Toxic Brain Needs Cleanse

November 19, 2025

In order for me to keep my inherently widely disparate life somewhat organized, I observe fairly strict daily routines. One of them is, after a long walk with puppy Scampi, to reserve two hours late mornings Monday through Thursday to compose a post for this blog.

Another is to nap between 1 and 2 pm.

Another is to try to get 7 hours of sleep at night, going to bed between 8 and 9 pm.

I can usually keep the morning pattern. And the nap. But getting 7 hours of sleep? Last night, I woke up a total of five times, after only one or two hours. Each time I wake up (and pee) it takes time to fall back asleep, via listening to podcasts on my phone.

And here’s a confession: the podcasts that help me sleep these days fall under the label of True Crime. Can you believe?

Last night was bad, really bad. Though my body has energy, my brain feels toxic.

 

And this morning’s routine has been disrupted as well. After our 4-mile walk, I opened my computer, only to suddenly discover that I had to deal with a situation involving a credit card, my credit union, and reservations for three for Thanksgiving Dinner at a downtown restaurant: $241.06 altogether. In order to make the reservation in the first place, which I did over a week ago, I had to get on a platform other than the restaurant itself (opentable.com). But today, I was told that my credit union couldn’t accept the $241.06 from that credit card. And that I needed to either call or go down to the credit union to tell them before dealing again with the reservation.

What? I went down there, but forgot to bring the computer which had the notice on it. They couldn’t figure it out either. I came back here, and tried to go on that same Open Table platform (assuming that the reservations had somehow not gone through), and pay again, this time with a debit card from the credit union, but was told that I had already made reservations and paid for them at that time; do I want to make another three reservations? (Reservations cannot be adjusted or canceled on that platform.)

 

Well, I just about threw up my hands.

Or maybe I should have just thrown up my hands. Let technology go. Let this computer go. Let my credit and debit cards go. Let it all go.

But here I am, composing a (truncated) post after all.

 

For my 83rd birthday this year, I’m gifting myself three days (December 18-20) in the Inn and walking the trails of Turkey Run State Park, and will take with me not even my dog Scampi (who tends to be as nervous system dominated as I am), only my phone, and that to only be used on the trails (in case I fall and hurt myself), and even the phone will be left in the car when I’m not on the trails, but instead, in my room, reading a real, printed book, or downstairs, in the restaurant.

I’ve done this before, this screen fast. And it’s way past time to do it again.

One month to go . . . birthday is the 19th December, same day that 3IAtlas (whatever that is or isn’t) is supposedly predicted to make its closest approach to Earth.

Meditation on “THE BIG BANG” and beyond . . .

November 18, 2025

I can say that I came into this life with a bang, a Big Bang; in other words, I emerged from the soft, close darkness of my mother’s womb into glaring hospital overhead lights.

I can say that I “cause” a Big Bang anytime I suddenly do or say something that shifts the entire perceptual field.

I can say that anytime anyone shoots to kill with a gun without a silencer, that the effect is that of a Big Bang. Or blows up with a bomb . . . on and on.

In other words, a Big Bang signals near-instantaneous shift from one “reality” to another with no, or hardly any, liminality.

Look closer at any of these scenes, however, slow any of them down, and what appeared as sudden melts into gradual. The more perception slows, the more subtle and smooth the transition.

In other words, so much depends on the nature of Time, how we experience Time.

 

Okay, now let’s go to the Big Guy, the main BIG BANG, which, despite all sorts of more or less recent cosmological attempts to undo it, still “sits at the bottom” of western cosmological conceptualizing.

Searching, searching . . . “Is the Big Bang real” . . .

How about this?

Among the many comments under this youtube video, this one:

Yes: “my brain breaks with the infinite regress.” If there is any philosophical no-no in the western tradition, it’s this: we simply cannot fathom falling through space forever, which is what this comment appears to portend. Though we sometimes dream that we are falling through space, it’s inevitably nightmarish.

The eastern tradition (Buddhism, Taoism, and so on) tends to soften the Big Bang blow, or eliminate it altogether, which may account for why westerners, when they immerse themselves in eastern ways, inevitably find themselves changed.

For example, I remember being utterly thrilled to discover the Buddhist philosophical notion of “co-dependent arising,” in which the notion of “first cause” (i.e., usually, Big Bang)? simply doesn’t arise. Instead, co-dependent arising indicates the interdependence and interpenetration of everything with everything else. In other words, everything arises through multiple causes and has multiple effects. Our stubbornly locked in western 3D linear chain of cause and effect dissolves into this larger, more spacious way of thinking.

Re: parsing multifaceted eastern ways of thinking, a reddit post (from 11 years ago) offered, among other things, this:

 

Why do I persist in asking unanswerable questions? Likely because I was totally traumatized by my early childhood expectation of the (nuclear) Big Bang that would end the world any day now, before I even got a chance to grow up!

All through my psychically crippled growing years, even in high school, this overriding dread persisted, to the point where, when it came time to apply for college as a high school senior, I wondered out loud what is the point? The world will likely end before I leave home. My Dad had to insist that I apply.

I was the only one in our large family who was so traumatized, the only one who sat on her mother’s lap when Hiroshima was announced over the radio, to her and my aunts’ and grandparents’ relieved cheers. (It meant we would not invade Japan, and therefore Dad would come home from where he was stationed in the Phillipines.) But to me it meant, “the world is going to end in my lifetime, and apparently nobody cares! I PERSONALLY MUST STOP IT!”

Imagine a 2.5 year old, coming to this conclusion.

I’ve posted on this fact about my life before. This time I want to concentrate on the Big Bang aspect, not of the world’s termination, but of it’s so-called origin story. Because I do think that since we in the west still largely, even if unconsciously, depend on a cosmology that relies on linear 3D, billiard-ball causality, that the Big Bang is necessary. “It all has to start somewhere, right?” My response: well maybe; or maybe the universe has been ongoing forever, as a radiant mysterious Presence.

This latter way of thinking is decidedly not western; it is eastern, supposedly, closer to Buddhism and Taoism.

But what is important here is that the Big Bang conceptual framework still informs our lives in all sorts of ways.

The Big Bang as supposedly what started it all “in the beginning;” which unconsciously implies, assuming symmetry, the Big (nuclear?) Bang that will end it all.

Got it?

No fun.

By the way, what got me going on this post was a substack offering by Unbekoming which energized me immensely.

https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/an-end-to-the-upside-down-cosmos