’s what you get when the connection is physical. Even better if non-local.
Do you see what I’m getting at? I don’t think what happened to me was primarily psychological. It was something more, and it absolutely might belong to the archetypal Platonic realm, or at least something energetic that changes the structure of your being.
After cutting the contact with LO, the catalyst of this experience, I entered something of a state of trance. It was November 2020. I bought music recording equipment and started writing and producing songs staying awake until morning, automatized in a perpetual state of flow. It was all about transformation and a positive perception switch. A metamorphosis. I’ve recorded and produced a whole album in 5 months with no previous experience. Everything in my head at that moment was about The Thing and about this experience — not necessarily about the person who triggered it, but where it leads. Just think of Dante and “The Divine Comedy“, the pillar of our culture written in the 14th century, still mandatory literature in schools today.
Love is an extremely powerful meme. Maybe also a god.
I had a physiological need to let The Thing out, to materialize it. The selfish meme was insisting: “Dating? Boring! Music is what you need to do! Consciousness research! Follow your heart!” Evolutionary biology sheds a tear, for another player is introduced:
The Platonic and geometric evolution of consciousness.
Voilá!
I’ve experienced flow, awakeness, energy, peace and acceptance that I never knew before, the things that people feel after taking DMT. I’ve been told, “I don’t remember you were like this before”, or “When did you get so enlightened?”
There is a switch.
Now, it’s been 2 years later and I am spending evenings and nights studying spin and entanglement, Maxwell’s equations, drawing vectors and fields, thinking about brain waves and constructing a geometric theory of consciousness. This is what I mean by saying I’m subjectively insane. It is also of help that some other consciousness researchers have come to same conclusions and speculations: I mention them in this post.
Hypersanity, madness, and Carl Jung:
Twin Flames: A serendipitous infatuation-woo I don’t want to say out loud (unlike Taylor Swift)
The last touch, which is sadly somewhat related to new age spiritualism, therefore muddied, is the story of journey of twin flames that comes all the way from Plato’s philosophy (to this you can listen to more details in the video at the very bottom of the post). Although I personally cringe over the term twin flame due to 1) relation to narcissistic/toxic relationships and 2) so many very bad and corny online content, I’ve decided to gather experiences of people on Quora, Reddit and other social networks, and try to present and describe this pattern because it corresponds to my experience.
TF experience refers to something of a once-in-a-lifetime apocalyptic love and is a necessary topic in spiritual communities, also a strong ingredient for the debate on souls being connected across space and time. It’s about finding alignment and discovering purpose. To me, this was never a thought. It was an overwhelming truth that I couldn’t understand verbally.
The idea here is that a particular consciousness-related energy (soul and spirit might be something similar but not necessarily identical) is embodied in two people/systems at once. This could happen when you think outside of spacetime, outside of matter. Those two perspectives represent each other’s dipoles, the yin and the yang. It’s a soul connection that heals a person from earthly sufferings because they transcend them as a mere reflex, like a chemical reaction.
No more than two electrons can be in the same stationary state. All they need is opposite spin.
“Iain McGilchrist can rightly be called a renaissance man, both metaphorically and literally. His range of knowledge and professional interests are exceptional. Is there another neuroscientist who has also been a literary scholar, or philosopher who has worked as a consultant psychiatrist? This gifted man now strives to bring about a ‘rebirth’ of the proper way to understand ourselves, the world and our relationship to it and one another. The Matter with Things is his magnum opus, the product of ten years work and the culmination of his long, varied and distinguished intellectual career(s). His core argument is that we need to move from an understanding based upon the reality of matter to one based on process and flow: ‘the assumption of a materialist world composed of “things” is the greatest impediment we face’ (p. 25).”
Crucially, a “soul shock” can happen prior to physical, bodily encounter because this kind of connection doesn’t need space and time to develop — it’s a part of a preexisting harmony (Plato + Leibniz). It is a duality fundamental to memory of consciousness.
In standard twin flame phenomenology reports, the intensity and confusion of such an apocalyptic event causes people to separate from each other because they don’t know how to deal with what is happening. The least to say is that it is unconventional, but nevertheless an aesthetic peak of perceived and felt beauty.
The incompleteness that the twins feel without their counterpart heals after they have grown spiritually and grown to love themselves, they learn the true meaning of forgiveness and they mature — evolution. They come to realize they are already complete.
The Thing has stayed, and love has inhabited the default mode network. Once both twins are ready, they come into union.
I clearly feel this dynamic as gravitational — attractive, mindless, automatic, and visceral.
Conclusion: Too impressed to be depressed?
Remember the image at the very beginning of this post?
Once your own stream of consciousness (the wave of subjective experience) binds to its own very end, it triggers transcendence: a line becomes a circle; topology has changed. Awareness of this deep knowledge manifests as a constant background feeling of having reached the goal: a glimpse of paradise, salvation from suffering. Another marvellous simplicity, the circular symbol of a ring — the two opposites connect.
Once that line binds to its own end, there is no way back. You are swollen. Abstractio.
Despite all my cognitive efforts to “explain away” this twin flame thing, I am helpless to admit that description of it matches what I am going through. I can still observe and enjoy the show though, as if watching a movie in which I am a character. Isn’t watching stuff happening on a screen just remembering how it was? Maybe Jim Morrisson knew something of a sort.
I only read about the TF phenomenon quite some time after it happened so I also never could have wished for it. It would also probably sound like something I would be more than skeptical of. Truth be told, when my ex and I were breaking up, she told me, “I wish you meet someone who will make you lose your mind!” and left dramatically. I thought, phew, that was slightly unreasonable. Now, not only that I’ve lost my mind, but I also don’t know if it’s a person, spirit, angel, alien, god, or an idea.
Maybe that’s the difference between a feeler and a believer. Either you know it—feel it—or you hopefully believe it just might be true. And maybe you just don’t think about it and end up getting smashed in the face.
_ _ _
All I can say is we’re up for an interesting journey in the following decades.
Thanks for reading!
*Edit: Added from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy & notes on Plato.
“If love does possesses “a nature” which is identifiable by some means-a personal expression, a discernible pattern of behavior, or other activity, it can still be asked whether that nature can be properly understood by humanity. Love may have a nature, yet we may not possess the proper intellectual capacity to understand it-accordingly, we may gain glimpses perhaps of its essence – as Socrates argues in The Symposium, but its true nature being forever beyond humanity’s intellectual grasp. Accordingly, love may be partially described, or hinted at, in a dialectic or analytical exposition of the concept but never understood in itself. Love may therefore become an epiphenomenal entity, generated by human action in loving, but never grasped by the mind or language.
Love may be so described as a Platonic Form, belonging to the higher realm of transcendental concepts that mortals can barely conceive of in their purity, catching only glimpses of the Forms’ conceptual shadows that logic and reason unveil or disclose.
Another view, again derived from Platonic philosophy, may permit love to be understood by certain people and not others. This invokes a hierarchical epistemology, that only the initiated, the experienced, the philosophical, or the poetical or musical, may gain insights into its nature. On one level this admits that only the experienced can know its nature, which is putatively true of any experience, but it also may imply a social division of understanding – that only philosopher kings may know true love.
On the first implication, those who do not feel or experience love are incapable (unless initiated through rite, dialectical philosophy, artistic processes, and so on) of comprehending its nature, whereas the second implication suggests (though this is not a logically necessary inference) that the non-initiated, or those incapable of understanding, feel only physical desire and not “love.” Accordingly, “love” belongs either to the higher faculties of all, understanding of which requires being educated in some manner or form, or it belongs to the higher echelons of society-to a priestly, philosophical, or artistic, poetic class. The uninitiated, the incapable, or the young and inexperienced-those who are not romantic troubadours-are doomed only to feel physical desire. This separating of love from physical desire has further implications concerning the nature of romantic love.”
Isn’t abstractio that what I describe?
Thoughts On Evolutions 
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