I was bed-ridden last weekend with a fever.  I have one about once a year, usually, coincidentally or not, in times of stress.  They last for a day or two and then recede.  During that time, I am possessed by geometric patterns - patters projected from within that need solving.  The feeling is difficult to describe.  I do not feel the impulse to solve patterns.  I do not make a choice.  The experience occurs at a level just below conscious.  My identity is not present in the analysis.  Just shapes.  Endless shapes and patterns.  My brain is the machine that explores and solves them.  The higher the fever, the harder this drives.  

The cube was the geometric shape of last weekend.  Every time I found a place for a cube, more chaotic cubes would be revealed.  The activity lasted for hours.  In another instance, I can distinctly remember a particularly high fever, 104 degrees, of a few years ago.  I was constantly rotating pinwheel shapes in an effort to point them in the right direction. On the few occasions I was consciously aware of it’s happening, it felt maddeningly unstoppable.  It just seemed to propel the fever higher and higher - The Sisyphus inside.  But in a delirious state, the will melts away and I was unable to engage it.

In a recent episode of Clever Apes, Jack Cowan discussed the possibility that hallucinations actually reflect the structure of the brain.  There is a systematic categorization of patterns here, whether they be drug, synesthetic, near-death or fever induced: a form constant.  The man who coined the term, Heinrich Klüver, found  four discreet categories: lattices, cobwebs, tunnels and spirals.

So then, the lattices (cubes) and spirals (pinwheels) experienced during a fever are perhaps a conscious look into the invisible workings of the brain.  Structures in nature are scalable.  They work on the micro and macro levels.  It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to conclude that the patterns that mesmerize us when we look at them are just reflections of our own invisible inner-structure.

~ü

During this brief transit we possess two gifts - consciousness of the gift of life and consciousness of its short loan from party or parties unknown.  We owe two gifts in return - a life fully lived, and a life surrendered at the end.

- James Hollis, “Permutations of Desire”, Parabola Magazine  (Fall 2010)

[Image: Andreas Levers Path, 2010]

If this was the cover of a book, it would be called The Spectrum of Light Reveals Itself, Duality and Other Short Stories of Symmetry and Enlightenment.  I’d read it.

~Schmüdde

The secrets of the universe are almost entirely invisible.

Dione (pictured in front) is a moon of Saturn and the fifteenth-largest moon in the solar system. Made up almost entirely of water ice, Dione is denser than all the moons smaller than it—combined. It’s shown here as it transits Titan, the second-largest moon in the solar system and the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere. It’s also the only other object in the solar system other than Earth that has shown clear evidence for liquid at the surface. Although Titan is composed of rocky material and water ice, the temperatures are too cold there for liquid water to exist. The lakes on Titan are filled with liquid methane.

(via NASA Image of the Day)