Lately, I’ve been seeing the same people in different places. The faces of people I’ve known in the past are pasted onto people I’ve just met. They’re the same people, I can feel it. Their voices are slightly different, their names are different, their stories have a slight variation, but they’re all the same people wearing different lives.
I saw a former co-worker named Kali last night at my new job. When I saw her, she bears such a striking resemblance to someone else I knew, Danielle and when she spoke, it was the both of them speaking through the same voice. Even the nuances were the same. The tossed back hair, the elfin smile. There is someone else, Natalie who reminds me of a woman I used to date in my 20s. I swear they are the same people. It goes beyond the simple reflections of a look, a vague scent that catches your nose when you’re not paying attention.
During the tenure of my writing for The Good Men Project, I’ve written about whatever I wanted to because I never had anything really important to say. Well, now I have something important to say, and I’m not sure how many people could possibly understand it. Not because it’s beyond anyone’s understanding, but because I lack the skill to get it across.
I have been more and more aware of a series of events that seem to repeat over and over again. A while ago, I wrote about the theory of simulation and how I think that that’s where we currently are. I wrote that more as my echo of the thought experiment emulated by a thousand minds in science since the 60’s, but ever since I looked at reality through the lens of someone who has “seen the source code of life”, the similarities of repetition are screaming at me from dark corners that once held silence.
These days, I can’t even rely on my memory for certain things, as people seem to remember things differently that I do, and not because of perspective. Usually, I don’t have to rely on my memory, I rely on books. There’s a certain comfort I’ve grown in reading. A book is almost by definition “immutable” and is only mutable by its destruction; “their memory never fails”. But, now even the passages of books reflecting what was, seem to be changed, as if the character of the words and phrases suggest things that never happened.
I feel on the verge of some kind of madness. Nothing violent, or aggressive, but some kind of shift in the way I perceive the world.
Everything used to have a flow, some kind of linear direction of cause and effect, and while that still is the case to some degree, I feel like the effect it has on those around me differs from what should exist. I feel like hands reached out to for help in darkness are quite simply holding you close to find a safe place to stick a knife. The world has grown cold, when it should be warm. It should be together, instead of floating little islands of isolated independence. I don’t remember the world being this hard and cold.
It has changed so much that walking the streets of my hometown has made me feel as “a stranger in a strange land.” I feel as if the flow of life has some how altered, as a massive boulder thrown into a shallow stream. Now the water has to find another route. I feel as a man living in the 1600’s would feel, suddenly disappearing and reappearing in the modern era with all its confusion.
The subjective morality that others perceive simply doesn’t exist anymore. One person’s preference is now another person’s law. Violence is somehow seen as normative, so much in fact that the news has to go twenty-four hours a day to keep up with it all.
And, somehow… I keep running into those same people. I keep seeing the same faces. I keep smelling the same scents. Either Nature is very frugal with her patterns, or there is something happening to me, just outside of my perception. I can see its effects, and realize how much they deviate from what I’ve always known. I realize its similarity to what the system has already shown me, but I feel like I’ve caught a glimpse behind the curtain. The only problem I have right now, is that I can’t rationalize or understand what I’ve seen quite yet.
I’m sure none of this makes any sense to you.
I feel like I’m having some kind of existential revelation.
I feel like I’m kind of seeing the blurring of the lines of separation, as if everything is slowly becoming one, as two atoms smashing together in a state of cultural and existential fission.
I feel like the key to understanding it is to keep reading, to keep writing, and to keep trying to understand why I keep seeing the same faces in different people.
Then again, I could just be legitimately going insane. I don’t believe I am. I can tie my shoes and do everything that a normal person (for lack of a better term) can do. Maybe I’m coming out of some kind of shared psychosis, and that I’m simply exhibiting the signs of being a sane man in an insane world. “In an insane world, a sane man will appear insane.”
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Photo: Getty Images
Welcome to awakening. Higher consciousness has found you crack the egg and now truth is becoming perceptible to you. 11:11
When we change where we’re viewing the world from, our sense of self and the world changes. Natural growth takes us deeper within which leads to a broader, more encompassing perspective. Kind of like stepping back or higher. However, if we don’t have any context for the shift, the mind doesn’t have a story for it and we lack language or explanation. Over time, the anomalies settle and it gets clearer. Then the mind can catch up. The key isn’t so much figuring it out with the mind – that comes after. The key is living life and having experiences.… Read more »
I came to the comments, and see none. Am I the only one relating? PS, in Clearwater 3x a year, beach, Starbucks too