PHOTO Macaulay Culkin wears Ryan Gosling wearing Macaulay Culkin T-shirt T-shirt

Today’s Moment of Zen is brought to you by Macaulay Culkin, who posed for the above mind-bending meta-tative photo wearing sunglasses and a T-shirt featuring a photo of Ryan Gosling wearing sunglasses and a T-shirt featuring Macaulay Culkin. I believe True Detective‘s Rust Cohle (or should I say Matthew Macaulaughey?) would refer to this as a flat circle.

The Inceptionesque photo was posted on Twitter yesterday by @cheesedayz, the Twitter account for Macaulay’s band Pizza Underground, along with the hashtag-heavy caption, “Let’s get meta #ryangosling #macaulayculkin #shirt #pizzaunderground #mug”

The Ryan Gosling photo is from an outing he had last year in which he was snapped sporting the Home Alone era Culkin T while running errands in California.

As you would imagine, the photo is taking the internet by storm and has inspired everything from hashtags to animated gifs like this created over at WoofMaker.com:

Celebs wearing T-shirts with other celebs is nothing new, and neither is celebs getting T-shirt photo payback — as evidenced by these photos of Justin Bieber sporting a T-shirt with Tiffani Thiessen as Saved by the Bell‘s Kelly Kapowski at the Much Music Awards in June of 2011 and Tiffani getting payback just a few days later by wearing a Biebs T:

Justin Bieber now has an opportunity to one-up Macaulay Culkin in the escalating meta-T wars… Here’s an example of what I’m talking about with an added layer of meta added in for fun:

Of course, Ryan Gosling is perhaps more primed for the next step of meta-wear:

Ryan Gosling wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin wearing a T-shirt of Gosling wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin. pic.twitter.com/yJF0AqTEVl

— Jen Lewis (@thisjenlewis) May 12, 2014

My apologies for the mind warp.