(original thread) there’s something interesting that happens when you void the warranty on your received indoctrination and get really into tinkering with your own mind – there comes this weird point where there’s a full-stack, full-spectrum teardown of everything from physiology to philosophy

for me personally i’ve found that language is a big part of it. idk if this generalizes. I think different people have different inner architectures. rn now I’m at a place where I have to question things like “what is ‘think’? what is ‘know’? what is ‘believe’?”

I don’t ask these questions from a place of abstract curiosity, although that can be fun too, but rather from hitting ‘inspect element’ on load-bearing structures in my psyche. What do I actually know? And here things get very trippy, because words smoosh concepts smoosh memories

meaning, a question of grammar or vocabulary – what does it mean to know? to see? to understand? that’s one category, another is– what is “deserve”? what is “worthy”? – these might seem like word games but they can unleash old monsters locked up deep in the body

I’ve only slept 4.5 hours in the last 2 days– and not because I’m trying to stay awake. I thought I was going to sleep a nice 12 hours when I went to bed earlier, and I was *jolted* awake 3 hours in by all of this, like some ancient factory deep within suddenly revved into motion

I don’t expect this to continue indefinitely, obviously, I look forward to the deep oceans of slumber that await me in, idk how long away. but even this for me is a sort of physical reminder of what feels like a broader truth about ideas, space, time, muscular tension…

I am coming to terms with the fact that the book that I am working on is a failure – Orwell said all books are failures! – because I am trying to do ~30 years of work in 3. it can’t quite be done, but there’s something invigorating about the *attempt*. a failure can be success

“a failure can be a success” is a silly bit of wordplay that can absolutely melt steel beams of tension in the body and send your heart soaring into the sky. it glitches across the frames from philosophy through language all the way to physiology

and, for some people, it might be completely inert, just a series of disordered symbols that make no sense. salvation can be a strangely personal, esoteric, idiosyncratic thing. actually, how can it NOT be? what’s amazing is that we can communicate at all

you might find eternal grace in a grain of sand, in an ashtray, in a child’s laughter, in a stranger’s tweet. you never quite know until it hits, and then it’s perfectly obvious in retrospect, and you can spend a lifetime trying to explain it and never quite convey it

because there’s always something magical and mysterious about the moment of conveyance, it transcends ordinary human bandwidth. it has the quality and effect of a thunderbolt. it never quite happens precisely when you expect it, or how