Endless Loop Quotes

He’s like a song she can’t get out of her head. Hard as she tries, the melody of their meeting runs through her mind on an endless loop, each time as surprisingly sweet as the last, like a lullaby, like a hymn, and she doesn’t think she could ever get tired of hearing it.

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.

Little victories are everything in a world where worst-case scenarios are on an endless loop in your head.

Since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves.

Due to Mom’s condition, she would attack “The Walls” from sun-up to sun-down and day after day due to her mentalparanoia. With the death of her sister, no barrier, partition, fence, or any standing surface would’ve been safe. That kind of trauma would’ve created an endless loop of rages such as: “Oh no! Oh no! Not my sister, you Devil Ass Dawg! Oh Jesus, those Dead Dawg have come and taken my sister away! Help me Jesus! Help me get those Dawg out of my house! Lawd, I can’t take these Dawg howling anymore! Lawd Jesus, bring her back! Lawd, bring her back!

We have to learn to turn off the autopilot that’s steering us in an endless loop. We all know people who snack while talking on the phone or watching the news. You ask them if the omelet they just ate had onion in it, and they can’t tell you,

You can fall in love again with someone you're already in love with. It's like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

Her life was one endless loop that she raced around, with steep banked curves so she could never change or slow down. It just delivered her back to herself, over and over and over.

Aspiration leads to success (and adversity). Success creates its own adversity (and, hopefully, new ambitions). And adversity leads to aspiration and more success. It’s an endless loop.

And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

They were women not strong enough or smart enough to leave. Women without imagination. So they stayed in Wind Gap and played their teenage lives on an endless loop.

Now Hadley presses her forehead against the window of the taxi and once again finds herself smiling at the thought of him. He's like a song she can't get out of her head. Hard as she tries, the melody of their meeting runs through her mind on an endless loop, each time as surprisingly sweet as the last, like a lullaby, like a hymn, and she doesn't think she could ever get tired of hearing it.

And then he understands: it’s a loop, an endless loop of injured children, growing old but keeping their pain fresh and new, causing yet more injury and starting the whole cycle over again.

After three glasses, Cynthia flung the windows open and announced, “Zac Efron, I love you!” to the whole of Chelsea, while Lesley was crouched head down over the lavatory bowl throwing up, Maggie had made Sarah a declaration of love (“you’re sho, sho beautiful, marry me!”), and Sarah was shedding floods of tears without knowing why. It hit me worst of all. I had jumped on Cynthia’s bed and was bawling out “Breaking Free” in an endless loop. When Cynthia’s father came into the room, I’d held Cynthia’s hairbrush up to him like a microphone and called out, “Sing alone, baldie! Get those hips swinging!” Although the next day I couldn’t even being to explain why myself. After that embarrassing episode, Lesley and I had decided to give the demon drink a wide berth in future (we gave Cynthia’s father a wide berth as well for a couple of months), and we had stuck to that resolution.

A man is deficient in understanding until he perceives that there is a whole cycle of evolution possible within himself: repeating endlessly, offering opportunities for personal development.

You're a maze, all high edges and endless loops. I can't find a way out, can't see where I've been. It's all running, lost in the dark of you. Trapped. Everywhere I turn is a dead end. I keep winding up back where I've started.

Karma says, If somebody hurts you, they will get punished for it. If you hurt yourself, you will get punished for it. If you are harming yourself by thoughts or actions, you will get punished for it. The punishment you thus get is also a hurt you cause to yourself. Then you get punished for that too. It becomes an endless loop of self-destruction.

Did you know the local tv channels broadcasts your 900 in an endless loop? It's a bunch of video want ads for snowmobiles, then some kind of school crap with Everett Walsh that nobody wants to see over and over,and then you.

Life would go back to being unendurable, except – and this was the worst part – she would in fact endure it, it wouldn’t kill her, she’d keep on living day after day after day, an endless loop of glorious sunrises and sunsets that Janie never got to see.

endless loop, n. See loop, endless. loop, endless, n,. See endless loop.

She knew she’d be hearing that voice, those words, on an endless loop in her brain, maybe for the rest of her life.

Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn’t mean that you’re lawless but that you are above the law. The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.

As cow, deer, and goat chew food again and again in endless circles, overthinking creates an endless loop and exhaust energy. Conscious micro meditation (Laghu gayan kriya) can bring you out of the loop.

The term rabbit hole makes us think of Alice plummeting straight down, but what I mean is an actual rabbit warren, the kind with endless looping tunnels, branching paths, all the accompanying claustrophobia.

And that is also the way the human mind works — by the compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing ever more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.

ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.

One day in the endless loop of history, in the circular currents of its water, where there was no future, and no past, these steps would be inscribed in the shaft of an antique wooden weapon, and would tell the tale of these two warriors.

Simply put, a woman’s brain is not her friend when it comes to confidence. We think too much and we think about the wrong things. Thinking harder and harder and harder won’t solve our issues, though, it won’t make us more confident, and it most certainly freezes decision making, not to mention action. Remember, the female brain works differently from the male brain; we really do have more going on, we are more keenly aware of everything happening around us, and that all becomes part of our cognitive stew. Ruminating drains the confidence from us. Those negative thoughts, and nightmare scenarios masquerading as problem solving, spin on an endless loop. We render ourselves unable to be in the moment or to trust our instincts because we are captive to those distracting, destructive thoughts, which gradually squeeze all the spontaneity out of life and work. We have got to stop ruminating.

Richards remembered the day - that glorious and terrible day - watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24-7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn't even remember why. He'd thought it right then; no, he'd felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they'd all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees - the subjects hadn't changed, they never would, all coming down, after you'd boiled away the bullshit, to somebody's quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where - but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

You can fall in love again with someone you’re already in love with. It’s like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.

And that was all of it. The machine stretched out in an endless, dizzying series of loops and whirls and weird mechanisms, sprouting wires like tree roots. It didn't look real to her. Neither did Myrnin, as he turned to her with a barely concealed red glow in his eyes.

According to Q-Jo, the whole tarot deck, or at least the twenty-two trump cards of the Major Arcana, may be read as the Fool's journey. "On one important level," she explained, "the major cards are chapters in the story of a quest. I'm talking the universal human quest for understanding and divine reunion. And it doesn't matter whether the quest starts with the Fool or ends with him, because it's a loop anyhow, a cycle endlessly repeated. When the naive young Fool finally tumbles over the precipice, he falls into the world of experience. Now his journey has really begun. Along the way, he'll meet all the teachers and tempters - the tempters are teachers, too - and challenging situations that a person is likely to meet in the task of his or her growing. The Fool is potentially everybody, but not everybody has the wisdom or the guts to play the fool. A lot of folks don't know what's in that bag they're carrying. And they're all too willing to trade it for cash. Inside the bag, the have every tool they need to facilitate their life's journey, but they won't even open it up and glance inside. Subconsciously, the goal of all of us out-of-control primates is essentially the same, but let me assure you of this: the only ones who'll ever reach that goal are the ones who have the courage to make fools of themselves along the way.

There’s no such thing as getting your hopes up if you’re anxious. Little victories are everything in a world where worst-case scenarios are on an endless loop in your head.

Women without imagination. So they stayed in Wind Gap and played their teenage lives on an endless loop.

I've never been able to stop the blockbuster disaster film from playing on an endless loop in my mind. I see the terrible coming, whether it is or not.

Maybe this is hell, I thought: alone in my house in the middle of the night, stuck in an endless loop of thermal discomfort.

The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.

Mum has had an anxious daughter for sixteen years and she still doesn't seem to get the concept of little victories. The spending an evening where I wasn't feeling sick every time someone asked me a question is actually a really big deal [...] There's no such thing as getting your hopes up if you're anxious. Little victories are everything in a world where worst-case scenarios are on an endless loop in your head.

...life would go back to being unendurable, except-and this was the worst part-she would in fact endure it, it wouldn't kill her, she'd keep on living day after day after day, an endless loop of glorious sunrises and sunsets that Janie never got to see.

Some people will never admit their behavior is toxic. Even when they do something wrong, they will somehow blame you. It's an endless loop of poison. Save your energy and protect your mental health. The best way to win with such a person is not to play.

the Godelian strange loop that arises in formal systems in mathematics (i.e., collections of rules for churning out an endless series of mathematical truths solely by mechanical symbol-shunting without any regard to meanings or ideas hidden in the shapes being manipulated) is a loop that allows such a system to "perceive itself", to talk about itself, to become "self-aware", and in a sense it would not be going too far to say that by virtue of having such a loop, a formal system acquires a self.

Truth loves nothing better than simplicity of truth: that is the lesson Columbe Josse ought to have learned from her medieval readings. But all she seems to have gleaned from her studies is how to make a conceptual fuss in the service of nothing. It is a sort of endless loop, and also a shameless waste of resources, including the courier and my own self. . . . Granted, the young woman has a fairly efficient way with words, despite her youth. But the fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burdens so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavors . . . Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in the field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of the elite - for this turns the University into a sect.

He’s like a song she can’t get out of her head. Hard as she tries, the melody of their meeting runs through her mind on an endless loop, each time as surprisingly sweet as the last, like a lullaby, like a hymn, and she doesn’t think she could ever get tired of hearing it.” ​— ​Jennifer E. Smith, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

Time reversed itself, looped back, collapsed, reordered itself. The world stretched out endlessly—and yet was defined and limited.

All airports make you drive in great circles to get anywhere. You can never just drive in to the airport and then turn around and drive back out again. You have to loop over and under and in and out and through and around, all on a network of roads architecturally based on the concept of the Christmas-present bow, following endless barely comprehensible signs.

She had done a lot of reading, and listened to a lot of podcasts about body positivity and health at every size, and how diet culture and Western beauty standards contributed to, and were fed by, capitalism and racism and misogyny in an endless loop that left women hungry and unhappy with empty bellies and depleted bank accounts, starving and tractable, too weak to change the world, or the way they had to move through it.

4. Micromanagement/Worrying/Obsessing/Looping/Over-Futurizing. I will not repetitively examine details over and over. I will not jump to negative conclusions. I will not endlessly second-guess myself. I cannot change the past. I forgive all my past mistakes. I cannot make the future perfectly safe. I will stop hunting for what could go wrong. I will not try to control the uncontrollable. I will not micromanage myself or others.

Truth loves nothing better than simplicity of truth: that is the lesson Columbe Josse ought to have learned from her medieval readings. But all she seems to have gleaned from her studies is how to make a conceptual fuss in the service of nothing. It is a sort of endless loop, and also a shameless waste of resources, including the courier and my own self. . . . Granted, the young woman has a fairly efficient way with words, despite her youth. But the fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burdens so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavors . . . Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in the field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of the elite - for this turns the University into a sect.

No. I know grief. You don't forget details. It's the opposite. Details torment you. They swirl through your mind in a relentless, agonizing loop until you think you'll go mad. The phone call you let go to voicemail because you were too busy reading a book. The offhandedness of that last text message. The endless, haunting, unchangeable dance of all that was said and unsaid as life pushes you further from the opportunity you lost to make things right.

[T]he important point is that a world of inter-dependent relationships, where things are intelligible only in terms of of each other, is a seamless unity. In such a world it is impossible to consider man apart from nature, as an exiled spirit which controls this world by having its roots in another. Man is himself a loop in the endless knot, and as he pulls in one direction he finds that he is pulled from another and cannot find the origin of the impulse.

We can all nod and smile and carry on our end of the conversation in an endless loop while our minds float somewhere outside our bodies. We are thinking about our kids, about finances and fiancees and soon-to-be ex wives, about the sex we're not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams.

Because social media sites give us information that tends to confirm our view of the world—what Pariser calls “an endless you-loop”—people live in increasingly narrow content silos and correspondingly smaller walled gardens of thought.

I am slowly learning to disregard the insatiable desire to be special. I think it began, the soft piano ballad of epiphanic freedom that danced in my head, when you mentioned that "Van Gogh was her thing" while I stood there in my overall dress, admiring his sunflowers at the art museum. And then again on South Street, while we thumbed through old records and I picked up Morrissey and you mentioned her name like it was stuck in your teeth. Each time, I felt a paintbrush on my cheeks, covering my skin in grey and fading me into a quiet, concealed background that hummed everything you've ever loved has been loved before, and everything you are has already been on an endless loop. It echoed in your wrists that I stared at, walking (home) in the middle of the street, and I felt like a ghost moving forward in an eternal line, waiting to haunt anyone who thought I was worth it. But no one keeps my name folded in their wallet. Only girls who are able to carve their names into paintings and vinyl live in pockets and dust bunnies and bathroom mirrors. And so be it, that I am grey and humming in the background. I am forgotten Sundays and chipped fingernail polish and borrowed sheets. I'm the song you'll get stuck in your head, but it will remind you of someone else. I am 2 in the afternoon, I am the last day of winter, I am a face on the sidewalk that won't show up in your dreams. And I am everywhere, and I am nothing at all.

Mum has had an anxious daughter for sixteen years, and she still doesn’t seem to get the concept of little victories. That spending an evening where I wasn’t feeling sick every time someone asked me a question is actually a really big deal, and the fact that it might just be a one-off is the kind of thing I’m already worried about. There’s no such thing as getting your hopes up if you’re anxious. Little victories are everything in a world where worst-case scenarios are on an endless loop in your head.

There’s a certain brutality about repeating things to yourself, even if those things are good. After you stop purposefully reciting the words, they continue in an automatic loop, wearing down a groove in your brain. I’ve experienced this before with Taylor Mears’s video and with some texts from Thom. Certain words hop aboard the Endless Loop Train and go around the track again and again and again, draining the fuel of my very consciousness. And that’s when it’s good words. With bad words, it’s much, much worse.

No matter how cleverly we disguise our anxieties they bear witness to the imperfect nature of the human heart. To be is to become. To become is not to be. We are a work-in-progress, incomplete, imperfect, unrealised, and by virtue of temporal actions, temporary - a verb more than a noun, an inner quest and an outward odyssey framed by metaphors, like Escher's "Print Gallery"; we make the endless journey round the pictures, retracing our steps in forgetfulness, avoiding but mindful of the space where there are no pictures, where there is no gallery, where there is nothing at all. And like flies in a fly bottle, trapped by a failure of vision, we go round and round and round the moebius loop of a print gallery of our own making, a picture inside a picture inside a picture, forever.

In the Western world, 10 percent of adults are alcoholics, 70 percent drink copious amounts of caffeine, 20 percent are addicted to tobacco, and more than 10 percent rely on antidepressants. Throw in the other legal and illegal drugs, and it is safe to say that each day, 98 percent of us ingest at least one mood-altering substance in our endless search for a better state of mind. Of course, many of us are multisubstance users, for instance, consuming caffeine in the morning and alcohol at night. One addictive substance counters the negative effects of the other in the classic, endless loop of Western chemical mood adjustment.

....Yes, San Francisco was far from all I longed to forget. But I was weary of the flat earth, the heat of summer and hard press of winter cold. The etchings in "Scribners" made me yearn for the loop and roll of land. I wanted to break free of the squeeze of buildings and streets running endlessly out to the horizon. p. 254

Don’t think. Sweep away the words, ideas, images swirling endlessly in the infernal dance of pitiless affliction. Push back the realization of an unspeakable truth for another second. Don’t speak. Don’t move. Hold on to the illusion of purpose for a few seconds. And when those seconds are over, start again, an infinite loop.

I felt it, too: the dread, the weight of the horrors we'd seen, which replayed themselves in an endless, lurid loop in my mind. But you can't feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn't make bad things worse anymore than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.

And didn’t it always go like that–body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

And didn't it always go like that - body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the great wide nothingness and out of our lives - sure, that would be nice - but so would a new Cadillac - quit dreaming - it just doesn't work that way. . .

The other New Age bullshit bullet to dodge is the constant aggressive sale of ‘wonder nature cures.’ Some are no better than snake oil, but others are true healing substances taken out of context, refined, and made into a supplement that you are told you must take every day (at great expense). Don’t get sucked into the bullshit. Learn about your own body, learn about substances and how they work, and do not get trapped in the endless New Age loop of pseudoscience.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule's head, and Jule's feet were planted on Goodman's head, and so on and so on. And didn't it always go like that-body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

You wore my watch then claimed it as your own, twisting its chain slowly, hovered over the blaze of my torment. You would yell endless regrets across the dance Hall of echoes. So many echoes from a source that swayed smiling…id throw u over & over but you were the yoyo that’s loop strapped itself to the bones of my finger, layers so deep it would take more than a cut to untie your deceit. Lips bitter but your touch soothing & sweet. My heart would palpitate the moment your presence crept through the walls of my flesh; you held tight the gasps of breath keeping my chest strained with the pressures of your high demands. Not a single thing was enough, you needed me fragmented…

I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations. I can easily understand women who embroider out of sorrow or who crochet because life exists. My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire. I don't interpret them like those who read cards to tell the future. I don't probe them, because in solitaire the cards don't have any special significance. I unwind myself like a multicoloured skein, or I make string figures of myself, like those woven on spread fingers and passed from child to child. I only take care that my thumb not miss its loop. Then I turn over my hand and the figure changes. And I start over.

He stood up, rushed to the fanned-out glossy company brochures. His finger landed on one in the center. Three stylized gold crowns. Corona Labs—BRINGING THE FUTURE TODAY. “This,” he said, finger tapping. Each time he touched the paper it seemed to get warmer. This turned out to be the brochure for a new company. Catherine picked it up, showed it to her husband. “I thought I knew more or less all the research labs in the country, but this is a new one.” Mac turned the glossy paper over in his big hands. There was a videolette loop embedded in the paper, all the rage nowadays. Some smiling woman in a lab coat endlessly raising a test tube in triumph, putting it down, raising it . . . Nick was shaking with tension. The logo, the name Corona Laboratories meant nothing to him, but still they shone in his mind.

The Black Snake" When the black snake flashed onto the morning road, and the truck could not swerve-- death, that is how it happens. Now he lies looped and useless as an old bicycle tire. I stop the car and carry him into the bushes. He is as cool and gleaming as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet as a dead brother. I leave him under the leaves and drive on, thinking about death: its suddenness, its terrible weight, its certain coming. Yet under reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones have always preferred. It is the story of endless good fortune. It says to oblivion: not me! It is the light at the center of every cell. It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward happily all spring through the green leaves before he came to the road. Mary Oliver, Twelve Moons. (Back Bay Books August 30, 1979)

Necessities 1 A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas, but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in. With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up. The green smear of the woods we first made love in. The yellow city we thought was our future. The red highways not traveled, the green ones with their missed exits, the black side roads which took us where we had not meant to go. The high peaks, recorded by relatives, though we prefer certain unmarked elevations, the private alps no one knows we have climbed. The careful boundaries we draw and erase. And always, around the edges, the opaque wash of blue, concealing the drop-off they have stepped into before us, singly, mapless, not looking back. 2 The illusion of progress. Imagine our lives without it: tape measures rolled back, yardsticks chopped off. Wheels turning but going nowhere. Paintings flat, with no vanishing point. The plots of all novels circular; page numbers reversing themselves past the middle. The mountaintop no longer a goal, merely the point between ascent and descent. All streets looping back on themselves; life as a beckoning road an absurd idea. Our children refusing to grow out of their childhoods; the years refusing to drag themselves toward the new century. And hope, the puppy that bounds ahead, no longer a household animal. 3 Answers to questions, an endless supply. New ones that startle, old ones that reassure us. All of them wrong perhaps, but for the moment solutions, like kisses or surgery. Rising inflections countered by level voices, words beginning with w hushed by declarative sentences. The small, bold sphere of the period chasing after the hook, the doubter that walks on water and treads air and refuses to go away. 4 Evidence that we matter. The crash of the plane which, at the last moment, we did not take. The involuntary turn of the head, which caused the bullet to miss us. The obscene caller who wakes us at midnight to the smell of gas. The moon's full blessing when we fell in love, its black mood when it was all over. Confirm us, we say to the world, with your weather, your gifts, your warnings, your ringing telephones, your long, bleak silences. 5 Even now, the old things first things, which taught us language. Things of day and of night. Irrational lightning, fickle clouds, the incorruptible moon. Fire as revolution, grass as the heir to all revolutions. Snow as the alphabet of the dead, subtle, undeciphered. The river as what we wish it to be. Trees in their humanness, animals in their otherness. Summits. Chasms. Clearings. And stars, which gave us the word distance, so we could name our deepest sadness.

I hold my breath while he hooks his hands under my thighs. When he resumes, it's faster, harder, and a whole new level of euphoria. I press my eyes shut just as they start to roll back. That spot. That elusive spot every man had such a hard time locating is front and center now. I silently dub him the G-spot whisperer. Another deep thrust hits it again. Good thing I'm not trying to speak anymore, because I've lost all my words. All I have to offer are huffs of hot air and whimpering. Lots and lots of whimpering. The edge of Callum's mouth turns up, and I have to swallow to keep from choking at the divine sight. He looks like a god in this moment. His skin is a golden glow, painted in specks of sweat, highlighting every single cut muscle he possesses. And his expression---a cross between concentration and satisfaction. It's hard physical work he's doing, but he relishes it. I can tell by the glimmer in his eyes, the way his hands cradle my legs so I'm comfortably supported. I can tell by the pinch of his jaw, those soft grunts he let loose, that this is blowing his mind too. For the second time in one night, pressure builds inside me. The feeling is almost too much, but all I want is more. These long, deliberate thrusts are the greatest physical sensations my body has ever experienced. I could explode at any moment, but I want this to last. Forever, if possible. Arching my back, I press my head against the pillow. I cry out, sounding like a rabid banshee. A muttered curse falls from his lips. "That's it. Don't hold back." Pressure and heat collide, and I couldn't hold back if I tried. The deep thrusts keep coming like an endless loop of crashing waves. Callum and my G-spot are new best friends, it seems. Over and over, he hits it. Over and over, the sensations build to an overwhelming peak. His pace shifts from impressive to phenomenal. If Callum were a sex doll, I'd buy a dozen. His stamina, his technique, his adoration of me and my body, it's all perfection. When I burst, I'm even louder than before. And just like before, I'm ablaze from the inside out. Ecstasy pulses through every inch of skin and bone. My blood pumps hot, like lava flowing through my veins. Every muscle tightens, then loosens. Panting, I clutch Callum's forearms and watch his face as he hits his own peak.

Government does not spend money; it circulates it. It does not redistribute money; it recirculates it. Social security circulates money back to citizens who contributed to it in the first place, and is then circulated again by them, generating increased economic activity that allows others to be paid, to contribute to social security and then to receive those benefits in the future, in an endless and essential positive feedback loop that sustains and expands our economy. Government circulates money, and the flow, direction, and pace of that circulation are determined by policies our elected leaders choose. The market, of course, is the prime circulator of wealth in an economy. But the public policies of this age of greed have created--by design-- historic distortion in the private economy. That is not circulation; it is clumping and clotting. Recirculation of wealth is as necessary to the economy as recirculation of blood is to the body.

All our lives are the same, braided together on the same surface, figuratively speaking. Not to make too fine a point of it and get nutty, but our lives are like a Möbius strip, an endless loop with no back or front, a strip with a twist in it joined end-to-end so that no matter where we are on it, only half is visible. We know instinctively that other lives we cannot see are hidden on the same surface at the same time—not underneath or on the other side.

Infinity of your thoughts Time does not seem to pass, As moments appear to be frozen in an unknown thought, I try hard to bypass, This eerie feeling and the war always lost yet often fought, And I wonder what is this feeling, This enigmatic state of endless time, With which I have now been for very long dealing, A state where time no longer remembers it is time, Then in this moment, Where infinity is cast in a battle with finity, Time remains suspended in an uncertain moment, Where every virtue exists except for certainty, As the war rages and both lose, Infinity retreats to its zone while finity retains its domain, And time that had been held trapped in this noose, Now attains its lost state and claims its lost domain, That spreads across infinity in the subsets of finity, Then my darling Irma, I love you infinitely, Because now there is certainty, And I want you to know, you are my only joy, my moment in time, my eternity, As time resumes its pace, I think of you in the lanes of my mind, And within it I discover our space, Where time still lies trapped, and it does not mind, This existence in a moment where infinity lies everywhere, The infinity of your feelings, your memories and your beauty, And there I lie thinking of you always somewhere, To feed the appetite of our love and its eternity, So if you ever talk to me my love, Maybe I am thinking in this corner feeding the infinity, Of your beauty and our love, To steal from time, from fate, from the Universe, our destiny, Where you lie within me, And we lie in this space of infinity, You loving me and I loving thee, Discovering the charms of your beauty, That is where my love I shall be, If you ever talk to me and you still need to find me, Walk into my mind, but tread softly for you shall be treading over infinity, Where I have spread my feelings just for thee, only thee, And as you behold me, Do not hesitate to wake me up, There in the corner of my mind where I shall always be, Kiss me and wake me up, Then let me cast you into the infinity of my mind and its thoughts, And reveal your own beauty to you, And as you wake up in the infinity of my thoughts, Allow me to cast the veil of infinity bearing your beauty and you, Then let time stop forever, Because now there shall be no need of new thoughts or new feelings, And we shall now exist forever, and forever, In infinities impenetrable ceilings, Where everything is just you and me, Nothing else, and where nothing exists, You and I lying in an eternally amorous state and what a wonder it shall be, Because now there is no identity, I am you and you are me, And both of us surrounded by eternity, In the universe where we have created our own space beyond every scalable limit, And we have become the masters of our own destiny, With nothing to include and nothing to omit, Because there is only one need, Your love for me and my love for you, And there is nothing to worry about or heed, Just your beauty and you, only you, in an endless existence where it is only you, Everywhere, here and there and even that space that time refers to as somewhere, There we lie wound on every loop of infinity, To spread with it everywhere, And believe in the beauty of our singular destiny!

Possibilities! In the loop of possibilities, There is always one reality, As you enter this cycle of possibilities, You unknowingly make a pact with eternity, To seek the new and to seek the original, And as you leave one loop only to enter another, You wonder what is fake and what is original, Because the loops are infinite and they hold this universe together, Where real is never obvious and fake is hidden too, And as you seek the real with your relentless prudence, You are cast in the dimensions fake and real too, Then to establish the reality is what defines that crescendo of prudence, And as ripples of time move over these loops of possibilities, You somehow segregate the unreal loops from the real, And in this intertwining net of possibilities, Now you, your thoughts, your desires are true and real, Whatever you seek now, seeks you as well, And the infinity breaks its endless loop, Because now you are part of eternity as well, Where you now can tell the fake from the original loop, Then the dimensions of the universe attain a singular state, Where universe is like a geometry with just one rule, That it is you who defines its every known and unknown state, And you become part of the reality integrated in every rule!

An endless loop. The beginning becomes the middle and there’s never supposed to be an end.

I tugged her body against mine, tits pressing to me and damn near making me groan with longing before she slid her hands up my chest as we began to dance with one another. My body fell into a rhythm with hers so naturally that I swear even my heart was pounding to the tune. Her chest brushed mine, fingers skimming up my neck as my hand fell to the round curve of her ass and I tugged her closer. My gaze was on her mouth as the heat between us built in time with the movements of our bodies and our breaths mingled in the small space left dividing us. But just as I was starting to give serious consideration to an absolutely terrible idea, she turned in my arms, her ass pushing back into my crotch as she hooked one arm around the back of my neck. A real growl escaped me then as she ground herself against me, making my cock swell and my thoughts scatter as I lost all sense of everything other than this fucking girl in my arms as we danced together. I was vaguely aware of Seth dancing with Gwen beside us, but I couldn't tear my eyes from this perfect temptation in my arms. It was hotter than any sex I could ever remember having and neither of us had removed so much as a single item of clothing. Roxy kept dancing with her hand clasped around the back of my neck, the arch of her spine giving me a view down her shirt which I was having a damn hard time tearing my attention from. The fabric shifted and slipped across her skin, offering me the barest glimpse of her hardened nipples with every thump of the music and I licked my lips with the desire to suck on them. My dick was definitely letting itself be known as she continued to grind herself against me and as much as I was enjoying that friction, I really needed to make some effort to control myself. I grasped her hip and turned her around, the beast in me purring as she instantly looped her arms around my neck to draw me closer. I didn't even know how many songs had played while we'd been dancing and I didn't care because I knew it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. My gaze met hers and the fire in her was enough to set me alight too as she tilted her chin up and bit down on that full bottom lip. My attention was instantly hooked on her mouth, our bodies still moving together in this hot, endless friction which was begging for some relief. My resolve was snapping, all the reasons I had to pull away falling from my mind like flakes of snow trying to land on an inferno and I found myself leaning in, devouring the distance that parted us like I wanted to devour this beautiful creature in my arms. I tightened my grip on her waist, letting her feel the throbbing press of my dick driving into her and making it more than clear what I wanted to spend the rest of the night doing to her. I didn't care if she was a Vega, a princess, the architect of my fall from power, none of that mattered. Because all there was in that moment was her and me and the press of the heavens above us driving us together like we might burn up in the fire which blazed between us if we didn't just dive into it now. (Darius POV)

My vast episodic memory of my past, together with its counterpart pointing blurrily towards what is yet to come (my episodic projectory, I think I’ll call it), and further embellished by a fantastic folio of alternative versions or “subjunctive replays” of countless episodes (“if only X had happened…”; “how lucky that Y never took place…”, “wouldn’t it be great if Z were to occur…” — and why not call this my episodic subjunctory?), gives rise to the endless hall of mirrors that constitutes my “I”.

There’s only one activity that stimulates the brain to produce all seven at the same time, and that’s the ecstatic state of flow. The shortest way there is deep, alpha-driven meditation. When you blend all seven into a single cocktail, the result is euphoria. Let’s see: What might a combination of the first letters of each drug look like? Serotonin, Oxytocin, Norepinephrine, Dopamine, Anandamide, Nitric oxide, and Beta-endorphin? Just for fun, let’s combine them, and call our cocktail’s special blend SONDANoBe. This is the magic formula that, produced inside our own bodies in the proper ratios, bathes the brain in the chemicals of ecstasy. GETTING HIGH ON YOUR OWN SUPPLY When I meditate, I can feel the moment when each drug in the cocktail kicks in. First, I use EFT tapping and release any and every negative thought, emotion, and energy. This drops my level of cortisol, along with suppressing the high beta brain waves of stress. I now have a molecular substrate in my brain upon which I can build a deep and focused meditative experience. Next, I close my eyes and focus. Dopamine kicks in as I anticipate the delicious hormone and neurotransmitter drug cocktail I’m about to be rewarded with. The dopaminergic reward system of my brain fires up and the “body learning” of how to meditate—stored in my basal ganglia, which memorize frequently performed actions—comes online. Ingredient one. My mind starts to wander. My email inbox. The morning’s first meeting. The laugh line of the movie I watched last night. An overdue deadline. Damn, I’m way out of the zone already, cortisol rising, and I haven’t been meditating more than 5 minutes. Dopamine brings me back to focus, aided by norepinephrine. I’m motivated. I want Bliss Brain more than I want an endless loop of the Me Show. I return to center. Cortisol drops. Ahhh, I’m back. Norepinephrine stimulates my attention. Ingredient two. Then I realize that my body is uncomfortable. I have a twinge in my right knee. My lower back hurts. My tummy’s rumbling because it’s empty. I consciously shift my wandering mind back into focus. Back in sync, my neurons secrete beta-endorphin, which masks the pain. The discomfort drops away, and being in a body feels wonderful. Ingredient three. I tune in to each of the archetypal strands that guide me. Mother Mary. Kwan Yin. Healing. Strength. Beauty. Wisdom. I imagine myself meditating in a field of a million saints. I’m lost in Bliss Brain, as serotonin, the satisfaction drug, kicks in. Ingredient four. I feel one with the universe. Oxytocin starts to flow, as I bond with everything. Ingredient five. That releases nitric oxide and anandamide. Ingredients six and seven.

No one tries to talk me out of a migraine aura. I never try to interpret the shimmering geometric shapes or figure out the scintillating stairways crawling in the corners of my vision. No matter how hard I stare, I’ll never see my friend’s eye. I just navigate by what I can see. I’m gentle with myself, and my friends care for me while I wait for it to go away. This same gentle patience is the treatment for OCD. I needed the patience to remember that OCD is a broken record, thoughts endlessly looping between the thalamus, cortex, and cingulate gyrus. The scratch that connected the record grooves was only deepened by researching, ruminating on, and then carefully avoiding things that scared me. I had to find a new way of knowing—so I could move on with the music.

Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it. Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration. We assume that these steps occur in a sort of chain reaction, like this: Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action If you want to accomplish something but don’t feel motivated or inspired, then you assume you’re just screwed. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not until a major emotional life event occurs that you can generate enough motivation to actually get off the couch and do something. The thing about motivation is that it’s not only a three-part chain, but an endless loop: Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.

Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it. Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration. We assume that these steps occur in a sort of chain reaction, like this: Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action If you want to accomplish something but don’t feel motivated or inspired, then you assume you’re just screwed. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not until a major emotional life event occurs that you can generate enough motivation to actually get off the couch and do something. The thing about motivation is that it’s not only a three-part chain, but an endless loop: Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc. Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, we can actually reorient our mindset in the following way: Action → Inspiration → Motivation If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something—anything, really—and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself. I call this the “do something” principle.

The loop and dive of a seagull in its own private dance. The way the sun caught the tips of white on a furious wave and threw out endless prisms of light.

A rare example of a well-defined, useful, but noncomputable problem is the halting problem. Imagine that I want to write a computer program that will examine another computer program and determine whether or not that program will eventually stop. If the program being examined has no loops or recursive subroutine calls, it is bound to finish eventually, but if it does have such constructs the program may well go on forever. It turns out that there is no algorithm for examining a program and determining whether or not it is fatally infected with an endless loop. Moreover, it’s not that no one has yet discovered such an algorithm; rather, no such algorithm is possible. The halting problem is noncomputable.

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

neither work nor language but sex is our (human) point of breaking with nature, the space where we confront ontological incompleteness and get caught in the endless self-reproducing loop in which the aim of desire is not its goal but the reproduction of its lack.

Bridges Life did not appear to breathe here, It was covered in endless rounds of thread of fear, So it tread quietly along the fringes, Scared that it might be the cause of collapsing bridges, Bridges that connected life with hope, And it watched these bridges from a distance placing itself on a discreet slope, But it dared not cross them, none of them, It looked at them in desperation, especially some, For it often crossed them to renew its reserves of liveliness, But now it feels pervaded by a deep feeling of sadness, Life here seems to be a part of some sort of purgatory, Waiting to cross over and leave behind this existence derogatory, It may not be a perspicuous show of feelings, But here these are life’s daily dealings, And I wonder what about life’s own posterity, Because in this land of death life somehow loses all its virility, Tamed by some obnoxious devil, Who has had a diabolic conception and then raised by some heinous evil, Maybe that is why the bridges look so frail and hopeless themselves, Bearing stacks of hopelessness displayed on hope’s own shelves, For when life does not cross the bridges of hope, It is death that forsakes life and then time withdraws its rope, That maintains the perfect cohesion, Between beginnings and ends , between fission and fusion, And when this balance is lost anywhere, Life is cast into a place where there exists life everywhere, But nothing else nowhere, Just life, no hopes, no beauty, no bliss, no summer, a life that becomes its own prisoner in this infinity somewhere, However, now the bridges have fallen, but few still stand, And life that is tired of living without hope, feels the dying hope’s hand, And like the rope of time it pulls it unto itself, and makes life cross the bridge, Thus, life once again walks on the happy ridge, Hoping to live another day, feel life in a better and different way, For living the same moment of time begets no joy, if it is lived the same way everyday, And time weaves its threads of mystery and surprises around it, Then death too gets woven somewhere in this loop of time, and life finally says, “so be it!” And it jumps into the sea of time and collects its moments of myriad experiences, While time registers all these instances, And when the loop of death unwinds, In it a new loop of life it always finds, Now, even if the bridges may fall and time may end, Life has learned to create moments of happiness that never end!

But an untrained soul has as much chance of navigating its destiny as a leaf in the wind. Hallucinogens, lucid dreams, death and even meditation can provide a window to dimensions not tied down to the simulation's laws of physics but unless the soul has been trained enough to navigate beyond its material body it is not going very far. Even worse it can get tied down to an endless loop around its fears and weaknesses, like an eternal bad dream that repeats itself.

There are moments in time that will stay with you forever. Little snippets of your life that your brain will capture and hang onto. Other moments will slip by in their insignificance, but some will hold so much sense and purpose to you that you can never let them go. The first time you fall in love, the first time your heart is broken, the first time you break a heart. It’s an endless loop of big moments that make up your life and the people you love. It’s those memories that will cling to you on your deathbed when you talk about your regrets.

Working out new ideas, concepts, hypotheses in a methodical, linear fashion is an indispensable part of human growth and becoming. But if all we have is the thinking mind—no openness to the heart, to the body’s knowing, to awareness itself—the mind tends to loop on itself, driving endless circles on well-worn lanes. We get stuck in the mind’s traffic jams and can never find an exit that will take us to the beach.

There is much I cannot say, Bella,” she muttered. Harrsing touched her gently. “You are afraid.” Blinking, Erida weighed her response. The candles flickered and she sighed. There was no use in lying. “I am,” she admitted. For so many reasons. To her surprise, Harrsing only shrugged, her narrow shoulders rising and falling beneath the swoop of her nightgown. “That is necessary.” Erida could not help but balk. “What?” The old woman shrugged again. “Fear is not so terrible as we make it out to be,” she said. “Fear means you have a head on your shoulders, a good one. It means you have a heart, as much as you try to hide it from the rest of us.” Like Erida, Lady Harrsing had her own mask, shaped from decades in the royal court. She let it slip to show a smile of her own, warmer and softer than a candle. It made Erica’s heart twist. “A king of queen without fear would be a horrific thing indeed,” she added with a scoff. Erida could not agree. Her own fears seemed endless, looped around her neck in an unbreakable chain. She wondered what it would mean to be free of her misgivings and worst thoughts. To be so strong as to be beyond fear itself. Where only glory and greatness remained. Lady Harrsing arched an eyebrow, watching the Queen. “To be feared is another thing entirely.” “That is necessary too,” Erida replied swiftly.

Her own fears seemed endless, looped around her neck in an unbreakable chain. She wondered what it would mean to be free of her misgivings and worst thoughts. To be so strong as to be beyond fear itself. Where only glory and greatness remained.

Shanghai was not alone in holding postwar trials. They were held everywhere, and it is worth asking why. What was gained? They were less about reestablishing the rule of law than about creating what Tony Judt has tagged as "the postwar." The Second World War ended in 1945, but the postwar went on. This was an era in which the victors who had prevailed, sanctified by the sacrifice of those who had worked and fought for that victory, could not be questioned. This condition lasted for decades, perpetuated through curricula and public entertainment in an almost endless loop of self-congratulation that brooked no alternative. The Gaullists in France, the Communists in China, The Nationalists in Taiwan, and the list could go on: the war gave them the right to impose their terms on the people they ruled.

Was that where he…” She hesitated, unable to finish the question. “Died,” he said, finishing it for her. “That’s where he died. Yes.” “Did you see him before that?” “Once. On my eighteenth birthday.” The room was white, Dan thought. So white and lonely. Only the buzzing of the overhead light and the psychiatrist’s pen, clicking in and out, as they stared at the silent, shackled form of his older brother. A pale visage, deathly so. A form that didn’t move but simply existed, staring slack-jawed at the corner of the room. A form that whispered “I’m sorry” in an endless loop. It was a husk, a shade, and whatever lived inside was silent and still.

But hypochondria is a plotless story, a deviation from the regular progression of an illness from stage to stage. Without a firm diagnosis for my unreliable symptoms, I am stuck in the first scene of the drama, endlessly looping around the first few lines of dialogue. The compulsion to narrativize this experience is always there, but always thwarted. The comfortable point at which to tell the story never arrives, because everything is always in present tense. No narrative structure can help those who never get to turn the page on the opening line.

evolution has no foresight. complex machinery develops its own agendas. brains cheat. feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptations of rhythm and music. the rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had by pointless introspection. aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. it begins to model the very process of modeling. it consumes ever more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. like the parasitic dna that accrues in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.