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.
