Reply to a comment of September 9

This statement is at the end of the comment,
'create the space that might allow the negative power to be constructed as an object.'
It shows how the concept of the Swirl is slippery and defies simple explanation.

I take it that 'negative power' is in some way destructive, and some countervailing power is needed to avoid the person succumbing to it.  But can an 'object' also be a power?  Or is it that an object can be conceived of as having some definition, and therefore able to be worked with. That may be the import of the above quote.

Like the Moebius strip, the Swirl as we have thought of it is like an optical illusion, with no clear inside or outside dimensions. Illusory only in spatial terms, however, because its effect is uncomfortably palpable.

Blaise Pascal puts it thus: "When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there ... now instead of then."

We speak about entering the Swirl, or being pulled into it, as if it has spatial dimensions, and also speak of it as an invader, like an alternate self who comes from Yung's dark side and intends to  take over.  However,  it is primarily an affect, a disturbing and distressing feeling, and in this way it is similar to other feelings to which we give some sense of space : 'falling in love', 'a towering rage',  or associate a colour: 'black depression', 'green with envy', 'blue mood'.

These are attempts to convey what a feeling is by using imagery. So why give the Swirl an objective existence, or indeed a colour, when the experience of it threatens to remove all experience, along with thought and agency. As feelings come and go, often without apparent cause, so the Swirl has a beginning and an end, with an intense median.

I say threatens because if the Swirl, however we may describe it, actually caused a complete implosion, there would be no surviving living organism.