Creatures

[Rough Draft]

(SOMDEland, pat 2) As Zzymbrr and I (my subconscious and conscious representations of self) began exploring SOMDEland, we wondered, what sorts of creatures live within my mythological universe....what lives within my subconscious? Since my subconscious lives within my brain, anything and everything within my subconscious is me and me alone. While shaped and guided by the external world, every memory, every thought, every trauma, every demon is just me....it is just a collection of neurons and connections within my brain. For example, when a person says something truly horrible that shatters me and throws me into loops of anger or depression...initially those are just sound waves which are compression and expansion of molecules that flow into my ears. And somehow those intangible patterns have the power to fundamentally change my brain and cause me to loop thoughts over and over again. Even after the hurtful person/event is gone, I keep thinking about them because the pain is deep in my subconscious...and that pain, that demon...is just a pattern within my brain..essentially composed of me. This is why every creature within SOMDEland looks the same, because they are all manifestations of myself (and therefore Zzymbrr who is the projection of my identity onto my subconscious). In another words, anything in the external world that affects me, lives as an avatar of myself within my subconscious

While honing my skills of cartography, I have been trying to map the complex landscape and architecture of my mythological universe, SOMDEland that stretches from Reality into the Imaginary. I discovered that SOMDEland is surrounded by a semipermeable membrane. This figure shows a zoomed up view of a transmembrane channel connecting three domains of existence: Reality (top), Digestion (middle) and SOMDEland (bottom).

The top of the figure shows the Domain of Reality where Ideas captured by Language and Mathematics are represented by a stream of letters and numbers that are being consumed by Zzymbrr (a representation of my subconscious). Because all creatures in SOMDEland distort space and time, the membrane has a huge bulge which looks like an eye.

Zzymbrr’s body is a saprophyte (see my previous post on the Magenta Coral which is pictorially represented by the faint lines along the edge of the body) where Reality is digested into new ideas that live in SOMDEland. In the first step, the real life letters and numbers are collected and broken down by little Creatures of Destiny that are like enzymes. Before the next step, more Creatures of Destiny are added and a byproduct is created that consists of letters and symbols of SOMDEland which represent idea-fragments. The second step represents the Gestation of an Idea and added to this are more Creatures of Destiny (and more idea fragments are created as byproducts) which leads to the third step: the Birth of an Idea. This Idea is seen leaving the vaginal opening, within a stream of imaginary language, and enters into the Domain of SOMDEland to start its own cycles of Cause and Effect. Entering into the vagina are sperm that encase old ideas. These ideas are used in the fourth step: the Death of an Idea where the idea is broken apart and used to start the next cycle.

My upcoming event, The Augmenting the Human Party, is a first attempt to bring my Research into the narrative of SOMDEland. The party has all three domains. It takes Reality (my research on Augmenting the Human through many presentations) and Digests it (through socialization and artmaking) and creates SOMDEland (through a ceremony saturated with my symbolism).

Within the body of the creature, ideas from reality are digested and formed anew. I take inspiration from the images below. I found the Magenta Coral at Brandeis and it is a saprophyte which consumes death and makes life, which is a process that is outlined in the figure below from a research paper.

Transmembrane Endocytotic Avatar Generation Creature

(SOMDEland, part 3) Previously, I wrote about how another person's hurtful actions can cause me to experience negative thoughts that loop in my mind. What is surprising is that even when the person is gone, they still live within my mind because my mind keeps looping the negativity. I feel like they live within my subconscious and keep bubbling up because my conscious mind keeps fighting to forget and move on. Because they live in my subconscious and my subconscious is composed of only myself (my neurons, my brain, etc), they become avatars that live in my subconscious as a reflection of myself. This drawing represents how a hurtful person enters into my subconscious as an avatar.

Everything above the double layered membrane represents my conscious self (the domain of Vivekanand Pandey Vimal) and everything below it represents my subconscious self (the domain of SOMDEland). The eyes represent how a hurtful person/experience enters into my mind through a sensory system. They are distorted because often our conscious mind adds a narrative that makes everything worse and perhaps distorts what is reality.

The hurtful person infects my mind as a virus, surfing down the channel. It then docks to a creature called the 'Transmembrane Endocytotic Avatar Generation Creature', where eventually the hurtful person will be consumed and turned into a manifestation of myself (Zzymbrr) because within my subconscious only representations of myself exist.

To represent how a hurtful event/person can infiltrate and infect my mind, I encased the person in a icosahedral viral capsid that belongs to Herpes Simplex Virus One . The image above is taken from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28528442

Interestingly, the way some hypothesize that Herpes enters into cells is by doing something called Herpes Simplex Virus Surfing. In my artwork, I borrow that idea, having the viral-person-capsid surf down into my subconscious. The image above is from here.

Surrounding the creature that will eventually endocytoticaly consume the human-virus that will infect my subconscious are structural lines that are motivated from the actin network infrastructure in a cell. The source for this image can be found here.

In my previous artwork, I explored the idea that a hurtful person, who causes the birth of negative mental loops, is really just a manifestation of myself. For example, a month ago, a corrupt man backed his car into mine and then lied to the insurance company that I actually hit him. This caused me to loop anger for many days even though he was no longer physically present. I even found out where he lived, lol...but I didn't do anything beyond sending a few angry phone messages. Even though I told myself to no longer think about it and I actively suppressed thoughts of anger, the thoughts would just bubble up uncontrollably from my unconscious. In a way, he had infected my subconscious and, like a virus, he kept reproducing and generating thoughts.

In this drawing, my conscious mind is above the double layered membrane and my subconscious is below it and it shows how a hurtful person enters into my subconscious. First, they are encased in a viral capsid and dock at the boundary to my subconscious (left). Next, the viral-person is encased in Zzymbrr which is a representation of my identity (middle). This is because my subconscious exists within my mind and the only entity that can exist within my subconscious is myself. Therefore everything from the external world is expressed as avatars (representations of myself) in my subconscious. As Zzymbrr consumes this viral person who is infecting my mind, little creatures of Destiny digest the person. Once the person has become an avatar (a representation of myself), this demon-creature descends down into my subconscious connected by an umbilical cord that is attached to my conscious mind through a placenta-like structure. This allows triggers from my conscious mind (like when the opposing insurance company calls and tells me that they won't reimburse my rental car) to enter into my subconscious. This is represented by winds of language that flow over the placenta.

Below I describe how I took some imagery from biology to motivate the drawings.

(SOMDEland, part 6) The image above shows the process of endocytosis where material from outside the cell enters into the cell. At first, the cell membrane deforms and creates an envelope around the material, then, it is hypothesized that actin filaments push on this envelope as it is cut away from the membrane. In my artwork (SOMDEland, part 5) I used similar visual themes, where the hurtful person entering from my conscious mind is consumed and enveloped by a Zzymbrr (a representation of myself that lives in the membrane between my conscious and subconscious). Then, filaments excreted by the Creatures of Destiny push the Zzymbrr to close its mouth and eventually drop down into my subconscious. Image source: http://radio.cuci.udg.mx/bch/ES/papers/Endocytosis_NatRevMolCellBiol_2007-v8-p603.pdf

(SOMDEland, part 7) In my drawing, looping-ideas (both positive and negative) from my conscious mind are endocytotically consumed by the Zzymbrr-Avatars which are held up by actin filaments (strands of protein). After I posted part 6, I was blessed with Avi Rodal's recommendation of a research paper that added greater depth to the role of these filaments. From my limited understanding, it seems that actin filaments are responsible for the shape of the cell and the deformation of the membrane during endocytosis. In SOMDEland, the double layered membrane represents the separation between my conscious and subconscious selves or, in another words, it represents the separation between Reality and my Interpretation of Reality. Using this analogy, the actin filaments are the architecture of SOMDEland...they are what define Reality in my subconscious. And the greater the influence of an idea, the greater the actin filaments deform my reality. This paper also proposes that, within a cell, the actin filaments can bend and store potential energy that can later be used for the process of endocytosis. In my next drawing I further explore the role of these filaments in the deformation and definition of Reality and the idea of the 'Web of Illusions'. The figure source is here.

Metaphorically, a placenta represents the interface between two different universes of identities, where ideas and thoughts can be exchanged. In SOMDEland, these universes are my conscious and subconscious worlds that are separated by a double layered membrane. In my last post, if you look at the right most part of the drawing, you will see a placenta-like structure that protrudes into my conscious mind from my subconscious. The placenta is connected to an umbilical cord that is attached to a Zzymbrr-Avatar who represents a looping idea that consumes my mind. As it descends into the depths of my subconscious, it receives information from my conscious mind. This is because, as a looping idea consumes a person's subconscious, it is often triggered, activated and sustained by what is happening in the world outside. The figure source is here.

The Web of Illusions within my Subconscious

Looping ideas that consume my mind, either from trauma or from something positive, are reborn in my subconscious as a representation of my own self (an avatar). As this avatar descends through the layers of my subconscious, it falls through a circle jerk of spiders who are weaving the fabric of my perceived reality. When I was growing up, my grandmother and mother would tell me about the concept of 'maya-jal', which is a Hindu philosophical idea that everything we perceive is a 'web of illusions'. In a way, neuroscience supports this idea because what we perceive isn't true Reality...instead, all of our sensory information is shattered across layers of neurons that extract a variety of different patterns, and then, all of that information is stitched together which represents our consciousness. In that sense, everything is a web of illusions. In that same way, every idea that enters into my subconscious is wrapped, by these spiders, in a Web of Illusion that deforms the fabric of my subconscious. The more powerful that a looping idea is, the greater its surrounding webbing and therefore the greater its ability to deform my subconscious. The webbing is made from actin filaments (see above), which is why it has the ability to deform the surrounding area.

As I drew the umbilically attached avatar that descended into the vast unknown of my subconscious while tethered to my conscious mind, I was reminded of a breathtaking display that I had seen in Space Center Houston. It was a display based on the picture above, of an astronaut umbilically connected through a lifeline to the ship, dangling between the entirety of Humanity on Earth and the unfathomable abyss of space. It was metaphorically so beautiful. My research is based on trying to understand, characterize and develop countermeasures for spatial disorientation that is experienced by astronauts and pilots. Picture source is here.

In my drawing, the spiderweb represents the philosophy of 'maya-jal' which is the idea that everything we perceive as being Reality is really a Web of Illusions. Borrowing this, in SOMDEland, every looping-idea influences and deforms the space-time fabric of my subconscious. The stronger the influence of an idea, the greater it is entangled in the spider web and the greater it deforms the space-time of my subconscious. This visualization is taken from Einstein's view of space-time where greater masses deform space-time more and that is what, partially, results in the phenomena of relativity. When I was talking to Avijit Bakshi, he told me about an interesting idea that some physicists were developing. With my very limited understanding, it is the idea that the most fundamental piece of reality are 'Spin Networks' that form webs, from which everything in the universe emerges. I liked that idea, whether it is true or not, because the perception/interpretation of Reality within SOMDEland emerges from the spider webs. Picture source is here

To see other examples of science artwork that I have done, check out the SciArt Section

Mother Nature's Fissures on the Earth of SOMDEland

As a review, looping-ideas (such as negative or positive experiences) enter into my conscious mind from my sensory system (eg eyes and ears). Then, these looping-ideas are consumed, digested and reborn as avatars in the double layered membrane that separates my conscious and subconscious selves. The avatars are all manifestations of myself, because only my identity exist within my mind and subconsciousness. And so, every piece of lingering anger and every persistent feeling of hurt is constructed using pieces of myself. From the double layered membrane, the avatar falls through a ring of spiders who weave a web around the avatar, giving it the power to deform the space-time (and therefore the perception of reality) in SOMDEland. This drawing shows an avatar who has landed on the Earth of SOMDEland, which is typically beautiful, lush, and filled with a fascination and love of the universe. However, scattered and often hidden across the Earth of SOMDEland are fissures, which like attractors (or like gravity) pull avatars into themselves. These fissures are not evil but they are capable of enhancing the inherent ability of every avatar to distort my perception of reality and to continue looping thoughts. In that sense, when I become depressed, it is because I have fallen into a fissure, and as many can attest...in that state, your perception of reality can fundamentally change. In this drawing, the fissure is Mother Nature who has embedded certain expectation of justice, love, hate, sex, and violence that may be inherent to the Human but also particular to me. This avatar must now go on a journey, falling through this fissure. The lines all around are the actin filaments that, under the influence of the fissure and avatar, distort the way that I see Reality.

Example: When a guy backed up into my car, completely crunching it and then lied to the insurance agency that I actually rear ended him, I got furious. Even after everything was over, he lingered in my thoughts and I kept looping what had happened. In that sense, this corrupt guy turned into an avatar and embedded himself in my subconscious. I would try not to think about it, but he would keep bubbling up in my mind. This avatar fell into fissures of 'justice' and 'violence/anger'. Surprisingly, I even looked up where he lived because he wasn't responding to my phone calls. Around that time, other things were happening too and they become 'evidence' that I was a weak man and that everyone walks over me and doesn't respect me. That perspective, while not entirely true, became a dominant view of my self-perception and any small unrelated event became evidence. In that way, that avatar activated a unique part of my insecurity. Eventually I want to hold workshops were each person artistically explores and defines their 'landscape of trauma'.

The Demon FiveMinutes who lives on the Earth of SOMDEland

In my previous post I introduced the Demon named FiveMintues who is born from within the womb of my mind and who lives within Somdeland. He represents how every five minutes the continuity and purity of my thoughts are disrupted by meaningless thoughts. He prevents me from merging with nature, from completing my work, from brainstorming epic ideas. I drew this rough sketch of FiveMintues during lab meeting and below I give a preview of some of his characteristics:

• He looks like a virus because he infects my thoughts with meaningless loops which are represented by the small loops within his body and the loops around his head which are reminiscent of electron energy levels. Language which brings humans together is also responsible for pushing Humanity away from Nature and the main source of sustenance for FiveMinutes is Language which is represented by the lines of abstract letters.

• FiveMinutes has five arms that have penises at the end of them and they penetrate into my mind and inject meaningless loops into the stream of my thoughts. While I feel violated being penetrated, the meaningless loops are addictive and so I want them too.

• Around my mind is a double layered membrane (which I haven't drawn well here) and each penis-arm injects a different theme which is surrounded by arrows which represent the feeling of loops. The first theme is the feeling of being a loser and being hurt and disrespected by people. The second theme are fantasies of being liked by the public after achieving accomplishments. The third theme are incessant sexual thoughts. The fourth theme is a list of things that I have to do. The final theme is a recursive repetition of FiveMintues, representing the addiction and positive feedback mechanism of falling into these loops.

Finally, the Demon FiveMinutes is a construct of my mind and therefore isn't evil. In my next journey, I have to learn to make peace with this demon by understanding myself and creating a way to communicate with myself so that I don't fall prey to FiveMinutes. Eventually, as I grow, FiveMinutes will become an ally.

The Age of Dissemination from my Subconscious to my Conscious Mind

Everything below the double layered membrane is the Domain of my Subconscious and everything above it is the Domain of my Conscious Mind. Laying upon the earth of my subconscious (SOMDEland), is Zzymbrr who is the representation of my identity projected onto my subconscious. Over the years he has become fertile with ideas that he has nurtured and nursed, and now, since the rebirth ceremony of 2020, he is ready to disseminate those ideas into the real world. He is surrounded by endoplasmic reticulum and emerging from him is a phallus that, like a plant virus, penetrates from one domain into another. At the double layered membrane where the disseminator punctures the barrier are structures similar to 'movement proteins' in plants which are what the plant virus exploits to infect another cell. In my drawing, these are held in place by actin-filament-like strands which represent the fabric of reality in my subconscious. Here, they have a hierarchical structure similar to a neural net. Once the phallus, which is modeled after the Tall Blue Lettuce (who grows in my yard) enters into my conscious mind, it disseminates my ideas into the real world through language-saturated-wind that is generated from my mouth. Then these sperm-like idea-babies impregnate the world and people's minds, for example through the internet as you are reading right now.

The disseminating phallus is modeled after The Tall Blue Lettuce (Lactuca biennis) who grows in my Garden of Biodiversity where I give sanctuary to those plants that others call weeds. On average it grows to be around 7 feet tall but, in special and perhaps magical places, it can grow to be 13 feet tall. You can see what a big boy it is, having fed from the meat of my spiritual energy and the fertility of my earth. As winter approaches, the stalk dies and the two pictures above are three years apart with different plants. It is said that the Tall Blue Lettuce's milky white sap has the power to tame pimples and possibly relieve skin problems, although some may develop rashes from the sap as well. Some believe that the leaves can be used to alleviate pain from stings and according to some Native Americans, the roots can be used to make teas to stop bleeding and help with diarrhea, nausea, pain and potentially heart and lung problems.

Info source: https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=LABI and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactuca_biennis

The leaves of the blue lettuce (right) have gorgeous lobes and ,once mature, the top the plant branches like a breathtaking neuronal dendritic arbor.

The Tall Blue Lettuce first produces small flowers that have a slight tinge of blue in them and then flowers give way to a bouquet of parachute seeds that catch the wind and like late summertime snow float through the sky and momentarily the world seems so magical.

Within my mythology and drawings, I represent the barrier between my subconscious and conscious minds with a double layered membrane. Originally to represent the Age of Dissemination where I take ideas from my subconscious and then bring them to my conscious mind to disseminate into the real world, I was thinking of using the metaphor of a virus. Just as a virus exists between the living and non-living worlds, my ideas, because of their origin, exist between the worlds of surreality and reality. Also like a virus, some (although not all) of my ideas are designed to land into other people's subconscious and multiply, replicate and mutate. I love Herpes Simplex Virus One. However, because I used the Tall Blue Lettuce as the model for the Disseminating Phallus I needed a virus that infected another cell by puncturing it not by exploding the host cell. But could such a virus exist? It exists in plants! A plant virus!

[image source: https://jvi.asm.org/content/93/15/e00296-19]

Usually there is a small gap in the cell wall between two plant cells called the plasmodesmata (left). These gaps are too small to allow the passage of virus and only allow small molecules to pass through. The virus is able to use movement proteins (right figure, the strong lines) to make the gap larger so that they can pass through and infect the next cell.

[image source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682205005787 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/plasmodesmata]

Allostatic Change on the Earth of SOMDEland

Often my conscious mind wants to be immersed in the flow of the present moment but a deep pull from my subconscious can throw me into cycles of repeating mental loops. Sometimes with each repeating cycle of thought, I can purify and resolve the internal conflict that caused it. However, if unaddressed, these cycles can dig deeper with every loop and eventually cause a fundamental change to the baseline of my thoughts and perception of reality. For example, when I fall into a depressive state, I perceive everything differently. Even small unrelated injuries feel like large wounds that support the idea of my defeat. With enough cycles of these negative thoughts, my perception of reality changes and that viewpoint of my defeat becomes my new normal state. This same idea can apply to the feeling of falling in love or any experience that has very large emotional weight that leads to looping thoughts.

To understand this artwork, let me first provide a quick summary of my previous artwork. First, an idea/experience that has big emotional value (eg trauma) goes from my conscious mind into my subconscious passing through a spiritual transmembrane channel. After that, the idea is reborn as an avatar that falls through a Ring of the Spiders of Destiny, who wrap the avatar in the web-of-illusions. Finally, the avatar falls to the Earth of SOMDEland where it can make cause-and-effect destiny. All avatars look the same and are all the manifestation of Zzymbr who is the main architect of SOMDEland and a representation of my subconscious identity.

This drawing depicts Mother Nature (A) laying upon the Earth of SOMDEland. Her face is a Zzymbr because she is me and, like me, she is balding and you can see the field of particles that are excited by the energy emitted from her bald spot. Her arms (B) are like cascading streams of neurons, one which goes deep into my subconscious and the other which climbs up into the interface between my subconscious and conscious minds. She integrates the streams of thoughts from both domains. Her body (C) is composed of swirling loops representing looping thoughts. In my subconscious, anything that doesn’t self perpetuate, fades away and is forgotten. Her vagina (D) represents an attractor point, which is neither good nor bad, it just a process of my subconscious. It could be anything that causes the mind to loop, such as trauma (eg depression) or even falling in love. Most loops are sustained through an internal monologue spoken through language which is depicted by characters that are undecipherable by the conscious mind. The entrance into the womb is like a lens which, like a ray diagram, takes parallel lines of language (Reality) and focuses it into a reinterpretation of Reality. For example, when I am depressed, I interpret the same world around me completely differently. Waiting within the entrance of the womb is a Funnel Spider of Destiny (E) who waits to pull my conscious mind into deep cycles of looping thoughts. All around is the Funnel Spider of Destiny’s maya-jal (web of illusions) (F). At one spot (G) you can see a pattern that is motivated from the bifurcation diagram of a logistic map, which represents the descent into chaos and the idea that even within the chaotic regime there are windows of stability.

The Funnel-Spider-Of-Destiny pulls my conscious mind into its looping madness and pushes it through a Klien tube (H) which is a 3D mobius strip. The Klien tube is filled with language which perpetuates the looping thoughts and it makes it very difficult to break out of the cycles. Emitted from the end of the Klien tube, which is depicted as a neuron terminal (I), are neurotransmitter-like Creatures of Destiny. I chose this because I am interested in the neuroscience of depression and use some ideas from that literature to motivate my artwork. As my conscious mind emerges from the Klien Tube, you can see that the body of Mother Nature and the Earth of SOMDEland has incrementally drifted and spiraled to a new state of normalcy (J, K). This represents how depression or any other state can fundamentally change the resting state of our mind. Slowly, over the days or months or years, our expectations and even the way we think can change.

The main reason I created the drawing is because I want to know and explore the nature of my subconscious. I want to understand where my deep desires come from and why sometimes, even when I know I shouldn't, I am compelled to make bad decisions. I want to know how my systems of reward, punishment and trauma shape the landscape of my subconscious. I especially want to understand why my mind loops thoughts and how I can diminish some loops while enhancing others. In a way, the study of addiction may provide some insights because the loops may be easier to characterize and quantify (e.g. through brain imaging) since they can often be much stronger and perhaps more stereotyped than other mental loops. In this figure, what fascinates me is how they depict the loops over time as spirals. That is, each iteration of a loop digs deeper and slowly fundamentally changes the reward-punishment landscape until the old normal is replaced with a new normal that depends on the source of addiction. I represent the spiral pattern in my drawing at points J and K.

Koob, George F., and Michel Le Moal. "Drug abuse: hedonic homeostatic dysregulation." Science 278.5335 (1997): 52-58.

In a review paper, by the same first author, I found another depiction (left image) of the spiraling process of addiction and allostatic change, where with each churning cycle of experience and hormones, the homeostatic restoring force weakens and a person's emotional state begins to drift away. In another words, with every cycle, a person's ability to return to the old normal weakens and eventually a new normal is created that depends on the source of addiction. What makes me fall in love with this image is that it has very similar vibes to my research (right image) where I strap blindfolded people into a machine that they have to balance in the absence of task-relevant gravitational cues. In this condition, people become disoriented and everyone shows a characteristic pattern of positional drifting. In the image, the black line is the angular position of the person and you can see that as they try to balance they get further and further away from the balance point which is at zero degrees. Perceptually, they feel as if they are at the balance point, however in reality they are very far away...and then they crash and lose control of the machine and are completely bewildered when they realize how far away they were from the balance point. This condition may be similar to the cycles of depression, where the restoring signal is not strong enough to bring the person back to the old normal (the balance point).

Koob, George F., and Jay Schulkin. "Addiction and stress: an allostatic view." Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 106 (2019): 245-262.

One day as I sat bathing in my imaginations, I unexpectedly saw a flash of movement in a plant on my desk. What could that have been? It was a Grass Spider (a funnel weaver)! And that is how the idea of the Funnel Spider of Destiny came into my drawing! Unlike many other spiders, the Grass Spider's webs are not sticky and usually insects either become entangled or hit a web-barrier and then fall down the funnel into a hole where the spider pounces and poisons and consumes.

Most often, you can find Grass Spiders on days that are pregnant with dew because the water droplets sit on the funnel web. Like many insects, when first frost comes it kills the spiders, however because I brought my plants indoor before first frost, this spider has survived. I watch it daily.

"Males spend most of their adult life wandering in search of a mate. Shortly after mating, the male often dies. The females typically do not wander from the web, and if they do, it is typically to find a new location to build the next web. Females spend most of their time capturing and eating prey, building up their strength to mate and lay eggs. Females do not search for mates, but rather, wait for the males to wander by and find them. In the fall, after mating, the females will deposit a disc-shaped egg sac in a crevice, and then die - often still clinging to the egg sac."

Info source: https://bugguide.net/node/view/2001

Because my drawings reflect my subconscious' digestion of reality, I love taking inspiration from places and ideas that my conscious mind has experienced. To draw the Funnel Spider of Destiny's web, I found a paper that contained beautiful hand drawn spider webs from the states of Rajasthan, UP, and MP in India. Interestingly, I am connected to each of these states because I spent a year in India working as a consultant for an NGO in Rajasthan, my mother's family is from UP and my father's family is from Chhaattisgarh (formerly part of MP). I also discovered in the acknowledgements section a professor from Amravati University. Amravati was the name of my grandmother from my father's side. Because of these coincidences, I enjoyed using these drawings as motivation for my drawing.

Lawania, Krishna Kant, and M. M. Trigunayat. "Web pattern and architecture in some spiders (Araneae) from Central India." International journal of Biotechnology and Bioengineering Research 4 (2013): 20-22.

If you look at Point G on my drawing you will see a pattern that is motivated from the bifurcation diagram of a logistic equation which is often used to show many of the features of chaos. On the figure to the left, it starts out as a single line which represents a stable system that is oscillating in one predictable way. As a parameter is increased in the logistic equation (on the x-axis), the system bifurcates and now there are two ways that the system can oscillate. Eventually the system goes into the chaotic regime (the dark bands). What is really breathtaking is that even when you are in the chaotic regime, there are certain parameter values where there is a window of peace and the system returns to a stable and predicable type of oscillation (point A on the left figure). I zoomed into that window of stability (right figure) and represented it in my drawing to represent the idea that even when we are trapped in a chaotic state of looping thoughts that keep unpredictably changing that there can be moments of stability. I remember once observing someone who was in very deep depression and then suddenly when the situation changed and the person was thrown into survival mode, they were momentarily outside of depression.

While I did not include this in my drawing, I enjoyed looking through this paper where the researchers created a model of the funnel web and discovered that the structure of the funnel web used resonance to communicate to the spider that the prey was caught. Using resonance was not a feature of other spider webs such as that of the Orb Weaver.

Naftilan, S. A. "Transmission of vibrations in funnel and sheet spider webs." International Journal of Biological Macromolecules 24.2-3 (1999): 289-293.

In point D of my drawing, I use the imagery of a lens to depict the opening into the Funnel Spider of Destiny's home. The figure above (left) shows how parallel lines of light pass through a converging lens which cause the rays of light to pass through the focal point. Similarly, parallel lines of reality represented by language are reinterpreted by the Spider and as a result my perception of reality fundamentally changes. This is referencing the idea that when I get depressed the same world seems completely different. Even very small injuries feel like big wounds that reinforce my feeling of defeat. The other motivation I used is from neuroscience (right image ) where neurotransmitters are being released by a neuron. This connects to the other studies that I cited above on the spiraling nature of addiction and its neuroscience origins.

Hand of Destiny Mapping onto SOMDEland

Lately in discussions with several people, I have been thinking about how some types of experiences can have a significant effect on us and pave a nearly inevitable path of destiny that can change our landscape of reward, whereas other experiences have minimal effect on our reward system. For example, in my romantic informational interviews, we have discussed how romantic/sexual exploration can ramp up very quickly when young (and old) and, in a way, the first experience can lead to a chain reaction of events that may be hard to avoid and once that happens, perhaps your landscape changes. Perhaps then, a new normal is reached and the role of romance becomes more essential to maintain the same status quo. The same is true with starting a new job that pushes your mind into a new flow of demands and goals and changes your landscape of reward.

​​In any case, I have been imagining mapping the full set of experiences (the ones that lead to a chain reaction of consequences and the ones that do not) as lines in a subconscious landscape that flow and that sink into attractor points.

In this rough draft image, the top is the world of reality and there the passage of time is depicted as different cycles of the moon. I chose this because recently I had a formative experience underneath the silvery midnight moonlight of the springtime pink supermoon. Underneath the moon is a double layered membrane which I usually use to represent the threshold between reality and my subconscious (the mythological universe of SOMDEland). Within SOMDEland is a hand which represents the Hand of Destiny (it also pays homage to the God Hand in Berserk which I found pretty epic) where some people believe that the lines of the hand reveal unavoidable paths of destiny. While I don’t believe that palmistry reveals cause-and-effect (although it can be beneficial as a placebo) I do like using its symbolism here. I also use the motif of a hand because this piece is part of a collaborative series where the previous drawing had a hand. On the hand are my Spiders of Destiny who weave cause-and-effect strands of web which define my Interpretation of Reality (maya-jal). The spiders, like moving proteins on mRNA, read the instructions and create the maya-jal webbing which then maps the destiny of my hand onto the landscape of my subconscious (represented by the arrows). Upon the earth of my subconscious there are two hills and a valley which represent the gravitational pull of the attractor point. On the right is Zzymbr, the personification of my subconscious self, who is inevitably rolling down this hill into the attractor point. The creatures of destiny are walking towards the attractor point to digest my emotions.