Top 9 Ways to Lose Your Mind

5. Electroshock yourself each and every time you cough, sigh, sneeze, sniff, or consider the immediate future.

6. Partner with a person who has already discovered a unique pathway to a lost mind. Have them show you the ropes. Always give them the benefit of the doubt.

7. Integrate: The Many Worlds Hypothesis, Panpsychism, the Growing Block or One-Electron or Big Banged Universe. Take any one of these concepts and let your in-the-moment mind heal over it like stalwart old trees engorge barb-wire fences and life gets a little strange. Do the same with Dr. Donald Hoffman’s “Case Against Reality” and the world as a whole becomes a static of little white lies.

Stated simply: all your senses have evolved over eons not to tell you the truth, but to tell you what will maximize — allow? — your survival. In his carefully designed simulations, the probability that you experience space, time, and physical objects as they actually are is zero. And it is not merely that you do not see infrared, that you do not hear the subaudible, that you cannot feel magnetic forces in your bones; your conscious experience, says Hoffman, is analogous to the desktop on your computer — when you click on the folder which holds the files of your dream journal, recognize that there is no wallpaper of a gorgeous sunset, there is no cartoon manilla folder, there is no sheet of paper awaiting your half-remembered scribblings. It is all there as a utilitarian sheen atop a maddeningly complex microcosmos of code. Actually, even that is a simplification and crude near-satire of what is really going on: zoom in deep enough and find the interplay of individual electrons under a self-organization so delicate and bizarre that a single transaction can hardly be understood without it falling apart.

So, then, what is reality? The work suggests no answer to this, only that what you perceive to be is a merely a screen. And further, that you are not capable of looking behind this screen. That the true goings-on of reality are far too much for your simian brain to handle. And if so, if this is all true — and few cogent detractors have raised their voice thus far — then you cannot trust this room in which you sit to be the room in which you sit and, further, you cannot trust that even your body as experienced is actually what is. And further, further, you cannot even trust the results of scientific experiment to give you the truth, for couldn’t all those results be similarly simplified to be grokked in a way that doesn’t tend toward your demise? What game are you even playing?

8. Each night, as you lie down to sleep, carefully consider the litany of cringe-worthy things you’ve said, and done: your tantrums as a child, your most humiliating faux pas, your crudest or most accidental insult.

9. Propagate/Self-medicate: He tucked in his shirt and clipped close what remained of his hair and he went into work at the car factory like all the others. His hands rarely greasy though he knew his way with tools and engines — what did those machines mean to him, I wonder. All this time, schizophrenia ran under his skin, like a deep well and subterranean river and so his children attended school and won spelling bees and he had nights where he burned his life’s paperwork in a backyard pit, where his lotto numbers directed the fate of the Soviet Union and the free world.
His son a distant-eyed wire, swarthy with his father’s France and his mother’s Syria. And all cosmic conspiracies in his head, before he even knew the words of them.
We did drugs, where I’m from. Some of us. Perhaps the best of us. We drank alcohol and smoked cannabis and dropped acid and swallowed bottles of cough syrup whole and ground our teeth on ecstasy. In some towns they say there is nothing to do but I came to see there was nothing to do anywhere for a sixteen year old. The hazards, only, differ. And what were they all to do? Follow rules? What good does that do anyone but grandmothers?

I heard this son was cracking whippets and pinching his nose to glug back robitussin. These dissociate, in case you do not know. The first sends one spiraling into a world of surreal connections and the second stretches and collapses the boundaries between. It makes one two-dimensional, five-dimensional, it makes one stare off into the distance entranced.
I gave him a ride once, two years younger than me, three. He was stuck out at our bowling alley, ensconced in the weedy parking lot next to a cored-out grocery store, feeling like a farflung outpost there just a few miles from the freeway. He’d been smoking pot and could hardly talk and I told him that was okay, I knew where he lived.

And I saw him once after that, in a chlamydial town where my birth hospital stands still. Walking the town square, for what it was. His hair wet without explanation. A tattoo of the Mickey’s bee cartoonish and fresh on his forearm. And I don’t remember exactly, because I was closer to being him than I was to being me, now, but it seemed like he was saying ‘don’t you see it? Can’t you see?’

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