Hey there, mere cognition blog thing. It's mostly been a minute. A long while back, I was going to write as I went through the epistles.
God decided life needed to get weird again.
So the writing went by the wayside.
A lot has happened as I neglected you. There have been ups and downs and lefts and rights.
Somewhere along the way, I thought about the nature of being and God's design of us - how we propagate traits down family lines.
I thought about a lot of other things too.
Most of all, though, I thought about a jewel that is most precious to me. Not more precious than Christ, but close behind.
I think I shall make time to begin writing again. That jewel will need to know things at future times.
The best time to plant a shade tree is twenty years ago. The second best time to plant a shade tree is now.
Over the past year or so, I've been seeing more advertisements for antidepressant medications such as Auvelity (a Wellbutrin/DXM mix) and Spravato (a ketamine-derived nasal spray). I find that particularly interesting.
What most people don't know about me is that, a little over 20 years ago, I experienced long-term depression. (This was likely more me being a whiny little kid, but I digress.. the experience was real enough.) The SSRIs I tried never worked, so I used my reasoning skills and interest in neurochemistry to.. self medicate. Most of the other group of people I associated with were just dabbling recreationally but I always had a reason behind it. Anecdotally, I can vouch for some of these psychoactive and dissociative substances having short-to-medium term effects on mood and increased post-administration cognitive clarity.
So it's interesting to see the medicine catch up. Two decades seems to be the average lag time.
Nonetheless, this sort of thing is not a permanent solution and I wouldn't suggest my route to others. It was dangerous, and I was desperate. There's a much better way.
It's a way that most would scoff at; a path that seems like foolishness to those unable or unwilling to consider it.
The only one that can take away your psychological pain and trauma is the mercy and grace of Christ Jesus. "Sure, whatever," you might say. Yet I am living proof of this.
You might chock it up to the psychological power of belief, but I can say definitively that this is far from the case in my experience. The conviction of my belief is not the progenitor of the peace - in fact, a lot of times it causes strife. Yet through it all, my mind is calmed beyond explanation or understanding.
You might be wondering how this can be; you might remember me from years ago as the perpetually angry, over-the-top, somewhat crazy guy.
The only thing I can say to that is: Come and See.
This is a repost from FB.
Facebook likes to ask me what I am thinking about. This is the type of stuff I think about, and probably the reason I'm not popular at parties.
Tohuwabohu - a German word, borrowed from Hebrew. Some translate it as meaning "nothingness", "void", "desolation" - words like that. However, there's other Hebrew terms for those words. Biblically, the term is likely more equivalent to "chaos". It shows up at the beginning of Genesis.
Contemporarily, chaos is defined in several ways: "a state of utter confusion", "a confused mass or mixture", "the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system."
I'm an agent of tohuwabohu in the latter sense. So are you. You think your life is ordered and comfortable. Underneath, in the fundamental world of matter that God spoke into existence, chaos reigns. Ordered chaos, but it looks like near chaos to us because it's difficult to even fathom.
Everything just so, balanced on the head of a proverbial pin to allow us to perform infinitely more complex actions. Just the simple act of grasping an object takes amazing feats of biocellular mechanics and physics, and the properties of your own body and of the object are built up from fundamental forces that we've only scratched the surface of.
If you can think on God's creation and not have your face just about melt, you're not thinking deeply enough about God's creation. It is absolutely amazing.
Be an agent of chaos. Recognize your monster. Then master them, using the Master above all.