Sat, 2 Aug 2025
Last night, fear delivered its familiar performance (details hardly matter, there's juicier drama ahead) but I watched all those neat mechanics rise on cue with a detachment I still haven't gotten used to. Panic rose, reason drowned, and I didn't even bother fighting it. Fright is a tool, after all. It got me to safety.
But then, too quickly, composure snapped back into place. Suspiciously so. A few months ago, the same event would've left me trembling, looping endlessly. This time, between the walk from my street to my door, I stepped through it without even a sigh of relief, just a clean severance to the present, as if the threat had not showed up at all.
Then the scramble began. A new thought was patting my back for returning to the present, observing my fear wither with a smugness only delusion dare afford. Meanwhile, too weak to consume me with panic, fear was shapeshifting, pulling every trick to lure me back through my reluctance to engage. The residues grasped at logic and altruism: My safety was compromised, therefore I must respond. "Shouldn't I report it? What this happens again to someone else? Isn't this irresponsible? What if I am dissociating?"
This is how thought survives, by latching onto cause and consequence. Pay attention, and it weaves a thread of logic. Follow it, and a narrative is born. Narratives don't seek truth, they seek continuity, and in that moment too many were competing for it.
One said "Report it. Don't let it pass unmarked." Another said "Let it rot in the past, I want to play Tame Impala right now. (He sings “I know I can seem uncaring in moments like these, just because I don’t regret it doesn’t mean I won’t think about it” wink)
I was hit by the comedy of it all, every thought trying to sedate another, these cunning little actors with no loyalty to me or my mind. They're survivalists and opportunists, each seducing me with a version of reality not because it's true, but because they need attention to keep existing. Like the body ensures biological survival, thoughts are beings interested only in their sustenance through associative and recursive mental processes. The mechanisms of language and memory work together to ensure that thoughts are continually repeated and reinforced. Thought itself doesn't even care about being believed, as long as you're paying attention, its succeeded. The mind is only a faithful host for these persistent parasites with no agency of its own.
So what remains when the loop is no longer fed? What happens when the fool sees the strings? But then, is that seeing itself not another thought pulling strings?
This is the final curtain behind the theatre of cognition itself. Even the witness, when it becomes compulsive, becomes another actor in deceptively humble robes, "Just observe. Just be. Don't act or you'll fall back into illusion." Once I pay attention to anything, it has risen. The act of observing observation rises, not as a noble guide but as another player in the game.
So I'm caught between realities, each vying for authorship over the present moment. All the other thoughts turn their attention to sedating this common enemy, masquerading as the watcher of the watcher, convincing me that all this observing has trapped me in paralysis. They insist that taking action, reporting the perpetrator, is the rational path, claiming my self-observation is what blocks me from engaging with the living, unfolding present. All sides claim they hold the key to presence, using the same weapon, narrative logic to sedate one another. There is no final arbiter because there is no pure "right" frame, no perfect thought to ride into liberation. The moment we chase the "correct" thought, we've already been caught.
The more I see this, really see it, the entire machinery starts to unravel.
We're not the master of thought. We're its ecosystem.
The only way through I’m discovering is, when I stop pulling, the rope disappears.
The space in which narration happens is a field too vast to condense within a single storyline.
Even this recognition would soon become another actor. I’m waiting to see how quickly it congratulates itself, "See? You've figured it out now." But that's the trap, no insight can resolve what it arises from. Self-reference only creates more loops.
So what if we let them all come? Let the thoughts spiral, seduce, accuse, distract. Let them be what they are, noise seeking meaning. The surrender isn't an allusion to inaction, not even anything more radical than breathing itself, not suppressing, not obeying, not even observing with purpose. Just allowing what's already happening to happen without looking for a grander motif or justification into a cohesive narrative.
In this surrender, something unexpected is emerging, when the cognitive engines fail to capture the present, the very noise they create is revealing an undisturbed silence underneath it all.