Only Echoes, Endlessly Repeated — 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.]
