Garden of torture

What if the bee stings me? What if I have developed an allergy? What if I can't... Every human mind has an inner, often tiny and considered negligible, garden grown with sudden looming bad thoughts, sometimes potential or half discarded obsessions and compulsions. If it is collective, as Jung might have said, it also plagues the safe haven people, so no place to hide without some risk or bother. If it is subconscious, it still beckons occasionally, face to face in sudden, untimely, broad daylight encounters.

Mind content becomes shared among people, therefore collective in the population. It accumulates from transmission via communication and example. Other people’s behaviour and stories are remembered, internalised with local content added, therefore your own. The memes in the wind, the market place, tête-à-tête encounters and parties attended, all affect people like the surges of viruses in Covid time.

And then every mind has a little generator of its own choice morsels, some digestible, others toxic or evil. The experiences we share make us like our parents, our friends, life partners, and enemies. The durable, decorative objects in the gardens of bad thoughts are the hardest bits to discard, the settled thoughts that define us, recidivism that will not budge, the ones beyond psychotherapy. Poison herbs of hate, rage and self-destruction are nurtured from habit. They are weeds! Still they bloom from time to time in momentary, macabre beauty that shocks and unnerves. These fruits shape lives for the worse, if other things don't grow as well. They may, of course, wither spontaneously during attacks of improvement, or get uprooted before they cause ruin.

When the gate of the dark garden, unnoticed but in some not far, swings open unexpectedly on a bad day, or by obsession not broken, evil herb flowers disturb the inner eye with nightmare colour corollas. Wet and skinless, dripping gunk, they wave disconcertingly in the face when living the nightmare, inviting to be touched and acting out reactions that will inevitably be wrong. What awaits is the waking dream that highlights the narrowness of comfort zones, the weakness of boundaries, and how quickly or how certainly good times pass.

And then, sanity prevails more or less sustainably in so many, the morbid avoided with a shudder in the sunshine. The lucky ones have much reason to consider themselves lucky. For deep in every mind notion gremlins lurk. They rarely, sporadically or frequently test the choices of thought travel destinations. And the choices set the habits.