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.]
