Sherlock is lying on the sofa. John walks into the room. "Alright Sherlock!" He says. "I'm off to bed...". Sherlock does not reply.
"Thinking?" Says John. Sherlock still does not reply.
Then, as he leaves, John says something.
"What I wouldn't give to see what was going on in that head of yours."
He flicks off the light as he leaves. Sherlock lies in the darkness. His mind pulsing, his thoughts vibrant.
"What I wouldn't give to see what was going on in that head of yours..."
Sherlock smiles, and turns his head. An idea has flowered. In one smooth movement, he sits up, pulls forward his computer, and begins to type...
You are in a room
It is empty but for two things. You, and the problem. The room is your mind. You are you. And the problem. The problem is strong, and clever, tall and perfect, and it hates you. Every fibre of it's being hates you, and there's nothing you can do to stop it from hurting you. It's so strong, so much stronger than you, and yet surely, the only way to move forward, is to defeat it, overpower it, push forward using all your might, and take the direct route, past your foe. You know you have no hope of defeating it, and as it begins to take control of you, you are scared. You are so scared. Fear is gripping you, twisting your heart. This situation is win or die. And you know the out come. You will die.
Wrong
There is a door. The problem is no longer important, all that matters is survival. You can beat the problem anyway, as long as you survive, that's what's important. You can come round a less direct way, you will make it back stronger, more experienced. The problem can wait. All that matters is escape. You grasp at the door, wrenching it open with the remainder of your strength, and you throw yourself through, uncaring for what lies ahead.
And now you can breathe
Everything is calm now. Gentle, and still. The problem can wait. It all can wait. Nothing needs to matter. You can just stay. Just stay. Forever. The air is soft and cool, and carefully it covers you, caressing your every particle. You are submerged in perfect strands, they cling to you with immacculate dependance, but never smother you, for they are no more rough or intruding than a feather to your cheek. The accept your every imperfection- you are the one thing they need, so they don't care that you're too tall, or too short or too fat or too thin or too spotty or too sweaty or too right or too wrong. You are simply you. And they are them. This is this. Simple as.
Don't get sidetracked. You are here for a reason.
That's right. You need to stay focused. You don't know why, but this has something to do with you and your problem, however indirectly, or you would not have brought yourself here. Close your eyes. As you do, something bizarre happens. The world swims entirely into focus. Suddenly, you can feel everything. Where before you were clueless, now you know all. You can feel that everything is black, except your cold, white frame, and the perfect electric blue strands that are covering you. More of them are drawn towards you, you have amassed quite a following. You can feel that you would be a sight to behold, were it not that only you could see it, with the blue strands dragging down miles below, twisting up and braiding together in one great pillar, thickening as it ascends, growing to create a huge, rounded conglomeration of light, centered around your body. Your skin seems paler than ever before, here, against a dark backdrop. An onlooker besides yourself may be fooled into believing that this demonstrated purity, but you know better. The purity is sullied by one thing, and one thing only- your jet black hair- a constant reminder that you will never be perfect, and never be pure. Never. Never. Never...
Look, you know what you have to do, so just do it! Stop apprectiating the views, and get on with it, before you go completely insane!
Alright, alright. It's disappointing, but you know that it's true- you need to get on with it. Now that your eyes are shut, you can feel something. A buzz, a hubbub, it's like standing in a busy shopping center, filled with inane chatter. "Hello!" you say "What is happening? What are you?" The question is within your own head, silent, and yet still too loud, cutting through the chatter, and silencing the crowd. "We are your thoughts." come the voices of a thousand different people, from a million different lifetimes, never speaking as a whole, so out of sync with one another, and yet somehow still making perfect sense in their entirety. "The things that you saw but were too busy too see. The things that you stored as a reflex, as opposed to for a conscious reason. The things you never remembered to forget." Ah. That explains why they are so dependant- they would not be allowed to exist without you. Thy need you. And right now, you need them. "Which of you do I need?" You say, in your loud, clear cutting tone.
"Why would we tell you that?" They say.
"I...I need your help. What shall I do without you?" You say. Your questions are no longer too loud- they are quiet, and hushed with fear. "Which of you do I need?" You repeat.
"That's for you to decide..." You hear. But they are not all speaking this time. How odd. You can feel that they are all still there. Yet you hear only one voice. Before you have time to properly assess this though, something else happens. For at some signal unseen and unheard, they come. They fall into your head, every last one, gushing in like some great tide, filling your every crevice. Every spot on your body, every single patch of naked skin, is a gateway for the subconscious. They flow in through your back, your fingers, your arms, your legs, your hair, your chest, your eyes. Nothing is freed from this tide. The feeling, while not unpleasant, is not usual. You find that every molecule of your being is perfectly intact, and yet completely out of place. It is not a scary feeling- more that you have been reshaped in order to be the accomadator for all of this information- enough to fill a library more that ten times over. Surely, you must be the only person ever to hold this much knowledge within you- you are the vessel for all the knowledge in the world. It is a special feeling, yes, but one that you know can not last. You must savour every moment.
No! You idiot! Grab what you can! Stop sightseeing, start working!
Oh god, how true! Suddenly, you are scrabbling, desperate to make sense of everything that has been thrust right into the palm of your hand, but you can't use, because there is no time- there's so little time! This is it- this is the answer to your problem- somewhere in the midst of this tangled sea of knowledge never really known, is everything you need and more. Ah, how fleeting is knowledge!- For the second you realise that you need to remember this stuff, you can feel it begin to recede. It's slow, but steady- you're losing your grip on the knowledge you hold within you. It becomes a desperate free fpr all, hearing each strand tell it's story, cementing the story in your mind, moving on to the next one. This process takes less than a second, but it is not enough- you need to find a way to make them help you, or you will lose everything...
Think! Think! For gods sake, THINK!
"If," Your thoughts now sound so much like words, that you need to use speech marks for them. You are adressing things within you, which puts a bizzare spin on things- words never spoken, soundwaves never thrown out into existence are reverberating within you, in a way unlike anything you thought to exist. You are momentarily speechless, so you begin your threat again. "If!" you think, and within you, the thought is so loud that, were it spoken, it would have shaken the world. "You do not tell me which of you I need to keep." You falter for a minute- this seems too cruel. The strands are your doing- you brought them into being, and, in a twisted way, they are your children. It seems wrong to do this to them. "I shall let you all go completely. I shall forget you all." You can not bear the thought of destroying all this knowledge, all these thoughts. You are confident, though, that they will do as you ask. There is a whisper within you- it's strange, as things go, to feel the conference of countless enteties as they gather in thier resolve. From some of the strands, the light fades. The colour is gone, the brightness is gone, and it's all in fact, very much gone. Of these strands, nothing remains but the information, the life has left them. You are suddenly filled with a swelling, overwhelming sadness at extinguishing the life, but the others remaining let you know that you have not extinguished the life- you have merely allowed it to become part of something bigger. In the same way that a man is made from billions of particles, your mind is made from billions of strands. And, in the same way that these particles would be lost, and lonely without the man pulling them together, and giving them a duty as part of the whole, these stands are lost and lonely without being part of a mind. Suddenly, the pity shifts, and you come to face the reality of the mass of blue within you. This is the reason they are all together- they are lonely and lost, and until there is a mind, all they have is each other. But they con not exist in this way forever, they are not really a team, they are not truly alligned, that is why they can not speak as a whole, but as individual voices. They do their best, with what they have, and each one that you take away cuts an agonising hole right through every last one of these strands. You have hurt them, today. They will heal, but slowly. With a rush as sudden as their entry, each strand flooded out in a great ball of electric blue light, blossoming out into the dark background like a firework, before spreading and dissapating out into the dark, settling like mist in stunning shining blue. You are alone again. Thinking of all the hurt you have caused today, you are sickened at yourself.
Stop being so bloody sentimental about your own bloody thoughts! Get out of here! Your'e going insane!
Looking down at your pitiful frame ,you can not bear the thought that you nearly recognised the whole, vile, pale affair to be purity. You are disgusting. You don't desrve this place, even if it is just a pit of black emptiness. "I will come back for you." You say, aloud this time, and then you open your eyes, and let the blackness suck you in, in your entirety.
You've got what you need, but you cannot yet fight again! You need to slot togther the peices first.
Where you are now, it does not matter. It is the stillness that matters. You can not move.
It is not frightening that you can not move- it is essential. In fact, you are pretty certain that the paralysis is self imposed. You get the feeling that if you wanted to move, you would be capable, but you don't. You send a message to your fingers, telling them to twitch. You feel the elctricity flow through your nerves, instant, and smooth. In fact, it comes at a bit of a shock when your feel the message abruptly cancelled. It was you that cancelled it though, you could tell that much. Some deep, subconscious ugre was preventing you from movement, and, were it possible to override your sunconscious, it would rarely be wise to. No, for now, you must stay still.
There is a way about being still. It is something nobody can ever put their finger on, subtle, and slow. Stillness is captivating, and unclosing, like a spell. A spell we fall under in a way so perfectly feather light that we can never even know we are under it until we break it. Stillness alters reality, and warps perspective, in a way unlike anything else, because it is self imposed. We put ourselves in a postition where we edit our own world, change our views without even noticing we've done is... well.. stillness. There is no other way in which to properly put it.
There are stages to stillness.
First, there is a fidgety stage, in which you realise that you are trying to be still, and suddenly everything is telling you to move. This position is not comfy enough to remain in for long, I might need to pee, my leg itches, I left the gas on. The brain throws all these urges at you, it forces you to want to move with every fibre of your being. It takes a strong mind to get through this stage.
Then, there is the acceptant stage. You realise that you are going to be remaining still for a very long time, wether you like it or not. Overconfidence can set in at this point- you know you'll be staying here for a while, and you know that you could forever, should the desire strike you. Nothing seems like it could ever disturb you, you are utterly, completely relaxed. Everything is still. Everyone makes it through this stage.
Third, is the losing it stage. You need to move now, every inch of your body is aching, desperate to move even the tiniest fraction. You are stiff all over and everything hurts, not one particle of you wants to remain still any longer. But at the same time, movement would kill you. To have stayed still for so long, to have sat here for this time so perfectly statuae, how could you bear to waste something like that? All of your efforts, gone. It is at this stage, also, that you begin to become invisible.
Nobody knows quite why, but after a certain amount of time has elapsed without even the tiniest movement from a given individual, that person, in a way, ceases to exist. The mind of any human being coming past, will white out that person, blank them to the point that the passer by will have ever noticed the existence of you. They just don't notice. At all.
Then, there is the fourth stage. Oh, the fourth stage... when you have been still for enough time that you reach the fourth stage, you are to be admired, and you shall certainly be rewarded. At the fourth stage, a miracle occurs.
Your surroundings are oblivious of you. You are not oblivious of them. Not in the slightest. Wherever you are, you see everything in perfect clarity, notice all, but never noticed, see all, but never seen, hear all, but never, no, never heard. Before you notice it, the world begins to move around you, moving faster than you, until, it moves with such blinding speed that you can no longer comprehend it's existence. It is all so painfully clear. Painfully clear. You never had to defeat the problem, not at all, you merely had to subdue it, untill it could be understood. The problem was not your enemy, it was a friend- all shook up, and confused as hell, yes, but a friend, that you needed to help.
Soon, you will be able to.
The world around you now, is so blindingly fast, whirling and spinning, so, so fast, while you are so still, that you belive. For just one second.
That you are the centre of the Universe.
But that is absurd. No matter how fast the world around you may move, no matter how long you stay still for, you never have mattered. You never do matter. You never will matter. Nobody really cares in the altogether. You are simply a speck.
But it blows your mind
You are both the centre of the universe, and a tiny, insignificant speck at exactly the same time. You are Everything. And Nothing.
'Till you can feel the pulse of the Universe.
And there you have it.
Genius.