Personal Faith and the MM Mind Maelstrom

'When we look in the mirror, are we sure we know who we are?'  David Wood

What if we all live a faith based life? A faith, a belief, that we will be alive in the future - tomorrow - that we will continue to function as we do now, until we don't. We assume that we will keep on breathing, indeed some concentrate on the rhythm, as in meditation. We assume that our bodily functions can be taken for granted, as if a benign being is looking after us, and it is safe to go to sleep because we believe we will wake up.

We always want to formalise a personal faith like this and turn it into a group process where, allied with others, we can feel less alone, and more secure as we sense their breathing and sing along with them. Established religions (and cults) offer an escape from atomisation and an awareness of the limits of biological life.
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But then, unbidden, comes the Mind Maelstrom - an attack of high anxiety and panic - a calamity that shakes my faith, because suddenly there is no protector, no loving parent, no companion. Instead, there is fear - that my heart will stop, that I will fall down, that a claustrophobic dream will become reality, that I will die and no one will know or care. It is like being sucked into Poe's maelstrom, a swirling vortex almost impossible to escape.

Without the self belief, the guarantee of continuity, I am helpless in an indifferent universe, immersed in Bion's nameless dread, facing imminent oblivion. The MM is like a psychotic episode, in which everyday reality is replaced by terrifying fantasies, agency is gone, and helplessness is there instead.   It is losing one's mind, for a time.

(MM is a rapid switch from order to chaos. From one part of the personality to another. The parts can usually coexist because one is hidden, but when that suppressed part erupts, order and reason are replaced by fear and confusion.)

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The inexplicable crisis softens, then passes. I am still here. Enormous relief, and my personal faith about to be restored, but there is also a feeling of shame for having succumbed to melodrama.

I want to keep the whole episode secret. How could I explain a causeless crisis, with no evidence of it apart from pallor and tremor? No, it's a weakness that is better hidden and forgotten.
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It may be possible for a group, a community, even a nation to be assailed by a collective MM, so as to lose confidence and effective function. The UK, facing the loss of its protector, the EU, is now in a state of anxiety, panic, and shame. The trauma that is Brexit is hitting individuals and communities, and is the outcome of an upsurge of suppressed anger and resentment as the once an Empire now feels like a colony that has lost its sovereignty, and therefore its faith in itself.

Spinning, Black Hole

' It seems that a supermassive black hole lurks in the heart not only of the Milky Way, but of many observable galaxies. The hub of the stellar carousel is a place where space and time end, and into which stars can disappear forever.'

Dennis Overbye 'Trolling the monster in the heart of the Milky Way'

Vertigo causes one's world to spin, on a vertical or lateral axis. Like being in the hub of a carousel that is turning, and unable to stop it.  Looking back on a bout of vertigo, it is the feeling of helplessness as well as the nausea which sticks in the memory.

Being caught in a black hole would mean immediate extinction, so nothing to remember, and a much more extreme comparison with an earthly experience like vertigo or Swirl. But a 'place where space and time end' captures something of the Swirl experience, notable as it is for a feeling that time has slowed, and that spatial orientation is lost.

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"Was it a curved space?
Angular? How thick were the walls? How deep was the space? How high? "

Are not these descriptors specific to a physical space, like a cave, rather than as in a metaphor?

Grammar

I feel anxious.
I have an anxiety disorder.
I am depressed.
I have a depressive disorder.

I feel a swirl?
I have a swirl?
I have a swirl disorder?

I am a swirl, swirled. I am swirling.

I am pulled into depression.
I am pulled into anxiety.

Part of the problem here is that the swirl is much less homogenous than, for example, depression and anxiety. Also it seems that one talks about the experience afterwards.

Limits

ken and I have a different take on the swirl. I did not realise this until Ken pointed it out. I think of the swirl spatially and he does not.

So, I think of someone entering the swirl. Not willingly at all but nonetheless entering it. Going inside or maybe pulled inside. There is then an inside and an outside, and  a line or space that when crossed signals the start of the swirl experience. That does not sound quite right but that is what it seem like. When we discussed this much earlier I thought then that one way out of the swirl was to consider the coordinates of the internal space. Almost literally. I then imagined the swirl as a cave or chasm, and what needed to be done was to look around and take measurements. Was it a curved space?
Angular? How thick were the walls? How deep was the space? How high? And so on.

Weird and eerie

I've been dipping into Mark Fisher's book "The Weird and the Eerie' published just before he died.
He writes about the terms as follows:

"....the weird is constituted by a presence - the presence of that which does not belong. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence.

I wonder if the swirl is a mix of both. If so what might be present? Maybe a spectral presence, namely a sense of being observed and thus shamed.

And what might be absent? What immediately comes to mind is agency. It is as if in the swirl the individual is powerless.

Naturalism

I am not sure what naturalism as a philosophical system excludes but I am pretty sure that it includes what Ken has written in his post below, 'What if?'
I suspect that this is all true, cells dying and/or being replenished and a sense that the body, biologically, in this narrative, is a bit like the state of nature in Hobbes. Or Bosch. But what I think is possibly excluded in the naturalistic account is, well, to use just one term, desire. I am not sure if desire happens naturally in the way that cellular degeneration does. Desire is about will or intention, conscious or unconscious. And that I think involves a different model of understanding to that of naturalism.
Maybe, following on yet again from the Poe story, swirls for me have a malevolent aspect. An aspect that is willed by a part of the self.

What if ?

If our bodily cells constantly die and renew, what is our constant? Our physical matter being temporary, what if all we are is our memories? Our brain constantly responds to and shapes our 'reality'. retains and forgets information, depends on memory to decide what to do next.

What if the Swirl is a temporary loss of memory, a space where normal continuity is replaced by a threat to survival?  When the Swirl invades a person, the illusion of order is gone, linear time is halted, equilibrium is lost, logical thinking no longer possible. 'Dark matter' or 'the unconscious' is the Swirl habitat. and there lies a bottomless tangle of nightmarish images. Or perhaps a Maelstrom.

What if the self is a kind of nothingness, always trying to become a something, and failing to do so? As Sartre had it, life is a constant drama of bad faith.

What if the self is a madly rational void?  If so, the Swirl may be an alternative self, a doppelganger that lives in the dark, and sometimes emerges to threaten the self that thinks it owns the light.

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'Dag Solstad's protagonists (Shyness and Dignity 1996) observe their lives as if they belong to someone else.'

'Diving for Seahorses: The Science and Secrets of Memory' Hilde and Ylva Ostby