When I've had too much, when my thoughts race out of control and I grow dizzy and nauseous, I find myself gravitating back to mysticism, or religious writing, though "religion" is a pretty heavily loaded term these days. It calms me. It sets me back.
One thing you notice after studying mysticism is that many of the great mystic disciplines have a preoccupation with "too much." Many of the writings, doctrines, practices, etc. have a lot to do with returning to a calm after too much pleasure seeking, too much wealth, too much ego, too much thinking, too much dogma, and so on. The wisest mystics don't hold these things in contempt in themselves: pleasure, ego, wealth, thinking, etc. But they do set themselves against too much of these things in a relative sense, though they tend to be wary of partaking in them anyways, because they understand their allure and their tendency to induce more - excepting perhaps thinking; more thinking is okay, but again not too much.
There is a great respect surrounding balance. It is ironic that organized religion itself sort of tends back to this state of too much structurally, though it retains the old symbols, but that is besides the point.
There is something curious that happens sonically with digital delay. Digital delay basically repeats an inputed signal in accordance with various parameters, creating an echo. If you turn up the decay and the feedback of the sound and everything, the signals wash back onto each other and for a while it sounds nice...a wall of sound. But after a while it grows tiresome, and even maddening if you have the right recurring patterns. It seems this is something similar metaphorically to what happens in life systems. There is this tendency towards blind progress in every direction, and upon finding its natural limits, washes back onto itself, as a sort of hall of mirrors, until the intervals grow to a point where there is a vast blindness and a breakdown of communication and intelligibility.
It seems a lot of different kinds of religions are a response to this phenomena. A counterthrust. A reset switch that allows one to begin again with the clarity to proceed.
