Mind Loss Paradox

This is a piece I wrote in 2009. It deserves to be on here. Read it, and then ask me to read it to you. It's better heard aloud.

Someone told me the other day that I lost my mind. It’s the kind of thing you hear pretty frequently, sometimes in the form of a question, sometimes as a statement. If it’s a joke and you still do have your mind, then you know what’s going on. The paradox of mind loss is that if you really have lost your mind, you won’t know that someone’s telling you the truth when they tell you that you’ve lost it. When I was told a few days ago, I, forgivably, thought it was a joke. It took a lot of convincing to make me believe such an outlandish statement.

            Naturally, the first place I checked was inside my head. Maybe it really was there, but was just doing other things. After all, I had no recollection of it leaving, so maybe it hadn’t after all. But no, it wasn’t there. I think I checked back sporadically, always to no avail.

            Last week I

            The next places I checked were the closets in and around my room, and then some on some of the other floors in the house. I recently reorganized things and figured it could have jumped into some storage space in the process. Unfortunately, none of the places I checked contained what appeared to be my the paradox of losing your mind loss is a paradox.

            After checking all of those closets, I realized I had too many fucking closets in this fucking house, but they were still all full. How can that happen? So I decided to turn one of the closets into a walk-in tanning booth. I bought a bunch of ultraviolet lights and rigged them up to a gas-powered generator. I think I bought the generator at the Home Depot, but I may have stolen it. I vaguely remember checking to see if it would fit under my coat. I knew there was a reason to hold on to that old North Face jacket even though it was too big for my current fashion sense. The only problem with the setup was the fumes, but I love the smell of gasoline.

            Someone told me I

The next place I checked for my mind was in the septic tank at my sister’s house upstate. I haven’t been to her house up there since last summer, but it may have hitchhiked up 17 into Roscoe, and then it’s not too far a walk from there to the mountain the house is on. The tallest mountain in the world is Mount Everest, but only because the other tall mountains are underwater and don’t have a chance to rise up like my black brethren.

            The next places I checked for my mind were the closets in and around my room in my cell phone with the touch screen that I hate typing on because I have big fingers. The eloquent man uses not the touch screen phone. Typewriters are a motherfucker, but they don’t have T9 just like my phone. What if you make a mistake on the last line of a page while using a typewriter? I’ll bet what you do in that situation says a lot about your personality.

            Naturally, the first place I lost my mind was the day before yesterday last week on the Gregorian calendar system of a down jacket paradox of mind loss and profit. An earthly person through whom God makes his messages heard. Blessed is the fruit of thy whom.

            So the next place I checked for this “mind” that I apparently lost was the fucking trash. What good is a fucking mind if you can’t control it? So I figured I might have thrown it in the garbage with all the other shit I don’t need. But it wasn’t there. Good, I hope the garbage men picked it up already, that useless waste of space. Fucking… fucking… fucking

            Then I decided that the best way to catch bees is with honey, so I left out a plate of hot, sexy brain juice that I collected from a brain fart in hopes that my mind would make itself apparent. I sat for three years in a chair in front of that plate waiting for my mind to show up, but I think it came in the first fifteen minutes to mess with me. Alas, the life of a hopeless romantic is often too much to bear. O mind, wherefore art thou lost?

The paradox of mind loss is that it makes you feel like you’ll never know when it’s Opposite Day since how can anyone tell you it’s Opposite Day? If it’s not and they say it is, then they’re lying sacks of shit, but if it is and they say it is, then it isn’t since they would have to say the opposite, which would necessitate their saying it’s not Opposite Day, in which case you heartily agree and if they agree then it’s just not Opposite Day, and if they try to argue with you, you kick them in the balls and run away.

Last week someone told me I lost my mind I ramble the paradox of mind loss I’ll never find my mind since you need a mind to search for a mind I give up on mind searching paradox of mind loss last week lost my mind someone me told paradox.

Traversing dimensions

If time is the fourth dimension, what if the fifth dimension is emotion?

You need four numbers from all four dimensions in which we live to set up a meeting, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson explained so well on on Business Insider: location, given by three numbers (x, y, z axis--latitude, longitude, altitude--with the z axis often assumed to be ground level, as with "meet me on 46th and 8th") and time, given by another numeric measurement. What is the next most important, and universal, descriptor of a specific place in space and time? The emotions of those present.

Emotions affect the way we see the world, precisely where and when we are. Bring a different set of emotions into a situation--be it a business meeting, a second date, a baseball at-bat--and the arc of the situation will change.

We do not need to concern ourselves with assigning emotions to inanimate objects like rocks or trees. We might exist in five dimensions and they might not, and that’s OK. But perhaps they do, at least some of them--perhaps a tree does have emotions, which it exhibits over decades or centuries, rather than over the minutes or hours of a day as we do. That's another topic for another day.

 

If we are to physically step out of our three dimensions into the fourth, we may find that everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is happening now. Tyson discusses this in the video which was spurred on by Interstellar, Vonnegut discusses it in his novels, I contemplate it often. As Tyson puts it in the video, "I can access all points of my three-dimensional space; yet I am a prisoner in the present, forever transitioning from the past into the future... If you go to a higher dimension, it's not unrealistic to think that you step out of the time dimension and now you look at time as though we look at space... If your whole timeline is laid out in front of you, then you have access to it."

 

Now, as emotional beings, we are able to influence our mental state to a point--but nothing can create the raw emotional response of a new experience lived for the first time. And so perhaps the ability to truly control one’s emotions is the fifth dimension: travel through space as we do today (up to the third dimension); travel through our timelines (the fourth); live every experience in any mental state (the fifth).

The next question, then, is what are the five still-higher dimensions required for superstring theory? I can postulate, but that, too, is a topic for another day.