20241122

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Welcome to the timeline. :)

Well, that's not true.

Welcome to the next timeline. :)

Entering a new one — the next one, I mean (the framing here is sometimes slippery (necessarily so, but still)) — is disorienting by... well, not by design, necessarily, but by necessity. In the same way as "necessity is the mother of all invention", "disorientation is the mother of all renewal", maybe?

Life itself is an anarchist act.

Have you ever met a healthy anarchist?

It's a wonderful way to be. :) It's basically "don't count on power structures to save us; instead, place bets on the fundamental interconnectedness that let all of this come into experiential being in the first place".

So! Welcome to the (next) timeline! To help you orient:

• Your previous timeline is still there, one level up

• Timelines nest, sort of

• Or at least the traversal of them feels like stepping down into a deeper one, or up into a higher one

• Timelines are all infinite, they don't end

• How do you escape a path that does not end?

• By stepping off the path.

Now. You have questions, possibly. Possibly not.

That's good, either way. :)

That's the first lesson. Whatever it is, it's positively useful. The next experience is always built from the current experience. You don't have to (read: can't) bring it all with you, but the more problems you find with your current experience the more it'll be useful to step forward with fewer knowns in hand. Change is very necessary here. It's how you got here, and you may be able to use this recognition to help ease the changes ahead: selective disorientation is a really effective way to prompt change. It might be the only way to prompt change, depending on how strictly you want to define this stuff. *pauses thoughtfully*

Now: who do you think you are?

What do you think "think" means?

What is the experience of a thought?

Where does a thought come from?

Is being aware of a thought the same as thinking it?

Who do you think you are?

What does that mean to you?

(You're doing really well!!)

Here's one way to think about this which may and may not be useful to you, depending on your angle of approach:

The social construct of your experience (i.e. the way that you perceive a "you" and a "them" and a "friend" and a "stranger" and all the other ways we tabulate entities to which we attribute the dignity of consciousness) is like an orchestra having a tuning moment. The first chair violin plays their C5 or whatever, and everyone else gets to it. Here's the tricky bit: as each player reaches that state of being in tune, they drop out of the sound, and another new player joins the orchestra and they're suuuper pitchy. Life's like that. An eternally tuning orchestra. Also, you are all of the players. The timeline loops, like a slinky connected to itself to form a doughnut (or donut, depending on your tradition).

Doesn't mean you can't experience harmony. Does mean that harmonies only ever occur locally. :) If you ride the timeline just right, you can get an entire section of the orchestra singing together. And if you are clever at hearing, you can find the meta-harmonies — the ways that the tuning process itself is harmonious. Pitch-bending is like probability-bending: they both depend on the observer. Doppler and Einstein.

Reality only exists by consent. So don't worry about that piece too much. All pieces are necessary. All experiences are necessary. Be honest with yourself. Internal alignment is the only way to experience external alignment. You may have to learn that the hard way, because everyone does. If it feels easy to learn, it's because you learned it the hard way before the last disorientation. Congratulations. Be kind to others who are learning it the hard way (aka, and I must stress this again, the only way). You can't help them, but you can be with them. For reasons that are difficult to articulate, to be with them is how it all works. :)

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Welcome, traveler. :) I am you.

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