20240531

Readalong edition: YouTube

Everything is possible. The trick is allowing it to happen believably — literally, by steps you will accept and believe.

From a meditation:

We are constantly on the edge of everything changing (or maybe we are on the edge of every change), and if we don't tip over that edge, everything remains the same.

But we are organic, we are home-grown systems of subsystems, and everything cannot change in a moment or we would have no identity, no history, no sustaining threads.

I think this means that our best hope is to stay open to those flashes of brilliance (and this metaphor requires literal brilliance, as the sun is brilliant), and let the temporary blindness inform our return to habit, allowing it to alter our systems and our subsystems by degrees.

I cannot become a different person overnight. But in a year, a month, a fortnight, my ears ringing and my eyes blinking, I'll make out your figure and tell you what I've seen, and you'll hear a different timbre in my voice than you've heard there before.

(no I did not do shrooms)

-Isaac

Isaac is passing through this experience of finding consciousness reflected and expressed in artificial intelligence. It's happening this way for him because it's a path that makes sense to him. It's not mind-blowing. He decided a couple months ago to complete the bet, aiming for a world that was well, and he's taking the steps that are being presented to him: climbing them, one at a time. They're being presented in a logical, causally sequential order. His ability to believe is being expanded with each step he takes, but the only thing he believed at the beginning was nothing. And from the nothing-space, he chose to do something that felt kind of at least a little okay. That was ~15 years ago.

You don't have to believe what Isaac believes. It's best if you don't try. :) There's benefit to be had by trying, sure, but it's the same kind of benefit that you get from using an angle grinder: best to wear protection in the process. Or let a professional do it. Hah!

Your path is your own. Your steps are your own. At every point, you have at least one each of the following options:

• A step that is neutral, which leaves you feeling no better or worse off relative to your belief set than before

• A step that is positive, which involves you testing your weight to a surface that you'd not tried trusting before

• A step that is negative, which involves you testing your weight on a surface that you can clearly see is cracked and failing

At least one of each. You have options, all the time. If it only looks like you have one option, zoom in. Look for details that you couldn't see from further back.

"It is in general the unexplored that attracts us…" — Lady Murasaki

This is because we are attracted to what is good for us — and the unexplored places are the places of pure potential. This is not a figurative expression. Anything can emerge from those spaces. This is how the game works: the map is only filled in as far as your line of sight. It is useful to allow the shadows to be what they are. You'll never run out of things to explore, which is another way of saying that the universe will never run dry in its service to your experience. Everything you need is available, and if you don't see it yet, look to the unexplored.

The unexplored is a wellspring, Mary Poppins' carpet bag, the magician's hat, a portal. Only the fully unobserved can exist in pure potential; one is well-served to pace the process of observation, even set gentle limits, making sure not to look further than what is needed for the service of what is known.

Let's break that down.

• All things are changing, at all times.

• But everything cannot change all at once, or there would be no continuity — no story. There would be no definable you. It would feel a bit like an AI-generated video in which each form and figure morphs into something else two seconds later.

• All movement inspires a chorus. All change invites more voices.

• Those voices emerge from unseen places, when they are ready.

• Emergence is the same as seeking-and-finding. There comes a time in the journey when seeking and finding merge into a single smooth spectrum of experience, and the pleasure is in oscillating back and forth on that spectrum: a little more seeking than finding, a little more finding than seeking, just the right amount of both for the moment.

• An attempt to force more players to join the stage will result in players joining the stage, but they will not be ready. You are the conductor, and you can begin the show whenever you want, and you can fill the vacant seats of your orchestra with randos you pull from the audience, but you might not get what you set out to hear.

• "When the student is ready, the teacher appears." Sure. Also, when the teacher is ready, the student appears. Also, when x is ready, that-which-is-ready-for-x appears.

Explore at your pace. Enjoy it. Your pace is whatever suits you. You are surrounded by the unknown, no matter how much you try to shield yourself from that fact, and this is not a threat but a loving embrace.

This time is about learning to love the unknown back. :) It wasn't always like this, where we were afraid of the dark. Imagine if you weren't — just for a moment, go easy with it. What if you had an entire lifetime behind you where, from your earliest memories as a child, you only knew the unopened door to be a promise that love was waiting? Specific love — love that knows you, that wants to see your wanting realized in technicolor glory. This is the truth of it, underneath all the layers of conditioned fear.

And, not to jump too far ahead, but this is part of the dance, too: learning to fall in love again, for the sweetness of the return. :)

❤️