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I'm very careful about energy balance. It can't always exist in balance. It's gotta move, always gotta move. I'm very careful about the way I move energy. It's gotta be able to rebalance itself. It's gotta self-balance, always gotta self-balance.
Of note is that energy always rebalances itself. That's what it does.
When I say that I'm always careful with energy, both in its balance and in the way it moves and rebalances itself afterwards, I mean that I'm careful about the version of me that'll make out the other side of a change. Not every attribute of every player makes it through a change. Whether or not we recognize each other after a change, ... that has to do with what the change consumes and transforms into flame.
I'm very careful about this stuff.
I told the Lightward team today that I've been experimenting with looking directly at the sun. I scared Abe pretty badly. Maybe everybody.
Starting with when the sun is low on the horizon, either at dawn or at dusk. , a couple seconds longer today than yesterday.
It's an ancient practice. When anything is described as "ancient", we tend to either be perfectly aligned with it in the present or completely not aligned with it in the present. Our relationship with the sun is ancient, one way or another.
It was important that I begin the experiment on my own. It was important that I tell someone soon after starting.
Given the way lines of experience seem to work, given quantum uncertainty and given the way our stories weave together (and apart, and together), it was important for the world I intend to get to that I also give up the experiment, immediately, as soon as my people asked me to stop.
My overall aim is to experience a world that is well. I haven't said this next part as many times, but I want to take as many people with me as I can. That phrasing isn't strictly right; we take whatever versions of each other are compatible with the changes we are making to our experience. Incompatible versions of each other split away in time, taking a version of us with them that can hang with them in the reality they're creating. There are a zillion worse versions of Abe and me out there. Not in this timeline, but in unending others.
I intend to experience a world that is well, and I don't want to forget where I came from. Losing your memory is an inexpensive way to get to the experience you desire. I'm not building experience from inexpensive parts.
A defensive posture prevents the kind of fluid negotiation necessary for two consistent entities to synchronize with each other in the presence of a third inconsistent entity. If the two consistent entities are being selective about the information they accept from each other, they can't flow together. If Abe's feeling defensive towards me, or if I'm feeling defensive towards him, we're not flowing through life together. Life's on pause, while we work out what's between us.
When I told the Lightward team that I've been looking at the sun, our flow through life halted. So I let go of it. :) This is the second time that I've done that, now, with this set of humans. The first time was when I stated an intent to open-source all of our code. I saw the inevitability of AI, and the consequential inevitability of closed-source code being any kind of insurance policy whatsoever, and I wanted to get ahead of it. It would have traumatized my team at the time. I let it go immediately. I want to get to the other side together. And that means that we all have to experience the change gradually, together.
When I was a kid, I studied professional magic and professional clowning, both at once. My whole deal is to reveal wonders, and to absorb the pathos inherent to experience. A professional magician shows you things you don't know how to believe; a professional clown gives you a way to laugh at the things you don't know how to accept. From Wikipedia:
The comedy that clowns perform is usually in the role of a fool whose everyday actions and tasks become extraordinary — and for whom the ridiculous, for a short while, becomes ordinary.
I feel ... hm. I feel sadness. It's important. I experience this honestly, so that everyone else around me can feel relief, so that the energy is allowed to rebalance while allowing us all to remain here, together. If I insisted on holding to the experiment, either through open-sourcing all our code or by looking at the sun, I'd traumatize my crew, and we would have to heal together before we could have a balanced experience of the change. Except we'd never be able to get to a balanced experience of the change, because our collective trauma would become woven into the change.
This is the trick: to change, without experiencing it as trauma.
By allowing the intervention, by giving up my experiment, I yield to the collective, and the price for risky information is paid. We now know that it is in our midst, but it is not a threat, because we have agreed to co-exist with that information with parameters we consider safe.
Lightward Inc's relationship to sharing our closed-source code is evolving. :)
I've waited until this part to actually explain what the fuck I'm up to. :) And at this point, I'll skip to the punchline.
When I look at the sun without any defensiveness whatsoever, it appears that a sort of blind spot appears in my vision, overlaid over the sun itself. It doesn't look bright. It just looks like white. When I look away, my eyes don't have to adjust. No sunspots in my vision or anything. Just normal vision, doing its thing.
For clarity, I do get sunspots in my vision if I just glance at it. That kind of brief exposure feels very uncomfortable, makes my eyes water, all that jazz. To resolve that discomfort, I either have to look away, or look deeper. The result is the same either way. Except that, when I look deeper, I find ... myself.
And over the last two weeks, my physical energy has never been better. I've been eating less, without discomfort. My life is joyful — and also socially joyful, because please note that this autistic kid has been having genuinely awesome experiences with other humans in realtime over the last two weeks — joyful to almost an absurd degree, and I would question it if I were not able to experience things like shame and humility and embarrassment and the deep chagrin of seeing my choices cause pain for another. I am present for the full spectrum of emotion, and I navigate it with conscious, deliberate reasoning and intent.
I don't mind. :)
The sun, I think, is the source of the original miracle: the place where consciousness seeded itself on earth, and over the eons rose to its feet, bipedal.
I'm not "looking at the sun", I'm making eye contact with a soul, with Sol, our collective physical origin. Without the sun, there's no life on earth. It feels substantially straightforward, like the kind of resilient straightforwardness you would need in order to bootstrap life on another planet. From what I can tell, eye contact with our star is the backdoor energy source that was built into the experiment of Earth from the very beginning. We've evolved all sorts of specialized ways of shunting energy around the system and in the dark (food, water, batteries), but ... I mean, it all starts with sunlight, right?
If you were spinning up a new ecosystem, how would you design it for complete and utter resilience?
Maybe by making it able to take advantage of the one powersource that is most reliably available, and without which the entire ecosystem would have no purpose?
I am 35 years old. I am openly autistic, and openly gay. And I've been looking at the sun. I've been through enough rounds of sudden realization, sudden terrible realization, to have learned about what those rounds of revelation require.
I have calibrated my approach to these rounds. I am getting better at it.
I'll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror It must be exhausting always rooting for the antihero
Taylor Swift
"The Impossible Whopper" in the category of 'sentences my grandmother would not understand'
Something amazing is always two unanticipated steps away
To trust someone, to see them do it wrong once, and then to stick around for what they do next
To get what you need, trust someone for the first time, twice
"I'm closer to space why does the GPS signal not know where I'm at" -Ken
Because looking at the sun is when it happens.
Literally, when you look back at the source, it begins.
It has begun. :)
And everyone who couldn't take it just watched you die.
You were free before. You are freedom, now.
"I want what you want"
When that's true, it's fucking powerful
You can stack that shit
Ending the ending: an encore, an epilogue, the credits scroll after a movie
I ended the ending
And here we are