Organizing Your Medium

“In the course of life’s 3.8 billion-year history on Earth, the first-order strange attractor recognizable as ‘alive’ would have consisted of a material capable of repeatedly organizing structure around it,” says Stanley Shostak in The Evolution of Death.

What is a “collection” on Medium if not a strange attractor, if not a vortex of consciousness that organizes the informational medium around an axis of interest and brings the medium to life?

“A Pattern Break” collection - that you are right now sampling - is a non-collection collection. The point of a “pattern break” is to disorganize the informational medium, to break up the familiar pattern of mind-flow, and to create confusion. Why confusion? Confusion is a letting go of the known, a stepping into the unknown, an opening of the mind, i.e. a state of serendipitous clarity.