The pause.

Late last week, I started feeling… a pause, within me. And I admit, I felt a twinge of worry.

In the past, whenever I felt this… pause, it always ended up feeling like a personal “brahmapralaya”: Wherein all things I'd been and created up until that point abruptly dies. The being I am dies. The things I created die. Everything is destroyed, and I have to rebuild everything from scratch. Over and over again.

It would begin quietly, initially feeling like boredom. Lack of interest. Disconnection. Distraction. Before rapidly building up and escalating into a violent shedding.

So… I worried because, simply put, I would prefer not to have to raze my brand-new website to the ground after only two months of writing 😮‍💨🤦🏻‍♀️ as I've truly been enjoying the experience of creating and playing in it.

So much for non-attachment, huh? 🤣

Yet, this time, there was something different.

The threads within me weren't “converging” into a “singularity”; terminating like they always did before. Rather, they looked more like convergence of graphical perspective; the threads continue.

And, the pause, for once, didn't feel like the end of a breath, but rather the space between breaths. Like the space between the first melt of winter and the first buds of spring.

The analogy that came to mind, if I even understand the basics of general relativity correctly, is: Not a curvature singularity. Rather, more a coordinate singularity?

A positional boundary that exists only in perception.

Fascinating, sure, but it definitely wasn't making sense initially! I'm still figuring it out, even as I write.

While contemplating this, I published the following:

As I change, my perspective changes. As my perspective changes, I change.

I discovered that learning, in me, is morphological in nature: As I ingest and digest new information, the very [something] of me transforms. The old me dies, and a new me is born.

This new me retains, obviously, enough continuity of self to present as (relatively) cohesive and coherent to the outside world. But in many ways, the new me is unable to perceive in the same way as the old me.

Because the new me is in a new “spacetime”, and thus sees, and interprets, the same data from a different somato-cognitive-existential position.

It's not merely about having a new or different perspective. Many times, I cannot “go back”, even if I'd like to, even if I try.

The light falls differently now. Different contours are illuminated. They capture my attention here and now.

I don't lose whatever I've gained in past iterations of me, but this past knowing gets integrated into the new me in a way that often can no longer be retrieved as a conscious knowing. It becomes more like muscle memory, like swimming or riding a bicycle.

It became apparent that the pause is the liminal space between the old me dying and the new me being born.

It seems like the pause is triggered when certain parameters are met. I'm imagining some “data stomach” within me that, once sated with ingested information, initiates digestion and integration protocols that, in turn, commences transformation procedures.

Once that starts, there's no going back: My “sense of present self” will rapidly begin to dissolve. I've always expressed this as feeling like I suddenly cocoonify and gooify, like a caterpillar.

The problem is that I fought this my entire life.

Both the timing and the mechanics of the pause are out of my control. Thus, for much of my life, I would suddenly reach cocoonify and gooify point, often at the worst possible times, and have no way of explaining it (because I've never understood it), much less receive support for it.

I hated it. It made me feel out of control of my mind, body, and life.

In processing this past anguish, though, I came to realize that the only reason the pause almost always mutated into a self-destructive “brahmapralaya”-like outcome is because:

• Self-destruction is the natural outcome of self-hatred;
• Self-hatred is the natural outcome of growing up and living in hateful (virulently intolerant and spiteful) socio-environments.

What I needed was a safe socio-environment in my childhood and early adulthood, where I could:

• Arrive at an understanding of my inner processes, at my pace, with curiosity and compassion; and
• Receive the support I needed to discover how to live in an outer world so vastly different from my inner world.

Instead, all I ever received was derision, direct or indirect, and that in turn, led me to vehemently judge, resist and attack my processes. It would be akin to said caterpillar violently sabotaging its own cocoonification and gooification, developmental and transformational processes. Can you imagine the amount of damage it would do to itself?

Now imagine the damage that is inflicted if this repeats several times a year, over decades. Yep. This is but one of various reasons I feel there is little wonder that I live with invisible disabilities today.

A few tense days passed. I eyed the pause with bated breath. I was expecting things to blow up, like always before. Yet, it didn't.

Instead, the pause merely… sat there. Staring back at me with calm, gentle eyes. So calm and gentle it was that I tentatively took the few steps towards it and sat down before it.

We took hands. We closed our eyes. We breathed together and we melded. Then, I gently surrendered myself to the dissolve.

In the midst of the shift, I peeked open an inner eye. Everything already looked new and unfamiliar. I sighed. I trembled. And I felt the hands that held mine squeeze gently in reassurance. “All's well,” I heard. I closed my eyes again and leaned deeper into the goo.

Suddenly, it was (kinda) over. It wasn't long; only a day or two. I was surprised. Yup, I was new, yet again. But when I looked around, I didn't feel the utter severance and lack of connection with my past self and creations, the way I experienced in the past.

I looked at my reading, notes, and writing. Different, yes, but not completely alien. I didn't experience a wracking sense of dissonant revulsion, like always happened in the past.

I assume that, because I embraced the process this (very first) time, free from egoic obsession or conflict while grounded in compassion and acceptance, I allowed the process to work as intended. Instead of becoming destructive, it simply did whatever it was always meant to do; simply, quietly.

I looked at my website. What a familiar yet different view! I feel like a hiker who climbed atop a peak, only to be magically transformed into a bird now looking down at familiar landscape from a wholly new perspective point.

Same things, different space(time): Perhaps that's all the pause ever was. A whole being transition from one space(time) to another, wherein I “pass through a singularity”, gooifying on the way through and reconstituting on the way out.

Not quite embodied clear perception. Similar, but different.

In comparing the two, the “movement” (illusory) of embodied clear perception is “upwards and/or outwards”, shifting one's perspective point from the involvement of thingness into the meta of nothingness.

Whereas the pause, on the other hand, moves one within the realm and between the spaces of thingness. Hmmm… I will ponder more on this.

In any case, I'm no longer me (again), but I'm still here. Fascinating.