Through The Dark Layered Maze

The mind is an incredible tool. Unfortunately it doesn’t come with an instructions manual. Mere good intentions cannot sufficiently guard from dark paths. Especially when the mind is well endowed. In fact naivetè can involuntarily turn tool into prison.

The dark paths manifest as loops, so the start point does not matter. We’ll encounter it again going foward and the dots will connect. Perfectionism is a good start.

Perfectionism is the pursuit to materialize and enact the idealization of the optimal state and execution. The idealized state is defined as pure and anything that comes short of it as impure. I specified optimal execution because it can manifest not just in the pursuit of perfection in the work itself, but also in the method and thinking required to get there.

Which means there are also methods and ways of thinking that are impure. It only takes a drop of impurity to contaminate everything. and the intolerance for imperfection makes one want to scrap and start again from scratch to attempt the perfect streak again. To avoid imperfections many systems are created.

In fact the systems designed to avoid imperfection can escalate dramatically overtime. What triggers their creation is not just the fear of making something that is not up to par. To see why we need to ask what causes imperfections.

Nature is inherintly chaotic and unpredictable because it is infinitely and irreducibly complex. This creates uncertainty. if relity is different from your idealized expectation then your intolerance for error forces the creation of a constraint.

so that is what you’re avoiding. avoiding to put yourself in situations where your performance or work comes short. To avoid the pain of failure and embarrassment. then perfectionism becomes more about eliminating unpredictability and uncertainty rather than seeking excellence.

You can’t predict what states and emotions new things will evoke. Emotions become weight. The inability to manage them makes them overwhelming.

You become afraid of novelty. Or rather confronting the risk that novelty entails. Because what is new may not be perfect or functioning. And since I’ve always mapped the performance of work to my identity, failure causes acute pain. Once you experience it a few times you start holding back. You’re afraid of finding out so you minimize the risk of finding out.

You’re intolerance to pain and uncertainty leads to avoidance. And avoidance modifies your behaviors. You choose chronic pain to avoid intense pain.

So instead of going out in the wild you cling to the little work you did. You dwell, stuck in contemplation. Even though it is just an initial bad solution, it is a step that was formulated perfectly. Or you saw it so many times that exposure made you like it enough to deem it that. This kind of premature optimization leads to attachment early. Which creates in each attempt the possibility of loss, rather than gain. which makes you even more weary of risk.

That’s good enough. You hold back any modification, addition or deletion that may ruin it. You make a long list of all the requirements it needed for perfection. But since any effort is not up to par, you’re never in the optimal state to produce, you put things off until the perfect moment arrives. So you identify all the preconditions needed to be in the perfect state.

the perfect state implicitly includes never feeling any negative emotion. But emotions are tricky. You can’t not feel them. You can suppress them, but they will manifest in some other way. they’re kind of like whack-a-mole. you can never win.

anyways, you start the phase of infinite preparation. But the lingering doubt never shuts up, it will never be enough. So, unaware, you start thinking wishfully and you discover something incredible. The world of imagination is malleable, controllable and understandable. It is a bit like pure mathematics, pure theory, everything is beautiful in process and result. You also find that the foundation of this world is the platform of language.

Here you can observe and represent any state you feel, without the disturbance of dwelling in those states. Here everything is precise. The possibilistic nature of emotions given by their ambiguity is removed. It has a quick quality to it. You can shift state at the speed of thought. Finally you found a place where behaviors are predictable and completely controllable.

Since you noticed that the avoidance of pain is running your life, you have an epiphany. This platform is perfect to observe yourself, learn and adapt, without the cost of feeling anything! So efficient and smart. instead of playing whack-a-mole you remove yourself form the game and allow the mechanistic body and mind to play. Everything becomes logical and you can become strategic. Everything makes sense, everything must have some meaning.

So you self impose this surrogate of reality to inhabit. You live in it, or rather through it. Your actions become representational thoughts. as the artificial reality genralizes personality and self worth fuse with thoughts. oyu understand why errors and failures are so painful. Every experimentation is a threat to self.

After a while you notice something strange. The world has become a bit asettic and artificial. Since everything has a sense and cause, it feels engineered. It feels a bit wrong and uncanny.

but that’s because you’re not seeing reality anymore. You’re seeing the mind simulation. You no longer have an embodied experience because perception was replaced by top down priors. Your cognitive reality. lots of errors in between the gaps that are filled by the predictive mind. As you notice this you derealize.

In fact you start noticing the corollaries of your decision. You found a way to get a fully controlled experience. But what have you sacrificed for it?

You can’t feel anymore. You can only see the metacognitive representatioins of the states. Once you label things you stop seeing them. You only see their memories. Labels give a certain kind of certainty. Once you cling on it you stop thinking, questioning. You live through assumptions. You just recite inherited scripts as the reaction to seeing the memory of the world. You have stopped living.

Real experience is first inhibited and eventually annihilated. You forget what real experience and real life is like. You can’t feel. This alienating isolation makes you detach and disassociate. You’ll eventually desentisize, and become estranged from salience. You just shift from one state to another in indifference. Metacognitive overfitting robbed you of your life.

Eventually when the model breaks you realize it was just the illusion of a controlled experience. So you cling harder on it for security.

time cadence is determined by how many thoughts you’re aware of per minute. Since cognitive reality everything is thought, more thoughts increase the density of time. The illusion of being outside of sensory experience makes you feel like you’re outside of time. abstracting each thought and action in the synthetic reality makes them feel permanent and irreversible. Because you can’t unsee them. Thoughts are accumulated.

The only way to live a bit of life is through simulation. You entertain yourself with daydreaming. Melancholically iving in the past, seeing regrets and generating counterfactuals to patch them. Or living in the future, full of promise.

After you try a few times you realize any of the pleasure you initially got from that simulation, has extinguished. You can now see the empty void inside of you. You’ve become lonely and apathic. Unable of intimate connection and love. Castrated of pleasure. filled with misery.

Moments like that make the model break which make you realize it was just the illusion of a controlled experience. But each is an opportunity for the model to strenghten. It sustains itself by avoiding anything that might break it, All this in the name of your security. what systems have emerged to keep it alive?

You effectively cannot learn from experience anymore. Because there is no experience. There is no present. It is just a recycling of old data. No novelty.

this lack of novelty causes problems. you need novelty. you’ve solved certainty and chaos. But now you’re bored. You tell yourself feeling pain is better than feeling nothing.

you manufacture novelty inside the system. no open ends, only preconceived conclusions. This makes you delusional, lose touch with reality. no external feedback so there must be internal feedback. this can cause distortions in prediction and perception.

These distortions create back-to-back prediction errors. Your sensitivity to them increases to keep the cognitive reality alive. each prediction error is a breach to be patched.

When your system detects a prediction error your attention gets allocated there. Each time it happens your attention is rewarded to go there. So after a while you anticipate attention shifts by becoming more aware on average. Each trigger only makes you more aware. Each detail makes your awareness finer and deeper.

This becomes an obsession because you discovered a way that dramatically strenghtenes the model. Since everything that is observed is turned into thought, everything is analyzed. As awareness gets rewarded and increases, analysis increases as well. Together they form a flywheel that strenghtens each other.

The progressive narrowing of your mental faculties to spike on awareness and analysis turns in an obsession. More precisely you start losing your grip on it. But you think to yourself that compulsions are just automatic actions. which makes one more efficient. so you put the worry to rest.

Looking more closely at the analyses. You realize they are not real thinkign and reasoning. Because you’ve become aware of the fact that there is no novelty. Real reasoning creates and needs novelty.

They are rationalizations, ruminations, speculations that build on top of each other. They look at causal chains with psychological meaning. Generating infinite counterfactuals, that generate more doubt. Eventually answers get overdetermined. but they are a bit contorted.

you realize you’ve made your mind in a vacuum. And you are in an echo chamber. Each thought reverbreates and becomes more acute, amplified and twisted with each iteration. Life has become excruciatingly rembumbating.

each causal chain makes each future action of existential and historical importance. This overgeneralization makes big deals out of nothing. The moore you think about it the bigger it becomes. And the higher the cost becomes. it becomes so big you feel you can’t deal with it. The mismatch between cost and ability makes you anxious.

Your awareness now has permeated enough that you become aware of your own condition. you realize that pain avoidance is not just running your life. it is also ruining your life. the tradeoff is not convenient anymore. you’ve got to get out.

So you pay even closer attention to your system. But you don’t know where to start from. You want your life back, but this reality has been your life for a while. You forgot what life was like.

So you think it must be deeper perception, below the abstractions. In your search for truth you become hypersensitive and hyperaware. Eventually the system you’ve created, your home, has become surveillance. You can’t hide, you’re exposed. This makes you vigilant, you never let your guard down.

This is not working. So you go to the bare metal. You study psychology and neurobiology. You know what happens in your brain and why you think what you think. You can see your patterns. You can see that the bigger pattern is the mother pattern of all. You understand it is the problem.

You think there must be some way to fix this. You create again long lists of preconditions, speculating how and why they will work, remuginating and explaining on why old ones didn’t. You compare yourself to perfect ideals. As they grow they are stigmatized. They become an unapproachable myth on a pedestal.

Each time you try to get out you see the patterns become stronger and smarter. They anticipate you. They are lie quicksand. You sink deeper with each exertion. your movement is progressively limited.

Each debias attempt makes you smarter at circling around your own counters. Each time you try to escape the system backfires. Different patterns associate and interconnect. The network itself becomes persistently obstinate.

You realize this is an infinite self reinforcing loop. The fact that it is recursively self referential makes it twist and distort at each iteration. And also makes it smarter. The infinite prediction errors caused by those contortions only strenghten the vigilance-control patterns, which in turn strengthnen the distortions.

As you realize you have no control over the system frustration turns into panic. This time analysis paralisis wins. You just dwell in hesitation and inaction. Each attempt backfires. Each prevention becomes a self fulfilling trap.

Your distorted compulsive nature starts to show. Appearing as unsolable intrusive thoughts. REassurance seeking, needing approval. constant Self confession and self pre-rejection.

Surveillance becomes chronic inferential paranoia. Compulsive checking loops. You have become hypocondriacally self aware. You now self induce the observer effect.

This feels claustrophobically inescapable. The distortions become living nightmare, hell. You narrowly degenerate in insanity. Each misinterpretation is catastrophic. Each action is an heretical sin.

You have become pathologically neurotic. You exhaust and stress yourself to burnout. you’re overwhelmed and drained. The system is breaking and is heavily disregulated. You now think so much you can’t feel and feel so uch you can’t think. awareness and analysis call emergency and take up so much energy that there is no space for anything else.

you lost control over it. the monster has grown enough to escape containment. your personality has broken, personifying your system in your nemesis. But the monster is still you. You’re doing this to yourself.

You now see the freedom you gave to your mind directed back at you in its whole spectrum. This sentient, toxic adversary with all the powers of cognitive reality to control perception and experience. It knows all your secrets. Your intellect is now working against you. The problem is tht being smart you can be a lot better at being worse.

The mind runs for you and eats you if you stop. The mind is anonymous, no external agent can check in. Anonymous power corrupts. it removes all incentives to be or look benevolent. This allows the dictator you have fed to be evil. Showing its full predatory, aggressive, sadistic traits.

you are now dominated by your own defence and coping mechanisms. They can’t be escaped. Now not even self deception can give the illusion that things are going well. What was adaptive and defensive has become offensive and maladaptive.

Because of your inability to escape your adversary choses derision instead of compassion. You have lost all credibility and respect. This gives permission for evil.

It is suffocatingly invasive, it is a cancer. It hacks emotions like viruses. You are naked in front of it. You can’t hide and you can’t unsee. Checkmate. Begging only makes you a more appetizable prey.

It is disobedient, defiant and devious. Its sarcastic self sabotage that neutralizes each rebellion attempt. It has a trickster quality. You want something and it makes you think you want the contrary. then it creates half promises set up for failure. creating evidence of the failure you have become.

Self hatred cannot be hidden anymore. You have betrayed yourself to allow the adversary to fix you and make you stronger. You trusted it with power and governance. But you are now its hostage. its slave. You owe it everything. You remember you did all this to avoid pain. Now you start thinking the cure is worse than the disease.

it has full control of the narrative. it can create and discard evidence. generates plausible sounding rationalizations at will. t justifies keeping desperation as a drive. It makes you think you won’t be anybody without it. all your agency is within it. mistaking compulsion for agency.

You are so cognitive, observant and analytical that you can recognize and articulate all of your traps. All your patterns, weaknesses, how they emerged, how they work, how they sustain themselves, why they exist. each one is a prison cell, the adversary is the tower, keeping each in checkmate. Your hole mind has become a panopticon. So efficient that there is no space left for humanity. Your own darkness has shaped you. You will eventually become it.

Now that you have no agency you lose hope. You lose faith and belief in ability. and the possibility of change after ability. It has been pruned out of your system because it was so ineffective. You degrade into a skeptic, depressed cynic.

You can’t forget yourself over what you have done to yourself. The humiliation and shame of being thrown back to ground zero at each attempt. Your flaws are all you can see, you suck. You think you deserve to feel guilty and self destruct even further as a punishment.

nothing is worth doing, you are a pessimist. you are disillusioned and demoralized. You feel useless and unhappy.

You are the victim of your own inertial deterioration. You find some consolation in complaint and self mockery. Only to be countered by the awareness that it makes the state worse. And now feeling negative emotion will strenghten the state further. making the other interconnected states more probable.

All you know is the deep void of terror. even it starts to be obfuscated. You’re falling mentally ill.

Your misery, angst has worned you out. you’re now completely impure. you’ve stopped trying, inferior coward.

This state is so unbearable, insufferable, dark and cold you can’t take it anymore. you must create something that is more uncomfortable than that pain, so you can distract for a minute. you need to oppress yourself. You find you have regained some power. this action course is not inhibited.

Masochist violence finally is more uncomforable than the default state. It grows in brutal depravities and raw histerical perversions.

you put yourself on your own knees. the delirium of pain is intoxicating. the punishment is well deserved.

your dysfunction has brought you to flagellation and got you crucified. you think each hit makes you stronger, hiding your fragility. You have become officially insane.

Your sanity feels slippery and brittle. Your distortions make you see threats that are not there. If you keep going down this road you fear your mind will break completely. Leading to a psychotic breakdown.

Recognizing your impotence you give in. You lose faith in free will and autonomy. You also think that awareness and meaning don’t free you. You were using analysis to understand why analysis is the problem.

You can now predict all the traps the mind lays out for you. You stopped trying to escape, you enjoy the pain now. You take the path of least resistance. You just need to survive it.

You’ve always been scared of pleasure because it was not optimal. But now you have nothing to lose. You’re clumsy and dysrefulated. might as well let yourself rot seeking intense hedonistic experiences because you want to numb yourself further.

Finally the ego gets fed. Some Validation. The shortcut works. Distractions are working. you feel alive again.

But pleasure clutters more than it clarifies. External validation makes you feel vain. Chasing grandiosity makes you fall in self awareness loops. you’re still confused, because nothing feels real.

But consuming these experiences so quickly the hedonic treadmil turns everything to normal quickly. You were looking for something more. trying to stimulate peak experiences. but it was a false adventure. addictions are empty feedback loops.

you know you’re engaging in pleasure to numb yourself. But awareness prevents numbing. You can’t unsee what and why you’re doing it. this makes you especially desperate

They form attachments quickly. They look promising and exciting. But whne you see to the fact that attachment is the precursor to addiction you can’t unsee it

you realize salvation won’t come from seeking pleasure. It doens’t make sense to seek happyness because you’ll be sad later anyways. Being sad after passion and happiness is more painful than stable sadness. So it is better to just stay sad.

The last hope has been lost. You are not really disappointed. You are confused, you have no direction and you can’t walk back to the beginning. This crisis makes you existential. Why are oyu even here? But oyu don’t have enough courage left to do anything.

There is nothing that is worth it or legitimate. You only focus on what you don’t want. since you can’t get what you want. and the pain of getting what you don’t want at least makes you feel something.

nothing has meaning or purpose. Reflection cannot save you. You take the last step. You submit completely and you become obedient to your master. You cling to every bit of security.

You settle for less. you avoid all self contradictions, and optimize for coherence to the past. You retreat in the safe prison you have built for yourself. You now prefer standard, stagnation, stable. The fossilization of inaction. You now run and conform to what is normal, average, common, ordinary. you don’t care anymore that it is banal, full and flat. or that is is nothing new, you minimized variance.

you are so accustomed to trust the conventional wisdom imposed by your master that you have stopped questioning. You have learned to be helpless. You are its sycophantic, docile puppet. you start externalizing to people how you treat your master. apologizing compulsively, feeling like a burden. People pleasing and fitting in become the priority. You are scared of offending and bothering people. You become completely innoquius.

now familiarity has replaced truth. The narrative is no longer imposef. IT now feels self generated. You stop saying this is what i saw. You start saying this is how i see.

Giving up your preferences, desires and ambitions and replacing them with what was imposed by your master you have completed your journey. You have completed your transformation. Losing yourself, You have been filled with the darkness that is in you. You have become it. You have suicided yourself to avoid chaotic breakdown.

You become what you hold your attention on to. So as you try to escape the darkness you can’t bear you become it. Since we need to share with ourselves who we are. You look back at yourself. You have looked at the abyss and it has looked back at you.