My lord, did I go off on a tangent yesterday. Let’s try this again.

Life as a liquid is hard because liquids have no inherent structure,. No skeleton. A liquid like me can take any shape but not for very long because maintaining a shape takes a constant input of energy and because the longer we stay in any one shape, the greater the fear that we will be caught in the wrong form and unable to shapeshift to adapt.

Thus, I feel safest when I am in my shapeless liquid state. That way, I am free to take whatever shape I need to take in order to handle what life throws at me.

As life strategies go, it has its setacks.

Like lack of agency. In its liquid state, water takes the shape of its container. No container, no shape. The water has little say in the matter. IF it wants to change shape without having to constantly input energy to maintain the new shape. it has to find a new container in the shape it desires.

And that’s hard to do when fear severely limits your capacity for exploration.

The hardest thing for a goo like me to do is to shape my own container, or as I tend to refer to it in this space, provide my own structure. I’d be a hell of a lot better off if I could do it, but that’s just not in the card for a guy like me.

Or at the very least, it’s something I will need to learn.

I don’t know why I am so scared of being caught in the wrong form. I can always just release my structure and shift to what’s needed. But that takes time and enery and mental effort and the crazed little animal in my head is convinced that means that we must therefore remain without form until the last possible moment.

To continue the animal metaphor, that scared little animal wants to maximize the number of ways it can escape at all times. Only full autonomy without form or commitment can make it feel safe.

And yet…. not.

Because it’s also too paranoid to relax when there are too many possibilities. Every escape route is also an avenue of attack that the mean old world could use to GET it at any second. So it also wants the security of structure.

So what it really wants is a container where it can revert to liquid form and relax because the container will provide the structure it needs to feel safe without the constant input of energy it finds so hard to keep up.

While at the same time haveing infinite escape routes.

And underneath it all, vigilance. Constant, painful, unblinking, paranoid vigilance. Always trying to be the eye that sees in all directions at the same time so that it can always see danger coming and flee in the right direction when it does.

I do a lot of fleeing. In fact, I do so much fleeing that I end up doing nothing at all. To flee in all directions at once is identical to standing stock still, scared of the world, afraid to go in any direction because that might take me closer to some horrible danger.

So instead, I hide from the world. My highly predictable life and constant, unchanging environment provide the container and my inability to hold my shape keeps me there. To change my life would be to change the shape of my container while I am still in it, and that feels incredibly weird and disturbing when I try.

Alternately,. I could build a new container then ooze my way into that. But that requires the confidence in my own ability to make that new container right, and that is a pretty tall order. And I would have to stop clinging to my current one in order to slide into the new one and that is quite the leap of faith.

Because the thing is, once a liquid like me finds a comfy container. we settle in hard. And the longer we stay in that comfy container, the more our will to search for a superior container fades away until escape seems impossible.

Or maybe I just want it to be impossible so I don’t have to face that harsh adult world that expects me to pick a form and stick with it.

Either way, it’s a pickle.

If only I could convince that scared little animal in me that it is safe to come out of its hidey hole now. That nothing but love and comfort and safety await it. In this metaphor, I’m like a domesticated cat that got abandoned and went feral and through painful and terrifying experience learned never to trust the hand of man again.

And at the same time, feels compelled to be cute and appealing and affectionate in order to convince people to take care of it.

No wonder I’m such a psycho.

How I wish I could just relax. For reals. All the way. I never totally relax as thigns are now. Even in my sleep, I am scared. The danger never truly goes away,

And this keeps me from true renewal. If I could fully relax, I could go all the way liquid and truly relax, rest, and renew.

Maybe even be reborn, fresh and new and free of the burdens of the past. Emerge from the fetid rancid stagnant dark into the clean bright beautiful light of dawn.

How I long to be free of my tainted self. To be truly clean. To be the person I was before the rape. The person I was meant to be. The person I was supposed to be.

But water does not know how to purify itself. So every day and in every moment, I am trying to balance my multitudinous toxicities against one another in order to simulate pure waters, at least in terms of pH balance.

I don’t know where to go to get purified.

And I don’t know what its like to be clean.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Story of my life, really.

Right now, I feel sort of in between states. I know that I am making major psychological progress but in the process it’s left me somewhat untethered and unfocused and a little insecure about who and what I am.

That’s fine. It’s what I expected. A barnacle like me can’t move to a new rock without letting go of the old rock, and things might well get far, far worse before they get better.

I might have to spend a lot of time in existential freefall, with nothing to support or define me but my very own self.

Been thinking about myself as water lately. You kinow. that old metaphor. I’ve used it here before. And it matches my Mars in Pisces, astrologically speaking.

Mars is not happy in Pisces. Mars is the sign of what gives you energy, motivation, and drive, and it helps define how you attack a problem or otherwise get things done.

Pisces is the sign of liquid water, and like water, Pisces tends to go with the flow, change to adapt, seek its lowest level, and remain without form.

That is a strange way for ones motivational system to work.

It’s not all bad. It gives me adaptability and the kind of deep sensitivity that lets me understand how truly fragile we all are and how hard it is to be human sometimes and essentially makes me such a deep humanist.

It’s probably also the wellspring of my genius, because it is this shapelessness that let my mind flow into the lock and become the key to unlock the answer to problems.

Probably helps me be mad creative too.

And it’s what makes me such a secular mystic. Yes, you read that right. It’s not an oxymoron. I have the same kinds of deep insights, poetic thoughts, transcendental consciousness, and connection with the hidden and the unseen as any mystic.

I just don’t believe it to be anything outside the operation of my particular brain. I am not align with the energy of the cosmos (though I have felt that way), I possess no special insight to the divine (though I could tell you a few things about it), and I am in no sense access to some kind of bullshit magic that defies the laws of time and space.

You guys know me. I’m a materialist. Things either exist, and therefore follow the laws of time and physics, or do not exist, in which case why are we talking about them?

Nothing gets to cheat.

I came up with the term “secular mystic” as a way to help reconcile these two sides of myself. I have had “mystical” experiences my whole life without declaring them supernatural in origin.

Perhaps being raised outside of religion played a part in that.

For example, I have had strong intuitions for my whole life. Truths suddenly occur to me in a blinding flash of insight. And they come on like a revelation, complete with the very wonderful feeling that things suddenly make a lot more sense.

I swear, an addiction to that feeling is what makes people like me philosophers.

These revelations of mine are quite powerful, and I can totally imagine that were I the product of another era, or a stricti religious upbringing, I might well have been tempted to think they had something to do with God.

Certainly, in the moment, I feel connected to something far greater than myself and the sudden rush of the joy of insight doesn’t seem like it comes from me.

But without a religious or mystical cosmology, and with my understanding of the human mind and how it works, I see the experience for what it is : brain activity.

Specifically, it is the activation of the reward center of the brain by the cognitive center responsible for keeping our body of knowledge as small and therefore fast as possible.

In that moment of insight, a large body of knowledge is suddenly condensed into a solution or principle the “app” that was working on that problem closes and releases all its resources, and the result is a euphoric moment where everything seems simple and clear and easy to understand.

It’s a heady thing. But it ain’t magic.

Similarly, I have had very strong attacks of deja vu for as long as I can remember, though it accelerated during my teen years and on into college.

Brain science to the rescue once more  That’s because during out teens and twenties, the brain is in its final pre-adult stage of development and its systems are growing in complexity by leaps and bounds, and the brain pathways that get used get reinforced far more than in adult brains, and the ones that do not get harshly culled.

Well I find it interesting, dammit.

And these deja vu attacks are powerful.  This is a full brain event. Memory and reality overlap and it really feels like the exact moment I am in has happened before.

And that used to scare the crap out of me. I felt like I was detaching from the normal time stream and that I was going to return to that previous moment and have to live all the same stuff all over again.

Why that is such a terrifying thought, I do not know. I would love to go back in time to a previous point with all I know now.

But in the moment, I am not exactly rational.

OVer time, thankfully, I got over that fear and now I just see the mments as somewhat unsettling but ultimately meaningness brain misfires where the part of my mind that separates memory from the present is briefly disabled.

It’s still a huge thing. A real full-brain neurological event. It often leaves me feeling dizzy and weak. I get goosebumps and all the hair on my body stands up. I get electric feelings in my hands and large muscle groups.. It really feels like Something happened.

But I know it’s just brain stuff.

So I just do my best to recover smoothly from it, and carry on.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.