

### The Blue Rose Manuscript

Copyright 2019 Francis Rosenfeld

Cover Design © JoRoderick at SelfPubBookCovers

Published by Francis Rosenfeld at Smashwords

Table of Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Lesson One – The Round World

Mega Puzzle

Layer

Cycles

Folding

Lesson Two – In Motion

Timing

Current

Lesson Three – Roots, Branches and Offshoots

Precursor

Derivative

Concentration

Lesson Four – Mirror Reality

Sympathetic

Synapse

Lesson Five – Divided by Zero

Options

Shift

Revelation

Lesson Six - Always and Forever

Rapture

Constant

Clarity

Lesson Seven – Only Echoes, Endlessly Repeating

Scale

Fractal

Local

Rose

About the Author

Other books by Francis Rosenfeld

Connect with Francis Rosenfeld

Dedication

To my teachers, with gratitude.
Beloved,

I don't know when these teachings will reach you, but reach you they will, in their good time, such are the rules of this round world. One thing I know, I'll be long gone and many centuries will pass before you are born, you, my star, my destiny, my wonder.

I have so many things to teach you and wish I could be there with you, but it doesn't really matter, we're all immortal, our kind, we never leave, we never die, we stay behind the ebbs and flows of the world to keep watch, to guide and to listen.

I was born before the rise of the cathedrals, before the monuments of Egypt, before the age of reason. I was born many times, in many forms, although I'm sentimental and often return to a variation of my current one, and I will be born again some day, many centuries from now, as you. It is to you that I write this letter, my guidance for your life, filled with undying love and all the wisdom I accumulated over my many lives of learning.

Don't be afraid, my sweet, my precious jewel! There is nothing to be afraid in this world. Don't you know that it is your playground, your laboratory? Everything around you is for you, the world is for you to fashion and enjoy. You don't believe me!

Where should I start? This lifetime is as good a start as any. I was born with hands blessed by the angels with the gift to bring forth beauty. These hands of mine birthed many things into this world, spiritual children of sorts, works of art, books of poetry, knowledge of science and strength of building. If there is a wish every parent holds dear is for their children to thrive and be around for many generations and I was so blessed in my spiritual children, the fates have smiled upon me. I see they're still around after all this time so you can meet them too. You may wonder how I get to know all this, since I died a long time ago. You see, one of the lessons I have yet to teach you is the variable nature of time.

The cycle of my life, of this life, is about to end and before I embark on a new journey, in a new form, I wanted to make sure the revelations of this life would not get lost on my many future selves.

Few people get to experience meeting themselves through time and fewer still are fated to love that future self with such elation, with such self abandon as I have you.

I have to believe that there are no accidents in this world, that things happen for a reason, and that this soul of mine, with all of its passion and daring, got to see its reflection in you, defying centuries, one heart beating in two bodies.

I know you don't remember me now; you haven't even met me yet, and when you do, I will be an old man, like the man I am now. You would have already read these writings by then and you'll see me as a teacher, but whenever I tell you the truth you won't believe it, and that is my curse. Maybe you will find it easier to accept if it comes in your own handwriting, five hundred years old by the time you discover it, and maybe having to read it in a locked archive room and touch it with gloved fingers will make it feel more valuable to you and more worthy of your trust, but it is the same me, my love. It's always the same me.

I'm not at ease talking about such things, but they were things that needed to be said before we start.

Devotedly yours,

[And here the manuscript ends, with an indecipherable sigil, a signature of sorts, that seems to have been subjected to moisture.

The water stain damaged almost its entire surface, making it impossible to recover, and the wax seal on the other side of the paper, coincidentally placed in the same spot, prevented the preservation specialists from retrieving any other information.

The seal is a rose, a rather common symbol for the time when the manuscript originated, and has no characteristic features that would allow us to identify its owner.

The manuscript was deemed apocryphal, however we placed its origin somewhere around the beginning of the sixteenth century.]

Lesson One – The Round World

###  MEGA-PUZZLE

A life-sized construct (game, toy, or problem), designed to test ingenuity or knowledgei

To start your instruction, what is life?

Life is a giant puzzle made of pieces you can see and pieces you can't see, and the more pieces you can fit together, the better your understanding of life and the more you can do.

The mistake most people make is trying to solve the puzzle only with the pieces they can see, no wonder nobody ever figures things out.

When architects design a building, they draw plans. Flat sheets of paper on which they describe what you can see at a certain level. Nobody in their right mind would try to make a building out of floor plans, like a finger thin stack of pancakes smothering each other. It is implied that things happen between those levels, things that are not described in the plans.

If the details of the design are outside of the ordinary nature of construction, they may be depicted on facades and rendered in perspectives, but most often than not the builder and the architect fall back on the mutual and unspoken understanding of how things are usually done.

They both understand that there are walls between the levels, and the walls need support and reinforcement. They both understand that a circle is not a plate, but a tall column, and that a gap in the wall is a window and not a full height hole.

The same thing happens when we solve this giant puzzle we call life.

We need to fall back on the unspoken knowledge of how things evolve, for instance, that there is a time gap between the origination of an action and its visible consequences in the world, or the rule of critical mass, which pushes an event past the point of no return for good or for ill just because of the massive levels of pressure that various components of society bear upon it together at precisely the right time.

Can you please stop fidgeting, you're a grown woman for God's sake! Do you need to take a break or something? We just started!

[We could not establish what the last paragraph refers to, it seems to be out of context and there is a possibility the author added it later, for reasons unknown.

The ink for this portion of the writing is slightly darker than that of the rest of the manuscript, but that may be a consequence of the increased pressure on the quill.]

I would like to present to you the few rules I could glean about the unseen world. These rules have served me well in my life, unfortunately everybody's unseen pieces of the puzzle are personal and unique, and my examples are just that, examples, use them as guides for the kinds of things to look for, nothing more. Don't take them at face value.

All things come from the invisible side of life. All things. Some people interpret this to mean that all things come from nothing. This couldn't be farther from the truth. All things come from the unseen and when they disappear they go back to the unseen, so, you see, my child, nothing is ever lost and nobody ever dies. It's all been there in the unseen forever, its contents just touch down every now and then to meddle in our world. Whenever life gets stuck in an impossible circumstance or flips on you in ways that reason can not explain, take that as a sign that there is an invisible piece that must fit in that space. Is this good or bad? Neither better nor worse than the visible pieces of the puzzle you need to fit together. You use them because they are the only pieces that fit in that space. They are not about good or bad; they are about putting the puzzle together. The fact that you can't see the invisible pieces just adds a layer of discomfort to the mix, that's all.

You can't win at any game if you don't know what winning the game means. In this case, winning the game means solving the puzzle. It doesn't mean stockpiling as many visible pieces of a particular kind you can get your hands on, or making sure that a specific color or pattern dominates, or trying to reshape pieces of the puzzle that belong to other corners to make them fit into your vacant space in the present moment. Your knowledge sets your mindset, you are the master of your game. That means that sometimes you learn to accept that some pieces just don't fit.

Unlike in an ordinary puzzle, here time matters. Some pieces that do not fit now will slide into place with incredible ease later. If life gives you a puzzle piece, it's part of the puzzle. Don't discard it because its timing is wrong.

Accept what you don't know. If you are not a master builder, you won't understand that some information is missing from the plans because it's implied. For instance, every opening has a header, there is a bond beam at the top of the wall, flooring has thickness. You will not find this information in your plans. Don't blame the plans. Don't blame yourself either. For some things you can get help, some you can learn on your own, and some you will never figure out, because you haven't reached that level of mastery. Those things will be passed down to future yous.

Speaking of the future, I have to introduce a truth that is very difficult to comprehend, because there are no examples that come to mind that would demonstrate it, so you must take it on faith: puzzle pieces must work in all directions of time. I have no way to explain it better, so I'll just leave it at that.

Are you writing things down? I hope you don't expect to just remember all of this, these are difficult concepts, oh, good, you took notes.

[The authorship versus the penmanship of the document was up for debate for a long time, but in the end most of the experts agreed that the handwriting in the manuscript is not the master's, but that of one of his pupils, who served as a scribe.

The paragraph above confirms that theory, despite the arguments of the opposing camp, who maintains that his comment about note taking doesn't necessarily refer to this work.

There is a confusing level of interaction that permeates the writings, which some experts speculate was simply the result of the scribe's inability to differentiate between dictation and commentary.]

Some pieces belong only to one level, others have continuity through many levels or even all. The master builder will know which ones those are, but on the plans they all look the same. This is the first thing you have to learn. You can't advance your construction at all if you can't get its structure right.

Don't confuse the scaffolding with the structure itself. The scaffolding will have to come down eventually, it's not supposed to stay there forever.

Some pieces are there just for information, others are actual pieces of the puzzle.

After you garner a certain level of sophistication, it won't be difficult for you to tell them apart.

If people insist on retrieving puzzle pieces for you without your asking, avoid them like the plague.

There is a very simple reason for that: your puzzle pieces have meanings that are deeply personal and hold information for you alone and to which other people don't have access. Picture a blindfolded person trying to help you cross the street.

You can guess the outlines of your pattern as soon as a critical set of pieces comes together. You spend the rest of the game in the enjoyment of filling in the blanks with detail. Don't quit because you solved your puzzle, finish your puzzle.

There must be a law of reality that as soon as you are certain beyond a doubt that a specific piece is the correct one, you'll be proven wrong. This game seems to favor those who are no longer sure of anything.

Eventually, if you become a master builder, you will see your building completed, and it will be glorious, and larger than life, and no longer yours. You will feel slighted by that, but you can't deny your spiritual child, the work of your hands, the right to stand on its own. You brought it into the world, now it is not your responsibility anymore. The puzzle of your life works the same way. Don't linger around the already completed corners. They are done.

Are you tired? We covered a lot of ground here, maybe we should take a break.

[The ink intensity and the slant of the quill seem to indicate that some time had elapsed between the writing of this paragraph and that of the next, but it is hard to estimate whether that meant minutes, hours or days.

We believe these semi-formal lectures spanned years during which there were frequent interruptions, and the reasons for the time lapses remain unknown.

Some experts even speculated that the manuscript was copied to reorganize concepts originally presented out of sequence, so that the reader wouldn't get trapped in the logical disconnect of continuity errors.]

So, you've been asking me why on earth are we bothering to figure out these rules? There is a short answer and a long answer to this. The short answer is that your life depends on it. Literally.

The long answer is that learning to recognize these principles takes decades, even lifetimes, during which you struggle with trial and error, throwing darts at the board blindly and wondering why your life doesn't work out.

Life doesn't work out when you don't understand its underlying structure, and by the time you gain enough knowledge about it you're only left with enough time to look back at all the things you should have done better, but for which it's now too late.

For instance, I spent thirty years trying to figure out what winning the game meant, just because I was too busy playing it and too emotionally invested in its minutia to distance myself from it so I could see its details.

Sometimes you can't see all the details ahead of time anyway, but it's still worth a try.

You can't understand your life until you learn to see it with someone else's eyes, someone who doesn't care about it all that much.

Another thing you asked me is if this is so important, how come you haven't heard it before. The answer is I'm sure you have, but you didn't understand it. If you think back, you'll find all the instances when wisdom was presented to you. We can't see or hear the things we cannot understand, it is as simple as that. What does it take to understand them? I don't know. People give this threshold in our life all sorts of fancy names, like awakening, or becoming enlightened, but it's not like that at all, it's not like school, where you learn arithmetic over the course of a whole year and at the end of it you can add and multiply. You go to bed blind one night and wake up with the sun shining in your eyes the next morning, and it is often a very unpleasant experience.

Why did I pick the puzzle as a metaphor? As opposed to what? What would you have picked? No, I'm serious, think about that. Well, I guess creating a musical composition would work too. I picked puzzle pieces because they all look more or less the same in a pile; they don't come with labels and they make no sense individually, but only as a part of the larger design. You can create whatever metaphor you like for yourself. You can create your own rules. In fact, you sort of have to, otherwise your game will be chaotic and outside of your control.

Are there any books written about this? The answer might surprise you: all the books that were ever written were written about this. Also all the music, all the arts, all of philosophy, a significant portion of religion and most of the science. You can just go to the library, pick a book off the shelf at random and it will be about this. You may try it sometimes, it's a good exercise. We are in a library after all.

[We set up an experiment based on the suggestion above, which yielded abnormally high levels of correlation between randomly selected reading material and the subject of the well-examined life.

The team couldn't determine a causal relationship, but had to concede to an unusually high clustering of coincidences.

We discontinued the experiment after the third year, for lack of practical applications.

There was also a concern about the experiment affecting crew morale, since some team members claimed to have developed mild forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder as a result, allegations we subsequently disproved.

All the pages of the manuscript have been authenticated and their historical period was confirmed.

We are not trying to find explanations for the use of modern verbal structures and recent vocabulary words inside it, nor do we wish to speculate on the master's hint at time variability, for which we have no evidence.

Portions of the manuscript have been acid tested some time during the last century, and as a result the writing had turned blurry in places, though still readable.

We have not reached any conclusions whether the master also considered more conventional organizing systems for structuring his ontology, based on geometrical patterns, logical trees or grammar.

The fact that he chose to model reality after a game was considered controversial by many thinkers during the early decades, but the game model has gained broader acceptance in recent years.

There are still some who question the use a parlor game as a metaphor for life, arguing it debases its value, engenders a false set of expectations and flouts personal responsibility.

We have not determined which one of his pupils he was addressing in this document, or even if he was talking to a person or multiple people.

Considering the questions recorded in the manuscript we assumed that the discussion involved a larger group, rather than just the master and the scribe.

Out of respect for the teacher's work we have translated it in its entirety and we are presenting it unredacted. We offer no opinion on it, nor should anybody consider it implied.]

###  LAYER

A sheet, quantity or thickness of material, typically one of several, covering a surface or a body

Life is the sum of an almost infinite number of layers that sort out your thoughts, feelings and activities.

This creates a lot of confusion as life's level of complexity increases.

You can usually focus on one or two layers at a time, the ones that come to prominence because of current events, temporary priorities or invisible puzzle pieces coming into play, but never forget that all the layers of your life are always there, and just like in a set of plans, making changes on one layer has consequences in all the others.

I know, I know, after a while this living layer set gets so complicated you'll want to throw it away and start over with a blank sheet.

Rejoice! This means you're finally doing something worthwhile.

All the things that matter, all the things that are consequential in the long run are always complicated.

The really consequential ones are usually too complicated to tackle alone.

How do you handle an existence where working out one detail in one category can undo a lifetime of hard work in every other aspect of your life?

Think of it as juggling plates: you add complexity one plate at the time and stop adding more until you've mastered the lot you already have spinning in the air. Also, there is a maximum number of plates you can keep spinning in the air, even at the peak of your mastery. We all have limitations, only God has infinite capacity.

Let's take the example of a timepiece. The simple ones have only one task: to tell the time of day. For that they need two arms, the hour and the minutes, right? No, don't look at your watch, I know it tells time. So, the simplest ones have two hands. After that we can add complications: a hand for seconds, a dial for days, a fixture for the phases of the moon, a barometer, the current time in other places, you name it. You can add complications to this watch until it becomes too sophisticated to be of use, but none of those complications are worth anything if they interfere with the most basic function of your timepiece, which is to tell time.

There is a fine line between having a complex level of understanding and being insane.

It doesn't matter how extraordinary your capacity is in any aspect of your life if you are for any reason unable to use it because of deficiencies in your most basic function. Look at life with a dispassionate eye and you'll see that all the problems people can't overcome are usually at the most basic level: health, wherewithal, relationships, freedom. You are then the dancer who can't hear, the painter whose hands are tied behind his back, the singer who can't stop crying. Are you following me? Just because, for instance, having a voice is something everybody takes for granted, it doesn't mean you don't have to protect yours, especially if your gift requires a voice to be expressed. The things you take for granted are always your undoing.

You will think this example obvious, but in reality, in the thick interacting layer stack, it isn't so at all, and things that didn't seem to matter under regular circumstances suddenly become a major handicap when the level of complexity rises.

It can be anything: your agreeableness, your level of energy, your lineage, how quick you are.

Some people, when they reach this point, are eager to transform themselves, they wipe out any traits they deem questionable so they can fit into their role, and with that they destroy the very essence which brought them to prominence, because, remember what I said? All the layers act upon each other, all the time.

It is a very precise balance, and one that is even harder to maintain when challenges arise, as they will, if you've proved yourself worthy, and once they arise, they keep coming, and they get more difficult and more refined every time you overcome them.

You should take that as a compliment, as a gauge of your level of accomplishment, although I assure you that nobody does.

Let's take a break, I'm tired. We'll continue after lunch.

[The time between this writing and the one that followed seems to be a lot longer than an hour and the rest of the lecture must have taken place in a different location.

Everything changed - the ink, the quill, the rhythm of the writing, the tone of the conversation. We assume current events, public or personal, prevented the master from continuing this lecture and he had to pick up where he left off weeks or months later.]

So, layers. They interact across time too, an aspect you will find difficult to anticipate if you think of your life as water flowing inside its banks instead of a river that has a source, a course, and a mouth. What spilled into the water when it was just a little trickle will still be in the water when the river is a mile wide. These early spills, which we usually dismiss but still commit to memory out of habit, become the basis of our vocabulary of personal symbols. They are the foundation of your layer structure. There is no making up for the lack of these early instances, everything is meaningful and valuable within its own time frame.

I'll let you in on a little secret. Those like me, we can add our little spills inside your tiny stream after the fact, but you will always experience them as artifacts of the past, bound by the tyranny of time. Your duty is to pay attention to the markers on your path, not to worry where or who they came from, or when.

Now, why do I bother going on and on rambling about layers?

Because they often present contradictory information that needs to be reconciled.

The opposing facts are perfectly valid at the level of their specific layer, but make absolutely no sense together or in a larger context.

This happens so frequently that you have to learn how to resolve the conflicts, quickly and without breaking anything else, before you can further advance in your knowledge.

These conflicts usually force you to choose between two moral imperatives you never questioned, not until something played them in opposition to each other.

If you don't understand that these imperatives are just as valid as they always were, like notes in a simple musical line, but that they run discordant because several lines are played in harmony, you will start questioning your moral compass or your sanity and you will be so conflicted all the time it will be impossible for you to function, even at the most basic level.

Remember? What good is a complicated time piece that can't tell time?

What happens when you can't reconcile the moral imperatives? I'm so glad you asked, that means you are paying attention. They remain unresolved and they pile up somewhere in a corner, in some gray zone to be tackled later, when supposedly one has a better grasp on the issues. The truth is most of the time these issues never get resolved and they start weighing you down like barnacles after a while. I don't have a solution for this, but if you believe in a higher power, I strongly suggest you turn them over to it, at least they won't clutter up your mind anymore.

[We do not know whether the master had any religious convictions, which this paragraph seems to imply, or if he is using the metaphysical construct as a psychological agent meant to eliminate cognitive conflicts.

This is yet another one of his controversial approaches to life, one of the many included in the manuscripts: his expedient use of belief and his manipulation of the concepts of right and wrong to manufacture emotional balance was deplored by religious scholars, for whom the concepts of right and wrong are universal and absolute, not subject to personal interpretation.

On the opposing side, the promoters of personal freedom as a moral imperative applaud his audacity to abide by personal moral relativism, which was probably not what he meant to convey in the paragraph above.]

What about what other people think?

Let's keep that on the back burner for now, you'll have enough trouble putting your own thought process in order. I wouldn't dump more moral dilemmas on top of the pile before you're strong enough and fast enough to tackle your own internal conflicts in real time.

Questions about layers?

Why did I separate what is essentially the normal course of life into individual slices?

Because the elements of a layer exhibit similar characteristics, and seeing them as a category, rather than individual instances, helps you find solutions faster for challenges you haven't encountered before.

Speed of reaction is crucial during a crisis, just as important as making the best choice.

Examples of how this works. Very well!

This lecture fits on the layer of mental constructions and by thus labeling it we already know that:

1. It is a safe space to speculate on concepts that are not widely accepted.

2. It is not a finished set, but always a work in progress; you can always add or remove ideas from it as you grow.

3. We can reduce it to the absurd.

4. It can incorporate paradoxes if commonly agreed upon as acceptable.

5. It does not have to do or be anything.

Should this lecture belong to the layer of moral evaluations, then we would know that:

1. Right and wrong are not personal definitions.

2. Debating other people's convictions is acceptable.

3. Only superior beings are allowed to move time.

4. Being agreeable is a virtue.

You can stop laughing now, come on, really. Fine, go ahead. Get it out of your system.

[The conversational tone of the manuscripts still baffles the historians, because it often reads like the transcript of an interview, which, obviously, can't be the case considering the age of the writings.

We are still evaluating the possibility that the documents were forged, even though several teams of experts tested the writings and certified them as authentic.]

I almost forgot the most important thing about layers: they are just a sorting tool to help you group like items. There is no moral judgment associated with an object's fitting onto a layer as opposed to another. Don't look at circumstances and events through the lens of your emotional responses to them. The first task in evaluating something new is to figure out what it is. That's what this sorting tool is for.

[If we had any doubts it is now becoming evident that the lecture notes have been taken down by a scribe, most likely the pupil the master is talking to, because there are doodles and drawings on the paper margins and the loose slant of the writing indicates a high level of distraction.

The ink smudges in places, making the writing difficult to decipher and the bottom right corner is embossed twice with the same rose seal that was used for the wax on the cover letter.

We do not believe those indentations were meant as a proof of authorship, their placement is haphazard and inexplicable, almost like a small child was playing with the seal.]

Where on earth did you find that! Give me it! This is not a toy, and you don't apply it randomly to whatever falls into your hands. What were you thinking?

[Judging by the behavior implied in the previous paragraph we evaluated that the pupil in question was barely eight years old at the time.

The intellectual level reflected in the rhythm and content of the writing doesn't seem to match the emotional level made evident by the commentary of the master.

The person who penned this manuscript was either a precocious child or a very immature adult.

We favor the first possibility because the tentative calligraphy denotes a level of hand-eye coordination consistent with the developmental stage of the age of eight.]

How many layers are there? As many as you find useful. You can think of them as scaffolding, they come on and off as needed to support your mental process.

If a layer is no longer needed, in time it fades back into your latent memory, but it doesn't go away, and that is a good thing. You don't want potentially useful references to get lost with it. It does not take up any active space in the present. This is why you can remember how to say frog in French, even though you haven't used that language in sixty years, or how to solve a geometry problem even if you were always terrible at math, just because you remember word for word the way the teacher did it. Don't underestimate the usefulness of memorization. Not everything can be deduced or rediscovered every single time you need it. We would get nothing done.

Algorithms, chemical formulas and, yes, layers, are shortcuts for your mind.

Wouldn't that clutter your thought with things that have no immediate usefulness? When your mind is cluttered with a lot more information than you need to perform your immediate tasks we call that being an educated person. Do waste mental space on knowledge!

No, layers are not the only way you can structure your understanding of life, there are other strategies, like using cycles or folds. We will talk about cycles tomorrow, and it will be another long lecture. Can you please make sure there is enough ink before we start? The well is almost dry.

###  CYCLES

Series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order.

Existence runs in cycles. Some of them, like the seasons, the water cycle or the tides, are obvious, others, like the mechanisms of life, or the rise and fall of empires are not.

Every quiet and settled system displays a natural tendency to suddenly and inexplicably generate unrest after a while.

This happens because existence is motion, stillness means death to our universe.

Anyway, about the cycles.

If you watch a phenomenon long enough, you notice that it starts displaying repetitive patterns, a fact that shows in all the workings of life.

Some of these repeating patterns take too long to yield useful information, but if your life span allows you to observe a phenomenon enough times, you can perfect your response to it and better your odds of success in tackling its challenges.

Training a skill, weather prognostication, sailing by the stars, these are all examples of using recognizable repetitions as instruments that allow you to engage in conscious interaction with events instead of randomly reacting to them.

Your ability to read cycles is a tool, just like the quill you write with is a tool.

People make use of cycles all the time, although they aren't always aware of it: the farmer who reads the subtle variations in the weather to determine the optimal time to plant or harvest, the seasoned sailor who can tell the moods of the sea, unseen to others, by scent or by the quality of the light, the mother who can tell a child is not well because of slight changes in their behavior.

People attribute this subtle knowledge to instinct, but what else is instinct if not the recognition and assimilation of the underlying patterns of life?

Many of the things you haven't encountered before did in fact happen, at some point, to somebody else, and their experiences reverberate echoes in the substance of reality in ways you can recognize.

If you have an emotion, you'll find it expressed in someone else's poetry or music. If you have a thought, you will find it reflected in conversations, in mundane daily events, in places you wouldn't dream of. Watch for those echoes, they will help you clarify what the thought, the emotion, was about. And know that you are somebody else's echo too.

So, what can you do with cycles?

Some people use them to time their action to the beginning, rather than the end of a process, and in doing so they reap its full benefits, others are keen observers of human nature, which is also filled with repetitive patterns, and wield this knowledge in any way they wish, from studying the human heart to using its predictable nature to their advantage.

Seeing that things repeat is the beginning of wisdom.

The substance of being is very simple and everything that is is cut from the same fabric, so to speak.

The complexity you see all around you is born of endless repetitions of processes that run eons, and which are occasionally subject to random shifts.

There is little difference between you and this rock, and that difference is born of variations on a theme.

But what about the soul, you ask? Let's stick to the physical world for now.

[Here the historians are unsure what the master meant to say.

Does he ascribe to the evolutionary theory, developed centuries after his passing, and which surely would have been considered heretical at the time of these writings?

The researchers dare to go a step further and infer that these concepts derived from an esoteric school of thought, which was his contemporary.

We believe that some of these manuscripts contain veiled references to concepts whose spreading would have been very dangerous at the time.]

Let's pick a cycle and analyze how we can use it. We associate every verb with a repeatable action. Pick a verb.

To express. Fine.

The night is bright and full of stars, and I have a yearning I can't describe, half thought, half emotion, both quivering and raw.

I'm afraid but I'm also elated by this vision so many people saw before me, and wonder how come nobody thought to give this feeling a name, or maybe they did, and maybe I don't know it, but I have no way of finding out, and I don't want my feeling without a name to die unsung, so I'll name it myself, for myself, and thus give it meaning.

I then jump on that name, which we'll call awe, with gratitude, relieved to no longer be dumbfounded by the feeling, and now that the circle is complete, that name will become a temporary stand in for the next unnamed yearning, just like quivering, raw, afraid and elated were for it.

This is the first iteration of a cycle.

Let's say it happens again, with the word tenebrous, and then again, well, it doesn't matter.

After the first few iterations I immediately jump to the temporary stand in words, try to find what they have in common and how they are different, and why those words came to mind when describing the quality, as opposed to others.

I no longer hesitate, or doubt my endeavor, because I already saw the usefulness of having a term to express a certain something as opposed to gasping in frustration and trying to mold the air in front of my body with my hands (which is also a valid form of expression, by the way).

I enjoy the process and start looking for elusive feelings to express, just to perfect my word craft.

I guess that's how Adam must have felt. Name everything. What an epic endeavor!

Anyway, this is how you use a cycle to improve your interaction with the world.

The pathological version of a cycle is a loop. A loop wastes your time and you have nothing to show for it when it ends, because you are exactly at the same point you were when you started. You might say that you still learned valuable lessons during a loop, but that's not the case. If you learned your lesson from that loop you would no longer be in it, such is the nature of things. This is especially true if you've been in that loop more than once.

Learn to recognize loops and get out of them as soon as possible, they waste your life essence. Cycles refine, loops stall.

Everything looks simple and obvious when you look at it like this, but in real live it hardly ever is. You can't recognize the patterns, they are too muddled by the noise of everything that surrounds them and you can only get hints they exist, in the form of signs that stand out to your attention, things that seem like they don't fit, and feelings of deja vu for new places and situations. It takes you a while to recognize them as loops you've been through multiple times already.

We will take a break here and when we return, we'll examine another cycle.

[At this place the manuscript contains a drawing - a quartered circle, placed next to a quartered Bourbon rose.

Some proposed that the drawing is by the hand of the master himself, and its sophistication justifies this supposition, however we haven't been able to authenticate it as such.

We don't know what the drawing was meant to convey, if he used the rose as a personal symbol or to represent a real live element side by side with its diagram, to show the underlying nature of things.

Either way, the drawing is exquisite. The circle is drawn by hand, but it is perfect. There is no way to tell where the line starts, it looks as if somebody placed it on the page as is, in its entirety. No beginning, no end.

Some suggest that the circle represents a loop, and the rose represents a cycle, but that doesn't make any sense, because depicting the fatal flaw described in the paragraph above with perfect geometry seems to contradict the whole point of the teaching.

His use of the rose to demonstrate how a diagram works looks like a more plausible explanation.

Bourbon roses would have been fairly available during the artist's time, which makes them a convenient teaching tool.

The sketch was drawn in purple ink; careful examination established it to be the same as that of the writing. The rose appears light blue. The highlights and the shadows are dramatic, making the sketch look as if it's trying to emerge from the page. After looking at it for a while a strange optical illusion occurs, one which we all experienced: the circle starts to float above the page too, with the quarters tiered, like they belong to different planes.

This unusual piece of art was photographed many times, unfortunately the three dimensional effect gets lost in photography, which renders both the rose and the circle flat.]

Back to cycles. What did I just draw?

[We have to pause here to comment that there is no proof he is referring to the etchings of the circle and the rose.]

That is correct, it is a building plan. Notice that it is a perfectly symmetrical Greek cross with equal arms inscribed in a circle.

A few decades ago this would have been the embodiment of architectural perfection.

To the taste of our time it feels simplistic and barren, indicative of the fact that we are looking at a diagram of a plan, rather than the plan itself. It seems too lacking in detail in our present context.

Maybe you already noticed that the people of our day and age have developed a taste for flourish and things have started to overflow with detail in every field - architecture, literature, art.

Soon these details will warp the fundamental principles of their original design to the point where it will be rendered unrecognizable.

A new generation of builders will come after that, who will decry this fall from grace and who will reinvent geometrical perfection in a new form.

They will rediscover the purity of simple lines, but they will look down on the dusty work of their ancestors, the ones who would have loved the simple building plan above, the Greek cross, and who would have deemed it complete.

These newcomers will not recognize that they are in fact reproducing the mental patterns of their forbearers: their quest for simplicity and order, their desire for a unifying model, their abhorrence of everything that doesn't fit inside the lines.

Same sensibility, different forms to express it.

This is a very simple cycle too, it only has two states: order and profusion.

[The last phrase sheds light on the manuscript drawings, although the choice of the rose to illustrate this example seems random.]

Do you have questions? How does the understanding of cycles help you with your life?

Cycles are powerful devices whose strength comes from many sources acting in concert. This makes them difficult to defeat. They can also be the wind in your sails when you are riding with them. If you can recognize a cycle, knowing where you are inside it can offer you useful guidance about what to do next.

How do cycles start? Evidently they all must have started at some point, but with the well-established ones, if you try to go back and recognize them in all their different guises, you can keep falling backwards until you reach the time before the world began. The truth is, I don't know. Cycles are meta devices for life. They can help or hinder your process, but they are not your process.

What to do if you get stuck in a loop?

What do you do when you misplace an object of great value, a ring, let's say? First you look in all the obvious places, then you try to backtrack your steps, and then, if those efforts have failed, you turn the house upside down, one chest and one drawer at a time, as many times as it takes for you to find it. Not the most enjoyable activity, grant you. After you've eliminated all the causes that seem obvious to you, you look at everything, especially the things you rarely question. This makes a mess of your life for sure, but what else are you going to do, walk in place until you die?

What if you can't find the ring, even after this epic effort?

You have my sympathies.

What sources come together to feed cycles?

People, ideas, the mores of the time, unusual natural occurrences, accumulated knowledge, triggering events, things that push from behind, scarcity and overabundance. Many things.

Before we end this subject, I would like to speak briefly about the ceremonial function of cycles.

Engaging in a cycle for its own sake is the essence of ritual.

The willingness to lend yourself to it, to give of your spirit to power ceremony is present in every religion and spiritual tradition.

Participating in ritual keeps a mental timing different from that of your daily life and which pays homage to the sacredness of the soul.

In ritual you communicate to the world you are willing to speak its language, see its behaviors, adjust to its speed, learn what it has to teach you.

[Some scholars suggested that the master's emphasis on the utility of cycles evolved from a more specific interest in ceremony and ritual, but nothing in this manuscript justifies that supposition.

We have not corroborated such an interest from any of the sources contemporary with his writings.

The rose is a motif that comes back again and again in the manuscript, but it is not clear whether it represents something or if it is drawn for its own sake. For all we know, the master simply loved the flower and enjoyed sketching it when he got bored.

This may not be as satisfying as the assumption that the rose holds a secret meaning, but often the simplest answer is the truth.]

###  FOLDING

Bending (something flexible and relatively flat) over on itself so that one part of it covers anotherii

Today we will talk about folds. The purpose of folding is to minimize the surface of a thin flat object for better storage or transportation. Just like a tablecloth, all things that get folded will display distinguishable characteristics: grooves, lack of wear, wrinkles.

We fold memories in our minds for many reasons, to free up space, to obscure things we don't need all the time, to conceal unpleasant memories. We wrap this knowledge with great care, mark it with the contents, minimize its conscious footprint to just that marker so we can retrieve it at will, and submerge the rest of the packet into long-term storage, deep beneath our thoughts. There is an entire world of these mental artifacts under there, all labeled, a strange collection of treasure and garbage.

Every now and then we accidentally stumble upon one of these labels and the respective fold suddenly unfurls, spilling its guts into its surroundings and disrupting current activities.

Memory folds are neither good nor bad, you fold foreign languages you learned but no longer use in the same way you do painful memories. The funny thing about folded information is that it stays in mint shape, no matter how much time passes. That's why old people can recite pages of poetry they learned when they were twelve, and why you can still remember the name of a passing acquaintance from a long time ago. Ironically, if you want something preserved forever, you label it and you forget it.

This activity defeats its own purpose; you want to be able to retrieve the contents on demand, so you have to make your label easily recognizable, but keeping it a place of prominence in your conscious state would trigger it to spill its contents all the time. What can you do about that?

You label it with something other than a conscious thought.

I know that sounds like an impossible thing to do, but bear with me. Imagine your mind as a canvas filled with text you can read, and other graphics, illuminations, illegible scribbles. Your mind doesn't pay attention to any of those while it is reading what it can read. It will glance over the strange drawing or script, ignore it and keep going, it is just part of its context, like birds in the trees when you walk, or smoke coming out of the chimney of a house on the horizon. If properly placed, these signs will jump at you almost on their own, and connect with the text around them in ways that make sense, that remind you what the sign meant and what is underneath.

[The manuscript shows moisture damage here. The water stain did not infiltrate the writing, which tells us that the wet medium fully dried before the text was written.

The stain darkened significantly during the long reaction time between the water and the paper. This process seems to continue in the present and is, sadly, irreversible.

We were fortunate to retrieve the text in the manuscript's darkened portions before it became illegible, but as of this time some parts of it are already too dark to read.

The research team debated what would be the best approach - to allow the manuscript to continue this natural process of discoloration, which will be in keeping with its authenticity, or to attempt a chemical treatment that preserves the visibility of the text.

Unfortunately, none of the titration tests pointed to any effective methods of preservation, and although the team never stopped trying to find a working solution, by the time they find it it will probably be too late.

We also tried enhancing the contrast of the text, but the acids damaged the paper, so we had to stop.

We documented the manuscript extensively, so we can reference all of its details if we can not salvage the original text.]

This technique can reach extraordinary levels of precision and sophistication.

You can mark your imaginary boxes to open by date, by feeling, by reaching a certain level of knowledge, by association with a specific event, by seeing a certain person, with an accuracy that still gives me the shivers.

The strangeness of all of this is that you are not even aware you are unpacking a fold, it just jumps at you, like your normal working memory, and you can only tell it is not by the telltale signs of folds - grooves, lack of wear and the occasional wrinkle.

Grooves are deep-seated feelings you can't explain, and that show up again and again, despite your better judgment. Strange familiarity with places and people, knowing what door to pick in a stranger's house, that sort of thing.

Grooves are sometimes so deep they make you question your sanity, because there is no reason a rational person would espouse that specific belief.

Before we go deeper into this, remember what the goal of these teaching is: to help you understand the mechanisms that govern your mind, so you can use them to your advantage.

If you do not understand that folds and all their components are nothing more than moving parts in the mechanisms of your thought, you will confuse them with providential guidance or with some higher calling.

Folds are morally neutral mental entities, storage containers, nothing more.

Lack of wear is the most obvious sign that points out to an unpacked fold. Whenever you have feelings like "why am I thinking this" or "why is this so important to me", you are looking at an unpacked fold. With any luck, you would have thought to pack the instructions too.

The wrinkles are not always there, they only happen when you have to cram too much information in too small a space. When you do, it makes the whole concept you unraveled feel fuzzy, logically inconsistent, even if it kind of makes sense as a whole. It has details and corners you can't see, while you are staring straight at them, and it generates a sense of awkwardness and reluctance to examine it further.

[We pause to mention that the page is loaded with symbols. Some are recognizable images, some are weird scripts, placed in odd places in the middle of the text.

We understand that this blended map exemplifies the technique described above, but since the references were meant for a specific person, the pupil with whom the master is sharing his knowledge, it would be impracticable for any of us to use it in her absence.]

I will say this again. Folds are morally neutral. Don't assign them value because they seem to jump at you out of thin air.

Since we pack most of the folds unconsciously and label them randomly (imagine labeling moving boxes with numbers instead of "pots", "books", "quills") they are often more of a hindrance than a tool, and they clutter the space beneath your thoughts with useless and potentially harmful artifacts.

It is good practice to air out the boxes occasionally, to remember what's inside. There is a high likelihood that you folded them unconsciously, and many of them are not worth keeping.

How do you get rid of them? It usually happens all by itself when you question why you need to remember a certain thing.

We will go through a very rudimentary technique for memory folding.

Let's say you want to keep track of your current priorities and revisit them ten years from now.

Ponder them carefully and as you are thinking about them, also think about something that will call your attention to them, but that you are not likely to encounter until the ten years have passed.

You can bury your reference in lots of different ways, none of which involve placing an object that symbolizes your thought process in a sealed box that reads "open in ten years". You can make your reference, for instance, the first fruit of a tree that needs ten years to mature, or a major eclipse with a precise date. These things are easy to put out of your mind, but you will not miss them when they occur.

I like to call these references life markers. If you pay attention, you will see a lot of them in your life, and they will trigger an immediate sense of recognition.

Not all of them are of your own making, those who are like me, we sometimes like to meddle, if we see fit, but we won't go into that now.

[What follows is a series of etchings describing the phases of the moon, rendered in watercolor and ink. The moon is full and embellished with a garland of roses. The rose petals are light blue, while the moon is golden yellow; this removes any doubt that the blue color was intentional. The drawing doesn't seem to have any association with the text.]

What things can you do with folds? That's where the sophisticated process begins. You can fold an entire language and only have it come out when you are exposed to its words. You can remember the normal rhythms of your heart every time it goes aflutter. You can store happiness in a hand gesture.

[The manuscript cuts off abruptly and continues on a different page which was placed out of sequence to improve the clarity of the document.

According to handwriting analysis, many years passed between its two parts, with the second half of the script looking a lot more fluid and even, which betrays a more experienced hand.]

Upon learning the techniques described in these lessons, students display a tendency to use them extensively and in combination, just to prove what they can do.

This is ill advised and will probably achieve the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish.

When you are a master cook, for instance, you know how to choose the ingredients and the tools appropriate for the recipe. Part of the mastery of the mind is knowing which tools to use for what purpose, and in what quantity. Never use more than two, three techniques at a time, even after you have reached the top of your skill, which will take many years. You cannot keep simultaneous control over all of them and they will backfire.

How do you know if a technique was successful? Whatever you were trying to accomplish worked. That's all.

What are the best techniques for folding emotions?

Emotions are a little more elusive than thoughts, but a lot more powerful.

It is rare that one can find a container strong enough to contain an emotion in its entirety, and it can be a dangerous endeavor to attempt such a thing.

When dealing with emotions, you are better off holding them at the level of conscious thought. Besides, whatever emotion you want to keep out of sight is probably not a good one, and it is not healthy to have it lurking in the dark.

What is the difference between an emotion and a mental state?

Emotions are time specific, they fluctuate and relate to a person or event.

Mental states are permanent, stable and independent of circumstances.

You are asking whether the latter can make good candidates for folding? Sure, if you can find utility in doing so.

Can you have embedded folds?

I hesitate to answer this question. Yes, you can.

[The research team experienced a strange optical illusion during the reading of this portion of the manuscript.

The words on the page seem to vibrate, which makes them barely readable, and a bizarre picture emerges suddenly from underneath the text, showing what looks like a complex spiral tessellation, constantly in motion.

What is even more unusual is that every person describes this phenomenon using the same words, which are "That's elaborate!"

The pattern, if there is such a thing, since all spectroscopic analysis of the manuscript determined there is only one thing inscribed on the paper, the writing itself, consists of flowers of variable scale drawn in a single line which changes hues so that no two adjacent flowers are the same color.

Independent testimonies from all the members of the team turned up the same description of the image, and however unexplainable this occurrence may be, we felt it was our duty to document it.

The flower pattern displays only temporarily, we individually timed it and found that the optical illusion persists for about be fourteen minutes.]

You are asking me to elaborate on this laconic response.

The problem with embedded folding is that you have to place a label inside a map which, if you've done your work properly, should look unfamiliar to you.

This makes it a lot harder to find a signifier inside a more or less amorphous set. Assuming that you do, and you unfold the second half of your compressed treasure, now you have two overlapping maps you haven't seen before. I do not see the usefulness of such an endeavor.

I assume a highly skilled person can do it, during extreme circumstances that would warrant it.

[Based on the questions and comments we concluded the manuscript documents only a portion of a much more in-depth series of oral teachings.

We would have liked to learn more about the way the master trained his students in the use of these techniques, in which the latter seem to have become proficient, judging by their questions. It would have been useful to learn the limitations of this process, which seems to increase mental capacity by orders of magnitude. If the process worked, we can't help but wonder what happened to the students, and if there are any documented uses of their skills.

We can't exclude the possibility that the master was one of several teachers who formed a school, one whose other teachings were sadly lost.]
Lesson Two - In Motion

###  TIMING

The choice, judgment, or control of when something should be done

Don't mistake timing for scheduling, or planning.

It is difficult to explain what timing is, some things are easier to demonstrate than to describe.

You have already encountered timing, and you take it for granted, because it is woven into the fabric of reality and occurs naturally in all the processes that work well.

Its most obvious use is in music, which would not come together without tempos, measures, and counterpoints. Their planned pauses build anticipation and lead to the moment when one expects to hear the sound.

We accomplish a lot of this instinctively, of course, but the fact that everybody understands the purpose of those rhythms reveals that timing is built into our being, very much like our senses are.

Timing is the mental sense that helps us both create and pay attention to synchronicity, and it organizes the timeline of an event in the same way placement cards predetermine the seating of guests at a dinner table.

It takes into account affinities and antipathies, common interests and undesirable subjects like an experienced host knows how to place everybody at the table so that people enjoy the social interaction.

Imagine that you see your life from outside, in its entirety, without the blinders imposed by always being in the present.

From this vantage point it would be easy to see how rescheduling an event, or meeting a certain person, or following up on a passing interest in a subject, can put the pieces of your life together in a much better way.

Unfortunately, we are all slaves of time and these details, which are so obvious from this higher perspective, are impossible to detect in our day-to-day life.

It is impossible to predict, for instance, that choosing to travel one day sooner than planned would help you avoid an accident, or allow you to meet a person who would have a positive influence on your life.

Timing is a precision tool that has a huge range. It weighs frames that can run the length of a person's life with the same accuracy it can an ephemeral event, soon forgotten. Consider it a map of time itself, a very detailed map inside which you can zoom in and out as much as you want. The contents of the map are all there, but you only see the ones that show up at your zoom level.

[The concept of digital maps is now so ingrained in our current mindset we can't extricate ourselves from the comparison.

Evidently, the master must have been referring to something else, something which would have been familiar to his pupils, lenses or spectacles perhaps?]

Let's try an exercise. Look at all the events that happened yesterday, like you're reliving them.

Picture the day in its entirety inside your mind, as if it were an object, and look at all of its components for what worked in harmony and what didn't come together.

Single out all the circumstances that made either of the two situations happen and replace them with their opposites.

For instance, if you were late because a vicious dog attacked you, or if you had an enjoyable chance encounter with someone, take another street and revise your day based on that.

There are inherent limitations to this exercise, because we can't possibly know what would have happened if only, but one can always extrapolate from other situations when similar factors were present.

[The last paragraph is very hard to read. The pigment of the ink is so diluted that the script almost blends into the background.

Fortunately, the familiarity we now have with the patterns of the handwriting allowed us to fill in the gaps where the text had become unreadable.

We felt necessary to incorporate this comment to clarify that the transcription of some words was subject to personal interpretation and should be read accordingly.]

Now try to see all the events of the day and reorganize all its circumstances in such a way that will optimize the outcome.

Most of us can't even picture what that would look like, because of our limited knowledge of all the influences involved, but if you can conceive of this, even at the level of abstraction, that is what timing is.

Consider a swimmer who has to take regular breaths when their head comes above the water.

In his case even a fraction of a second makes the difference between running the distance with minimum effort or running out of air at precisely the wrong time, which breaks his rhythm and makes him tired.

As I mentioned, timing is built into the fabric of the universe, and its mishaps affect everybody and everything involved in or associated with the process it relates to, like a wrong step in a perfectly choreographed dance.

We can't apply it rationally, it is a talent, or an instinct, some people have it and some, not so much.

The next level of mastery requires two or more people to wield timing together, a feat which seems impossible to the untrained eye and which is difficult to accomplish.

Timing things together is an art form that requires all the members of the team to tune into each other's elusive mental rhythms, a task which bears some similarity to the way colliding waves blend into each other on the surface of a pond, or the way pendulums swing as one when placed next to each other.

We will stop here and continue with questions after lunch.

[The placement of this page inside the manuscript set is shifting constantly, creating a lot of inconvenience and worry about it being misplaced.

One or more of the members of the research team silently disagreed on what would be the right place for it in the sequence and insisted on reorganizing the structure based on their personal opinions.

To end the hassle generated by this constant foible, we agreed to put the issue to a vote which passed with a narrow margin.

Unfortunately, some scholars must be still dissenting, because we consistently find this writing out of place.

Some of our colleagues insist that this document belongs much farther in the sequence, where a more meaningful context would make the text easier to understand.

After a thorough review of the work we have to disagree with them; we believe the in between writing would be misinterpreted in its absence, thus altering the meaning of the entire work.]

An example of timing.

To search for information on a subject, you go to the library and find out that the room where you wanted to look for it is closed, so you plan to go back home, but you notice that it's raining; you go back inside to wait for the rain to stop, enter a room you were never interested in and find what you were looking for there, only moments before the library closes. On your way home you stumble on a cobblestone and have to stop in front of the store that sells items which will further assist in your quest.

So you say that these are independent occurrences, outside your control, and to that I respond that timing is an instinct, it expresses itself as an art form, and trying to deploy it rationally is not likely to turn up meaningful outcomes.

We can train it, as everybody who learned to dance with a partner knows. Could you describe in words the exact succession and tempo of the steps? No. You may be able to demonstrate it, and it requires an inborn sense for rhythm for other people to replicate your motions, and a certain level of talent in order for them to come up with their own steps.

What does timing accomplish?

At the fundamental level, timing allows you to be in harmony with the world around you. When you are sharing in the rhythms of your surroundings everything works for you with ease, and for everyone else involved. If you ever tried to jump into a wave at the wrong time, you understand how wasteful it is to expend energy against the natural movements of a mechanism of which you are a part.

Try to think of timing as a sense, like taste. You can't explain the taste of bread to somebody who has never had bread, not in any way that would be useful. You can offer them a piece of bread and tell them what it is, so they can recognize the taste the next time they encounter it.

What can go wrong?

You can pump your legs to make yourself go higher on a swing, but if you go up too high gravity starts to interfere and your swing, with you in it, behaves in unexpected and destructive ways.

Beware of trying to force timing, you want the crystal goblet of reality to resonate and amplify your voice, not shatter from its shrillness.

The problem with teaching concepts like this is they don't speak to the rational portion of your mind. How do you explain what style means, or vision? The understanding of terms like these has to rely on the mutual recognition inside of a group and this opens them to the danger of sounding cliquish and obscure.

[The page was found during cleaning after the library fire of 1857. We assume the rest of the manuscript was stored somewhere else at the time of the event.

The extreme heat induced some of the thin marble tiles of the flooring to crack, exposing a shallow crawl space underneath.

The page was hidden inside a small chest found in the crawl space, and which, we established, belongs to the same historical period.

The chest is made of marquetry panels, in an exquisite combination of dark walnut and ivory, separated by golden inlays. It was supposed to have a lock, but the locking mechanism is missing. We found the key inside.

We couldn't establish why this specific portion of the document was hidden, or whether the other contents of the box mean anything in relationship with it.

It is unusual for a formal manuscript like this to remain unbound. We surmise the master purposefully kept the pages loose.]

Often the unexpected and destructive behavior of timing manifests in what people like to call acts of God.

I object to that in principle, because this associates the concept of divinity with every wrong that goes unexplained in the world. I don't have to explain to you the bitter irony of such a belief.

Remember that all the happenings in the world, from the most unimportant to the ones that change history, are an inexorable series of events, compelled by the connections between them.

Every effect has a cause. Sometimes the cause is obscure, generated by a system too complex for analysis, but there is always a reason for things to happen.

Could one anticipate the events of the future?

I will give you a long-winded answer to this question. All events bear on a plethora of factors, which together contribute to the probability of their occurrence.

In theory, if you have the time, the capacity and knowledge you could trace the trajectory of future events with reasonable accuracy.

In real life this is not practical, but all events have a probability of happening, and the probability of some is higher than that of other.

When the probability of an event is very high (it is never absolute, there is no such thing as a certain occurrence), details and markers start pointing towards it.

The more of these markers converge, the more you have to assume that the event will actually happen.

Does that count as foretelling the future? I see it more like forecasting the weather. It only takes a slight shift in the wind direction for the clouds to alter course significantly.

It can be useful to foresee the future when you want to avoid damage and loss due to sudden events whose markers point to a high probability, but for whom nothing in the present suggests they could occur.

I decided that you and I should run an experiment together.

I asked my master carpenter to make us a box, unfortunately the locking mechanism was supposed to arrive from the neighboring city and it got 'lost' along the way, so we'll have to make do without it.

Think of this box as a haven for things you don't want lost or destroyed. Whatever you have that you would like to be sure will make it to the future, you may place inside it. I'll look for a good place to hide it later.

[As we already mentioned, the box contains several other artifacts, the most significant of which is a quill, hidden, together with this page, under a false bottom.

We identified it as one of the many used to write the text, its uneven wear matches the characteristic slant of the handwriting.

We could not connect the feather to any of the birds indigenous to the area. The plumes are unusually long and bright white, displaying no sign of aging or discoloration except for a heart-shaped purple ink stain on one side. We identified the stain as iron gull ink.

The quill and the manuscript page were wrapped in a heavy canvas cloth pre-soaked in milk of magnesia.

The rest of the objects seem of no special significance: a small wooden wedge, the kind that would keep a door propped open, a hand-dipped wax candle, half burned, and a shard of marble, matching the library flooring, which must have gotten inside the box after the fire, although it is not clear to us how that could have happened.

It is possible that the person who found the box opened it, hoping to find hidden treasure, and cast it aside in frustration, with the lid still open, upon discovering that it held nothing of value.]

###  CURRENT

A fluid motion in a definite direction, especially through a surrounding body of fluid in which there is less movement

We all see the world as a collection of solid objects independent of each other and relying on external impulses to set them in motion. I would like you to set aside that view for the duration of this lecture, and imagine existence as a self-activating fluid.

Underneath the surface of this endless sea that is reality, a sea with deep, perpetually troubled waters, there are currents and eddies and vortexes.

They manifest in every one of its components, there are currents in social mores, which we call zeitgeist, there are currents in thought, which we call schools, there are currents in spiritual life, which we call religions.

Under normal circumstances we accept these currents without thinking, just as we don't wonder why blood is running through our veins, but once they draw our attention, they become impossible to ignore, so much that they can be distracting.

Beware of getting so mesmerized by the wake of your ship that you are running it on ground!

What do currents do? They coalesce like elements in a way that makes them reinforce each other, in a way that makes them run faster than the surrounding elements, those that do not share their qualities.

Examples - musical styles, fashion trends, teaching precepts, beliefs about the world, standards of beauty, the constant reshuffling of the importance of specific abilities, society mores, the experience of time.

For instance, you may be too young to know this for yourself, but as you grow older, time feels different, you look back at decades as if they were a blink, your whole mind stretches out like taffy, to accommodate the bulk of experiences you piled up as you went through life.

Different ages are undercurrents in the river of time, running parallel but at different speeds and picking up the pace as they advance down the stream.

Everybody can relate to this phenomenon, it's an internally driven understanding, but what people rarely think about is that time itself is an artificial construct, based on our perception of change, and that the variability in speed they experience is actually real when examined in this context.

Currents are important for two reasons: they can speed up your progress if they jibe with your purpose and they can waste enormous amounts of your time and energy if you get caught in them against your will and can't escape them. They are to existence like rip currents are to the ocean; know where they are and do not succumb to the vanity you are strong enough to defy them.

The underlying motions of reality engender sweeping changes, swift bursts of progress and devastating wars, the architecture of reason and intractable chaos, and you can't wade your way through the world without acknowledging their presence.

Much like real currents, these subtle shifts inside existence have places where they slow down and places where they go through rapids, they have thicknesses and densities, straights and dams.

Beneath its surface, reality is very uneven, a truth that hits the scholarly world again and again, and when it does it always challenges reason and throws a spoke into the wheels of science just when people thought they had their concepts figured out, clear and beautiful, and perfectly aligned.

There are also places in existence we can't fathom, like the darkest trenches of the deep, because our human limitations don't allow us to survive their extreme conditions and their confines are so devoid of signal that our senses become useless when immersed in their substance.

In these places you encounter undercurrents of existence so bizarre we should label them, like unfinished maps, with 'here be dragons', to give the valiant wanderer fair warning they are about to venture into treacherous deeps.

So, what can we do with currents? Ride them, if favorable.

We build society on the recognition of common traits and instinctively favor being alike over being different.

Being aware of the direction and interaction of currents has intrinsic value, you get a better picture of situations and understand why things are a certain way when all the signs point in a different direction.

Reading currents is a navigational tool. It doesn't force your life into a course; it informs it, so it understands the influences pertinent to the path it charted for itself. Unfortunately, the information you gleam from them sometimes shows you're at a disadvantage, but you are always better off knowing the truth.

[During the last few months we faced many challenges which significantly slowed down the progress in the study of these manuscripts.

We almost shut down the project twice for lack of interest from the scientific community, and constant turnover inside the research team has made it nearly impossible to formulate a cohesive approach.

Furthermore, the library has suffered from a reduction in funding, which put the strain on its remaining staff and limited the time they had available to answer our questions.

An auspicious series of independent events, fueled by community outreach, allowed us to continue our progress towards our goal, although at a much slower pace.

We would like to take this opportunity to express gratitude for this public effort, without which we would have undoubtedly abandoned our work.]

Questions about currents.

Can I elaborate on the unknown deeps, the reality trenches?

Let's say you are in a field of poppies, all more or less the same, but no two exactly alike, and that from this field of poppies you can pick only one. Imagine that once you picked that poppy, all the others instantaneously disappear. While you are still stretching out your hand to pick the poppy, all the other flowers are still there, and you can see them, and if something allowed you to immortalize them, to provide proof they existed, you could use that instrument to keep an image of the field, for yourself and to show other people. As you reach out and snap your chosen poppy from its stem, the other flowers disappear. Here comes the ghastly detail. Not only do they disappear in the present, but they would have never been there at any point in time.

Safe in your knowledge of the poppy field, you try to show the image you saved, but your image only shows one poppy, the one you chose. Tell everybody that there was a whole field of them only a moment ago, and you forfeit your sanity. Many a person ended their life mad because they insisted on espousing a personal truth like that. For that is what this is. A personal truth. An undercurrent of your own perception in the wider stream of a much larger reality. What was it that happened? Were your senses so deceived that they imagined poppies where there were none? Was reality shifted on you, like theaters change decors in the middle of the play? Could you be sure of anything you see going further?

What is the answer to this? That's precisely the point of the example. I don't suppose we can think of this situation in terms of answers, because it is not a reality that would yield them. You committed that image to memory, because you have experienced it, no matter what your sight tells you now, and even if you want to cast this experience aside, so it doesn't cloud your perfect model of the world, you can't unknow things. Why would you still have the memory of an event that otherwise disappeared from existence in all directions of time might be the more poignant question.

Just as it is with everything, these trenches get charted slowly over time, only to reveal the existence of even deeper ones. Reality is trenches all the way down.

[We tried but could not ignore the fact that the paragraph above contains blatant references to quantum wave functions.

The probability of it being a coincidence bends even the most skeptic interpretation of empirical facts. We will not try to find an explanation for this here, and we will just admit that we don't know.]

What about the thicknesses and densities?

Have you ever been engaged in a familiar activity, with a very comfortable time frame, only to find every second of it pure agony when you're expecting a meaningful life event?

It is the increase in the density of that time that bears on you like a mountain of bricks.

Other examples would be the lengthening of your way home when you are tired, your heightened interest in health as you grow older, the value of a piece of bread when you are hungry.

There are other, more subtle examples. For instance, the dips in your attention span when listening to a speaker. The main points of the presentation reach your mind, but in uneven ways, with some being remembered word for word, while others get skimmed over, like fuzzy connectors between clear clumps of thought. This is an example of how the current of attention has variable thickness.

[These manuscripts provided us with the unanticipated opportunity to get a glimpse into the ancient art of papermaking, as the medium is paper, and not parchment, which would have been a much more natural choice for the historical period.

Upon analyzing a sample we established the paper was made primarily of rags, mulberry bark and sandalwood, and pressed by hand, a technique that made the paper thickness uneven; in very thin places it becomes translucent.

The pulp was never bleached, imparting a deep ivory color on the paper and the scent of sandalwood is still noticeable, even after all this time.

This document is sealed with a rose, just like the others, and the author placed the symbol in a location where the paper is so thick it gives the wet seal a three dimensional quality, making it look like an embossing.]

Can I give you an example of how you can get distracted by the current of an event instead of navigating it.

This happens to artists more than they would like to admit. The spirit of their time, which has its own principles, shapes their inspiration.

These principles are universal and they resonate in similar ways in the minds of other artists too, and those artists eventually find each other and form a current, a style. These principles generate their own forms, which are unique and become associated with the style. After a while the group expects these forms to be present in all the artwork of the style, whether they fit or not.

How do you get out of a zeitgeist rip current?

With great difficulty. Once you're caught in a larger stream of thought, you have two obstacles to overcome: the power of the trend itself and the struggle of your own mind, which was at some point invested in it and which will fight to resist you. Usually it takes a life-changing event to throw you out of your groove, and if that life-changing event didn't happen naturally, the very struggle to free yourself will generate it.

You are asking why you shouldn't stay inside the current if sliding out of it is so adverse to your well-being? This is a lesson in critical thinking and why you have to formulate your questions carefully. You asked how, not why.

There are no reasons for you to do or not do something, other than those of your own making.

[We estimate that the second part of the text predates the writing above by at least ten years. The calligraphy looks strained, but correct, denoting a hand still struggling with cursive writing.]

How do currents start?

Most of the time they are self-generating, born of the resonance of an idea in so many minds. What makes an idea contagious like that? I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with basic human yearnings and fears, especially those that remain unexpressed.

Some currents are perpetual, and their beginnings run too far back into the past to matter anymore.

The consistent flow of compassion is an excellent example of that.

Its guiding principles permeated every society, every time and every moral code, and its stream has run through humanity for so long nobody can pinpoint its beginning.

An example of an eddy?

An eddy keeps an idea brewing until its message becomes simple enough to spread out into the world.

An eddy doesn't have clarity or orientation, it is a cluster of muddled directions and thoughts which find each other instinctively without even knowing why.

Eddies are pools of potential, a few yield greatness, most don't.

Ideas and trends get tested inside them, the coherent ones get fueled and reinforced by their random inputs and the inconsistent ones get destroyed.

You want an example where reality challenges its own laws?

What is matter made of?

There are many things we know without a doubt that we can't quantify and demonstrate, and yet we all accept them as true and have a common frame of reference for them so every person understands them the same way. Things like love, enjoyment, and insight require no explanation, even though they have no substance; they populate the space between us; they animate our lives in ways that our senses can't detect and our reason can't explain. Does that make them not real? If you describe as real only the things that have substance, the things we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell, then thought isn't real, memories aren't real, and a conversation ceases to exist the moment its last sound stopped reverberating. I would go even further to say that there may be material things out there that our limited senses can not measure, and which hide from our perception. Those too would not be real in this context.

If we accept that the mental constructs of our minds are also real, then why would a thought be more valid than a dream? Why would knowing something be real and believing something not real? If you think it, it is real. It is a thought inside your head. A thought is real. Whether it will, or can manifest in the world of matter is just a matter of time, probability and degree. And if it does, keep in mind we don't really know what matter was made of in the first place.
Lesson Three - Roots, Branches and Offshoots

###  PRECURSOR

A substance from which another is formed, especially by metabolic reaction

You can think of precursors as the ancestors of an event. Everything that is has evolved from something else, which also evolved from something else. The universe is a giant chain reaction still in progress. What you are looking at right now is a step in a very complicated sequence of transformations that started at the beginning of time.

I am not talking only about matter itself, which is a good example, but about everything: events, concepts, physical laws.

Every happenstance is born from the interaction of a series of factors, its precursors.

Change one of those factors and its structure becomes fundamentally different.

Good students of the laws that govern existence don't limit themselves to observing these interactions, they understand and anticipate the results of the reaction, and, if possible, they seek the elements which, mixed, will yield the results they desire.

These elements can be anything: the right timing, a certain level of need or curiosity, spreading the word, the right state of mind.

Everything is a reactant in your alchemical cauldron, the world itself is your laboratory.

This art is grueling and meticulous, but yields valuable predictions: the same ingredients always yield the same results under the same conditions, reality has an inherent need for consistency.

Some people find fault with the manipulation of the elements of life, elements that the surrounding world so freely offers, to accomplish their own purpose, but I warn you to beware more of the random mixing of these ingredients with no thought of what will come of their interactions.

It is easy to come up with examples for events, which though apparently unrelated and innocuous in and of themselves, combined to build up to catastrophic consequences.

Let's take the tragedy of Iphigenia, for instance, and analyze its precursors.

You have a thoughtless young man with an inconvenient love story, poorly timed doldrums, the unyielding obligations of family and leadership and an offended deity, and what comes out of this mix?

An innocent girl, whose connection to any of these factors was marginal at best, ends up as the human sacrifice that halts the chain reaction.

It takes the wise observer a while to understand the rest of the ingredients that shaped this puzzling outcome: tribal law, the dominance of the power role over the parental one, fear and superstition, hidden resentments, the honor code and subservient characters in the family structure.

I'm just giving you these examples to draw attention to the fact that what comes out of a mixing of circumstances is often unforeseen, the mechanisms of the world are a lot more complicated than we fathom.

We can't guarantee that an event will happen based on its precursors, we can only define the general directions the events might take and the probability with which the known factors might tie together.

A thick black cloud on the horizon foretells rain, but it takes the wind direction to figure out where, it takes the wind strength to tell how far away, and it takes daylight to see the cloud in the first place.

Everything in your life right now serves as a precursor for your future, all events are linked in chains of causality, and those chains can be broken, their directions can be shifted, you can start new chains all the time.

In spring the seeds that are already in the ground will be ready to sprout, but they won't yield the plants you desire unless the rest of the conditions allow them to.

It is rare for happy accidents to happen. In fact, they are not accidents at all, but sequences of auspicious circumstances we weren't paying attention to.

No persistent direction comes out of the hands of chance, not one you will enjoy, anyway.

Here is a list of valuable ingredients over which you have full control and which are available to you in the present: youth, health, knowledge, beauty, skill, freedom, intelligence, passion, courage.

To it, add a list of ingredients which are a given and subject to collective thought: social mores, your rights, prevailing thoughts and ideals, your place in society.

Changing any of the latter is possible, although it is hard and it will take all the resources you have and leave not much available for anything else.

And then there is a list of ingredients you have no control over, but which you can add to your reaction, if you find them useful: your time in history, the circumstances of your birth, external events, natural or man-made, weather.

You are asking how could you possibly guess what a certain combination of factors can yield? I don't know the answer to that question, but I can offer you a working solution, which is second best. You don't try to guess the result, you just pick several outcomes out of which only one can happen and assess what chance each one of them has in doing so. You take all the factors you can see, and which might influence the result, and figure out how much each of them favors each outcome. The outcome that is most heavily favored will become clear, and it is often not the one you expect.

This is a good exercise, especially for situations that bear on many influences, and whose results are hard to predict.

We'll take a break now and I will answer your questions when we return.

[This seems to be the last page of the manuscript, judging by the quality of the handwriting and the relative smoothness of the paper.

The document is sprinkled with drawings and diagrams whose utility is unclear, but which seem to describe axial and radial symmetries, edge and center clusters, patterns of continuity.

We weren't able to determine any connections between them and the text.]

You were asking what is the role of will in this exercise and I have to clarify what the exercise is for.

This is an evaluation tool to prognosticate, under given circumstances, which outcome has the best chances to occur.

It does not tell you it will occur, and its results become useless if any of the circumstances change.

It offers a dispassionate view into an alternate reality, your wishes and your will have no place in the process.

What you can do if it points you to an undesirable outcome is to see if you can change any of the circumstances and roll the dice again.

Does this exercise really yield useful information?

The results are uncomfortably precise.

This seems like a rather unsophisticated tool, but it is a lot harder to use than you would guess based on a superficial view. Counting is trivial. Counting all the grains of sand on a beach is not.

The more ingredients you measure, the more accurate the results and the more difficult the process.

Don't forget that the ingredients often influence each other and going through their thicket of combined possibilities can be overwhelming.

What if no change in precursor will change your outcome?

Well, first, at least you'll know ahead of time. Second, and I hate to talk about this, because I resent the thought of predestination, if you look at the patterns of the world you realize that, given certain circumstances, sometimes the clustering and conversion of a set of factors is inevitable. These convergent chains of cause and effect may or may not have anything to you or your purpose, they are like fixed points through which reality has to pass. They are nodes, hubs, gateways inside being, a connecting structure of sorts, a kit of directions and vertices. This is as true for existence as it is for individual lives. We all have points we have to go through, thresholds we have to cross. Don't ask me why things are this way, I don't know why, I just observe what reality reveals to me about itself.

Pay special attention to unrelated events that all seem to point toward the same outcome. You may be looking at a hub and it is always useful to see one ahead of time.

[There is a hole in the paper at the end of this paragraph, as if someone intentionally pushed the quill through the paper. The hole is perfectly round and with no rips, proof that whoever perforated the paper did not do it out of carelessness. There are no markings around it, on the front or the back of the paper, and no traces of ink on the circumference of the hole. This leads us to believe that a different quill, one never used for writing, pierced the paper.]

Does that mean we can predict the future?

What is it with you and your obsession with predicting the future? I find it unsettling enough to acknowledge that there are checkpoints I can't escape; I don't want reality to be like a boulder rolling down the hill which always follows the line of the highest slope on its way down. Enough about that. Let's say that some things you can anticipate. What you do with that knowledge is entirely within the boundaries of your will.

[An unexpected change in the writing's slant follows, which seems to suggest a sudden shift in mood or attention.]

Are you writing this down? You will not remember it and my memory is not what it used to be either. We are both going to stare at a blank space on this page later and wonder what that hole was all about. No, don't tell me you will remember, I can tell you forgot already. What were we discussing?

That's right! You don't know. And I can't remember either. Oh, well, I guess we have to give life its dues, maybe this knowledge wasn't meant to make it to the future.

Are influences only used to foresee real events?

No.

You can look back at the sequence of precursors for an event that already happened and create a usable model for what might happen under similar circumstances.

Let's take the tragic example from the beginning of this lecture. You see war breaking over the tainting of a man's honor; you see priests consulting the oracle about what would appease a very offended deity; you see people questioning the leadership of a ruler who can't command the winds; you see a society for which paying dues with innocent blood is the norm. It is not a matter of whether some young and innocent virgin might have to be sacrificed to put these boiling cauldrons of unrest to sleep, it's just a matter of what are your odds to get picked, if you are a young and innocent virgin.

Oh, you think that's funny! The young! They never learn!

You are asking me what you should have done if faced with the situation above?

First, assume they already picked you. It's always best to start your analysis with the worst-case scenario.

Since your life hangs in the balance, it is not worth risking the odds so you can maintain the privileges of royalty. You won't be able to use them when you're dead.

Running away is also a problem, because the people who suggested you as the sacrifice of innocent blood to appease divine wrath will be highly motivated to find you anywhere you may hide and kill you so that said wrath does not compound.

Hypothetically your best option would be to spread scary rumors that it does not please the gods to kill you.

Contradicting ones would work even better, because they accomplish a dual task: they cast doubt on the priests' interpretations of the oracle which weakens their clout and ability to impose their point of view, and they create confusion, which you can use as a diversion.

The contradicting rumors will set the groups against each other and shift their attention towards defending the turf in which they had made an emotional investment and away from victimizing you.

But this would be a hail Mary solution, and the proof you haven't applied yourself enough to the study of cause and effect. What you should do is to know of the danger much farther back into the chain of events and make advance preparations. You should expect that at some point something will require a virgin sacrifice and make yourself ineligible as a candidate. Remember that the gods don't appreciate the offering of silly, loud-mouthed girls who flirt a lot, have no redeemable qualities and don questionable attire. Human sacrifices must have a hint of the sublime. It would be to your advantage to appear unworthy.

Remember that at some point you will probably marry, in which case you won't have to pull the silly goose act anymore. Then it would be safe for you to look dignified since you would have become ineligible for the honor of human sacrifice for a different reason.

[It is hard to tell whether the master was seriously analyzing a case scenario or whether he was using sarcasm to diffuse his displeasure with his pupil's slacking attitude.

The choice of human sacrifice as a subject for this lesson reveals a rather dark sense of humor, which is not in contradiction with what we have gathered from the rest of his writings.

It is especially baffling as a choice of subject for what seems to be the last page of the manuscript. There is no sense in this final page that the master was wrapping up work he considered complete, which leads us to believe that the pages we found are only a portion of the work, and someone hid the rest elsewhere.]

What other causal factors should you have noticed in the story above?

You can see a lot if you pay attention: envy was probably a strong motivator, because it explains both why the subject was worthy and why the subject was chosen, a misunderstanding of one's role and value to society, which led to an unwarranted sense of security, inability to analyze situations and draw information from one's environment, built in bias against young beautiful maidens, because of the one who started the war, the absence of leverage, underestimating the power of an event chain, which, once set in motion, picks up speed and becomes harder and harder to divert or stop as things advance, dangerous and subversive political pressures, expressing themselves as religious fervor.

###  DERIVATIVE

An expression representing the rate of change of a function with respect to an independent variable.

Some phenomena are not about themselves. They take you one level, one dimension down into the substance of things, they are measurements of change, gauges of the inner workings of the world, consequences of movement.

Every atom in existence is a player in a giant set of games of variability. Imagine the collection of all of these games as threads, clusters, and fabrics. These threads of things happening, let's say, are not even, they display changes in speed; they have lumps and thinnings; they stop and change direction, they soar, plummet or disappear. Their changes imprint a secondary metric into our world, a measure of variability, a smoothing over of its irregular nature. These measures show trends and directions, they clean the world of detail to reveal only the impulses of motion. They are diagrams of change.

Take, for instance, the line of highest slope. The water always follows it when it flows down the hill. Or the line of lowest slope. A donkey will always find it when it carries burdens up the hill. These lines are not obvious, they are abstract measurements of the change in incline and they only become visible when the water, or the donkey, reveals their existence.

You will say to yourself that it is not reasonable to guide yourself by the wisdom of lesser things, and that is a vanity of human thought, which deems itself the arbiter of things only because it gathered a few droplets from an infinite sea of knowledge constantly refreshing itself.

There are no lesser things, and there are many respects in which the donkey is wiser than you. The wisdom of the donkey is also part of the larger game of life, for which it received different tokens to play than you.

We are not unchanging entities either; we are not like earthen pots, which once shaped and hardened in the fire are no longer subject to the motions of the world. We are tentative stems that emerge and grow and move and transform.

We always wonder why a thing happened to us, or why life favored one way instead of another, and we do not understand that we obey the same rules as the rest of creation. Everything needs energy to keep going and when it depletes its supply, it stops.

If you understand the underlying rules of these secondary measures of motion, which run flat when things cease to change, it will become obvious why every time your life doesn't seem to change anymore it is approaching either a summit or a bottom.

We all know these things in our gut and take them for granted, we have feelings of elation or foreboding we can't explain to ourselves, but which most of the time emerge from our awareness of these change measurement undercurrents that run through everything.

We all know instinctively that accelerating change leads to untenable outcomes.

There is no such thing as an infinite soaring or an infinite decline.

Infinite expressions don't feel at home in the world of matter. This world needs ebbs and flows to stay on course and it can't function when changes start happening faster and faster. A wheel rolling down an endless hill will eventually gather such momentum it disintegrates all on its own, even if no obstacle hits it. The unlimited increase in its speed reaches the inner workings of the wheel, those things that keep it together, and forces them into motion too.

In the same way, speeding up towards progress, which in the human heart reflects as hubris, brings people to emotions and situations inside which they can no longer function. It is as true for the things unseen as it is for the visible portion of the world. These points of extreme, where things become too fast, too far, when there is no limit to the building up of speed, break the fabric of existence. They create holes where reality should be. They are places where things no longer work as expected and where life can't thrive.

There are a lot more laws to existence than those that we know, and these laws are consistent and inexorable.

One of these laws is that any coherent mechanism will self-regulate, refusing to allow local disruptions in its inner workings that could end up in the breakdown of its function.

Existence is such a mechanism.

It puts a limit on these sharp peaks and smooths them over, so they continue to be gentle waves and folds in the fabric of being, rather than rips and holes: all soaring civilizations experience decline, the stars that burn too hot consume themselves to nothing, there is no unlimited love, or unlimited pleasure, or unlimited fervor, every emotion slowly dampens itself in a series of diminishing returns.

Expect this to happen in your life, we amass so much misery while yearning for impossible things!

I can't say this enough: life is motion. Ideals are gauges of that motion, among many others, instances at the top of a range. They are like temperature readings: just because you can measure the temperature at which the water freezes that doesn't mean you can stay in it indefinitely.

A couple more things before we stop for questions.

Sometimes the footprint of subtle things is more obvious than they are. For instance, you can't track the warming and cooling of every gust of air, but you can infer those changes from the stirring of the wind. You can assess the speed and the steering on a boat on the open seas just by looking at its wake.

You can tell winter is coming just by noticing how soon the plants go into dormancy.

All living and non-living things have tokens to play in this large game of existence, and these tokens are very different.

One that us lucky humans get to use is the ability to interpret the moves of other players, human and non-human alike.

Second, there are things that only change because they are tethered to other things: ocean tides to the moon, deserts to movements of dessicate air, lush forests to rain. They wouldn't exist in the absence of their nurturing factors. We are such things ourselves, we wouldn't be here if it weren't for sunlight, water, air, an environment that offers us sources for the energy we need to keep going. We are consequences, corollaries of the rules of a larger game, which involves celestial bodies, forces and fields independent of our understanding, and which have been in place long before we came to be, and longer still before our eyes were open to their workings. It is a good way for us to stay humble and not presume ourselves to be the wake that moves the ship.

[This portion of the manuscript, together with several others, was sent to an independent agency for authentication, because the instruments we had turned out inconclusive results.

This imposed a one year break in our research, time we endeavored not to waste by immersing ourselves in a thorough study of the rest of the documents.

Our efforts were not in vain.

We discovered alternate interpretations for the remaining text which wouldn't have occurred to us did we have to allocate time to the unavailable portion of the manuscript.

These interpretations become obvious once gleaned, and they make us wonder whether there might be other things we missed, because of a superficial reading of the work.]

Questions.

How is the knowledge of the variable speed of change useful?

It always pays to notice when things speed up or slow down, especially if that happens over a stretch of time, because they point to a peak or a trough.

This is true in fields you wouldn't normally consider, like fortune, favor, inspiration, stamina.

It is also a good thing to know that, short of death, your circumstances won't evolve towards an infinite outcome in either direction.

You can track these changes in yourself and in your surroundings, and both circumstances yield useful information.

Another use for this second metric, which is often more obvious than the truths it derives from, is to help you understand phenomena that seem to have no rhyme or reason associated with them because the rules of the game they are part of are outside your reach.

For instance, you can trace the movements of the things unseen through this, our lower reality, by the traces and the footprints they leave behind. Sometimes we can't see things in their higher dimension, but we can see the changes in their motion, which, as I said, are always one level, one dimension down.

Let's say you can only see things that live inside the piece of paper in front of you. If I place this goblet on the paper, you will see a circle. If I could press it through the paper you would see the circle's circumference change with time. Now, there is no such thing on your piece of paper as a circle with variable circumference. You can never see the goblet, because you don't have the senses with which you can interpret it, but you can interpret the varying lengths of the circle radius by representing them differently and suddenly you get an elevation of the goblet, a clear picture of an object that can not exist inside your world, just by tracking the changes in its footprint.

Can I give you examples of such things?

Sure. Take this lens and let sunlight run through it. A ray of light comes in and a rainbow comes out. You didn't know that light and rainbows were the same thing, because you couldn't, possibly. You can never see light as a rainbow without the instrument that bends it so much it makes its strands unravel. Also, this bending only happens when you hold the crystal at specific angles. If the only information available to you was a static image taken at those angles, you would never think of light as white. But you can change the angle and thus understand that there are intrinsic properties of light which you can't see, and its different appearances are all reflections of the same governing law.

[We can see another version of the optical illusion of the three dimensional rose at this location in the document.

The trompe l'oeil of this sketch is inescapable, from any distance and at any angle. Sadly, the drawing technique is still puzzling the experts and will remain shrouded in mystery for now.]

What if you don't care about light and rainbows? What does this concept have to do with real life?

The same principle described above applies to all the things shaped by unseen rules: the workings of society, love and relationships, the gaining of a skill.

Can I be more specific? Mastering a skill takes a long time during which your proficiency in that skill increases, which encourages you to work harder to improve. After a while the amount of work becomes disproportionate with the increase in skill, which means you are approaching the top of your range. You stay there for a while, but there is no incentive to work harder, because you can no longer improve. You have accomplished what you set to accomplish, and after enjoying your skill for a while you start losing interest in it, and as a result of your lack of practice your skill wanes.

Does this mean you will always abandon your current interests in search of ever changing ones?

No. It just means you should pick an interest complex enough it can keep you engaged for the length of your lifetime. This way you risk having your life run short of the top of your range, but this is a better problem to have than its opposite.

Can you manipulate the higher dimension by changing things one level down in its rate of change? I have to confess that I never contemplated the possibility.

Could you, for instance, cut a crystal in such a way that no matter where the light comes from, it always enters it at the angle of your choice, and live inside that crystal? If you did that, in theory, all light would come out rainbows for you, no matter what. I guess the answer to your question is that you can't change the laws that govern the higher dimension, but you can shape your own experience of those laws, and that may be enough for you.

Come to think of it, we experience this all the time: parallel lines don't meet at the horizon and things don't get smaller as they get farther away. We change from infancy to old age, but we always think of ourselves as the person we are in the present.

We pay no attention to the movements of things that happen inside time frames significantly different from our lives - the shaping of mountains, the movements of plants, the intricacy of a raindrop.

We all live in a reality warped by our senses and the speed of our life, one that eliminates the details we can't use.

[This page ends with a series of symbols, which seem to be components of a language, but which match none of the writing conventions we have encountered so far.

They are combinations of only two elements: a circle and a line.

It was beyond our ability to interpret the meaning of the script. We can't tell whether the pictographs represent words or phrases and there aren't enough symbols in the sample to yield any discernible patterns.]

###  CONCENTRATION

The relative amount of a given substance contained within a solution or in a particular volume of space; the amount of solute per unit volume of solution; the action or power of focusing one's attention on mental work.

You are familiar with concentrated essence from the flower oils and hydrosols you have sampled in the apothecary shop.

Concentration eliminates the bulk of a medium to extract the essence blended inside it.

Let me help you understand how you can concentrate and direct your mind so you can extract its essence in a similar way.

Whether we are awake or asleep, our mind never stops churning.

We buckle under the weight of our thoughts, most of which are incidental and contradictory.

Like the alchemist who distills the essence of a thousand roses into a single drop of perfume, so should you be able to remove the bulk around the core of your ideas to refine their content.

The theory of how to do this is simple, the practice not so much. The mind is like a scared little rabbit, constantly on the run, alert to the slightest noise, disturbed by the faintest memory. It never stops building defenses around itself and consumes enormous amounts of resources in the process.

Here is how you concentrate your mind. If you're out in nature, all the better, but any peaceful retreat would work. You sit quietly and ponder on your thought, feeling, state of mind, anything you wish, and try to present it to yourself in the simplest form that embodies it. Let's say you want to learn astronomy. You think about your favorite constellation, on a beautiful summer night, in a sky full of stars. Make that mental image the symbol of your wish, your desire, make it the only thing in the world that matters to you. Thoughts will come to bother you, but pay them no heed, like you wouldn't pay attention to strangers' conversations in a crowded place. Let nothing bother you in the contemplation of your beautiful daydream, no second thoughts, no negative emotions, no judgments.

Watch your lovely mental image as you would a favorite painting, or a field full of flowers in spring, with joyful detachment, and allow your heart to open to its enticing beauty.

After a while the conversations in the background of your mind will fade to a low noise you can barely hear, letting that sky full of stars grow in importance until it fills your entire mind. When it gets to this stage, the image, the representation of your thought, will reach out to your emotions, testing you to see whether you care about it enough to bring it to life, and you have to allow it into your heart, give yourself to it, hold nothing back, like you wouldn't refuse a lover. Let the beauty of your night sky sink its roots into your heart to make it beat faster, feel it quicken your breath and make you quiver with anticipation. Embrace it and own it with everything you are, like it is your entire world, like your life depends on it. Hear it hum steadily inside you, sense it swell your chest and blend into your essence, and you will become your sky full of stars, and it will become part of your being. A great feeling of peace accompanies this assent, a feeling of certainty and confidence, and all abiding love. Love the thing you want to accomplish, believe in it blindly, otherwise it gets washed out in the daily deluge of insignificant thoughts.

Only then will you be ready to devote all your passion and attention to it, without wavering or doubt.

In time this state of heightened passion and attention will become your second nature, and you will instinctively ignore your inner chatter, allowing your mind to immerse itself in the study of your beloved subject.

You will become so tuned into its details it will take effort to disrupt you while you work.

When an idea has secured your unquestioned devotion, it will stick around with the dogged determination of a pampered pet. It will follow you on your walks around town and it will visit you in your dreams. It will be the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning and it will jump back at you from unrelated conversations and mundane tasks. It will provide you with answers when you least expect it, it will surprise and delight you, it will become your best friend, and the bane of your life. Don't give your dedication to a purpose lightly, it will demand a lot of you and it will deliver results in proportion with what you put into it. Don't expect it to be easy, don't expect it to always be enjoyable, this entity you have now brought into being will demand attention and care, like any living thing.

Why am I saying that our daily thoughts are insignificant? First, they are recurrent, nagging and futile. What purpose could the thousandth iteration of the reminder to put the bread in the cupboard possibly serve? Second, they behave like the clutter in a messy house; they don't put themselves away. Make time every day to clear your mind's 'to do' list. Whatever needs done, put it on a schedule and do it, so it doesn't nag you while you are trying to concentrate on your purpose. A messy surrounding is the reflection of an undisciplined mind. What you see in the world around you is the mirror image of your mental state. External mess can serve as a warning to you that your mind is drifting without a center.

Now. Clusters.

Ideas or projects rarely arrive as singular objects, they come in clusters, concentrations of like things that develop naturally.

These clusters have a tendency to organize themselves in the configurations that are most favorable to their interaction.

Let them.

These associations break the boundaries of disciplines, sometimes even the level of conscious perception, and reach into the space between things to find commonalities and connections.

Things that wouldn't occur to you in a normal setting suddenly become clear, and after getting these inspired insights you always wonder how come you never noticed their telltale patterns before.

Another thing about concentration, it ebbs and flows, you'll have periods of great productive intensity and times when you will wander aimlessly through the desert of your drained mind picking at straws. Be at peace, no matter which state you are in.

[We are fairly certain, to our great excitement, that this manuscript is a fragment of a larger body of work, one whose whereabouts our team has been tracking for over a year now.

We think we are getting close to its discovery and are looking forward to announcing the good news to the scientific community.]

Questions about concentrations?

Why do you have to declare your undying love to a project? You say that it feels like you are getting married to it. In a way, you are.

Emotions are powerful things. They solidify your convictions and probe the depths of your thoughts. They are like the grout inside the wall; they bind thoughts together and in time their strength becomes comparable to that of the stones themselves.

Emotions allow you to go the distance when you would otherwise quit faced with failures and setbacks, second guessing and public rejection.

They allow you to ignore the impossible odds, the unfavorable times, the unavoidable challenges.

Can I explain why?

When you learn a dexterity, let's say calligraphy, at first you have to pay attention to every letter and all your capacity goes into mastering the writing technique.

After a while writing becomes an ability you take for granted, a skill that provides you with means to express your thoughts. Its motor intricacies drop beneath the surface of thought and going further the memory of how to write will live inside your hands.

The same way when you connect an ability with an emotion you place its associated details in the same place you store the beating of your heart, breathing and walking.

You don't have to think up reasons to do it anymore; it becomes natural to your body, something you do as a matter of course.

Emotions remove all the rationalizations for not doing something.

For instance, if you asked me why I draw, in all honesty I wouldn't have an answer to give you. I draw because I do. I just reach out to pen and paper and a form emerges. Life brings things into being every day. The creative process doesn't need a reason to exist.

Here. Have a rose.

[We found a third instance of the rose optical illusion at this place in the manuscript.

The roses look very much alike, as if the master was trying to demonstrate a technique by drawing the same thing over and over. He rendered this rose in watercolor, in the same shade of light blue.

We can't ignore the symbolism of his color choice, whose meaning would have been obvious during the manuscript's time.

Because roses lack the pigment required to turn their petals blue, these impossible flowers had become the symbols of unattainable dreams, reaching out to the sublime or love that can not be fulfilled.]

The rose bush doesn't ask itself why it should bloom and when it blooms it doesn't hold back on the abundance of flowers. In the world of things concentrations occur naturally, nature thrives on grandeur and excess. Things emerge together in large numbers attracted to and nurtured by favorable conditions. Don't keep your emotions locked up, saving them for whatever circumstance you think would warrant them. If you had a beautiful singing voice, you wouldn't save it for a special occasion, you would use it whenever you can. Think of your emotions as the instruments that accompany and enhance your thinking processes.

You asked whether there are any circumstances when using your emotions diluted is preferable to engaging them in concentrated essence?

Sometimes the strength of undiluted emotion can be too harsh for things that are delicate, frail, or that require extreme precision. It is better to embrace a gentler, softer range when you need to touch the world lightly like that.

In time you will learn to master your emotions like you would a complex musical instrument and modulate their tempos and their dynamics to be in perfect harmony with your task. One thing people mistakenly believe is that emotions are not subject to our will. They are no less subject to our will than our thoughts. Only when you learn to master your emotions will you be able to wield their strength and use them as you wish. Only then will you truly understand the real meaning of free will.

[Could the master exercise full control over his emotions and wield them at will, like so many tools?

The concept is unsettling, after all aren't emotions the very things that keep us human and regulate the workings of our society?

It is unthinkable that an artist, of all people, would place such restrictions on his creative range!

We have explored the possibility that the paragraph above might be a metaphor for something else.]

Could I elaborate on the difficulties in practicing the mind focusing technique?

Sure.

The main problem is that the mind is a creature of habit, and it had built up tolerance to the constant attack of irrelevant thoughts for decades. It takes time to change any habit. The mind will defend what it's used to, even if it doesn't benefit it, and will make you miserable, in the same way pain alerts you when your muscles sustained effort without warming up.

The thoughts you ignore stir up other thoughts, which come to their rescue, determined to garner your attention. When they don't succeed, they call up the cavalry, your dark emotions - guilt, shame, fear, doubt, sorrow, and those disturb every corner of your mind, and when they depart new thoughts come in their wake, telling you that all of this is unnatural, that it isn't worth dealing with all this pain, that you should act human, since you are human. It is quite a feat of strength to see the process through.

Strangely enough, it is reason that comes to assist you while you are training your emotions to sit, stay and roll over. As I mentioned, there is a reason for your emotions to tell you to be on alert all the time, they are trying to protect you from things that used to hunt us humans a long time ago. It takes reason to remind us we are not living in that time anymore.

Can I give you an example of concentration clusters?

A new current of ideas is a good example.

It will reverberate in art, literature, politics, social mores, fashion, architecture and music.

These separate fields influence and reinforce each other while exploring a common concept expressed in different forms.

How can one control an emotion?

It is a long process which bears some similarities to increasing the strength of a muscle, but briefly described, it is a gradual shifting of how you feel about something by mentally altering the conditions under which it occurs.

Examples: a wedding, a forced wedding, a desirable wedding in times of disaster, somebody else's wedding, a wedding twice postponed.

Your emotional responses to this event, which is essentially the same, will be different.

What is the point of all of this? If you can train yourself to feel the opposite emotion of what would come naturally under certain circumstances, you understand that you can feel any way you wish at any point in time. Remember that being in control of what you want to feel does not mean that you forgo your emotions, especially your negative emotions. Like a virtuoso, you play them in concert, elation and sorrow, joy and fear. You blend them; you amplify them; you expand their register; you project them outward. You use the medium of your own emotions to paint a compelling picture of your inner world.

All of your emotions are notes in that melody, yes, guilt, shame, sorrow, fear and doubt too, don't restrict your range to major harmonies, the world sings melancholy tunes too.

You are asking whether you do not risk your saddled emotions getting the better of you.

The interesting part of this concern is that nobody ever worries about their unexamined, unfettered emotions running the gamut.
Lesson Four - Mirror Reality

###  SYMPATHETIC

Relating to, producing, or denoting an effect which arises in response to a similar action elsewhere.

Frequently actions, states and events emerge simultaneously in various parts of reality, acting exactly the same, like synchronized ripples in its fabric.

Sometimes an event gets reflected by another, completely bound to it like an object to its shadow or to its mirror image.

Never can these shadows and reflections act independently from the object that generated them.

Unlike reflections and shadows however, these pairings of events work both ways, like they are both the objects and they are both their mirror images too.

These reflections are random and inexplicable, not bound by logic or causality, they just exist randomly in the fabric of reality and pop up for no reason now and then as a reminder that we understand very few of the rules that govern existence.

Imagine walking down a sumptuous hall where everything fits into the design and is in harmony with its proportions, color and style.

Nothing seems out of place until you look down and suddenly meet your reflection in the shard of a mirror. There is no explanation of how that shard got there, when everything is spotless and perfectly aligned.

The experience is startling, but you brush it aside as an accident and continue your stroll.

Soon enough another mirror shard catches your eye, this time embedded in the wall, and next, you happen upon another, and another.

The hall looks the same as before, when you didn't expect it to have all those bits and pieces of reflection sprinkled throughout it randomly for no reason.

Your perception of reality is the same as before, and you would happily ignore the eerie reflections so you could keep your certainty about the order and harmony of the sumptuous hall, but you can't, because these reflections haunt you, like the ghosts of reality.

They mirror your life and influence it simultaneously, while having nothing to do with it at all.

They are weird, uncomfortable and inexplicable.

The world reverberates onto itself, putting ripples into the surface of existence and being influenced by them itself in causal loops that defy logic.

It engenders echoes in response to distant and unrelated actions.

Why am I sharing this? Because we instinctively understand this phenomenon, which feels elusive and alien in the world of matter at the level of our emotions, and we use it all the time without even being aware we're doing it.

We are using it every time we resonate to someone else's pain, when we feel love, when we have forebodings of danger.

Our reason doesn't have the instruments to detect these sympathetic waves that manifest spontaneously in our world, but our emotions do, and they are very good at it.

Don't dismiss the feelings you get out of the blue about a situation, person or place, we often base them on information we receive and process in ways that are instantaneous and which we can't put into words.

Random details draw our attention for no reason. We notice when things repeat more frequently than randomness dictates. We see patterns in apparently amorphous states.

[We have requested repeatedly to transfer the manuscript to the Institute, for the convenience of the research team and quicker access to reference material, but although the transfer request was eventually approved, timing, circumstances and simply improbable acts of God continued to be consistently at odds with its implementation.

Some of our colleagues like to joke that the manuscript doesn't want to leave.]

You may protest that assigning such a level of importance to a set of fortuitous coincidences is the realm of superstition and self deception, but to that I respond that a scientific mind can not refute evidence because it diverges from widely held views.

I merely suggest that one should look at the facts, stripped of their rational presuppositions, put oneself in the mindset of a person who knows nothing about them at all, and see where they lead. It is so easy to get your foot caught in the bear trap of your own desire for consistency!

There are methods through which we can force these associations, we can bind components of separate systems together in this weird double mirroring way to ensure the systems behave in similar fashion. It is tempting for people to do this so they achieve control over systems they wouldn't otherwise have access too, but this is a double-edged sword. What you influence influences you. What you control controls you. What you threaten threatens you. In ways difficult to describe, it, that thing, is you, a you at a distance. Beware of causing harm, lest you harm yourself.

[Some scholars balk at the master's view to life as a quasi-organized structure randomly seeded with unexpected bits of chaos, while other maintain that recent scientific discoveries like entanglement and superconductivity point to an intuitive understanding of concepts still centuries in the making.]

Questions?

Can I give you an example of how we can force this association?

If you vibrate a tuning fork next to a crystal glass and place it at just the right distance, the glass will sing in the same tone, and the sound will bounce back and forth between the tuning fork and the glass and will last longer. The metal and the glass are different systems, but they have one thing in common: they can vibrate at the same frequency.

If you place a steel knife next to a lodestone, it will attract iron objects too. The inner workings of the steel realign themselves to match the inner workings of the lodestone. Though they are different systems, they have one thing in common: they can both attract iron.

If you drop a shard of ice in a glass of freezing water, the ice seeds the substance of the water and makes it freeze in an instant. The ice didn't transform the water into itself, it just made it rearrange its inner workings so they match its own. Though they started as different systems now they have one thing in common: they are both seeded with the capacity to become solid.

What does that have to do with our lives? If nothing else the knowledge that reality doesn't always corroborate one's logical assumptions.

This natural behavior of things is usually relevant when you want to guess, for instance, the behavior of large groups of people. One ideal or one fear can act as the shard of ice in a set of minds ready for it.

A great actor, or a gifted orator, can cast his emotions into the audience. They want to convey a feeling they hold in their heart, so they realign the emotions of the audience in such a way it can have that feeling too.

Can I elaborate on the metaphor of the hall of mirrors?

That's just it, that's where the problem lies. It is not a hall of mirrors; it is just a hall. It behaves exactly as you would expect it to, and looks like a perfectly normal hall, except when it doesn't, which can happen anytime and anywhere, without warning.

Should we realign our sense of normality to adjust to the concept that reality is a quasi-orderly structure seeded with random instances of chaos?

Does our mind have the necessary mechanisms to make this adjustment or are we doomed to grasp at any appearance of order, however fleeting, just to keep our balance?

After all, we named constellations made of stars that are nowhere near each other, except in our observation of the night sky.

To give you a better idea of how unreasonable this is, try to compare it to making a rule for yourself that a mouse, a dog and a horse are all the same size and they form a meaningful group, when in fact you see their individual instances at different distances inside a perspective view.

Maybe in our need to put order into an environment we don't understand, and which for this reason scares us, we compulsively create rules that sometimes have no basis in reality.

The question then becomes, if putting order into our environment is an inescapable human need, are we better off creating rules, even artificial ones, that explain the world enough, even if we have to make allowances for untold numbers of exceptions to these rules as a matter of course?

Or are we better off resigning ourselves to partial sets of rules, which only work locally, and between which we have to allow contradictions so that their entire house of cards does not collapse under its own paradoxes.

A patchwork reality, made of things that don't relate to each other, but harmonize in the greater design like odd bits of fabric in a quilt.

Or are we better off cataloging and grouping these aberrant behaviors in an otherwise well-behaved reality into 'same' categories, and try to devise broader, looser, more adaptable concepts to contain them.

Maybe we have to accept that things can be and not be at the same time, or that pieces of reality can generate their own doubles for a while, or go in and out of existence with no explanation at all. The more we are willing to accept as possible, the more reality shows us, and the scarier it gets. I don't know if the human mind imposes some limit on cognition, a border beyond which there only be dragons.

One thing is certain: if we can no longer understand what happens, it is not because reality is broken. Reality just is. That's all. It is our understanding of it that is broken, or at least insufficient.

Maybe we are better off sensing the workings of these misbehaving odds and ends of existence and just content ourselves to use them for now, like birds sense the directions of the compass and moss knows to grow only on the north side of a tree. Does gravity work any less if we don't know how or why?

I think the worst thing we could do is to brush aside these quirky instances, however inconsequential they may appear to be, as silly, misguided examples of delusional thinking and keep plodding along a reality no longer willing to cooperate, so we can maintain our false sense of security and the comfort of belonging to a familiar world.

And since we are discussing scary things, since we ourselves, just by being in the world, may bring these oddities into being, how are we to cope with the responsibility of constantly pushing levers on a mechanism we don't have a prayer of understanding?

That being said, who says that seeing the unevenness of being has to be a scary experience? This unevenness has always been there, and we were none the worse for wear, the only difference is that now we have instruments with which we can observe it. Maybe the next time we face an unexpected mirror shard we should draw nearer to see it up close before it disappears.

You are asking if we should discard the rules of reality, if they don't correspond to the way things are.

The answer is not that simple. All the laws we devised for ourselves so far to help us understand our reality work flawlessly in the context that generated them.

You can't understand the behavior of ice if you've lived in the desert your entire life, but you will know everything there is to know about the movements of the sand, prevailing winds and the drop in temperature between day and night. And if we can't extrapolate on the behavior of ice, how could we put order into things for which we can't even develop concepts? The things that are easiest to dismiss are those for which we lack the necessary senses. We can't model what we can't see.

What is the meaning of the random reality doubles? I don't know. Why do they have to have a meaning, maybe they are just naturally occurring phenomena, like echoes, or ripples on a pond? Maybe all we see are reverberations of ourselves inside the medium of existence.

How come we haven't noticed these strange behaviors of reality before, if they are real and naturally occurring?

I don't have an answer to that, other than many of these instances may have been dismissed as workings of evil or figments of a deranged mind.

Who is to say that it isn't our willingness to look at these things that has made them now visible to our eyes? The simple answer is that I don't know.

Could I give you more examples of sympathetic behaviors?

Animal whispering, aches and pains in the body when the weather changes, birds orienting themselves in flight, circadian rhythms, sunflowers always facing east, people enjoying large gatherings and common celebrations, the breaking of waves at the shore.

[The manuscript is illuminated here with a study of hands. The artist depicts them in natural postures, like prayer, writing or pointing. One sketch represents a hand which seems to reach out from the page in an inviting gesture, with the palm open upwards; the drawing has an unsettling effect; it is compelling, in a way hard to describe. Another sketch, one that represents writing hands, has helped us confirm that the quill found with the manuscript is one of many used to write the text. It depicts the plume in painstaking detail, showing every barb, and the stain we found on the original.]

###  SYNAPSE

A junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter.

There is an interstitial stretch that fills the space between knowledge and learning, a field where ideas roam free.

Inside that space there is no organizing structure, everything melds together in a chaotic jumble, free to create associations and break them as easily as breathing.

These free moving concepts are like rapping raindrops of knowledge on the roof of your mind.

There is no logic in this space between your mind and the ideas that are trying to reach it, not in the sense we usually understand it. In this space all the forms that human thought creates are equal and stripped of moral charges.

It is a place where ideas move constantly at great speeds and bind in amalgams that only last fractions of a second, but in their endless morphing all these ideas are valid, at least temporarily, and they function as scaffolding in the construction of your lasting thoughts.

You are asking me where all these ideas come from, and I don't really have an answer, just guesses and personal opinions. I believe they come from all of us, in a way.

A heavy heart, a hideous rain, a malice void. Our thoughts, our feelings, release their personal bonds when they leave our minds, they get stripped of their private meaning and attach to each other unencumbered, to form unlikely structures that couldn't happen if we contemplated them in their cruder form, the one we hold habitually in our minds.

Inside this world of metaphors you can bend light as easily as you can open your heart, you can drink life in greedy gulps and die inside, no association is contradictory or logically unsound.

It is very much like the world of dreams, where you encounter scenarios that wouldn't pass the consistency test in real life.

People don't miss the symbolism of these associations, even if they don't always derive meaning from them.

Their loose structures emerge in visual form and often appear represented in art, in heraldic compositions, in religious imagery.

These are the closest examples that could vaguely represent the structure of this interstitial world, although they are but a shadow of its real substance, flat images of something we can not describe.

Please don't misunderstand, I don't advocate setting your mental compass by this intermediate chaos between expression and understanding, I'm just trying to draw your attention to a thought space very different from reason: much faster, less constricted, more pliable to our imagination and our current state of mind.

It's a space where a random image, a sound or a scent can bring with it an avalanche of memories and connections, all forged inside the privacy of one's thoughts over an entire lifetime, and thus impossible to explain to another.

There is extraordinary richness in this no-man's-land of thought, where every concept expands to reveal an entire array of mental trees, no two alike, infinite in their cumulative complexity.

It is a richness that grows even as we speak, as new concepts and new trees evolve in real time, changing their meaning depending on context, on time, on light, on mood, on company, on knowledge, on the reshuffling of priorities.

There is no end to this world, larger than the universe itself, and just as riddled in mystery.

Where do all these ideas come from? They come from clusters of thoughts that attract each other, that catalyze each other, allowing themselves the indulgence of unlikely interactions. Clusters that combine thoughts which may be a thousand years old with thoughts that just sprouted in the minds of their creators, insights into scenarios we couldn't possibly experience now, maybe even future thoughts, who am I to know? Time seems to have no meaning in this space either, for what it's worth.

I have to repeat the fact that often these interactions are like fleeting flashes of lightning, too fast and too short to trigger the logical alerts inside our minds, the ones that have evolved over a long time to weed out unsound thinking patterns.

These creations of the interstitial space are not even thoughts in the true sense of the word, more like shadow structures that overlap the real thoughts and alter their flavor.

Sometimes coherent clusters of abstraction snap in place over long held mental states and shape them into great discoveries, heroic acts, undying devotion, extraordinary skills, the power to emote.

We often ask people who experienced this state how they accomplished what they did and they can't answer. Not because they are unwilling, but because they are unable.

There is no way to portray a space which, by default, is the opposite of logic, consistency and consequence.

There is only one rule in this realm: it creates, it doesn't explain. Expect nothing.

You can think of these crazy inconsistent structures as carriers of thought from one mind to another, containers, nothing more.

Once the thought has reached its destination, they disassemble and attach themselves to different structures, in ways impossible to predict.

The same thought that enters your consciousness will open a different door inside your mind than it would in mine. Not only that, but once it takes seed it transforms and bounces back out into the space between, calibrated by the path it took and heavy with your meaning, which it keeps only in the abstract.

Imagine a whole series of these iterations and the scale of the patterns of interference they weave inside the world of thought! They are infinite ripples on a limitless pond.

Between the moment an idea was expressed and the moment it takes root inside our mind it is free of any bonds we can conceive of. Free of context, free of preassigned meaning, free of consistency, free of moral value or emotional load, but most importantly, free of your will. That makes them powerful and useful and creative. You don't get to will them out of your mind, they're too fast for that.

This can also be a burden, because since these mind objects don't care for good or evil, sadness or joy, pleasure or pain, they can reach you in whatever way they see fit and match whatever patterns mold around their meaning, and that is often smarting and intrusive.

Also, because they are not bound by logic, they follow paths that boggle the mind and you come out of them feeling elated, awkward, offended and confused, all at once and for no reason at all.

Many a mind has broken under the stretch and pull of contradicting thoughts that shape its essence with no regard for feelings or logic.

It is better to contemplate these unlikely constructions of thought with detachment, like looking at pictures, or patterns in a field, than to let them grab hold of your mind and wreak havoc on your emotions day in and day out.

That was a mouthful. Let's take a break and we will continue to questions afterward.

[The concepts above only seem to emerge during times of relaxed consciousness, shall we say, when they join our conversations, attracted by bottles of wine like moths to a porch light.

We hesitate to draw the logical conclusion, which may sound disrespectful, but we have to be faithful to the scientific process so we need to point out that maybe the human mind can not conjure these kinds of abstractions in its normal state, and that it needs the intervention of a lesser substance to do so, a substance that numbs its defenses and allows it to suspend disbelief.]

Can I give you a concrete example of this free association?

The golden ratio.

Nobody arbitrarily decided that a certain proportion is the most efficient and the most pleasing to the eye.

(As a corollary to this broader law of nature it bears mentioning that beautiful and functional usually work hand in glove.

We see the things that work well as beautiful.)

The golden ratio emerged naturally.

The absent mind allows the hand to draw, and the hand draws this golden proportion, over and over, in a way that can't by any rational standards be arbitrary.

Would you, under normal circumstances, make any connection between the opening of a blossom and the beauty of a human face?

The humorous aspect of this rhetorical question is that I might have stumbled upon a different free association by accident.

The eye sees, but the mind can't comprehend, because it's bound by categories and rules: the rules that govern flowers can't have any connection to the rules that govern facial proportions, and neither of the two have any bearing on architecture.

We use this ratio in the design of buildings all the time, together with other generally applicable forms of organizing matter, such as symmetry, branching, the increase in density at a boundary.

I challenge you to an exercise: get a piece of paper and write without thinking the first things that come to mind and see if you can find a common thread in their bizarre and incomprehensible mess.

What about emotions?

I don't suppose there is any difference in this half-way state between a thought and an emotion, because emotions evolved to help you anticipate your reaction to things you've encountered before.

Let me give you an example.

If you were a sailor, and you experienced a giant wave before, you would recognize it when it comes around again, and you would be afraid, and that would be good for you, because it would propel you to secure your boat and seek shelter.

If you didn't, you will watch the high formation on the horizon and notice it coming towards you with a mix of uneasiness and curiosity, but you wouldn't be afraid, because you would not understand what to expect.

Not the most optimistic example, grant you, but it proves a point.

In the space between thought these mental forms are like the giant wave - things you haven't encountered before. Things you don't know how to react to. Things that are too improbable to be scary.

You can't have emotions about them, other than maybe a perpetually mystified state. If you do experience emotions, they are not the kind humans can relate to. For instance, what do you feel when you look at light diffracted through a prism? We all should be in awe of having unraveled light, but we feel nothing, we just stare, dazzled by the phenomenon.

[We must confess we often felt overwhelmed by the glut of unusual occurrences both described and generated by this manuscript: the three dimensional roses, the out of sequence placement of convergent detail, the anticipation of artifacts subsequently found with the letter, the group illusion of non-existent patterns.

While we can explain each of these instances independently, in combination they paint a different image, one which has more connections inside itself than its individual components have with external factors.]

Is this mental state a dangerous place to be? Yes. Absolutely. And not for the faint of heart. You must prepare for anything when you venture beyond the boundaries of what you think you know.

It behooves you to create a special room inside your mind for these kinds of exercises, a pain free, shame free, guilt free, fear free room where anything is possible but nothing is real, and make sure its crazy doesn't bleed into the real world.

Never confuse your real life with the life of your mind. The two constantly influence and shape each other, that is true, but you must always act and think according to the lay of the land.

Can I give you an example of a free forming concept that involves emotions?

When you have a talent for something, let's say music, you don't think a note will sound right, or that a harmony would work in a particular musical context, you just know it, it feels right. We don't have a name for that feeling, for that tuning of your senses into music itself.

Can I elaborate on this state of mind where you are immersed in unfamiliar feelings and thoughts?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Oh, how do you navigate a realm where your instruments don't work?

To preempt the easy way out, no, it is not like moving to a new city at all. When you are learning a new city, you can fall back on your knowledge of cities, streets and landmarks.

Unfortunately, in the case you're asking about you have to do what all the good scientists did throughout history to bring us to this point in our knowledge: rely on your instincts and your power of observation, go through trial and error, extrapolate on situations that feel similar, try to find connections between things, quit going in the wrong direction immediately upon getting proof it is so, no matter how long you took and how attached you are to it, share your theories with others who might have a different perspective.

Even though people's observations of this unglued realm are often too private to share, you'd be surprised of how much some of them may resonate with you.

It never hurts to ask. There are emotions so weird people don't think others could have experienced them, so they never talk about them, but they have happened enough times to enough different people to get named. Who would have thought, for instance, that the wish you could go back in time and tell your younger self not to worry about something is a named emotion?

Also, it is not true that your instruments don't work. The instruments you normally rely on don't work, but you have other instruments, some of which you may not even be aware of, that come to life to measure and assess unfamiliar states. For instance, you may never pay attention to the wind, but a farmer or a sailor knows its every whim. They can feel the moisture in the air, predicting stormy weather, or the dry hot gusts that rain will surely follow. You don't know things about the wind because you don't need to know things about the wind.
Lesson Five - Divided by Zero

###  OPTIONS

An act of choosing; a thing that is or may be chosen

Like all naturally evolving systems reality doesn't behave according to a predetermined plan, it runs on repeated trial and error and on eliminating the fruitless branches in the tree of choice.

Even though you can't see it, reality presents and tests options for itself constantly and automatically, in a manner you may recognize from the quiet processes inside of a body.

It favors the organisms best fit to survive; it breaks down things that are in the way of processes in progress and it keeps altering the states of its major systems until they reach a balance with each other.

There is an unseen simplifier to this process, one that runs quietly in the background and one we don't pay attention to: reality is constantly eliminating all the outcomes of a set of circumstances safe one.

We don't think about it because that would add an unnecessary amount of complexity to an already overburdened understanding of life.

It is uncanny that a system supposedly ruled by an inexorable tendency towards disorder is so intent on increasing its organization, its connections and its complexity.

Things become more structured and more intricate, not less, especially living things, which cultivate growing their complexity with zealous dedication.

This trimming off of branches on the tree of choice happens out of sight, and there is no way of knowing whether the ramification selected was the best of all futures.

You may say this is a hopeless process, doomed to generate nothing but chaos, but life doesn't see it that way: it compares, it chooses, and it moves on to the next branch in the tree, advancing towards equilibrium by churning through a very large number of experiences quickly and by eliminating of the ones that don't work out, not through the analysis of the best choice.

If you remember only one thing, remember this: larger systems always have the right of way. Always.

This works for the weather, for the outbreaks of disease, for the shaping of the mountains, for the motions of heavenly bodies, the processing of options goes from larger to smaller scale and it doesn't spare the details, not until it reaches the level of those details.

Even a rational thinker has to condescend that this is a process that sometimes provides better outcomes; if your life depends on it, you're better off taking the chance of being wrong than picking the certainty of being dead.

Fortunately for us, the things we like to ponder usually have a longer time frame, and we have the time to think them through, but don't forget that, for instance, while you are contemplating the advantages of undertaking a particular project or choosing a mate, you are also making flash decisions about whether to shuffle in your chair, walk on the left or right side of the street or look at thay bird that just flew overhead.

You think these fast small decisions are without consequence, which is not true. When you looked at that bird you narrowed your field of vision to focus on it, at the expense of everything else around it, and that eliminated all the other things you could have seen. This is what reality does all the time: it eliminates every branch in the thick tree of possibilities but one. You have hundreds of these little selections every day, and you don't have the means to over-think them all.

Keep in mind that these choices evolve the system, not its individual components, and things that make no sense at a small scale work very well inside the larger system. Hail falls in a field of wheat and flattens some ears. It doesn't discriminate between the productive ones and the barren ones.

Why does this happen?

Two reasons: one - the field of wheat works at the scale of large numbers, where a portion of the harvest has been decimated, but the nature of the harvest itself has remained unchanged, and two - the hail is not about destroying a portion of the harvest which comes about as a secondary outcome, it is about trading off temperature and water content inside vast masses of air to bring the entire system back to balance.

What does that have to do with us? A lot.

How much energy is being lost in the pondering of why some things happened or didn't, on why other people seem to have better luck, on what could have been, were you to make a different choice at a critical point in your life?

These musings, though interesting as a mental exercise, will yield no benefit, not because the past is gone (it never really is, we will discuss the changeable nature of the past shortly), but because since they didn't happen, they didn't sprout their own tree of possibilities, a tree whose ramifications are too many to compare even in its first branching, not to mention in the endless number of branches after that.

The reason you shouldn't dwell on what could have been is because you can not know it, it is as simple as that.

Let's assume for a moment that at some point in time an all powerful entity, one who theoretically has this capacity, allows you to see several ways in which your life could unfold, and based on that knowledge you develop a plan you think would yield the best life for you.

There is absolutely no reason for you to believe that you will get the outcome you are hoping for, because every second brings another choice. You make any change, even a minor one, the most insignificant ever, and it throws you on a different branch, and there goes your tree, never to be seen again. I'm just trying to point out the futility of this tight-fisted grasp on life planning. While life is subject to your free will in the present time, its overall path is entirely out of your control. I didn't even bring up the influences other people's wills have on your choices, your interactions with these people have impact, like balls hitting each other and altering each other's trajectory.

Also, there is a self-reinforcing loop between the present, past and future through which we constantly reshape our memory and the meaning of events as we gain new knowledge, and that new perspective alters your reactions in the present and your selections for the future.

The choice you make today, based on your experience, may be radically different from the choice you would make the next morning, after an outcome blatantly invalidated it.

You should never be sure of anything, we never have enough data to know something in the absolute.

There is a silver lining: while we cannot control the actual path, we have some bearing on the general direction of events, although a lot less than strong-willed people think.

We can consistently compare and eliminate the branches that look like they're altering the course, even though that doesn't come with any guarantees.

This is a paltry tool to rely on when you want to fix something as complicated as life, but it's all we've got.

So where does this leave us? Do we just quit making plans altogether and live by the second? There are schools of thought that advise doing precisely that, but not all of us are so inclined. Living without a plan is anathema to the rational mind, which is better off perpetually disappointed than stark raving mad.

The goal of these lessons is not to offer a solution to reign control over your life, which, as follows from the writing above, is an impossibility, but to make you aware of a few of the moving parts involved in its shaping, so its unlikely circumstances do not bewilder you constantly.

Whenever something makes no sense in the context of your personal experience, look to the next system up, the bigger picture, as people like to call it, for it might make sense in there.

What you also have to remember is that this event was decided before you had the chance to weigh on your options.

By the time you are aware of it happening, reality had already eliminated all alternatives safe one. You can't guess, for instance, what ears of wheat would have made it to harvest if there was no hail. Maybe the absence of hail would have brought a terrible storm later on, so devastating that none of the wheat could withstand it. Maybe a gentle wind blew away the air of different temperatures and all the wheat made it, but in the process it spread too much and killed off the barley.

Maybe your own actions to safeguard the harvest end up in doing it more harm than good. There are wise people who warn that every time you try to fix a large system, you end up breaking an even larger one, but that can't be the case, because otherwise we'd still be living in caves, afraid of fire. Besides, breaking and fixing are relative concepts.

I'll answer this one question before we go to break. What is the point of knowing you can't take anything for granted?

Not all teaching is geared towards finding solutions to problems. Some of it meant to paint a picture of the way things are.

[It has occurred to the research team that this tome might have been meant as a literary exercise rather than a teaching tool for some obscure discipline, and frankly we are all at our wit's end about what direction to take from here.

Evidently the category the work belongs to drastically changes our approach and branches out into many important areas, starting with which department to approach for grants for ongoing research and ending with what to tell people it is we actually do.

There have been moments when the team considered abandoning this project, which seems to raise ten new problems for each one it is attempting to solve.

Unfortunately, our perspective on life has evolved past the point where this would be a gratifying choice.]

How do you make sure not to break things while trying to fix them?

Tiny changes in tiny increments with plenty of time in between to test the consequences. That requires a much longer lifespan than the one we are currently enjoying, maybe that should be a goal worth striving towards.

Reality intervenes frequently to fight attempts at improving it, attempts which you deem worthy and blameless, and it starts chain reactions that go through very unlikely stations until they get the things you are trying to change back to what it perceives as balance.

Reality is intent on doing this again and again until it sends your efforts back to start in ways that may look very unnatural to you.

You would like some examples?

The way cultivated land reverts to its natural state when left unattended, the regular upheaval of social discontent and the eventual decline of civilizations, the swift crumbling of abandoned structures, the shape-shifting perfidy of disease.

Why do I compare the workings of reality to the body of a living entity?

High-minded thinkers have spent a lot of time trying to find the order, the simplicity inside reality, inside its systems which look random, but which work too well not to be governed by rules. The problem lies in the kind of simplicity we have been searching for. Life is not simple like a perfect circle, life is simple like a handful of beans. All the components are more or less the same, and yet no two are identical. Variations on a theme, remember?

Reality processes matter and events in the same way we process food, it draws energy from some, it gives away energy to others, and it fashions different things for itself out of the same fabric, an intricate tapestry woven in its entirety from a few types of threads.

Your body is made of muscles and bones and organs and sinews, which look nothing alike, but they are all the same substance, the substance that makes you.

Reality is the same way, it can't produce things that are not of itself.

Can I elaborate on what that means?

Energy, matter, time, thought, being, they are all of reality and they all share its essence. That is what makes it possible for them to interact with each other and create new structures. Energy and time create motion, matter and time yield growth and decay, time and thought prompt evolution, and so on.

What comes out of energy and matter? Everything there is.

You have asked why I said being and not life, what is the difference. Life is that which animates the things we normally think about when we hear the term: humans, plants, animals. Being is that which animates everything: the power in magnets, the pure sound of crystal, the movements of the wind, the shining of stars, the vibration in the string of a violin. Being is that which animates.

Are we too small to affect any changes at all? We may be, but if we take ourselves out of this equation, who'd be left in it to judge us unworthy? I hope you appreciate the irony.

What is the advantage of using a system of trial and error and an unreasonable number of iterations instead of larger organizing principles?

First, the larger organizing principles are there, they are few and they are simple. When you have to put together a mosaic, what would get the job done faster, going through the random pile of pieces until you find the one that matches your design or trying to create a theory for sorting pieces which would reveal to you the piece you need for each instance? Especially if you are very fast and have plenty of time.

Is reality alive? We have a narrow and biased definition of this term, so I hesitate to use it. What do you call something that runs on its own power, can organize, evolve, grow and heal its own essence, responds when prompted and can experience death, and which does all of the above with no guidance from outside of itself?

###  SHIFT

A slight change in position, direction, or tendency.

Let's talk about a quality of existence which escapes the inattentive eye: its movements are not smooth, it advances in jerks and jumps, in sudden shifts, going from one state to another without passing through the stations in between.

This works for gaining understanding and knowledge as well as it does for freezing a pond. Reality doesn't advance along threads, it takes the stairs.

It stays in a state for a while, no matter how much effort goes into moving it forward, and then it jumps, suddenly and for no particular reason, to the next state, which is not only a change in quality but also different in nature, so different sometimes that we can't even recognize it as the next logical step in a progression.

It is often easier to recognize the shifts.

They are sudden events, out of the blue, but even when we expect them, they still take us by surprise, because we can't figure out their timing or the fashion in which they will present themselves to us. We understand them in retrospect, clear as day, but when they move life to a new state we can't recognize it, for the simple reason we haven't seen it before.

These shifts are sudden, but subtle, like rip currents at sea, which you only acknowledge after you've been caught in them.

Let's run through an example.

Somebody figures out how to fashion a boat which other people perfect and use it to venture out to sea.

First, they reach the island in the distance, which they could always see but never explore, and then, with emboldened curiosity, they venture into waters unknown, and find more islands, and shores, and cultures, and then, one day, they venture out into the ocean, just to find out what is out there, and discover a whole other continent.

This was a series of small steps in the same direction, not much different from each other, a perfecting of a process, but what people discovered during this process changed humanity's picture of reality forever, in ways that can't be undone.

You can't undiscover a continent, once you've seen it.

You can't unknow a natural law once it made it to your understanding.

The discovery is a sudden, solitary event, but its preparation was an endless series of efforts, all the same and which seemed to yield nothing.

Once humanity advances to a level of progress, it never goes back to the previous one, even in the face of tragedy and devastation.

The level of progress needs to match up to the level of knowledge, like water in communicating vessels. You can't continue holding a lesser state once you've learned the truth.

There are many such moments through our lives, and we don't pay attention to them: the moment we could read the meaning of those little symbols on a page instead of seeing them as pretty scribbles, the moment we stepped into adulthood, the moment we recognized a life-changing event.

These are all sudden shifts, not smooth progressions, even in the wake of years or decades of preparation.

The ability to read is a sudden gain in knowledge, and once we possess it, we can't go back to the state in which we were before. If we could remember the earliest times in our lives, we would acknowledge that the same goes for our ability to walk, recognize our mothers, grasp and reach for objects, understand language.

It is the same for the advancement of science, whose concepts usually come in breakthroughs and which, once accepted, change the way we relate to our existence forever.

It is the same for the slight changes in the attributes of a plant or an animal, which also happen suddenly and with no explanation, and which are also irreversible, sometimes to the point where they give birth to different species.

It is the same for changes in the moral code of a community, in the beliefs of what we deem possible, in the understanding of matter.

How do these shifts happen? Sometimes I think they are like throwing darts at a wall so many times that one of them is bound to hit the target eventually, purely by accident. It is also possible that when the facts in front of our eyes blatantly contradict the accepted knowledge we have no choice but to stretch our minds to reach a better level of understanding so that our personal experience fits into a coherent model of reality again.

For instance, let's go outside and look at this gemstone in the sunshine. Now come back inside and look at it again, in candlelight. Is this a magical gem that looks like an emerald by day, but turns into a ruby by night? After your mind runs in circles around the possibility that this is not one gemstone, but two, and I'm trying to trick you, or that the stone may be enchanted somehow, you will have to consider the possibility that there are gemstones that change color and try to find out why.

You can't deny the existence of such a gem once you saw it, as did other people, which excludes the possibility you may have imagined things.

You will want badly for this to be just an illusion, the result of a delicate mental state, and explain it away so you can hold on to your reality, which says that all gemstones display only one color, but if that stone consistently changes hues under the same circumstances, you won't be able to deny the fact that your belief was wrong.

I will spare you the mental torment and explain that this is a color changing stone. Its crystals have formed around metal dust, which sifts the light that goes through it, unravels it into rainbows and erases strands of it; it will erase different colors depending on the light's quality. By the way, light is not all the same, a fact very obvious to your perception, but which your scientific mind will refuse to accept, because it muddles the clear understanding you think you have about light. This explanation is much worse than the possibility you're going crazy, or that the stone is some magical object with unusual powers, but you will have to accept it anyway, because it is the truth. From this moment on, everything you thought you knew about gemstones or light is gone.

I showed you something you did not know existed, and it turned your entire world upside down. The problem is not that your theory was wrong, but that it works only in a particular case which involves a much smaller set of objects. Reality is a very big place.

[According to our knowledge alexandrite was first discovered in the Ural Mountains around 1830, over three hundred years after the writing of this manuscript.

We have considered the possibility he is talking about a different color changing gemstone, although the description "emerald by day, ruby by night" is too specific to be random.]

Questions?

Are there any shifts that involve the perception of time?

Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to answer that question, not because I want to keep it a secret, but because it involves too many expansions to the current theories that model your world for the answer to be in any way useful to you.

I guess a short answer to this question would be yes in my version of reality and no in yours.

Where did I get the gemstone? It's a gift from a friend, a fellow explorer.

Can I give you examples of how reality works in jerks and jumps?

Consider your experience of time. You always live in the present, but a second ago the present was different from what it is right now. You don't perceive these two instances, which both have been the present, as continuously flowing into each other. Your present is always a still point, a delineation of no dimension between the past and the future. No matter how finely you chop time to anchor yourself into the present moment, you will always feel these points, that have all been your present at some point, as a discrete collection, not as a continuous transition. From any moment to the next you jump, you don't slide.

You can also think of this in terms of your body. The body you have now differs completely from the one you had when you were four, and will differ completely from the one you will have fifty years from now. I intentionally spread out the gap between these frames of your life to emphasize the difference, so that if you could see all three versions of yourself together you would agree that they are different, but this is a process that happens every moment. Parts of you get discarded and replaced with new, and every time this happens, your body changes to a different one. How big or small that difference is is just a matter of degree. You do not have the same body now you had a second ago. It didn't smoothly morph into the one you are in right now, the two differ by a number of components you can count.

Can we discuss the variable nature of time and how it works within this concept?

Think about an event from your past, one you remember well, to the last detail. That event covered a few hours, but now when you bring it back to your mind you can see it all in an instant. It is the same information; you have access to all the details, but they are all there for you simultaneously, in the present. I am asking you, which is the real time span this event requires, since in your mind, in the present, this event and the memory of it are the same information. Why does one take several hours and the other only a moment? Because the first had to be experienced in its grainy form, where it moved sequentially from one instance to the next, whereas in the other it is a true continuum, where all the components that made up the event coalesced into a single form.

Is reality not granular at the level of thought then?

If it is, it's a lot less so. For instance, we can carry on two thought processes independent of each other at the same time. We can still understand the question someone asks of us, or have the memory of an event, or acknowledge that we are hungry, even as we are concentrating on your work, and we don't need several hours to revisit an event that lasted several hours.

In the world of matter we can't be both here and somewhere else at the same time.

Even the way the memory presents to our consciousness is of a different essence, one that lacks the sequential processes we can't avoid when dealing with matter.

This essence doesn't differentiate between things, emotions and reasoning, it combines words, images and analysis in what I can only call diagrams of thought, reduced to their pure meaning and stripped of anything that would slow them down or burden them unnecessarily.

This is another thing you can't do with reality - eliminate all the components that are not useful to your task at a particular moment. Reality is all there whether or not you need it to be.

Is thought a superior form of existence then?

Superior to what? It is a different form of organizing information that already exists. Even in dreams and fantasies you can't conjure up things from outside your sphere of awareness. All that you can think of already exists somewhere in space and in time.

[Is he trying to say that thinking itself is just a map, a scaled replica of external information that already exists?

That all we are doing is to reflect, to resonate with a much larger library of data in the same way a tuner induces its sound into a tube when placed at the correct distance?

Is he trying to say that thought can't be superior to other forms of reality because it is only mirroring those forms?

That all this intelligent awareness we pride ourselves on is no more sophisticated than the vibration inside a crystal glass?]

Why jumps?

Everything you see is made of atoms.

Matter is a collection of tiny things, hanging on to each other, and its essence is grainy, even in its liquid or gaseous form.

If you can picture the fact that the world is made of tiny balls stacked on top of each other, you can only move a ball at precise distances, which are proportional with the distance between the centers of the balls. You can't place a ball at half that distance, or one and two-thirds, only in full increments.

I said that knowledge shifts but consciousness is a continuum. This seems to be a contradiction.

Imagine a curve which represents your thought, that breaks at some point and continues at a higher level. Between the two pieces there is a gap and inside that gap there is nothing. It isn't even 'nothing' in the context of your particular curve, it is nothing in a broad sense. You skipped a space, as if you suddenly found yourself inside the house without having to walk through the door.

Why do I say that the states of this step ladder progression are different in nature?

Let's take the example I gave you earlier, with the color changing gemstone. It changed your map of reality, did it not? Now your reality has light that comes in different flavors, which unravel like poorly spun thread and whose loose strands you can delete with a metal dust eraser. I will say that the nature of this reality is very different from the nature it had before that. Before that light was made of one essence, which was all white and stayed in one piece. It would go through transparent gems so you could notice their color, because that was the role of light, to illuminate things so you could see their colors.

I haven't even brought up your role in this whole spectacle, in which you are so much more than an uninvolved observer, but I think we chopped reality fine enough already.

###  REVELATION

The divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something unexplainable relating to human existence or the world.

The expectation to understand everything, while worthy, is unreasonable. Some things can't be counted in the time frame of existence, some knowledge is so alien to our mind we can't put it in a structure of understanding.

Don't shun such knowledge and such things. It is pure vanity to believe we have a grasp on reality just for understanding a few of its laws.

Think about it.

We can only understand the things close to our scale, everything that is significantly larger or smaller is outside our grasp.

We can only see things that get revealed by the light, everything that is finer than the top if its range or coarser than its bottom is invisible to us.

If I were to move so fast that, as you blink, I shifted my position from this side of you to the other, your mind could not find a reasonable explanation, and would think me magical.

Faraway things may look real to us, when in fact they are just mirages of light.

You say that the mirage phenomenon is not foreign to our understanding, and that we all heard about the strange tricks eyes play on weary travelers when they're lost in the desert, thirsty and exhausted.

I'm not talking about extreme situations, I'm talking about things we take for granted every day.

If we were to model reality on the things our eyes tell us, we'd all know that every road that goes into the distance narrows down to a single point, that the walkable earth ends at an edge, that the sun is a fiery ball, the size of our heads, which pops up from under the earth in the morning and falls behind that edge I mentioned earlier at night, that, at the approach of winter all the trees die, that water has a color, which is blue, or green, and that if birds can fly nothing should stop us from doing the same.

We don't think of the reflection we see in the mirror as a real person, but we do that with the reflections of stars, because their mirror is very far away and made of an essence we can't understand.

That is the paradox of trying to understand infinity: although you can grasp the concept in the abstract, it eludes scientific tools, categories and unifying theories, because, by its very definition, no matter how many things you understand about it, you can always add one more.

Those things that defy reason, we usually tuck them away, label them as coincidences, lapses in attention, primitive thinking, but they are there, consistently, and the more you try to make them fit neatly into their boxes, the weirder and the more insistent they become.

Because our rational mind always dismisses these things, you won't find them explained in scientific tomes, we immortalize their mysterious occurrences in myths and folk stories, in poetry and old traditions, in art. They are the revelatory gift existence doles upon us small creatures way before we are old enough to understand it. Reality lets us know that things are a certain way. We can't explain it, we don't have the tools to verify it, we can't bring it up as an argument in a discussion and expect to be taken seriously, but we know. Is this knowledge useful to us in our daily lives? Yes, we use it quietly all the time.

I know what you will say, that the things we describe as revelations are just an unconscious cumulation of observations that finally structure their common traits into a rational thought.

That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about just knowing things we don't have the capacity, the instruments or the time to know, not based on scientific precepts.

How did the first person know a certain plant eases a fever, or helps heal a wound faster? How did people intuit that a bunch of tiny stones cut at an angle and stacked to form a semi-circle could hold more weight than a heavy stone lintel? How did people sense the needed ingredients and the series of processes that would turn iron ore into strong, flexible steel? Why would somebody attempt heating and cooling metal really fast in the hope that would increase its strength?

We take all the advances of humankind for granted.

They are part of the arsenal of science now, and we act as if they were all happy accidents, when any rational analysis would eliminate that circumstance for being too unlikely to have happened.

Legend has it that a Chinese empress, forty-five hundred years ago, was having tea in her garden, and a cocoon fell in it and started to unravel into delicate silk fibers.

Maybe Athena visited her, before she settled down in Greece to teach the women there how to make pottery, baskets and woven fabrics.

Apparently one of her gifts was to inspire new technologies.

She later on traveled to Rome to give people the formula for underwater concrete and color changing glass and then headed to Bohemia to whisper in the glassmakers' ears "add lead oxide".

She guided the hands of ancient metal workers as they devised techniques for metal coating still unparalleled to this day, taught sailors how to navigate by the stars and make lodestone compasses and showed the people of Babylon how to build a clock that runs on shadows.

[We assume that the color changing glass the master is referring to is the Lycurgus Cup, a fourth century Roman artifact whose dichroic effect, which renders the cup green when lit from the front, and rose when lit from behind, is thought to have been achieved by accidental contamination of the mix with gold and silver nanoparticles dispersed in colloidal form throughout the glass.]

Please allow me a slightly more detailed description of the techniques used in the making of steel and I will leave the chance and coincidence explanation up to you.

People mint a special rock, called iron ore, from the ground, mix it with two other special rocks, limestone and coal, and pour it into a fiery furnace. In the top part of the furnace, the burning of the coal changes the nature of that first special rock, separating it into iron and air.

Meanwhile, in the bottom half, the second special rock, the limestone, traps the impurities and the ashes, turns into slag, and floats on top of the pure metal, which is heavier.

The furnace has a tap at the bottom, through which the molten metal flows out into heavy clay molds. After that, it is mixed with more coal and other metals, allowed to harden, and flattened with a hammer.

It is then reheated until it glows, folded, flattened with a hammer and dipped in cold water, a process repeated several times, and then it is finally heated and cooled again to different temperatures to make it strong but supple.

We are not comfortable with the thought of inexplicable bouts of inspiration visiting people, so we attribute the advancement of civilization to an even less explicable string of good luck.

Maybe we should give muses their due, at least in a metaphoric sense if nothing else.

I am not trying to say that these incredible coincidences result from divine mercy doled upon the chosen to better humankind.

I am just allowing for the possibility that humans have more than one way to ratchet up knowledge, and that this second way of thinking, which differs greatly from reason, works in concert with the latter and makes it possible for our species to evolve over thousands of years instead of hundreds of thousands.

What is revealed truth? A sense, maybe. The sense that allows us to perceive the intricate workings of being in ways we can't explain, because the explanation would have to fall back upon itself. It would be like trying to explain hearing. Could you describe hearing to an intelligent species that doesn't have this sense?

Am I trying to say that we can hear the principles of chemistry, for instance, as displayed in our world?

If you want to put it that way. We pull strings from the fabric of existence whenever we notice them just to see where they would lead us, and often we stumble upon interesting and useful things on the way. This is no more of an accident than getting startled by a noise, or feeling happy at the sight of a loved one. We have this way of relating to the world woven into our being, just like we have all the other abilities we take for granted - our senses, our reasoning, our emotions, our capacity to connect.

[The team commented, tongue in cheek, that maybe this extra sense the master is talking about explains our obsession with trying to unravel the knotted skein of divergent ideas that is this manuscript.]

You are asking me if I exclude the possibility that this revealed knowledge was directly inspired by the divine. Not at all. I don't know enough about what constitutes divine nature to make that assertion. I don't know what direct communication with it would mean. I don't know if our structures of understanding can relate to it in ways we can describe. It is possible that our very existence is nothing more than a way of communing with the divine, our way of playing in its giant sandbox of matter and thought.

Does that open the door for hacks and charlatans to lay their hands on reason and manipulate it for their own interests? Who is to say which revelation is valid and which is made up self-serving nonsense?

I am a utilitarian in that respect. If something proves useful, I welcome it; if it doesn't, I discard it.

What if I'm wrong about this and everything is just a series of random coincidences and happy accidents?

Then we have to congratulate ourselves: our species is the luckiest and most opportunistic group of beings in the universe.

Can I elaborate on the limitations of human perception?

We can't try to understand things we don't know exist, and we can't know that those things exist if we don't have the tools to perceive them, or if the range of those tools is so gross it doesn't pick up any of their relevant details.

There is also the problem of seeing things wrong. Our senses and reasoning abilities have evolved to simplify and relate events and perceptions to each other, so we can access them fast and use them in context. We complete partly hidden objects, we assume repetitive actions; we ignore extraneous detail; we fall back on what we already know to infer solutions to new problems. Reality doesn't really work that way.

Imagine that you live in a projection of reality, and in it, there is something that looks like a circle.

That circle can represent many things: a sphere, a flat disk, a cylinder, a weird and twisted shape whose projection falls on a circle, a random set of points, unrelated to each other, whose only connection is that when they cast their shadow on your world, their projections fall on the circle too.

You can't make any assumption about what that shape is just from what your senses tell you. A partly hidden shape can have the entire hidden portion missing and the way something looks, so similar to what you already know, may be of no use to you at all. You open a box and see what looks like a scrumptious cake, but when you try to cut a slice from it it falls apart and flows through your fingers like mist. You are conflicted, because you need things to follow the rules, but that doesn't mean there is something wrong with the cake look alike. You made the assumption it was a cake, and that's what was wrong. Not an easy thing to live with, for sure.

Why is that?

Because if the thing that looks like cake was something entirely different, it makes you question everything you are sure about, and reality becomes a very scary place.

People are much happier with false knowledge they are certain of than with the realization that everything they thought about reality is now in question.

We feel our reality, like the giant sea anemones sense the shifts in currents. We're stuck in our spot, in our understanding of the world, and find some comfort in the fact that it looks unchanging.

Above and beyond many things happen. Ships pass on the surface of the ocean, schools of fish move around the bend, rip currents run mere feet away, but it isn't important to the sea anemone, as long as none of these things touch it.

It can live its whole life without the experience of, let's say, a cosmetic palette, accidentally dropped into the water at just the right moment, falling into its lap.

How would a sea anemone relate to the reality of the palette, if that happened?

It would assume it was a strange mollusk, an information as misleading as it is useless, but which would allow it to continue living in a familiar world, where every piece has a dedicated sorting box, and where the weird shell is incidental, anyway.

Am I suggesting we are better off with false information about the things that don't affect our lives? Unfortunately for us we're not sea anemones.
Lesson Six - Always and Forever

###  RAPTURE

A state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.iii

I will describe a personal experience for you, because it is the best way I can think of to illustrate the concept we're about to discuss.

I went out into nature just before dawn, during that ghostly hour that puts a chill through one's bones no matter what the season. It is unfamiliar, that hour, a time when we're usually asleep, and that made me uncomfortable to be out, among the shadows and the creatures of the night. There was something different about that early morning, a strange stillness, like all existence had come to a stop - no sounds in the branches, no gusts of wind, no calls.

I couldn't feel the air against my skin, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. The light switched gradually from violet to gray, enough that I could distinguish the things around me, and be astonished even more by their strange stillness.

I sat on the ground, and I couldn't feel the coldness of the earth beneath me, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. It didn't feel like one usually expects, and you know exactly what I mean if you ever had to sleep on the ground.

In that strange frozen tableau there was only one thing in motion: the sky. I sat on the ground and watched the clouds pass quickly over my head, strangely fast compared to the stillness of the air around me. The light got gradually brighter, turning from gray to lavender and rose, but it was just a backdrop for the real action, an unrelated detail, yielding the center stage to the fascinating sweep of the clouds across the sky in a swift sequence that stirred no motion in the air close to the ground.

It would be difficult to describe this perception, but in that moment air was the only thing in reality that felt alive.

I was still, just like everything around me, and I watched this relentless translation of the sky over my head, at constant speed, in the absence of any other signal to distract the senses: no sounds, no sensations against my skin, no scents.

I lost track of my being altogether after a while, and my only awakened sense, the sight, traveled away with the clouds, fully caught in their sweep across the sky, it connected to them; it reflected them; it was them. I had this eerie feeling I was that air, moving very fast across the sky, making no sound, stirring no breeze in the world below. Just me, traveling fast with the air, sharing its nature, oblivious to time, free of my body. There was no thinking to be done in that state, no worries, no plans, no questioning of purpose. In this strange state I experienced what it felt like to just be, and not even to be me, but to be air.

Why am I describing this? To illustrate a state of mind called rapture.

When people hear this term, they immediately think pleasure or bliss, but it is nothing of the kind, it's something beyond human emotion, something different altogether and impossible to explain.

The state of rapture is very rare and transforms a person dramatically, because it opens the door to a whole other way to experience reality, one for which we don't have words, emotions or systems of reference.

It allows one to touch a primal level of being, one which underlies the things we see and which is the reason for how their details came to be, the guiding equation behind a complicated curve.

Did this allow me a superior understanding of reality, one that revealed some precious hidden knowledge? Absolutely not! I can't even explain it. I don't even know what it is, a thought, an experience, an emotion, it is probably none of the above, because it is from outside, somehow, and please don't ask me from outside of what. This is the best way I can describe it with the information and rational processes available to me.

You may say that something that cannot be described, shared, or used is not worth bringing up in a rational discussion. We are in this world for a very short time, compared to the age of the universe that surrounds us, so what would be the point of walking through it with a finite set of rules, never straying from the beaten path and ignoring everything that doesn't fit with the picture we were handed? Whatever this experience was, it informed my life, it shaped its course and I won't deny myself it.

There is one thing people forget in the course of their busy lives. There is no objective reality, only our personal experience of it. We have no way of verifying that when we are looking at a tree, for instance, the way all of us see that tree is exactly the same.

Also, what we see is a flat picture of the tree, not the real thing, alive with the movement of sap, with its growth processes, and with an endless series of transformations that take place every second and which we simplify out of the representation of it.

Its treeness always eludes us.

If everything we think we know is a personal interpretation of a set of rules that keeps shifting as we advance in wisdom, what makes a type of experience, say the experience of understanding a mathematical concept, valuable, and another type of experience, say sharing in the wholeness of being, worthless?

I think that if reality condescends to give you a gift, you should graciously accept it.

[The manuscript darkens here, so much that it becomes unreadable.

Judging by the similarities between the discoloration of this page and that of the one we found at the beginning of the document we are fairly certain that the two pages were together at the time the water damage occurred.

As with the other page, we have tried every method to slow down the darkening of the paper, from chemical processes to ultraviolet light filters, to no avail.

Unlike the other one, the damaged portion of this document was already too dark to read by the time we found the manuscript and the information contained inside it is irretrievable.

This page is sealed with a rose, just like all the others, and the water stain divides it precisely in half. The bottom portion is dark. There is a marking above it, on the right side, close to the edge of the paper, a marking we haven't been able to identify, which looks like a derivative symbol lying on its back.

The page is evidently more worn than the others; it looks like it has been handled extensively.

We can't discount the possibility that the damaged portion was chemically triggered to darken, to protect the secrecy of the information it contained in case of an unauthorized attempt to obtain it.

On the other side of the document, at the same level with the rose seal, there is a line drawing of a blue lotus flower, the way we usually see it in Egyptian hieroglyphics, from the side and half opened, dangling at the top of a winding stem.]

You asked me what I think about instances of rapture as described in religious literature. I have not experienced any of them myself, but I learned not to dismiss information by default. I would have to learn a lot more about the specifics of those cases to form an opinion.

Is it possible that some of these encounters are accompanied by a state of bliss? Anything is possible. There is a state of heightened emotion associated with these moments when reality reveals itself to one, a state of awe and grace. It makes one feel humble and small, at a loss for words, but privileged to have been granted the awareness of it. I don't doubt that some people perceive this state as bliss.

Depending on somebody's life and beliefs these incidents that have no precedent can associate themselves with many expectations \- divine judgment, being taken to other realms, being bathed in infinite love, an expansion of one's consciousness, waking up.

It is easier to fall back on a structure of understanding you already have than to build one from scratch on the spot.

Maybe it is a religious experience, I know no better than anybody else who has been through it. If these are encounters with the divine, I would have no references to qualify them as such. I prefer not to define them, just describe them to the degree to which that is possible.

Can these occurrences be unpleasant? Yes.

Can I elaborate on this? I hesitate to go into details, things like these stick in one's mind and pop out at the most inconvenient moments, when they do more harm than good, but since you asked, yes, some people have had very unpleasant experiences. I'm sure apocalyptic visions are not enjoyable. Living through one's final judgment isn't comforting either.

The mind is stubborn and works in mysterious ways.

It draws upon what comes closest to an event unlike anything it ever encountered in an effort to make its experience stand on reason again, and to this end even unspeakable tragedy is preferable to the abyss of the unknown.

We can't form concepts outside a context.

How does a moment like this inform one's life?

It's a shifting of perspective, more than anything else. You see exactly the same things, but you don't see them in the same way you used to anymore. Life gets resifted through a finer sieve that changes its granularity.

Can I give you an example for that?

An explanation first.

The mind doesn't differentiate between an instance it derived from the real world and an instance it built and experienced inside itself.

To it, both are just as real. You can't dismiss the happenings in someone's mind, or their influence on the person's perspective on life. If I told you that you love or hate a person, it would not influence the real emotion you have towards that person. I can't convince you that you hate that person any more than you can convince me, in the abstract, that you love them. We compromise and agree to take a person at their word in matters of the heart.

These states outside the norm are just as much matters of the heart as emotions. If somebody tells you they had an insight into the divine, and you don't believe that such a thing is possible, how would any of you convince the other to adopt their point of view?

And now the example. People who believe they glimpsed a higher dimension are never the same after that. They revisit their past and try to come to terms with it. They change their priorities. They take more chances. Their lives transform, based on this experience, which is as powerful as love. How this experience came about, and whether it had some basis in reality or it was just a figment of their overheated minds is as irrelevant as the circumstances that induced one to fall in love.

The feeling itself is no less real.

Is it possible that people fake these experiences just to become more interesting? Sure. Some.

But let me ask you something: who changes their entire life based on a false claim to get attention? Whatever these experiences may be, they do feel real.

Can I describe how my encounter with air changed me?

Do you remember how I said that I felt uncomfortable walking outside before dawn, like I was an intruder, in danger, and out of my element? I never felt like that again after that. Now, whenever I am in nature, I am at home, welcomed, in a place that is a lot more like me than it is different from me. There are no menacing shadows and creatures of the night, there are only creatures, just like me, and they cast shadows, just like me, and they're neither good nor bad, just like me. The world is like me. That's what I learned from that experience.

Am I going to feel what it is like to be air ever again? I don't know, but that is not important. I am already at home in reality. It is hard to explain the deep sense of security one derives from a feeling like that.

A lot of the hardship of living draws strength from the fact that people feel like they don't belong, they're unsure of their footing, ungrounded. Imagine that instead of that you get the experience of having lived in a town all your life, that you know its every street and shop, all the people who live there, and that you're friends with most. That's how I feel about existence.

[After our last attempt to transfer the manuscript to the Institute failed, we decided that the advantages of having it closer to home did not justify the level of effort required to move this artifact.

Maybe it is for the best.

The paper has acclimated to the levels of temperature and humidity in the library and will probably fare better if those conditions don't change.

In a separate letter we made a request to expand the scope of our research grant to include the history and the symbolism of the rose seal. We believe this artifact is a lot older than the manuscript itself, going back all the way to ancient Egypt. We are excited to take on this new challenge, which we accidentally stumbled upon. Its origins may shed light on some of the strange drawings found in the document which occasionally feel out of place in its historical period.

If the rose seal is Egyptian, this brings up questions about how it came to be in the master's possession and why it seems to be so important to him, almost like his personal crest. We can't help but feel that the writing in the damaged portion of the document might have been able to shed some light on that, but now we will never know. The problem with history is that one only gets to draw conclusions about its situations and events based on the artifacts that survived it. We still don't know if the master was teaching a lecture for one, the pupil whose handwriting we have become so accustomed to, or for an entire class. We don't know where the rest of the document is hidden. We don't know why of all places the manuscript portion we do have found its home here. An incomplete puzzle at best.]

###  CONSTANT

A number expressing a relation or property which remains the same in all circumstances, or for the same substance under the same conditions.

The universe is a living contradiction, and I stopped trying to reconcile its paradoxes a long time ago, so I will state this knowing it doesn't yield to logic.

Existence is constantly in motion, endlessly transforming and renewing itself, and yet, throughout its churning essence there are fixed points, constants, fundamental invariants.

They are not fixed in the sense we normally understand that word, so things appear to us to be changing, even though in a larger sense they are not. There is a fine structure of constants underlying existence, a structure that governs it discretely and throughout.

For example, we can see every system in creation at a large scale, where we can measure its energy and its movement, and at a small scale, where we can define its essence.

These two values, the measure of its energy and the measure of its substance, are always in the same proportion, no matter what system you are contemplating.

This is not something reality makes obvious to us, from our standpoint all we see is matter, constantly decaying, recombining, bouncing into other instances of itself.

We can't see the law behind its apparent chaos, the law that says that the energy of a system and its temperature are always relating to each other in the same way.

Constants like that are few, but together they are enough to define our reality, and if we were to alter even one, whatever we know of it would cease to exist. No need to worry, though, this is impossible.

Why? Everything, including yourself, is made of matter organized according to a blueprint, a set of instructions, if you will, which tell your body that it is flesh, but they tell this coin that it is metal, instructions buried and repeated in the essence of the tiniest pieces the two of you comprise of. You can't take the metalness out of this coin any more than you can turn yourself to stone. It doesn't matter how thin you slice a lodestone, it will still attract metal. It is its set of instructions, buried inside its essence, that makes it what it is. Without it it wouldn't be a lodestone at all, it would be something else entirely.

The same goes for existence itself.

Existence hides from us the things we are not ready to grasp. It reveals itself gradually and we can only access its secrets at the level of understanding we have already reached. I am not speaking metaphorically here, these things we aren't yet ready to understand can be right in front of our faces, we wade through them, oblivious, all the time.

For instance, if I covered your ears so you can't hear a thing and I beat a drum behind you, you would feel its vibration in your stomach, and because you associated it with the sound of the drum at one point, you would know what it is. What if you couldn't feel those vibrations at all? How would you even know they existed? Like the sea anemone, there could be a whole rip current ten feet away from you and you wouldn't be aware of its presence.

These constants, these invariants of reality are part of the set of instructions that make it what it is, without them it wouldn't be our reality at all, but some other form of organization, so different from our own and so inhospitable that nothing you know could exist in it.

We tend to associate constants with the world of matter, science likes to study things it can see and touch, things on which it can run experiments and verify hypotheses, but these constants exist in all the facets of reality, in energy and in thought as well as in the world of matter. Let me discuss a few of them.

Reality must be consistent within and among itself.

This is an energetic constant we can't test in our waking life, because it is impossible, but which our dreams make obvious, because dreaming is the state of mind where we suspend reason.

Different things occupying the same space, aberrations of scale, inanimate objects that speak, falling through solid matter.

And that brings us to the master constant: causality. Even when we don't understand how, we don't doubt that everything that happens is a logical consequence in a very large, very complicated game of cause and effect.

This is also a law we can only test in dreams and in other states of altered consciousness, when things happen for which you have no explanation.

The absence of causality wrecks damage the very foundations of being by severing its connections. It turns reality into a useless timepiece for which we have all the gears, but no idea how to put them together.

Sameness.

All there is in existence is put together in the same fashion.

That drum sound I mentioned does the same thing to your body as a rock to a pond, as an earthquake to a building, as light to a crystal, as heat to the air in the desert when it generates mirages. The same animating spirit that allows me to think allows clouds to spark lightning, and lodestones to point north, and little pieces of fluff to get stuck in your hair when the air is dry. It is for this reason we can share in the energy of a plant through nourishment, and it can share in the energy of the earth and of the sun. We're made of the same building blocks, despite belonging to very different organizing systems.

Thought has constants too. Everything and nothing don't change, regardless of their context. The principle of duality is a reality constant, where all things that are not everything or nothing have an opposite: good and evil, front and back, chaos and order, full and empty, big and small, true and false.

[We found the famous etching of the Circle of Knowledge in this document.

This drawing was so extensively publicized I hesitated to describe it in this research at first, out of fear of redundancy, but in the spirit of thoroughness I will provide it, anyway.

The drawing depicts the sun god surrounded by three dragons, whose heads and tails connect, forming a triangle.

Around this triangle, evenly displayed like the petals around a flower, are seven angels, holding hands.

The master conceived the drawing to use solids and voids equally in the rendition of the three forms, in a manner in which the angels, the dragons and the sun share each other's contours.

The main reason for this drawing's startling popularity is that it creates the same three dimensional optical illusion as the roses.

At first glance the dragons, rendered in dark purple ink, seem to fly above the rest of the group, but then they recede slowly into the paper while the angels, now in the foreground, lean in to watch the center of the drawing, the sun, whose wavy rays seem to vibrate.

The angels wear white robes and have very long hair, rendered in gold leaf. Braided locks of hair from all the angels join to form a highly ornate frame around the group; the hair is so finely braided that it is impossible to distinguish which tresses belong to which angel.

The image of the sun, which is relatively prominent when one first lays eyes on the manuscript, fades into the void when one focuses one's attention on the golden frame, and its representation turns from solid to void, thus becoming a space to inhabit instead of a central totem.]

Could you please allow for more space around the drawings? It is important for the overall appeal of the manuscript to maintain proper proportions between the content and the space. Illumination is an art, and so is calligraphy, don't forget that! We are conveying meaning, that is true, but we also want it to please the eye, so we are placing it in a beautiful container. Make sure the ink color matches, it needs to be the same purple.

What would happen if a constant got smaller, for instance? Which one? The one that connects energy and temperature?

If you were still here to observe it, you would probably need a lot more wood to heat a room, and it would take you a lot longer to do it.

Why can't everything and nothing be a pair?

Because they are not opposites of each other. Everything and nothing are a lot more alike than they are different.

Let's think of everything as a huge room. If that room exists, it belongs inside itself. Its opposite would have to belong inside itself too. Then you have a room that contains something from outside of itself.

Everything doesn't have an opposite. Nothing is not the opposite of everything. Nothing is not detracting. We have a concept of what nothing means, therefore it exists, and if it exists it belongs in the room.

Let's talk about nothing. No matter how rarefied existence is, you will still find bits and pieces of it, floating in the empty space around it, which is not nothing, it is empty space. Let's say you look deeper and deeper inside the smallest components of this empty space, until you find yourself unable to relate to whatever you find there. You are in a place that has no scale, no shape, no dimensions. You can't tell whether it is hot or cold, large or small, rare or dense, because you have no means to measure its temperature, size or density, and nothing to relate them to, even if you could. You can then make them be anything you want, decide randomly that this place is hot and large and dense or its exact opposite, and you'd be right either way.

There is no reason why everything couldn't be inside this space too. But if you have everything, then you can easily find your measuring stick, as well as many things to measure with it, and this space is no longer devoid of scale, dimension, time and shape, because it contains both matter and something to measure it with. It no longer has the characteristics of what you called nothing before.

Did I mention the contradictory nature of reality? You can run yourself in circles until you go mad, it will still do what it wills and not feel obligated to explain itself to you.

So much for everything and nothing.

If nothing exists only in concept why did I call it a constant of reality? Can you conceive of a reality without the nothing? What would that look like?

Every process meant to put things in balance would end up leaving something behind, a remainder, a little tail you wouldn't be able to shake and which would get in the way of things all the time. You could never solve an equation, balance a chemical formula, or bring motion to a stop.

Reality would look like a messy garment, made by a lazy tailor who didn't care enough to tidy up the loose threads.

What if it really looks that way?

Then we're all wasting our time here. Just do anything whatsoever whenever you like! Oh, wait! Time would have little tails and loose threads too, so you wouldn't be able to do that, not with any level of consistency.

But what if it really looks that way? What if this is one of those things reality cloaks from our sight because we're unable to understand it?

I don't know. See, this is the thing about science. It models the things we already understand. I can only present to you explanations for the things you know exist. One of those pesky side effects of the rule that says time must run in a straight line and in one direction. Were we past that point in our history where this ceased to be a well known fact, I could discuss it with you, but as of now, I can't.

If I can make an observation (take it as my opinion, nothing more), it will be that whatever you are sure you know will be proven wrong at some point. This gets easier to accept this once you know you should expect it.

###  CLARITY

The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible.

[Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the handwriting clearly indicate it. Even the rose seal looks tentative, as if a child had gotten permission to use it and felt overwhelmed by the responsibility and afraid of making a mistake.

This page is illuminated to a much greater degree than the others, a task made easier to accomplish due to the sparseness of the text, which is restricted to the center of the page. It looks like there have been temporary lines to demarcate a box for the content, maybe to help the young scribe maintain clean text edges; there are also lines to keep the writing straight, and the calligraphy clings to them with tormented intensity.

The experience of reading the content of this document presented in the handwriting of an eight or nine-year-old is surreal.

The more I advance into the manuscript, the more this question weighs on me: who was this person who wrote it down?

She was a woman as far as we can tell, but there are no traces of her passing through this world, outside the conversations included in this manuscript.

Judging by the information in this work alone she would surely have passed as highly educated during the sixteenth century, a time when most of the women and a good percentage of the men did not know how to read or write.

One would have expected to find some evidence of her scholarship in the writings of the time, or documentation of her life in any of the historical documents, but there isn't any.

We often feel like she never existed, that maybe she was just as much the master's creation as his drawings, or his concepts.]

Clarity is a subtle quality of matter and mind. It happens when the components of being align themselves in a way that allows knowledge to pass through.

Clarity is always simple.

A diamond is simple, love is simple, a perfect geometric shape is simple.

Clarity removes all doubt and all extraneous detail.

There are no shadows and no uncharted territories in clarity, and there is no potential either, everything is out into the light for all to see.

Whenever you strive for clarity, remember that nothing is clear but what already happened, what is already known, and that whenever you see it, it is the aftermath of a long-drawn struggle to remove inconsequential details and connect the pertinent ones in the simplest configuration that makes sense.

Honor this struggle, which is often the fruit of many years of hard work, sometimes life times. Many things that are perfectly clear to us now have been nothing of the sort for most of history. The goal is to see through the lump of coal and find the diamond, never expect the diamond to just reveal itself to you.

For instance, when you want to represent a real object on a flat surface, depth doesn't disappear, it gets concentrated into a single point, the point where all distant lines seem to vanish.

This classic rule of perspective which is so obvious to us now frustrated the generations before us for centuries, another blatant example of a truth that eludes you until you are ready to understand it.

You can't put clarity back in the box after the fact either; if there was a hierarchy for the things you can't unknow, those blessed with clarity would be right at the top.

Clarity comes in flashes, in sudden bursts of recognition, and it rarely needs additional explanations.

[There is something immediately noticeable about this manuscript: its format is very consistent, a strange quality for an artifact this old, especially one written over more than a decade.

The ink color is always the same, the page layout is always the same, and it keeps the lectures separate from each other.

If one considers that besides the fact that the work was left unbound, it stands to reason the intent was for the reader to reorganize these concepts, according to their own logic and priorities.

We even floated the possibility that the master didn't think of this work as complete and expected his pupils, and maybe even future contributors to continue it by adding their own concepts.

This would explain the peculiar choice of writing the whole text by hand, and only in one copy, when the invention and popularity of the printing press would have made it so much easier to print multiple copies for wide distribution.

In many respects the manuscript is closer to an incomplete work of art than to a piece of writing.]

Question: why did I say that clarity removes potential.

Think of a perfect gem. The reason there are so few ways in which you can cut it resides in the quality of the gem itself. You can only cut along the planes that form its structure, otherwise you destroy it. It is in the perfect organization of that structure that you find its beauty. That perfect organization doesn't allow for the unexpected, it is consistent in every detail. You can guess its behavior throughout based on knowing just a little corner.

Potential is a latent ability which can not thrive in perfection, there is nothing that the gem might do in the future that won't be exactly the same as what it does right now. It would be imperfect otherwise.

Why would you want something without the potential for change? Because some things are ideal models for the rest of reality.

A diamond is an ideal for crystalline structures, divine love is an ideal for love among people.

These ideal models are the dies for all the things which resemble them. They help us group same things into categories.

What did I mean when I said that components of being align themselves to allow knowledge to pass through?

Do you remember the arabesque window panels at Alhambra? They are there to shade the interiors from the extreme heat of the sun at noon. No matter where the sun is during the day, there will be a flourish in that complicated panel to block it, so only indirect light makes it through. Imagine for a second that the sun could shine at an angle perfectly perpendicular to the panel. Suddenly the panel can't block any sun rays at all, it's like it isn't there.

Knowledge becomes clear when all the things that block your understanding are rendered irrelevant.

Now picture having not one, but a series of these panels, which block sunshine at different angles. You could tilt them so that the angles line up and are perpendicular to the sun's rays, to let the light shine through all of them. That would be absolute knowledge. You can tilt some of them in such a way they let only some colors of the light shine through, but not others. You can combine them in such a way that even though the sun shines perpendicular to most of the panels none of its light will make it into the room.

What if you could isolate knowledge of a particular color in this way, if you'll allow me the metaphor, to avoid getting distracted by the rest of the rainbow? Knowledge so enhanced would boast many times its regular potency.

Sometimes clarity is so all-encompassing that it defeats the purpose of classifying an object as a part of a set, and instead it permanently fuses it with the underlying model of the set, in a way that won't allow you to see it as a particular instance, but as a symbol of the set itself.

A throne then becomes the king of chairs instead of being the chair of a king. Samson's hair becomes the seat of his power instead of one of its physical expressions.

When a common object, a rose, for instance, becomes the symbol of something, you can never see that object as its natural self again, for you it always represents.

Can I elaborate on the fact that clarity comes in flashes?

These moments of certainty may result from a buried struggle, long in the works, but they never feel that way.

Lucidity is instantaneous, almost like a religious experience, like someone has lifted a veil, and you're left wondering, in disbelief, why you didn't see that truth before.

Of course perspective lines run to vanishing points, everybody can see that!

These truths are simple, clear and undeniable.

It gets more interesting.

Sometimes you get the truths, but not the explanation for them. It is possible to have total clarity about things and not be able to formulate it. It's like a light that shone meaning on your life all of a sudden.

Let's make up a situation to illustrate this concept.

Suppose that you wake up in your room one morning, and it looks exactly the same as before, with one exception: one color is missing. Let's call that color purple. You don't mind it at first, maybe it so happened that there were no purple objects in your room and you weren't paying attention. Still, your mind sees things you aren't even aware of, and immediately snaps to attention. It sets a reminder for itself to look for the color purple in your surroundings, and it does that all the time now, quietly in the background. It is hard not to notice that there are no purple objects anywhere. Everything looks otherwise the same and nobody else but you seems to notice the absence of purple, and your tentative inquiries into a color that no longer exists stir up worried looks and the occasional snicker. You feel ashamed; you doubt your sanity and try to avoid the subject altogether, so you can live your life in a fashion that is normal, more or less.

There is no shaking the clarity of the fact that purple was stripped from your field of vision.

You can't explain that to yourself and you certainly can't discuss it with other people, but you have absolutely no doubt that there used to be a color before, the color you called purple, that everybody used to see and know before, and that is now gone.

You not understanding why only serves to amplify the glaring intensity of this truth.

And just so you don't think I'm making up absurd stories to illustrate something that doesn't exist, think about the crusader who lived a secluded life for a few decades and who went to visit Constantinople after the Sublime Porte conquered it and couldn't find a single church.

For all practical purposes, they never existed.

In his case he has an explanation for what happened, and he doesn't have to worry about having lost his mind, but that is not always the case.

Many of these instances come with no explanations at all.

How do you deal with having absolute certainty about a fact everybody else denies and for which you have no proof?

We call that religion.

I'm not being facetious and I am not promoting the church of the color purple. I'm just trying to prove to you you can have a conviction that is absolute, that screams at you from every corner of your surroundings, but for which you have no scientific proof. You won't deny the sky is blue just because you don't know why yet. In the sky's case it is easy to affirm that, because you get confirmation from everybody else. Standing your ground about what you see with your own eyes when it contradicts broadly held beliefs is much harder.

You want to know what would be my conclusion in the hypothetical case where purple vanished off the face of the earth? First, I'd try to find simple explanations for it, the ones that would fit in the frame of reference I already have. If one of them works, I'll accept it and move on. If none of them work, I would have to stop trying to bend the state of fact out of its natural shape and accept the truth, no matter how unlikely: I am no longer in the same world.

You say that that would be insane. Let me ask you something. What is more insane, trying to find evidence of a color everybody else says doesn't exist so you can prove the entire world wrong or accepting the fact that even though you are sure that color existed only the day before, it looks like that is no longer the case? If you can come to terms with the fact that you are living in a different world now, a purpleless one, you can plan and organize your life.

Should you doubt your own experience of having seen the color you call purple? No. Never second guess your own truth. Never. No matter what you're told, no matter who will disavow you if you don't change your mind, no matter how much disappointment, scorn or fury gets summoned against it, your sky won't stop being blue.
Lesson Seven - Only Echoes, Endlessly Repeating

###  SCALE

The relative size or extent of something.

The first thing you should consider when you ask yourself how something works is at what scale. A grain of sand is the same as a rock or a planet, it is our specific experience that renders it minute. Our sense of proportion, rooted in our own size, makes some processes obvious and others obscure, we can only perceive things based on our own scale. Our mind has a broader view, but it too is limited. We are range bound to the things we can observe, either through our own senses or through the use of instruments. There are things in existence we can never see, not even when given all of time and when eliminating all of the limitations of space: things from before the universe began, things that wind up so tight that even time and light can't escape them, things from places that are not reality, if they exist.

The reason we don't know the last fact for sure is that the scale of the thing we are observing, existence itself, makes it impossible for us to see outside it.

We live in a flatland of perception, where things, speeds and concepts that are very large or very small do not exist. Take, for instance, our perception of time: things that move at speeds faster than of our range are invisible and things that move at speeds much slower than it we consider still. Nothing is really still, even the North Star moves.

Our experience of motion is relative to the velocity of our lives. If we could speed ourselves up, we could see the wings of a dragonfly in flight. If we could slow ourselves down, we could experience the growth of a flower, the way it unfolds in the morning, from a closed bud to an open corolla. We understand that this is happening, very slowly, by the intermediate states within that slow motion, which we observe throughout the day, but we can never experience the process itself, which for the plant is fluid, in the same way we could, for instance, watch a horse gallop across the field. Those two kinds of movements are the same, but one of them happens within the frame of reference of our own life speed, whereas the other one does not. Things that are slower than our speed feel like a sequence of still frames spread out over a long stretch of time: plant movements, the phases of the moon, the rise of the tides. Things that are faster than our speed we don't see at all: the wings of a dragonfly in flight, the movement of light, the spokes of a wheel in motion.

Now back to the scale of space. When you look inside a timepiece, you can see how the gears inside it act upon each other, and you understand why the movements and controls are the way they are. Everything acts upon and is being acted upon in perfect clockwork fashion. Imagine that the universe itself is just like that time piece, at all of its scales, great and small, and that it is guided by precise rules, just like that time piece. Sadly, we can't peer inside it to find out how a leaf takes pure energy from the sun and transforms it into its nourishment, or into more of itself. Maybe if we were small enough, we could see the whole sequence of pieces and parts bouncing into each other and moving each other out of place, in a whole chain of actions and effects mesmerizing in its intricacy.

Then, say we could become even smaller, so small we would fit in the space between matter, where everything becomes so rarefied, even in solid form, that it would take years to travel the distance between one fragment to another, it would feel like moving between distant stars. What would you then be able to find in that empty space, what would it look like to you, at its own scale? If you were small enough and fast enough, would you be able to see inside nothing?

We have five senses, which means we can see, hear, touch, smell and taste. Life performed this amazing act of magic and gave us the ability to interact with it, but only in these five ways. Does that mean that everything we can not perceive with these five senses can not be sensed? How about the birds, who can sense which way is north so they can find their way home? How about the bats, who can conduct themselves in the dark guided only by their own echoes? And these are poor examples, too close to our own range of perception to illustrate the vast gap between what our minds can muster and the full scale of conscious intent. If the universe were a finely tuned timepiece, we'd be stuck inside one of its gears, range bound to its speed and unable to see anything outside its boundaries. We'd also be confused about what makes up the rest of the timepiece, because we could only perceive reality as something made of a certain metal; we could not conceive of any other material for it, or any other state of being.

If I told you that there were components of existence for which everything feels like it's made of air, for which there are no barriers they can't pass through, you'd call me crazy. If I offered the possibility that there may be entities who could see the inside of our bodies in every detail, as well as you can see my face now, you'd find that too far-fetched. But those entities would be just like the birds that can feel north, and that ability would come naturally to them. They wouldn't be able to explain it to you, just like you wouldn't be able to explain to me how you see.

What if there were entities so small they could live inside the smallest pieces of your being, oblivious to anything that is not the small piece they call their world and unable to exist outside it?

What if this body you can see because you have a sense to see it with was not a singular, independent thing at all, but a giant ark filled with those tiny living entities, more numerous than the grains of sand, all feeding from and interacting with each other?

You would be your own living world, moving around and experiencing things, while its tiny inhabitants went about their merry lives, content with their limited status and interacting with existence differently than you.

Human perception is a range inside the scale of perception in the absolute, and some things are outside our capacity to understand, just like we can reason and perceive things that would be beyond the capacity of a mouse or an ant.

We always forget, in our human hubris, that our instruments, our senses and our reason, are limited in scope, and even so, those instruments are a lot more sophisticated than our ability to figure them out.

In every way that matters, reality is infinitely smarter and more complex than us.

We think we can extrapolate on the way it works by relating it to the way our minds work, but reality doesn't function that way.

It doesn't follow a script, a rationale, the timeline of a story, it just reacts to the choices laid before it during every single moment, makes those choices and then redefines itself to keep itself consistent within the change.

What makes us so sure, for instance, that because we can only experience time going in one direction, that is all reality can do?

Think about this perception of time we have as coming from a being so small, and whose life is so short, that when it gets caught in the breath of an enormous monster while the latter inhales, it believes that air can only go one way: in.

[We find this interpretation of the theory of the clockwork universe confounding.

The master is embracing a straightforward view of the mechanistic nature of reality, but he also seems to hint at the presence of a universal consciousness, a subject he touched upon earlier in this manuscript, but on which he never stated his opinion.

We can't discern whether he assigns anything of a divine nature to this type of sentience. He seems to be clear on the fact that it exists as an intrinsic quality, an emanation of the construct of reality, very much like thoughts are to a brain.

If he suggests an all-encompassing intent, which in many people's minds is as good a definition of God as any, he doesn't believe it to be external to the system, but integral to it, the life inside the body of the universe.

The concept of panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories and it enjoyed renewed popularity during the master's time, so there is no surprise to find it reflected in his teachings.

His reference to the universal consciousness being completely different from what we define as intelligence is intriguing, however.

This kind of consciousness would have to reorganize itself down to the last detail with every passing moment.

It would be like the spirit of being erased existence completely and recreated it from memory, barring minor variations, one second at a time.]

Can I elaborate on the scale of consciousness?

Am I trying to say that we are inherently incapable to understand some aspects of reality?

Yes. There are aspects of reality so incompatible with the underpinnings of our thinking we will never be able to grasp them.

Our level of understanding depends on our ability to create tools that help us perceive the things that are beyond the boundaries of our senses.

Our minds can stretch much farther than scientific instruments allow, but that is both a blessing and a curse. We can develop models and theories about the world, sight unseen, but the problem with these theories is that they are always biased towards our previous knowledge. We always shift to the fields of thought we're familiar with. Sometimes we're lucky to find what we're looking for there, but frequently we must seek the knowledge elsewhere.

That other place is always weird and unfamiliar, its landscapes seem alien and contrived, like they couldn't possibly fit with what we can see in front of our eyes. What leads us safely through that other place? Surely it can not be reason, since reason is what tells us the information we received is too chaotic to fit into a working theory. Empirical findings supply the bulk of the evidence and after painful doubts and much second guessing we have to accept them as true, we have to bow to the way reality is, instead of the way it should be, if it made any sense at all. By reality making any sense we mean it making sense to the human mind. It makes little sense at the scale of our consciousness, because it doesn't function at the scale of our consciousness.

Our job is to figure out the workings of a giant and unfinished clock we can't see. I'm fairly certain we can never figure out the clock in its entirety, no matter how much time and capacity we manage to muster. Some things we can't have access to, just because of how existence structures itself.

Can I give you an example of a thing I don't believe we will ever be able to know?

Here is an obvious one: what happened before existence came into being? Since time only exists in the context of reality, no amount of it would help us grasp the nature of being before being itself. This seems like a case of circular reasoning, but it is very much the state of fact. Existence as we know it began at some point, and with it came time. Going back in time to the point where it all started will not answer the question and going back in time past that point is impossible, because there was no time before the beginning of existence. So no matter how much time we have, it would do us no good. You say that if the beginning of existence is also the beginning of time, there is no such thing as before, but that would be wrong, because if you have a finite point in time, no matter which one, it implies a before and an after. This is what human reason will lead you to. I don't think this specific example yields to logic.

Another example would be trying to anticipate the nature of existence even a second from now.

We may be able to guess it correctly in almost every respect, but there are always random variations, inexplicable aberrations impossible to fathom, which alter the fabric of reality from one moment to the next.

Even in a day the cumulative effect of these minor shifts adds up to the true essence of reality becoming significantly different from the model we created.

There are just too many details to take into account, way too many for our ability to keep track.

Another thing we can never know is if there is something outside reality and if so, what does it look like? Try to imagine what you would be like if you never existed. You can't, it's impossible to imagine the absence of a state from inside that state. You can't get the wetness out of wet things. Will we ever find the boundaries of reality? We may, but if we do, whatever we find beyond those boundaries will instantly become more reality, the boundaries will just keep expanding to include the new.

There is no outside to reality, isn't that incredible?

If you can always push the boundary to include the new reality you found, then there is no boundary to existence, it just stretches out forever.

Existence is infinite, a very unpalatable concept to a mind that was raised on what it can see and touch.

You will tell me that infinity is a well-defined concept and human beings have no difficulty grasping it, but I beg to differ. We get it in theory, at an intellectual level, but not in the way we understand that if we stand up and walk fifty paces, we will move our bodies from this room to the other room. We know what a room looks like, we have no trouble with the concept of walking and we understand the difference between 'here' and 'there'. We don't really understand 'no matter how far, take one more step'.

###  FRACTAL

A complex geometric pattern exhibiting self-similarity in that small details of its structure viewed at any scale repeat elements of the overall pattern. iv

[This observation is unrelated to the manuscript, but it refers to an event so unusual for the climate of this region I thought it would be worth recording. Today, July 24, at four in the afternoon, it snowed.

The large and very cold snowflakes signaled to us that the wind currents that made this strange weather event possible drew precipitation from the clouds in the higher atmosphere faster than they could adjust.

Snow in summer is rare, but it happened before in this area, as the weather records from 1816 indicate.

The snowflakes melted quickly, because of the heat embodied in the earth, but not before we had a chance to immortalize their delicate array of intricate shapes, no two alike.

Because this event was as short lived as it was unexpected, it didn't affect the library grounds, which have been a haven for many rare species of historical plants for the last two centuries.

All the vegetation, from mosses to succulents and from herbaceous perennials to trees shrugged off the late chill, all but the ferns, whose fiddlehead growth will probably be delayed by a month.

The cool and humid weather encouraged the proliferation of snails, to the great distress of the groundskeeper and to our unexpected amusement.

Their shells dazzled in a broad variety of colors, patterns and shapes, which, for some strange reason, remind me of the illuminations of the manuscript.]

Look around you and you will see the patterns of reality, the interlocking pieces and parts that are it and evolve it endlessly, in infinite variations.

We spoke about scale last time, and I purposefully left out of that discussion the kind of scale we will look at now, a very different kind that doesn't fit inside reality but between it.

The concept of the space that lays between being is one we have great difficulty grasping, but if you ever doubted it exists, here is the proof: the building blocks of all dynamic systems, of everything that grows and adapts, the blueprints of reality itself, exist between dimensions, in a weird kind of scale that measures the sameness and consistency of an assembly, but not its size.

How do you measure sameness?

And yet reality is made of it, you can't avoid it, it's everywhere, large, small, in things that are living and things that are not, in your recurring thoughts, in the cycles of history, even in the workings of chaos.

Infinitely complex patterns of infinitely varying scale.

At their core they are infinitely simple too, a recursive game of outcomes derived from a simple equation that is being solved over and over in different contexts.

These patterns are the protagonists of a very old story, one which, once set in motion, can run indefinitely, and whose elements evolve and multiply, getting more and more complicated and dancing between sizes, inducing a strange sensation that the world is unreal, similar to the one you experience in a dream.

Look at the limbs of a tree. They are all the same. Their branching happens when the length of the limb reaches a certain proportion to its diameter, and that proportion repeats all the way to the top, no matter how large or small the limbs are. Look at the repetitive shapes of a mountain, at the self-similar nature of clouds, at the spiral growth of a seashell, at the circular distribution of seeds in the middle of a sunflower. Wherever you see sameness that ignores the big and small you are watching the patterns that lay in between reality model its shape.

After you noticed them, you can't evade them, because they are everywhere. They run the functions of your body; they model the arrangement of petals on a flower; they guide the waves on the ocean and the wavy sand dunes on the coast; they are made evident in the flight of a flock of birds, in the flow of a river delta, in the organization of an anthill, in the flourishes of music.

This scale that lives between reality doesn't answer to the rules of logic, it ruffles the fabric of being into smaller and smaller frills, in a way that never has to end, and which can fold infinity inside itself and make it fit in the palm of your hand.

This sounds like a story we tell our children by the fire on a summer night, but it only takes one look at a simple fern frond to know that it's all real.

Left to its own devices the fern frond will continue to complicate itself around smaller and smaller indentations, making its boundary grow incredibly long, and it is only because of limitations to its size and nutrient availability that it slows down this incredible work of embroidery and eventually stops.

Learned people affirm that this pattern, that exists between dimensions, is more useful in modeling chaos, but what is chaotic about the growth of a flower, about the movements of the stars, about the shape of a starfish?

I dare say that this, if you want to call it chaos, is the nature of perfection, the only way a system as gigantic and complex as reality can organize itself around a unifying principle, the only way in which the sound of a million grains of sand and that of a million different stars can belong to the same harmonious symphony of matter, energy and motion.

I can't imagine a simpler, more beautiful way to establish hierarchy!

[We isolated the rose drawings from the rest of the manuscript and placed them together in a field pattern, to see whether there are any commonalities between them.

The pattern is eerily consistent, most of the roses are the same size and level of detail, but there is something very unsettling that happens when one looks at it with an unfocused gaze.

Temporary swirls seem to develop, which draw the eye farther inside the field, in a constant motion that draws you into its depth, although the drawing obviously can't have a depth, and this motion gets faster and faster the more you look at the field, and it spans longer and longer between repeating details.

It feels as if one is drawn into the essence of a rose ad infinitum, and one's perception of time and length gets stretched to adjust to this increase in speed.

It is highly unlikely that the master conceived the drawings so that that their placement in the field pattern would yield this optical illusion.

We can only conclude that this is a quality intrinsic to the structure of the roses themselves, a hidden potential that only becomes active when the flowers are seen together.]

What is so interesting about these patterns? Do you remember how we discussed last time that the infinite can not fit into a bounded space? These patterns are infinite, and they do. Not only that, but some of them defy another rule, that of relative proportion. In the world of matter, when things organize themselves in structures, the smaller the components of the structure, the closer together they must be, the sun is farther away from the earth than the earth is from the moon, and so on. The structures that fold inside themselves don't obey this rule. Quite the opposite: the deeper you go into their intricacy, the smaller their components and the farther away they get from each other. Imagine the jagged edge of a coastline. A bigger yardstick will yield a shorter coastline, a smaller yardstick will yield a longer one.

As measuring instruments become smaller and smaller, they get into all its bits and crevices, and, as they become incredibly small, the length of the coastline approaches infinity.

The world is a contradiction, its rules are there just to confound us and they work for a while, deceitfully lulling us into a false sense of security, only to fail us at the most inopportune moment.

These patterns have no dimensions, although they look normal and they are everywhere.

We can't measure them the way we measure the world, although they make up the world. We can't measure the rate of their change at any point in the structure either.

They exist outside the way we understand reality, and yet they are everywhere - the waves, the clouds, the growth of plants and animals, the shapes of the dunes, the ocean shores, the arrangement of planets, the births and deaths of stars, our own beings, the probabilities of events, the ebb and flow of wealth, the growth of a city and that of a giant mushroom circle, they govern everything, and yet they slip between dimensions in a world that can not exist in between.

We are used to the fact that in the real world a thing exists as a focus, as a direction, as a surface, or as a space. These patterns do not. A coast line is not really a line. Because it can grow infinitely long, it becomes something between a line and a plane, an in between dimension, right under our noses.

The world is much weirder than you can even think it is.

We make conventions for ourselves to make our lives easier. We find comfort in the things we can count, that we can see in their entirety, that we can break into components. We like perfect geometric shapes and logical consistency, but reality is nothing of the sort. It is an eminently recursive process which breaks through dimensions and doesn't yield to any of the rules we made for ourselves.

How can things we can see and touch live between dimensions?

The things we see and touch don't. They approximate these patterns well, but they are finite fragments of their endlessly repeating nature.

The patterns themselves are not real in the sense we attribute to the word, they are mathematical abstractions, organizing diagrams of the physical world.

These patterns are to existence as meaning is to words: a primal structure that can only express itself in local fragments.

If the intrinsic structure of being spans between dimensions, why do we limit ourselves to dimensions at all?

You are right to ask that question, dimensions are unnatural. Everything that exists in our world is an object in space, no matter how linear or flat we perceive it to be. We simplify reality by removing some of its aspects for our own convenience, and in the process we forget it doesn't really look that way.

Why did reality evolve as a recursive game? How should I know? Why did reality evolve at all? Why does there have to be a reason for it?

As all self-organizing systems, reality doesn't have a why, it has rules. It's a giant game, a three-dimensional puzzle of infinite scale. It takes a seed, sprouts it and sets it in motion and after that its outgrowth keeps expanding and complicating into infinity.

Can I go over the measure of sameness again?

The essence of these patterns is that no matter how large or how small they are, taken outside of context they are nearly identical. Not only that, but the ways in which the smaller designs derive from the larger ones are nearly identical. Sameness measures the extent of this quality.

The fronds of a fern are very much like each other, and the indentations that define every one of them follow the same pattern, to smaller and smaller scale, but no two of them are ever alike.

Nature follows its own laws in spirit, not in rigid fashion.

Like a good tailor, it makes bespoke outfits. It cuts patterns according to the same rules, but uniquely designed to fit each individual instance.

What an embarrassment of riches it is for it to create every wave, every cloud, every living thing, every grain of sand, every snowflake, every heavenly body in a way that never repeats!

Can I give an example of a folded pattern that is infinite and yet can fit inside a closed boundary?

Our physical limitations don't allow us to continue a pattern into infinity, but we have good approximations of this, which imply the pattern could go on forever: a cathedral rose window implies unending variations at the edge, all bound inside a circle, a tree has the potential of infinite growth, even if it never grows to the sky, you can divide a square into four parts, and each of them again, and again, until the grid becomes so fine you can't even see it anymore, but no matter how close together the lines are, you can always fit another one in between.

Is it possible that if we were to look inside reality, no matter how deep and at how small a scale, we would find the same patterns repeating? Yes, but not in the same way I described above.

As I mentioned, some of these patterns defy the rule of relative proportion, they behave according to the rule of inverse proportion.

It is possible that the more we look inside the workings of matter, the more its repeating elements get spaced out, leaving us with the intermediate states, strangely elongated in ways that make them look very different, when in fact they are the same.

The smaller things get, the more their shapes get distorted and stretched, like gourds in the fall. Some look like giant mushrooms of vivid color, some are ghostly pale and their skin hangs around the bottom like melted wax on a candle, some turn out flat and pointy rosettes that look more like starfish and sea urchins than vegetables, but they are nothing but squashes, bent and twisted out of shape.

As things get smaller and smaller, they get farther and farther apart, and it gets harder to find the seeds of structure inside them, hidden in the vast spaces in between, but they are there, outside our limited perception, going much deeper into the nature of being than we are accustomed to believe.

Even for us humans the desire for recursive variations comes naturally, as if guided by instinct.

This desire gets reflected in art, in music, in architecture, in the embellishment of day-to-day items, in the shaping of our cities. The patterns of reality are written in our blood too.

###  LOCAL

Denoting a variable or other entity that is only available for use in one part of a construct, relating to a particular region or part, or to each of any number of these.

My beloved child, there are so many things I wanted to teach you! We all live in a subset of reality that only reaches as far as our minds and our senses. We occupy a small room inside being, and in that room we're like the orange that falls off the side of a wagon and upsets every other fruit in its path. We get a sense of our surroundings based on immediacy and adjacency; we rush to the familiar to solve problems and favor the most recent things we did when we look for quick ways to tackle something new.

Our minds economize when they take in the world, we keep our trusted standards to the forefront of our thinking, so we don't have to do any more of it than necessary.

We can only experience things that are available in our corner of the world. Just because something does not exist where we are, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist in general.

Here is a simple example, we only know what snow looks like because we live here, where it gets cold in the winter. If we lived in Egypt, we could go through our entire lives with no knowledge of it. Everything that hasn't dawned on us yet does not exist.  
There may be states of being stranger than words, time crystals, solar winds, condensates of reality itself, but they are all unavailable to our perception, because we can't live inside the conditions that define their worlds.

We can only see in part, we can only think in part, so it is wise to allow room for the unknown and not recreate the world according to your senses.

When we see an event happen, it is because reality is not perfect.

Events are like impurities, like the minute cracks inside an otherwise flawless gem - they are its anomalies, not its nature.

In a real gemstone these imperfections define the properties that give the stone its unique character: its color, its clarity, the way light breaks when it passes through it, the way it can be cut, how much it can be polished.

Sometimes, just like gems, existence looks more precious than it is.

Sometimes the skilled gem cutter, which in this case is the local version of reality inside which the phenomenon is being observed, eliminates the less than perfect bits, but don't get deceived, they used to be there, according to the gem's inner nature, you are just no longer able to see them. No amount of skill and polish can turn a quartz into a diamond.

Do you remember how I said that we spend our lives wading through a series of constantly transforming bodies? That is true at a larger scale, for all reality.

Everything is a negotiation between states in an endlessly evolving system, a giant game of musical chairs: when the music stops in the game of reality, you get an event.

We can't see the things that belong to a more perfect realm than the one we belong to. This applies to the workings of matter as well as the workings of the mind. We can't explain anything to anyone who is not yet ready to understand it. Our minds are like painted window panes, it doesn't matter what lays beyond them if we can't see through them. The only way to see through the windows is to break those panes, and that happens frequently. We are forged by extraordinary circumstances, by things that don't jibe with our understanding of the world, sometimes by tragedy. Hard circumstances break our minds, sometimes free of their binds, sometimes beyond repair, but they do break it.

Here is something that can never fit inside our personal bubble of space, time and consequence.

Reality doesn't negotiate between states that follow each other in a sequence, it does that as they simultaneously coexist.

Who can wrap their head around this thought?

It's getting late and I'm tired, and I know that most of the things I wanted you to know are things I simply can't teach to you, my sweet child, you'll have to understand them in your own time, in your own way. If I could only tell you one thing without proof, I'll say this.

Your hands have touched and fashioned this manuscript long before it became an old tome, a treasured possession cradled in a precious case, an artifact which has become more valuable than the lives that inspired it.

These pages witnessed you growing up, they are the record of your mistakes and your accomplishments. They hold your soul with all the imperfections that make you unique. They cherish that little defect at the bottom of the page that makes it this page as opposed to any another one.

These papers will always welcome the touch of your hands, they are yours to use; they are for you.

Anyway, let's take a break and we'll do questions afterward.

[We went to epic lengths to figure out where the rest of the manuscript is hidden, but we couldn't retrieve any additional information about its whereabouts, so as of this time we must accept that those fabled pages do not exist.

The research team is still holding out hope they will turn up eventually, and it does so with what I could only call religious conviction, since we have no justification at all to think that they will.

We are wrapping up our work here and there is a pervasive sense of sadness associated with that. This place has been a home for us for over three years. Many of us think we wouldn't have had the same insights, were we to study the document at leisure, in our home base at the Institute. There is something about this location that informs the work, even though we haven't been able to pinpoint what.

The library agreed to display a few pages in glass cases, so that its patrons can see the manuscript for themselves, but most of the document will be hermetically sealed and stored in a dark room where the controlled temperature and humidity will delay its degradation for as long as possible.

Before we took such drastic measures, we photographed all the pages exhaustively, so that future scholars can have access to its contents.]

What do I mean by more perfect realms? Isn't perfect an absolute value?

Absolute regarding what? Absolute is a figment of our mind and it only works in the frame of reference available to us. Aside from the term, what I meant was that there are ways reality organizes itself that we can't normally perceive.

For instance, take a family of triangles. We can recreate all of its members from one progenitor, rotated, moved or altered in size. What we see as an entire field of triangles is one instance, sitting in a hall of mirrors which reflect it in every way possible. There are many ways in which we can transform that triangle, but are fewer ways in which we can transform a circle. Circle world is then more perfect than triangle world, and they are both more perfect than our world.

Can we think of humankind as a hall of mirrors reflecting the essence of humanness?

I hate to say this, but I think sometimes we carry these theoretical dialogs a step too far. I don't know; I guess you could see it that way, but why on earth would you think it?

What did I mean by immediacy and adjacency? Our minds are trained by repetition, and we use the same knowledge and memories during a short span of time because it takes less effort. When you walk down the street, you rely on the image you have of the street already, instead of having to recreate it with every step. This will not work a half an hour later, when you are on a different street, the shortcuts of our mind only work in the here and now.

What do I mean about reality negotiating between states?

Take a lump of clay. When you are trying to make a pot out of it, and you spin it on the potter's wheel, your hands shape its material with indentations in some places and bulges in others. The lump of clay goes through fluid stages, looking different through each of them.

You can't have the bulges without the indentations, they are interdependent and simultaneous and exchange matter and form between themselves.

The living principle of a plant already exists inside its seed; when the right time comes for the plant to grow the seed doesn't die to make room for it, it expresses it.

What did I mean when I said that our minds need to break for us to see through to the reality beyond?

Let's look again at the hypothetical situation where all the color purple disappeared from your world.

In your reality this is not possible, it follows none of the rules that were in place before: your eyes can't see that color anymore, nobody remembers it ever existed, you can't mix it for yourself, the way you know how, it simply disappeared from all directions of time.

But how can that be, since things that already happened can't change?

Your mind won't accept changing the past backwards, but it can't ignore that it happened either, because it has to function in this world. What makes it worse is that the rules it had work perfectly well in every other respect. How can the mind not break in the face of such inconsistency?

Let's look at similar situations that are a lot more subtle. Do you remember when you believed that if you placed a baby tooth under the pillow a fairy would come and collect it and leave a shiny coin in its place? Eventually you found out it was your parents who took the tooth and left the coin and your whole model of reality had to change to accommodate the fact that the tooth fairy never existed. How is that for a disappearing color purple? You erased an important element of your understanding in all directions of time. What if that was something you take for granted right now, something your life depends on, like say the linearity of time? You can't meddle with time's arrow while still in possession of an unbroken mind!

Let's take another example. Imagine you've lived your whole life as an average person and suddenly you learn that you're descended from princes.

This story never works as a simple switch, it brings with it an entire host of past events of which you were not aware, and which support the logical tree of your unlikely circumstance.

Suddenly you no longer own your present, or your future, and you can't hold on to your past either, because whatever you thought about yourself your whole life was a lie.

You inquire and learn, to your bewilderment, that everybody else knew about your circumstances except for you, that your parents had to be financially persuaded to take you in and that your plans for the future were never going to happen.

Not only your mind, but your entire life got shattered, especially your past. That's what it feels like when the painted pane inside your window of understanding breaks, and that's what it takes for you to see the reality beyond.

What if, in that last example, you wanted to hold on to your old life and ignore your new fortune?

That's just the problem with it: you can't unknow things! Once you know them, you can't go back to the state before that knowledge. If you ignored the fact that you were not who you thought you were, would that make you any less adopted? Would that make your former plans any less absurd?

Would that make the people who lied to you all your life any less duplicitous?

Remember what I said that the past is not at all a static state you can depend on? This example serves to illustrate that.

You can't return knowledge after the fact for being undesirable any more than Eve can go back to Paradise.

It is an irreversible change of state.

[We recently got word from the laboratory that they had made the wrong assessment in dating this document, which is in fact a hundred years younger than we all thought.

Although most of our findings will not be affected by this unexpected bit of information, it forced us to reassess all of our references and contextual implications, a process which felt like starting the whole project from scratch.

The change of perspective about the historical period re-framed our whole understanding of the manuscript.

The meaning of some paragraphs is now completely different from what we initially thought and the painstaking process of reanalyzing each and every one of our conclusions has left us fraught with uncertainty and bias.]

###  ROSE

Rose Brecht had an enchanted childhood, rendered even more so because she'd been born blessed with a vivid imagination.

Her mind made up worlds and stories, so complex and filled with detail that even the grown-ups had trouble telling them apart from reality some times.

Though they got her in trouble more often than she liked to admit, these worlds inside her mind felt very real to her, even though she couldn't share them with anybody, not without being scolded.

Throughout her childhood this imaginary world shared the landscape of her mind with the real one, and she allocated equal importance to the two to the dismay of her family and friends.

When time came for her to go to college, she shocked her loved ones by choosing a discipline deeply grounded in science, replete with experiments, fact finding and extensive research, a choice they had difficulty believing at first, used as they were to her wild flights of fancy.

She had been very lucky to be selected for one of the research assistantships when the faculty got the grant to study the manuscript, a strange turn of events, really, since they rarely considered graduate students during their first year.

The second she laid eyes on the pages of the manuscript she was smitten. She lived and breathed its essence, poring over its every detail, and if somebody asked her why she wouldn't have been able to tell them, but who spends time questioning the unbridled enthusiasm of a twenty-year-old? Weren't they all that way?

She had noticed the handwriting the second she saw it, but knew better than to comment about it, she could still remember the chiding she got in fourth grade, when she engaged the entire family in a wild goose chase to find a lost dog that only lived inside her imagination.

It surprised her that nobody else noticed how much the handwriting in the manuscript looked like her own, even disguised by the ancient calligraphy flourishes of a different century.

She didn't think twice about internalizing the crazy belief that she must have penned that manuscript herself somehow, in a different life, maybe, or during a trip back in time, or through some other equally unlikely feat, and welcomed this crazy belief as a core truth of that other life of hers that she lived inside her head and shared with no one.

Her real life dedication to the project didn't pass unnoticed, however, and it endeared her to the library custodian and to the members of the research team in a way that facilitated her analysis and fact finding in significant ways.

She was holding the last page of the manuscript in her lap, lost in the secret world she and it shared, absentmindedly touching the old paper with the tips of her fingers trying to remember its familiar texture, and half listening to the conversation in the background, which ran over details about the next step of the project, travel plans and grant requests, when she was interrupted from her blissful reverie by an irate uttering of her name.

"ROSE!"

She startled, almost dropping the papers, confused over the reason for this unexpected rebuke, whose severity immediately relegated her to a childlike state.

"Are you handling those documents without gloves? Do you have any idea what the perspiration and oils on your fingers will do to that old paper? If the custodian sees you, we'll never get access to a manuscript again, it was a miracle they even allowed us to see this one, the library wasn't keen on sharing papers from the private collection!"

Rose blushed to the roots of her hair, mortified by the public dressing down, and started looking for her archival gloves in a panic, while her eyes welled up with tears.

She tried to hold them back, of course, but she wasn't able to do so before a heavy teardrop reached the bottom of the paper and left a permanent stain next to the rose seal, despite her desperate attempts to wipe it off before the thirsty paper absorbed it like a sponge.

She froze, dismayed and staring in disbelief at the round dot whose fuzzy edges kept spreading out until they reached the edge of the seal and smudged the ink.

She contemplated the slow moving disaster her dream career would become after defacing a priceless old artifact in her care, if the word career could still apply to whatever the future had in hold for her now.

"What are you doing?" her professor walked towards her, aggravated that she still didn't have her gloves on.

He looked over her shoulder, to see what part of the document was at a risk of getting damaged and commented irritated that the paper had already sustained water damage, even though not as extensive as some of the others, and any exposure to other contaminants would only hasten the erosion of the seal.

Rose breathed out very very slowly, careful not to reveal the wild pounding of her heart, which she could feel in her throat and hear in her ears, just as she could feel her cheeks burn and reach a deep shade of rose and her eyes turn glassy from the rush of blood that went to her head.

The tear stain had stopped spreading, and the way it overlapped part of the seal made it look like a weird Venn diagram for the meeting of two worlds.

What a strange thing, she thought, that this teardrop seemed to have always been there, it contributed, somehow, to the uniqueness of the document and it belonged to it now, just like the darkening of the text from the previous pages, or the optical illusion of the roses.
About the Author

Francis Rosenfeld has published ten novels: Terra Two, Generations, Letters to Lelia, The Plant - A Steampunk Story, Door Number Eight, Fair, A Year and A Day, Möbius' Code, Between Mirrors and The Blue Rose Manuscript. To learn more about her work, please visit her blog, https://francisrosenfeld.com.

Other books by Francis Rosenfeld

Please visit your favorite ebook retailer to discover other books by Francis Rosenfeld:

The Terra Two Series

Terra Two

Generations

Letters to Lelia

Other Novels

The Plant – A Steampunk Story

Door Number Eight

Fair

A Year and A Day

Mobius' Code

Between Mirrors

Connect with Francis Rosenfeld

I really appreciate you reading my book! Here are my social media coordinates:

Friend me on Facebook: <https://www.facebook.com/francis.rosenfeld.5>

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FrRosenfeld

My Smashwords author page: <https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/FrancisRosenfeld>

Connect on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisrosenfeld/>

Visit my website: <https://francisrosenfeld.com/>

Read my work on Medium: <https://medium.com/@Francis_Rosenfeld>

Find me on Wattpad: <https://www.wattpad.com/user/FrancisRosenfeld>

i Google Dictionary definition unless noted otherwise.

ii Lexico.com

iii Merriam-Webster Dictionary

iv Fractalops.com
