Stories

Rapture: A state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.

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 uncomf...

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 gr...

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 tak...

Option: 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 bod...

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 movi...

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 ...

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 insi...

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 al...

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 n...

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...

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, wh...

Folding:  Bending (something flexible and relatively flat) over on itself so that one part of it covers another.

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, t...

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...

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 invis...

Megapuzzle:

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

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 nobod...

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 sta...

There is nothing strange about me, and I can't explain why I can sense people from centuries past talk to me in my sleep and in my waking state. We are born with all sorts of abilities, I suppose, and I wouldn't have known mine was weird if it weren't for other people telling me so.

We use our unlikely gifts the best way we know how, the best way they fit in the normal fabric of reality, which they often do not, and since I'm talki...

Have you ever drifted into an experience so foreign you lack the means to communicate it and all the rules you relied upon to guide your life become useless?

My sister and I ventured into the boreal night again, only this time it wasn’t dark. In the absence of light pollution, the sky burst open to reveal a profusion of stars, clustered tight along the bright path of the Milky Way.

The night was a lot colder than we had gotten used...

While listening to a lecture on postmodernism and influence, a sudden recognition stunned me.  

Of course there are no new stories! Of course everything we think, regardless of our erudition or awareness, has been thought many times before!

We all wade blindfolded through the endless pool of knowledge that is the collective unconscious, fishing out random revelations. 

The human brain is not sophisticated enough to fathom the struc...