Poison For The Mind

Poison for the mind.

I used to think all knowledge was good, and the more knowledge you have, the better off you are because that makes you better able to plan, prepare, and protect yourself.

How naïve I was then. I eventually learned that stories have a power in themselves, and that power is sometimes not positive.

I heard a story many years ago from my mother-in-law at the time about her brother's wife in Yugoslavia. A true story about her little 3 year old boy that was so shocking and horrifying that I honestly feel like just hearing it did some permanent damage to my mind. It was a bit of poison to my spirit. A profound sadness. Not enough to kill me, but enough to leave a permanent mark.

But don't worry, I will spare you the details of this story in order to protect YOUR mind. I wouldn't want you to have to carry this around inside you the way I have for all these years. Your soul can remain clean of this stain at least.

But do you know about this concept? Is there some dark truth, some terrible story, some taste of evil that you know but wish you had never known?

I'm not talking about trauma that comes from bad things happening to you. Everyone has some of that in their life. But other than the empathy of a few, the effect is more or less limited to the person that it happened to.

Instead, I'm talking about some bit of knowledge, where the darkness is more portable. It travels with the story. Something that troubles your mind, that poisons your spirit and leaves a stain on your soul, and would do the same to anyone else who hears it?

Sometimes we are wise enough to stand at the top of the stairs of a story and look down into the dark and know that that way leads down into madness and possibly even suicide, and then overcome our curiosity, close the door, and walk away, knowing we chose to live in the light instead.

That said, to step even deeper into the dark just for a moment, let me set a boundary here. In my curious but impressionable youth I have read about rumors from the occult that there are some truly ancient entities of pure evil that are as old as the creation of this universe, or possibly even older and originating in another universe. In my mind, I picture them as a sort of formless black cloud floating in space. A self-aware force of unspeakable, pure evil looking for a place to land and exercise their nature. It is said that if you just speak their name you can invoke them, and they can instantiate themselves into this dimension, this world, YOUR life. Then you are REALLY in trouble, on levels you cannot imagine. I saw one of those names written in a book once, but I dared not speak it aloud. I felt there was a risk from just reading it. To be clear then, I am NOT asking about anything that dark. Let's step away from that abyss.

I am only talking about some sad stories or some forbidden knowledge that you wish you had never heard. Something that carries a sadness with it and could impact anyone else just from hearing it.

On a related note, I once read a short story about a joke, created as a weapon of sorts, that was so powerful that anyone who heard it spread it around to others like a virus, but no one could stop laughing until they all finally laughed themselves to cardiac arrest and death. To immunize their own soldiers against it, the country that created the deadly joke also created an antidote. The antidote was an additional fact that unwound the humor from the joke, thus ending the laughter and allowing the victim to recover.