Holes in Our Logic

There’s a curious phenomenon that was named only as recently as 2005: Trypophobia. In fact, not everyone is in agreement that it encapsulates a true phobia, for many people who are affected experience disgust, not fear (an important point to revisit, later). Here is the nature of it — people with trypophobia have a skin-crawling revulsion toward clusters of small holes (or clusters of bumps). Things like the seed heads of certain flowers, honeycomb, groups of soap bubbles, or the surface of a sponge can elicit these feelings.

The effect is particularly pronounced when the clusters of holes or bumps present somewhere on the body; full-blown panic and rejection can ensue.

What might cause this reaction? What do holes and bumps mean to us, that we feel compelled to reject and escape them?

Psychologists have been theorizing that trypophobia is due to our instinctive repulsion toward signs of disease, parasites — transmissible dysregulating dangers. This notion makes a lot of sense… but I want to propose a more basic, universal reason for our disgust at holes— one that encompasses revulsion at disease and decay, yet goes beyond it.

Fundamentally, holes are emptiness. And, there is nothing quite as jarring as encountering emptiness where we anticipated solidity.

Nothing is as solid as it seems. Radio waves pass through the walls of houses. Tectonic plates shift the ground beneath our feet. Our skin is full of pores. Our eyes’ field of vision has a blind-spot. Our self-awareness has numerous blind-spots. The atoms and molecules of our world make electromagnetic bonds and repellent forces across vast distances (for their scale) that create the illusion of solid form where there is a flickering probability.

We know the story of Siddartha Gautama, son of a clan chief in a village on the flanks of the Himalayas. By tradition, Siddartha is said to have been sheltered from knowledge of pain of the world, living entirely within the courtyard of his father’s estate, until — famously — he slipped out of the compound incognito. The story goes that as he wandered the streets outside the palace, he encountered three visions that haunted his heart: the sight of an old man, a sick man, and a dead man.

Trypophobia gives us insight into the true recoil in Siddartha’s experience. The visceral shock and disgust at the awful holes in the facade of everything. It’s beyond rot, you understand. We know better than to look at the whole world through a microscope — you don’t want to see all that!

But…what if we can’t help it? What if you can’t see anything else?

This is a fractal world. When you think of fractals, you probably picture a shape that expands to infinite complexity at every turn. But fractals can go the other way, too — there are fractal sponges. When you first look, you see a volumetric shape with a bunch of holes. Then you look closer…and between every two holes is another hole, identical in every way to the others but proportionately smaller. Look again: There are holes on either side, midway between an original size hole and the smaller hole. These new holes are yet smaller.

You can look as long as you want. What you have is an infinite regression of holes, creating a spongeform shape which is so riddled, it leads you to wonder whether there is any there there at all.

Menger Sponge. (Scientific American)

What is this compounded emptiness? How can there be anything to us at all? We hear that Siddartha’s initial reaction to witnessing the grotesque infinity of our being was to run away and hide, to renounce all, and to seek escape. His retreat was into ascetic single-minded focus, and — in a way — most of us do something similar, what with our hobbies, our fixations, our addictions. The dust jacket tries to hold the binding together.

The kind of refuge that Siddartha sought at first was single-pointed purity, invariance, perfection in awareness. He was looking for the inviolable solid, the eternal, luminous gold, incorruptible. We, too, have this pursuit in the western European tradition of alchemy (that draws from ancient Egyptian magical source material).

Yet, listen to what Karl Jung had to say in Mysterium Coniunctionis (his final published work, a very dense and inspired synthesis of alchemy with transcendental psychology):

All these statements apply just as well to the prima materia in its feminine aspect: it is the moon, the mother of all things, the vessel, it consists of opposites, has a thousand names, is an old woman and a whore…it is wisdom and teaches wisdom, it contains the elixir of life in potentia…it is the earth and the serpent hidden in the earth, the blackness and the dew and the miraculous water which brings together all that is divided. …There is…a typical combination of various motifs: trickery, cruelty, motherliness, murder of relatives and children, magic, rejuvenation, and — gold.

Very interesting, isn’t it, to realize that the Mater, the original mother material, is essentially as sly and dangerous and deceptive as it is foundational?

We know that Siddartha Gautama abandoned the ascetic practices and the lifestyle of a sannyasi renunciate which first drew him in the aftermath of his initial shock at witnessing the porousness of the world. He developed a spiritual path based on moderation, a compassionate embrace of the wisdom that nothing is golden, that all form disappoints and terrifies — that even the demons and gods in their exalted realms do crumble (given enough time) and grossly yield to emptiness.

Call it exposure therapy…which is exactly how psychologists attempt to heal phobias. They will show you pictures of the trigger stimulus, then bring you in closer, and ultimately have you touch the thing, all while reinforcing the calm within, and rerouting panic into curiosity. Ultimately, via the Buddha’s method of paying attention, you come to realize that you are the thing with an infinite number of holes in your alibi of self-hood.

No refuge, no escape, no pure, eternal crystal of knowing, can evade the reality of our perforation. There is, however, another aspect to trypophobia that is equally responsible for creeping us out. This is because trypophobic triggers don’t merely confront us with hollow emptiness but also with unnerving duplication.

Identical reproduction makes our hair stand on end. It is strange, powerful magic. We don’t really understand how things can be identical. It’s tempting to think that repetitive similarity is something monstrous that we have brought to the world with our mass production of “product” churned out from assembly lines or even through the praxis of cottage industry. Our hearts tell us that the natural order of things is to always go out on a limb toward irreplaceable singularity. Uniqueness is comforting, reinforcing as it does our intuitive notion of specialness, rarity, value. It lends uncomplicated meaning.

We can even tolerate redundancy as long as the avenues of redundant accomplishment are, in some way, unique. But twin-hood is nonsense because it challenges the notion that we walk incomparable arcs through the world with a history that belongs to each of us individually.

Indeed, we don’t really find exact-sameness in nature in the macro-scale (with perhaps the curious and telling exception of black holes), nor does the phenomenon arise naturally in the meso-scale with which we are most familiar. It doesn’t appear until we come to the molecular and atomic scale — where, for instance, it is functionally and measurably impossible to tell two hydrogen atoms apart from one another.

Now, this sudden onset of duplication in the micro-world may be observational bias rather than intrinsic identicality, but then again it may indicate something about the transitional process of reality from scale to scale. Can something unique be exactly duplicated? It certainly is odd that such a plethora of unique entities as fill our meso-scale world are built from indistinguishable clones at the level of our atomic fabric.

There are two liminal realms where people do encounter the oddity of exact duplication on a regular basis. One we have already mentioned — the microscopic world of bacteria and viruses. It is surely not coincidence that these replicating entities multiplying on the margins of existence to create huge numbers of duplicates can cause repetitive alteration of our flesh leading to “disease” images that trigger trypophobia. The repetition of small, identical bumps or holes in our skin is as alarming as the decay and emptiness. It fills us with a vision of being overrun, taken by a surge of horrible sameness.

The other realm where we experience identical duplication might surprise you…or perhaps not, given the sheer number of people who claim to have encountered this phenomenon. Internet paranormal forums are rife with accounts of individuals seeing and hearing clones of family members or friends, only to realize that the subject in question is in another room, or asleep…or absent from the premises altogether. Sometimes, the impersonation is simply a word or two called out in an exact replica of the familiar voice. Then again, some duplicates present themselves visibly, but don’t say a word and behave strangely, hanging slack and motionless in a doorway, staring, before turning around and disappearing.

Probably most intriguing are the cases where individuals tell stories of having detailed, lengthy visible interactions and auditory conversations with a duplicate entity, followed by a moment where the apparition vanishes simultaneous with the dawning awareness that so-and-so is not actually here.

There are a staggering number of these accounts. This is a typical example:

My brother and I are 16 months apart. [When I was 4 and he was turning 6,] we had…metal bunk beds…. I had the top bunk and he had the bottom. My brother would cry a lot at night…. It was normal for his crying to wake me up. One night I’ll never forget though. I woke up to him crying, but he was trying to stifle it. Well, I heard MY OWN VOICE calling his name in a whisper. I sat there not understanding what was happening and I slid my arm down the gap between the bed and the wall. …He held my hand immediately and we stayed like that until the sun came up. He told me [the voice] is why he [often] cried at night. We never told my mom.

— Historical_Toe6522

And here is an example of a more elaborate encounter. The storyteller says he and his father were out in the woods, toward dusk, hunting wild boar. He heard rustling and a gunshot from the direction of his father’s position.

After about 3 minutes of walking I came up on what I thought was his stand. Though, it was more like a shack, it looked very unkept and rickety. I approached it and saw my dad through a gap in one of the walls, that I assumed was a shooting window. I whispered asking him if he’d gotten anything. He very slowly turned to look at me. If you hunt you know that your head movements must be slow as not to alert any game. But this wasn’t that — it was more of a foreign movement, one resembling that of a serial killer in some dumb horror movie. He looked at me with a blank expression for a minute… well, not blank… it had a slight hint of anger… but, I quickly chocked that up to my dad wondering why I’d leave my stand before he called me. Seeing that, I decided he was not ready to leave, so I made my way back to my stand without questioning him further.

Sure enough my dad called my phone a few minutes after I got back to my stand, saying he was coming to get me and we’d leave. On the way home I asked him why he didn’t say anything when I came by. He looked at me confused and said something along the lines of “you never came to me.”

— TripleStuftOreo

What (the hell?) is going on here? How can this type of encounter be one of the most common, widespread paranormal experiences that people are having?

Just the very idea that duplicates of ourselves are materializing, speaking in our voices, staring at us, and vanishing evokes a spine-tingling dread and curiosity quite similar to the feelings that wash over us with trypophobia.

The leading interpretations of what causes the mimic phenomenon are that either we are regularly intersecting with other timelines, probabilities, universes; or, that a class of entity exists which is strikingly adept at imitating us — and does so for various reasons ranging from loneliness or curiosity to deceit and treachery.

What is key (and unnerving) is that these are not just passable impersonations. They are exact reproductions of our reality. That “clone stamping” is, in its way, as difficult — or more so — to make ok in our hearts as it is to grapple with the underlying void emptiness of everything.

We need a meditation or exposure therapy to also deal with duplication — it’s full impact and meaning, not the dabbling in duplication that humanity plays with to mesmerizing and often disastrous effect. We can commit whole classes of beings to genocide or commodification. We can change the surface of the Earth by doing the same small actions over and over. We can model reality on computers by manipulating classes of objects, and create synthetic worlds that hypnotize us for years. Some of us spend our lives in such places.

Yet, it’s all splashing in the baby pool. We don’t really yet know what duplication means, its role in the schema of identity. We grin nervously at the notion that our doppelgangers might be walking the Earth at this very moment. It’s an ambivalently flattering thought. We’re pretty sure we’ll never meet them, perhaps on account of hidden cosmic laws, or due to circumstance; but we are always walking through rooms we just left, it seems. The prima materia is not singular or unique. In the fractal form, a thousand transient echoes of ourselves all claim to be first.