Suicide and the scientist (aka me)
Tags: Science, Magic, Storytelling, Suicide, Chaos Magic

A story of magic

In my own pursuit of happiness, the first major thing I did was to use logic to deconstruct reason and myself.

I know that sounds stupid and pointless but that is what I did. I pursued a task that had driven many logicians mad because somehow I thought I would succeed and I did.

I succeeded because I had no choice but to succeed.

In 2012 I became suicidal. Every day for six months, I debated whether to throw myself in front of the tracks while I waited for the tube to get to work or to keep living for another miserable day.

The building of my identity had been confronted and, rather than accept the collapse my mind started concocting a plan to destroy me rather than destroy the building.

The thing that confronted me was some woo woo experience that had no room in the sphere of science unless it was to declare it a pathology, a disease gnawing at my feeble mind, a thing to be eradicated and forgotten.

The thing is, that “disease”, that impossible experience had reminded me of what it felt to be alive. Truly alive, where each and one of my cells functioned in the ecstasy of existence.

That kind of alive that makes you scream and roar with joy and pleasure.

I refused with all my heart to pretend that alive didn’t happen.

The two parts inside myself started a conflict that quickly escalated into suicidal thoughts and ruminations. One part struggling to be believed and the other struggling to exist.

I don’t wish anybody the kind of anxiety, sadness, anger and terror I experienced. The amount of suffering I endured alone because everywhere I looked I could only see people who would vouch for science and the rationality of things and the denial of one of the most meaningful things my being ever held.

The hell built by reason is bright but its light burns you frozen.

It was then, in the midst of suicidal ideation, that I started using logic to see if I could claw my way out of that hole.

I reviewed every bit of that numinous experience and parsed all its elements through my logic and my beliefs in science and what was right/wrong.

I did it again and again until eventually, I noticed something new that I had forgotten and brought light onto the experience; or even better, I ultimately accepted that for that numinous experience to be true, one of my beliefs that deemed it impossible had to go.

This was systematic and occupied almost every free moment I had — since it was either that or wallowing in suicidal machinations.

Months passed by and one day the process gave me enough room to confess, in a room full of strangers, my suicidal feelings. That was the end of an era as those thoughts started to quickly evaporate from that point.

Despite those feelings abandoning me, I did not forget the process and I devoted more time to polish it.

I remembered what I learnt during my master in logic in Amsterdam. I remembered modal logic and how modal logic systems were extracted from sections of the first-order or second-order logic. I remember how the researchers rather than getting engrossed in the intractability of higher-order systems and the incompleteness theorem of Gödel, they found sections of those systems that could work and operate well under certain limitations.

I realised I could use a set of beliefs to handle a situation and throw those beliefs away when they were not useful for another one

I started using that model and I started becoming more and more able to elicit happiness, joy and with time, magic.

Yes, magic.

On my own and through science, I had taught myself Chaos Magic.