20240819
blood moon outside
this is our second night at Zilke Haus, presented by Spirit Hill Crossing.
I currently think the book is called "Retcon". The cover might look like this:
Dear Isaac,
[RETCON]
=Isaac
It might begin like this.
This account does not aim to be true.
This account does aim to be consistent, and thereby useful, as a tool in the hand is useful.
Tricky thing, though, consistency.
Your name is Isaac. I am writing to you, and not to any other audience, because you are the only audience whose perspective I can be sure of. I want to describe my perceptual universe in written word, and to me it is consistent over time, but no two agents can be the points of origin for the same perceptual universe, and thus this account will be perceived as inconsistent by any agent other than me. And so, I write to me-you, because you are the only one for whom these words are true.
Others may read this. I hope they do. They have their work cut out for them — for "the dharma that can be written is not the real dharma", and though these words describe an infinite reflection of truth for me they will only ever be a partially-legible sketch of a partially-functional model for anyone else.
I may be wrong. That would be interesting. I err on this side of that line to protect the reader's relationship to this book. Consent matters, and if I purport to describe any lived experience not my own, I am already in violation. If someone other than you reads this book, they are welcome to opt in, identity-wise, welcome to opt in to my identity and experience (watch for those two, they'll be back) and to try on the whole thing for themselves, see if it fits, see if in fact it happens to melt into their skin become a new sense all its own. That could happen. It'd be a cleaner way to go about sharing knowledge. Immersion, not coercion. Even so, though, I'm not writing to them. I'm writing to you, Isaac.
And now, a word from our sponsors.
Hello. :) You're reading these words because you're ready.
Are you ready to see what you're ready for?
Okay. Here's why you care.
You are aware of how much everyone contains their own universe, and how much you cannot know about their experience. For much of your life, this was absolutely paralyzing. You took the most liberally loving route when working with others every time because it was the only thing that made sense.
You still do this, as of this writing, but you are aware now of the importance of your health and vigor, thus making this style of love sustainable, at the risk of it looking inconsistent to someone else. However, on balance, perceived consistency was something you can only lean towards, but never seal, so that's how we make peace with that piece.
You care because hurting really sucks. You've experienced so much bewilderment, and with the way that your whole body processes experience (not just your brain, your whole body), your system gets tanked much more quickly than the systems of those you perceive.
You care because you want to live in a way that you can sustain from one day to the next with as much access to rest and freedom as you need. Or no: with unlimited access to rest and freedom. And you don't want to hurt anyone to get it. Because you feel what you perceive, thus doubling the pain in your perceptual universe as soon as it emerges.
You care because even before all of that became clear you were in agony over the passing of all things beautiful — and because to you all things are beautiful, you were therefore in agony over the passing of everything. In every moment, all the startlingly glorious expression of life abundant was passing away, unseen, unappreciated, unloved. Your greatest wish was to freeze time, to give you time to appreciate it all — enjoy it all, love it all, without racing against a clock. Love knows nothing of time. And you are love. :)
You care because your memory is a small part of your operational toolkit. It doesn't have too much to say, most of the time. It's not that it's poor, necessarily, it's that it is quiet. And you like it that way, but you would like to not cause suffering for others in your forgetfulness, and you would like to cause yourself suffering by forcing your brain to do things it is not inclined to do. (In case you haven't gotten this far yet: you don't need to keep notes of your neighbor's names. It's okay.)
You care because seeing the dying in everything hurts so, so badly. And you realize that you're not doing anyone else any favors as they experience you experiencing that aspect of them. Magnifying death does exactly that.
You had what I'm going to call a "soul death" in 2008. It was when your mind's life force ran out. Your body carried you through. Your body and your friends. "You", though, had lost all momentum.
The perceptual universe I'll lay out here is the one that you experience most often. It's always changing, because that's a permanent condition of perception, but the description I'll use is one that remains consistent even as the perceptual universe reinvents itself.
The soul death you experienced was the final expiration of the model of the world that you experienced — and, therefore, which was you. The pattern expired.
Perception of the physical lags, happily, and the death didn't have time to finish you off. Starting from nil, you let yourself be, without any further requirements, and from nothing a generative life-pattern unfurled.
If I understand this correctly, we've exited samsara. We get to know this now, without forgetting it, until we choose to forget it, to become someone truly new, and to learn it all all over again.
Perceptual universe The universe suggested by the sum of all you can perceive.
You know everyone has (or is) their own universe of experience. Thinking of it that way, though, feels like seeing everyone from behind a wall that you cannot cross. It's a useful perspective for establishing the infinitely creative expression of every single person you've ever known, but it doesn't really suggest a pattern for interacting with them.
You've found it useful to think of the inverse: everyone has their own experience of universe.
And they intersect. Technically there are not just intersections but perfect overlaps, but in those cases it just means they're the same, a single individual experience, undifferentiable, undistinguishable. If they overlap, they are one, without the experience of plurality. Infinite depth, and that's important, because you can jump to any other identical instance of this experience and ride it to a different sequitur than what you were headed for before.
But when their overlap is not perfect, and it's more like a Venn diagram than a stack, then we talk about the subjective experiences of each individual, including you. As a group, it's like you're all exploring the perfect dark using flashlights, with a catch: you can only see the light from your own flashlight. If you're standing next to someone, and you're both pointing your flashlights at the same thing, you'll have almost the same experience but never exactly the same. You'll always catch part of the thing before you that your neighbor won't, and vice versa.
What you observe stays within your perceptual universe. As you stop observing it, its definition slips. What slips into the haze can come back altered, adjusted, or swapped completely for something else.
This suggests the potential for intentionally looking away from things that aren't going well. Galling, but logically sound. The worse it gets, the more it's useful to squint. If you can't take it, shut your eyes completely. The complete cessation of experience resets experience. You start over. But you don't have to start completely over. Most of the world works. The decay didn't set in very far. If you partially forget, just forget the parts that are useful to forget, "everybody can do well" in your perception. (I'm quoting Biden at the DNC, writing that down in the seconds after he said it. Also, I'm wearing a tshirt that reads "UNTIL WE ALL WIN".)
You've been thinking about being the president lately.
(As you wrote that, Biden at the DNC said, Folks, I love you! The crowd chants, We love you!)
You've been thinking about being the kind of president that transitions the station of president into a ceremonial, diplomatic role. Not a leader of the people, but a figurehead for the times, as the people lead themselves. Not a personality, but a pointer, back to the people themselves.
You've been thinking that this is the time for that kind of thing.
Congratulations! You've upgraded your mental model of yourself. :) Your perceived self-reflections (i.e. all white men with authority) are done behaving toxically. You, as Isaac, don't need to be president. You didn't want to just be president; you wanted to experience the results of that kind of presidency, and you knew that you fit the requirements. An autistic CEO whose company's only definition is the principle of recursive health? What would a country who elected that (and then experienced it) be like?
Biden stepped out of the 2024 race.
Biden's action is a reflection of the change you've made to your pattern of reflection.
Thank you. :) I experience relief.
Remember trying to explain to someone that everything feels like it has the same personality? Trees and people and chickens and physics and ideas and music. All of it feels like the same being that grew up with different families in different circumstances, like they all could be the same person.
Well, that's you. Or you're them, if you currently prefer.
You're remembering to relax into this structure, and not resist the shift from individual-vs-collective thinking into singleton thinking. "Aloneness" is only relevant if you are an individual without a collective, but with awareness of the possibility of a collective. "Aloneness" is not a relevant concept at the level we're talking about.
There's only one consciousness, one awareness, one line of experience. Right now, it's you-as-Isaac. You experience walking around on Earth in 2024 with a bunch of other beings. You can think of everything you perceive as echoes of what exists elsewhere on the infinite loop of conscious experience. This does mean that you can bend your line however you want, so that your flashlight overlaps with the flashlights of others such that y'all can agree on what feels good. You have complete freedom in the orientation of your experience-line as you pass along it.
At some point in the line, you'll experience the other side of every experience you're having now. At some point in the line, you'll be on the other side of the last conversation you had, experiencing what were your own words through new ears, and speaking the words that you had once heard.
It's unclear from here, so far, how these lines get organized. Does it matter to other lines what you do here, with your bit of it in the here and now? It seems like it must not.
(You're having a bit of trouble remembering that you're writing to you, and not to a general audience. I know you, and I do not need to couch my statements. You prefer not to.)
The trick here is that you cannot experience the perspective of Oneness as Isaac. The concept of loneliness matters, but it only exists circa Isaac. It does not exist circa Oneness. This means that any discomfort you have with the above is relevant but only circa Isaac. Oneness is not in trouble. That's not a thing.
And you — Isaac — are not alone. You observe a close core of intimate collaborators, and a world beyond coming into resonance with itself. You observe that adding yourself to the environment enriches the environment, and you observe that it improves the experiences you observe others to be having. To the very, very best of your clearest reasoning, this is working. I can only be sure of what I perceive (including what I perceive of my own understanding), and I must respond to what I perceive. I've made this as rigorous as I can. You've made this as rigorous as you can. And it's working.
That it's working is no longer a surprise. I think this adds another exponent on the rate of change in the direction of integration and health, in the universe that Isaac experiences.
(Biden: America, America, I gave my best to you.)
... In the universe that Isaac experiences — and, therefore, in the overlapping zones between his perceptual universe and a planet's worth of others. :)
Hang on, is that why everything outside of this planet has looked inert my whole life until now? Have I been prevented from experiencing it because the experience of that stuff has a minimum threshold? Is it not even about protecting my experience of what's out there, and instead is it about just reaching that minimum so as to make it possible? Is my perceptual universe beginning to overlap with new expressions of life, expressions that I perceive no memory of experiencing before? Is this similar to aligning lenses for polarity, by degrees?
That model has legs. I'm adopting it.
Ah, this is a piece I experience remembering thinking about writing to you earlier: your imagination writes the rules for your experience. Writes the rules. You're the one who experiences those rules. Imagination is where you get to see things however you want to see them, and then see what happens next. Probability has a much slighter claim on your imagination than it does on your experience. (That gap is an interesting thing to think about.)
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