The night of unknowing
The evening my mind blew, when that's no figure of speech but as close an analogy as I can reach to what happened on July 21-22, must -- if slowly I am to learn from it -- remain almost free of words about the experience itself.
There were none, just a blown, fused brain, which left physical burns on my head, my temples. When I get to that description, I've got to be very careful with the words.
I have since been filled with awe and incomprehension because from the start it took days to take in. For hours, I was "gone" altogether, no sense of identity.
As myself, I ceased to exist. The experience was unexpected and not one I'd care to go through again. If there was any reason, maybe it was starting a vacation in a state of exhaustion, very weary of the world and tired of being told "you live in a world of your own".
I'm now wary too. I don't want to make links where none were. That day, the first of a long-awaited holiday, I did want to be in a world of my own! I'd had seven wonderful but very difficult months.
For doctors, I ended 2004 with a clean bill of health -- mental health -- and felt proud when told I was entitled to be so, as a man who had shown courage.
And I took this for a new beginning, out in the world, in my private life, with other people and here on the log.
I was wrong.
Now I find myself full of uncertainties. It took just a couple of words to blow me to fragments: "London" ... "bombs".
I'd switched off to the news the instant I left work on July 19 and if I'm to give you the story, it must be straight.
Those words devastated me.
They sunk in slowly. I couldn't believe it had happened again, I didn't want to know, I "died to the world" for hours. Looking back to the man I sought out on recovering some sense of identity, I understood what Lao Tzu meant when he wrote 2,500 years ago of being "sick of sickness".
I blame nobody now, certainly not the person who gave me that little too much data to process after months when I did my best to conceal many of my feelings.
For reasons that have no place here, I'd taken risk after risk, trying to do the right things, be whole, be myself, and give all I could to others.
That hasn't changed. It's how I wish to live. I can see no other way to behave. For years I've known the more you give, the richer you are -- it's old wisdom, it's never been otherwise.
In my job, the relentless news itself, but seek to work well and I'm very fond of some fellow journalists and greatly admire their courage in our world full of truly shocking violence, cruelty and greed.
I need to learn to be more detached, while staying as wide open as I sought for so long.
Already this log is full of my views on brutality, inhumanity and the sadness I feel confronted with blind selfishness, along with spirited entries in defence of colleagues in the media accused by the public of manipulating the news and engaging in disinformation.
It was getting to me and I've been bringing my work home, thinking it better to express such things here rather than taking out on my anger and resentment on people who do me no harm.
However, I've also written recent entries that have bewildered people and confused them, got some worried about me, whether I have been as well as professed. I'm ashamed of such writing, I so much want to do something worthwhile.
I think, at last, I have the means, but it's been such a lonely job getting here ... and in a way, I'm not writing this for you. I don't mean to be rude. If you're interested, that's great! But you're reading somebody who just wants it logged. A catharsis. Right out of my system.
I feel it should be here, but not where I first put it.
Out in the orchard instead.
If I can help others, then good. I should like to.
I think I might have gone beyond "depression", by accident, to know where those terrible downers come from, what they are, and thanks to the teachers I'll pay reverence to now, a way to keep my head and my integrity. Some call it the Way.
To each our own.
To be rid of this poison!
I wrote thousands of words, trying to be clear about some unusual experiences, what I began to call "weird stuff", on being told: "Okay, you are psychic, you can do things with your mind others can't, so live with it, stop denying it to please others who refuse to accept it and aren't interested in the science."
Many people said "nonsense, you talk rubbish."
That hurt.
It hurt more than I've been willing to admit and this is equally true of fear. It may be stupid, but I didn't realise the latter until last week, when I had to face the fear that, in spite of a daily professed optimism, I've often felt.
I've had reason to be afraid for myself, but that doesn't matter. It isn't a story for this log: I made hard choices and stuck by them. Some people know, many don't, that's how it must be. I don't regret what I did, I believe it was right. I lost one friend out of stupidity; but I lost many more people I'd believed to be "friends" out of cowardice and self-interest on their part.
That episode is now over.
What I know to be right informs me -- as real knowledge and the very beginnings of wisdom, just a start -- I have no right to judge these people. I can't abide them and don't want to be anywhere near them, but it's not for me to judge them.
Cigarettes are bad, yes. But getting hurt and hurting others, failures of communication, carelessness and thoughtless behaviour, scaring people, misunderstandings, these things have been killing me, a rot in the soul, poison unto death.
One 'what if...' to care about: what revolution?
There's no point in writing more of such troubles, apart from a true acknowledgement of fear, not for myself, but for the world, our children and their children.
After an experience that left me in a state of deep shock right at the outset of a holiday when I had but three desires -- far more fun to write about and I shall -- I've only one theory left that strikes me as being of any importance if I'm right.
With a scientist, I was discussing what I've called for many months the Quiet Revolution, logging my perceptions of the way minds seem to be changing, quietly, and have done throughout my life from the late 1960s.
He said, "Do your homework!"
I started, as he suggested, with memes (Wikipedia) -- "mental viruses" and went on. The science gets hard, but it exists. It's possible I've handed out such viruses. Everybody does. The science is also young, much remains unknown.
I'm highly empathetic, there's no doubt of that and how occasionally I've manifest an odd ability to be "inside people's heads", feeling their feelings if not actually reading their thoughts.
What has gone unsaid before has always been: "If I'm doing this and it's real, I can find myself so aware of how others are feeling, then what might I be leaving behind? Can they not know I'm 'inside' them, do I not leave traces of myself?"
That has to go unanswered.
I can't know, some denied I've understood them, others accept and appreciate it; just one of "Nick's crazy ways," I guess. It seems academic now, I've not been aware of doing it for some weeks.
I suspect I've not just been talking about a revolution, a gentle and long process of "changing minds". There's a high chance the screenplay -- a very start-stop job -- I was doing for nearly a year was about evolution.
I've made notes. Chances are I'll chuck most, I'm really in a mood and have been for days to keep on getting rid of things, empty my head. Nevertheless, if that's right -- the research is worth reading -- that "revolution" is making converts after all.
I was wrong, it's happening fast, took a new direction in the 20th century in highly technological cultures. Our kids and theirs will have to adapt swiftly, many of them. As I understand it, one of the first "technological" innovations that triggered deeper evolutionary changes than many realised was the pill.
Pure and simple. Never mind the ethics, the religious debates, the politics of sexual liberation, the contraceptive pill and subsequent medical advances were and are it: technology moving in, changing us and speeding things up.
Our kids may need all the help they can get. People can be cruel and quite terrifying. Nature is ruthless. People can also be understanding, wise, gentle and kind. We have a choice: we help the children or we don't, we leave them to "nature".
Should this be correct, they will be in for nothing like the onslaught of paradox and contradictions of that night. But we're giving them a planet we're busy wrecking through selfishness; memes are travelling around it and can be very confusing.
We're all teachers and all students, age is irrelevant.
My daughter has a head full of ideas I didn't give her, her mother didn't give them to her and she doesn't know where they come from, but she gets upset when she can't handle them.
It's always been like that. What's new is the nature of such ideas and a qualitative difference, novel ways of thinking. I was going to log this in considerable detail, with examples. I may yet, one day, once I've done more homework, put it somewhere else.
There's also the sheer quantity of data....
If anybody's reading this, well, there I must leave it.
Uncertainties. I can take no more for now. When gloomy, this hypothesis worries me. When cheerful, it fills me with optimism. I think: "Okay, if the children can take it, the world will be much the better and happier for it. People will care to share."
The crash: how I lost it
What happens to a computer when asked to cope with too much?
Even the most powerful deal in logic, can't process excessive input and have a problem with contradictory input. Overload one, especially badly maintained, and it crashes.
If anyone is to "blame" for an excess of data, more than my mind could take, it's me, nobody else. My brain responded rather like my Mac when its core system can't cope, has what's known as a "kernel panic" and hands out an order: "Switch me off this instant!"
Any sense of identity I have disappeared after taking on too much data late one evening.
I recovered myself -- if that's the term, I don't know -- many hours later, as the birds outside stopped singing, the day had begun, a cat was hungry, and my brain began to operate in the usual ways once more and found an awareness of my surroundings.
'To know without knowing is best'
 After saying "Oh God" out loud and feeding the cat, then I grabbed for Lao Tzu's 'Tao Te Ching', with some chance of understanding what a man who died 2,500 years ago had to tell us. I've read it before, but this was different.
My brain insists: Please, pattern, order, people and events in a succession that makes sense of your life! Because my brain, like everybody's, needs that.
The reality is "I don't know".
It could have been anything. You're reading a last story about someone who was amused when told he was so good at writing about nothing, he'd do a really successful film.
To know no thing and no where and non sense.
That's where I "went". Those paradoxes I've always loved playing with? Wham! I got them. Others have written of the blinding, unimaginable light. That terrible darkness. A loss of identity. To be no body and no thing. Pain beyond bearing, yet still I'm here. And the joy. An ecstasy greater than any you've ever known.
There is more and no words for any of it, words are no use.
How "long" it lasted I don't know. There's no notion of time, order... sequence. To write anything else would be to start hypothesising and telling lies.
I shall not do this, I refuse because it's so very wrong. If I build on the raw, direct experience to make links where there aren't any would be a dreadful mistake.
While I never to go through that again, nor do I want to falsify it. Once a person, with an identity, a cat to feed, a dawn broken, I could say somebody is "evil" and talk about "wicked" behaviour, but there can be no talk of "good" and "evil", "truth" or "falsehood", "God" or the absence of God.
I know nothing about such concepts, they are without meaning in an absolute sense.
Without them comes a direct knowledge where Lao Tzu says all you can: "To know without knowing is best."
He and others talk about "right" and "wrong". That I can now grasp. It makes sense.
And such men and women, who know that asking where knowledge like this comes from is a question without an answer, because nobody knows, offer something else. For him, it's a Way.
That Way suits me. If you don't know what is right, best to wait, ask somebody wise and let it come to you.
"Stop thinking" was fine, too, still is. But I'd like to learn more now about what others call "Right thinking". Not mental gymnastics. Taoism, with other wise paths I've already explored but never quite understood, fit a man who would like to move on without gods.
This has done something quite "shocking" to me: I find myself a reverent person. Me? I'm renowned for being stupid and funny and irreverent.
I don't want to lose irreverence or wit. I like teasing people and being teased back, the ruder the better sometimes. But I would rather like to stop being stupid. I'd really like to get things right. In short, I'm stuck with wanting to "wise up".
And I need help. Ursula K. Le Guin (Wikipedia again) is, by light-years, the best story-teller around. I grew up on her knee, she's wise and I think she's the world's greatest living story-teller in English, but of course, it's to each their own.
That the Kid fell in love with her books gives me great joy.
I didn't know until recently that Ursula grew up on Lao Tzu's knee and he was the man I knew could suddenly help me once I got back. Ursula eventually came to write this of the 'Tao Te Ching':
"It is the most loveable of all the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring."
To me, it is a very deep spring along with a few other books I too find inexhaustible.
But there's the other. It's a river, many rivers, streams, oceans. This log has stayed afloat on these.
Music has saved me from myself and the world where no words could.
That's the story now.
1:09:04 AM 
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