Overthinker
- Alfred Koo
- Jun 4, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 25, 2020
You are an astronaut, floating in space. Nothing appeal to you except the lights glowing from the stars. The absolute peacefulness makes your body gradually evaporates, becoming part of the atmosphere. All that's left is your mind. No more past, no more future, only the present. Nothing is suppressed; nothing matters. Under no deliberate thinking, images and voices flow through your mind, and sparks of ideas emerge like the luminescent creatures in the deep sea, emitting lavishing patterns of lights. They have always been there, but for the first time, they whisper to you.
So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions
By thoughts I mean specifically, chatter in the skull
Perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating
I'm not saying that thinking is bad
Like everything else, it's useful in moderation
A good servant, but a bad master
And all civilized peoples
Have increasingly become crazy and self destructive
Because through excessive thinking they have lost touch with reality
That's to say
We confuse signs
With the real world
This is the beginning of meditation
Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth
And a great occasion is somehow, spoiled for us, unless photographed
And to read about it the next day in the newspaper
Is oddly more fun for us than the original event
This is a disaster
For as a result of confusing the real world of nature with mere signs
We are destroying nature
We are so tied up in our minds that we've lost our senses
Time to wake up
What is reality ?
Obviously, no one can say
Because it isn't words
It isn't material, that's just an idea
Reality is ...
The point can not be explained in words
I'm not trying to put you down
It's an expression of you as you are
One must live ...
We need to survive, to go on
We must go on"
--- Overthinker by INZO (text adapted from Alan Watts' Overthinking Will Kill Your Reality)
Our mind and our surroundings interact like two solutions with a concentration gradient. Our surroundings are often highly concentrated with information and stimuli; as we deliberately evaluate and interpret, our mind gradually becomes burdened with overflowing thoughts. What should I be doing now? Could I have done that? What would I want to become? The lessons of the past, the unsatisfied present, and the idealistic future accumulate and exhaust our brain, even haunt us in our sleep. After all, thoughts are subjective belongings. They denature once isolated within us for too long. They enslave and trap you if they're not renewed with the ingredients from the outside. However, this renewal cannot arrive without "diluting" our inner concentration. That is why, every once a while, we need to hit the reset button. We need to dredge our mind, letting the chaotic, tangled thoughts and emotions to diffuse out. It's only when our mind becomes less concentrated that we can smoothly absorb new information and receive stimuli.
This is the message of Overthinker : we need to feel the moment in the present. Nowadays what we regard as leisure is either an alternative form of conformity or simply an act of numbing our stress. We are convinced that to relax means swiping your phone, shopping online, and chatting with friends. We consume alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, ecstasy, LSD, and other psychoactive drugs to escape the unbearable present. What is the feeling that we are looking for in these activities, ultimately? It's to rid of the overthinking to allow pure appreciation of the surroundings. That feeling of weightlessness of the physical body and the vanishing of deliberate thinking, is the cleansing of the mind. However, to truly achieve that, what we need is to be alone and rid our surroundings of artificial stimuli. We shouldn't be feeling the world purely through other media- pictures, video clips, and words - for they merely represent a partial reflection of the real world. Instead, we need to directly feel our surroundings without the assistance of any alternative force. This is how we integrate ourselves into reality. This is how we, as both animals and humans, should live.
Comments