I had an unpleasant feeling.

I’ll skip lunch, I thought.

“Why?” Mary asked.

“Then I’ll stay thin,” I said.

“That has nothing to do with that unpleasant feeling,” Mary said.

“But it happened so fast,” I said.

I tried to get a psychosis.

It took me 20 years.

I counted 30 times a day of not speaking out — that’s 219,000 times.

I miss it now.

I miss being chased by helicopters.

“The whole world could see your thoughts,” Mary says.

It takes years to get into a depression, so it takes years to get out.

It takes years to get into a psychosis, so it takes years to get out.

The problem with all these things is that when it hits, it hits hard—and then you want out immediately.

But what you haven’t realized is that for years, your days have been getting slightly greyer, day by day.

This is very hard to spot. You almost don’t notice.

Greyer and greyer—and then, boom: pitch black.

The interesting thing about the Bible is that people tend to divide into two camps.

Either you are defending it, or you are trying to disprove it—claiming it’s idiotic, yada yada.

Being in one of those camps says a lot about you.

You can also read it like this: what a beautiful story, or what a fascinating way to look at history. Whether something is literally true or not is not always the point in life.

Most things we believe right now will probably turn out not to be true later on—maybe around 99%. Does that mean everyone is an idiot right now for believing things that will eventually be proven wrong?

I’m not religious, but a lot of things in religion—especially around life rhythm—are nothing short of brilliant. Taking one day off per week, both for yourself and for the environment. Taking moments of silence during the day. Looking out for others. Science still has a lot of catching up to do in certain areas. Some things work in practice and nobody really knows why. Some facets of religion are exactly like that.

By the way, the first line in Genesis:

“In the beginning G created the heavens and the earth.”

gets lost in translation, I think. It means something like this: when time was created (one of the first dimensions), then—after that, or simultaneously—the spatial dimensions (up and down, heaven and earth) were created.

Time always gets messed up a bit. We think the universe is old because it is 14.6 billion years old. But time at the beginning is not the same as time now. It’s perspective. For life forms like plankton—whose lineage goes back almost to the beginning of life on Earth—time is not the same as it is for us.

How to Switch Brain Regions Manually

I like riding bikes in paradise.

You can read the sentence above from multiple dimensions. You can look only at the words—the shape of the words, for example—without engaging the dimension of meaning. You can read the text while being completely ignorant of what the words actually mean.

This is what editors often do when they scan a text for double spaces, wrong hyphenation, or incorrect punctuation. You look at the text, but you don’t really process what the words are saying.

You can also read the text by focusing only on meaning, without really looking at spelling.

Or you can read the text and look for the meaning under the meaning. What does it really say? It’s clearly not about riding a bike in paradise. What does the writer actually mean?

The point is that there are thousands of these dimensions, and you can switch between them manually.

I like to use sound only. When I read the sentence “I like riding bikes in paradise,” I focus purely on the sounds—the phonetic splatter in my head, so to speak. I read it in audio only. I hear how the letters fall.