Stories

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero Shift

Shift: A slight change in position, direction, or tendency.
 
Let’s talk about a quality of existence which escapes the inattentive eye: its movements are not smooth, it advances in jerks and jumps, in sudden shifts, going from one state to another without passing through the stations in between. 
This works for gaining understanding and knowledge as well as it does for freezing a pond. Reality doesn’t advance along threads, it takes the stairs. 
It stays in a state for a while, no matter how much effort goes into moving it forward, and then it jumps, suddenly and for no particular reason, to the next state, which is not only a change in quality but also different in nature, so different sometimes that we can’t even recognize it as the next logical step in a progression. 
It is often easier to recognize the shifts.
They are sudden events, out of the blue, but even when we expect them, they still take us by surprise, because we can’t figure out their timing or the fashion in which they will present themselves to us. We understand them in retrospect, clear as day, but when they move life to a new state we can’t recognize it, for the simple reason we haven’t seen it before.
These shifts are sudden, but subtle, like rip currents at sea, which you only acknowledge after you’ve been caught in them.

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero - Options

Option: An act of choosing; a thing that is or may be chosen
 
Like all naturally evolving systems reality doesn’t behave according to a predetermined plan, it runs on repeated trial and error and on eliminating the fruitless branches in the tree of choice. 
Even though you can’t see it, reality presents and tests options for itself constantly and automatically, in a manner you may recognize from the quiet processes inside of a body. 
It favors the organisms best fit to survive; it breaks down things that are in the way of processes in progress and it keeps altering the states of its major systems until they reach a balance with each other.
There is an unseen simplifier to this process, one that runs quietly in the background and one we don’t pay attention to: reality is constantly eliminating all the outcomes of a set of circumstances safe one. 
We don’t think about it because that would add an unnecessary amount of complexity to an already overburdened understanding of life.

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Mirror Reality Synapse

Synapse: A junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter.
There is an interstitial stretch that fills the space between knowledge and learning, a field where ideas roam free. 
Inside that space there is no organizing structure, everything melds together in a chaotic jumble, free to create associations and break them as easily as breathing. 
These free moving concepts are like rapping raindrops of knowledge on the roof of your mind.
There is no logic in this space between your mind and the ideas that are trying to reach it, not in the sense we usually understand it. In this space all the forms that human thought creates are equal and stripped of moral charges. 
It is a place where ideas move constantly at great speeds and bind in amalgams that only last fractions of a second, but in their endless morphing all these ideas are valid, at least temporarily, and they function as scaffolding in the construction of your lasting thoughts. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Mirror Reality -Sympathetic

Sympathetic: Relating to, producing, or denoting an effect which arises in response to a similar action elsewhere.
Frequently actions, states and events emerge simultaneously in various parts of reality, acting exactly the same, like synchronized ripples in its fabric.  
Sometimes an event gets reflected by another, completely bound to it like an object to its shadow or to its mirror image. 
Never can these shadows and reflections act independently from the object that generated them. 
Unlike reflections and shadows however, these pairings of events work both ways, like they are both the objects and they are both their mirror images too.
These reflections are random and inexplicable, not bound by logic or causality, they just exist randomly in the fabric of reality and pop up for no reason now and then as a reminder that we understand very few of the rules that govern existence.
Imagine walking down a sumptuous hall where everything fits into the design and is in harmony with its proportions, color and style. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Roots, Branches and Offshoots - Concentration

Concentration: The relative amount of a given substance contained within a solution or in a particular volume of space; the amount of solute per unit volume of solution; the action or power of focusing one’s attention on mental work.
You are familiar with concentrated essence from the flower oils and hydrosols you have sampled in the apothecary shop. 
Concentration eliminates the bulk of a medium to extract the essence blended inside it. 
Let me help you understand how you can concentrate and direct your mind so you can extract its essence in a similar way.
Whether we are awake or asleep, our mind never stops churning. 
We buckle under the weight of our thoughts, most of which are incidental and contradictory. 
Like the alchemist who distills the essence of a thousand roses into a single drop of perfume, so should you be able to remove the bulk around the core of your ideas to refine their content.
The theory of how to do this is simple, the practice not so much. The mind is like a scared little rabbit, constantly on the run, alert to the slightest noise, disturbed by the faintest memory. It never stops building defenses around itself and consumes enormous amounts of resources in the process.

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Roots, Branches and Offshoots - Derivative

Derivative: An expression representing the rate of change of a function with respect to an independent variable. 
Some phenomena are not about themselves. They take you one level, one dimension down into the substance of things, they are measurements of change, gauges of the inner workings of the world, consequences of movement.
Every atom in existence is a player in a giant set of games of variability. Imagine the collection of all of these games as threads, clusters, and fabrics. These threads of things happening, let’s say, are not even, they display changes in speed; they have lumps and thinnings; they stop and change direction, they soar, plummet or disappear. Their changes imprint a secondary metric into our world, a measure of variability, a smoothing over of its irregular nature. These measures show trends and directions, they clean the world of detail to reveal only the impulses of motion. They are diagrams of change. 
Take, for instance, the line of highest slope. The water always follows it when it flows down the hill. Or the line of lowest slope. A donkey will always find it when it carries burdens up the hill. These lines are not obvious, they are abstract measurements of the change in incline and they only become visible when the water, or the donkey, reveals their existence. 
You will say to yourself that it is not reasonable to guide yourself by the wisdom of lesser things, and that is a vanity of human thought, which deems itself the arbiter of things only because it gathered a few droplets from an infinite sea of knowledge constantly refreshing itself. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Roots, Branches and Offshoots - Precursor

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. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - In Motion Current

Current: A fluid motion in a definite direction, especially through a surrounding body of fluid in which there is less movement
We all see the world as a collection of solid objects independent of each other and relying on external impulses to set them in motion. I would like you to set aside that view for the duration of this lecture, and imagine existence as a self-activating fluid.
Underneath the surface of this endless sea that is reality, a sea with deep, perpetually troubled waters, there are currents and eddies and vortexes. 
They manifest in every one of its components, there are currents in social mores, which we call zeitgeist, there are currents in thought, which we call schools, there are currents in spiritual life, which we call religions. 
Under normal circumstances we accept these currents without thinking, just as we don’t wonder why blood is running through our veins, but once they draw our attention, they become impossible to ignore, so much that they can be distracting. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - In Motion - Timing

Timing: The choice, judgment, or control of when something should be done.
 
Don’t mistake timing for scheduling, or planning. 
It is difficult to explain what timing is, some things are easier to demonstrate than to describe. 
You have already encountered timing, and you take it for granted, because it is woven into the fabric of reality and occurs naturally in all the processes that work well.
Its most obvious use is in music, which would not come together without tempos, measures, and counterpoints. Their planned pauses build anticipation and lead to the moment when one expects to hear the sound. 
We accomplish a lot of this instinctively, of course, but the fact that everybody understands the purpose of those rhythms reveals that timing is built into our being, very much like our senses are.
Timing is the mental sense that helps us both create and pay attention to synchronicity, and it organizes the timeline of an event in the same way placement cards predetermine the seating of guests at a dinner table. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - The Round World - Folding

Folding:  Bending (something flexible and relatively flat) over on itself so that one part of it covers another.
Today we will talk about folds. The purpose of folding is to minimize the surface of a thin flat object for better storage or transportation. Just like a tablecloth, all things that get folded will display distinguishable characteristics: grooves, lack of wear, wrinkles. 
We fold memories in our minds for many reasons, to free up space, to obscure things we don’t need all the time, to conceal unpleasant memories. We wrap this knowledge with great care, mark it with the contents, minimize its conscious footprint to just that marker so we can retrieve it at will, and submerge the rest of the packet into long-term storage, deep beneath our thoughts. There is an entire world of these mental artifacts under there, all labeled, a strange collection of treasure and garbage.
Every now and then we accidentally stumble upon one of these labels and the respective fold suddenly unfurls, spilling its guts into its surroundings and disrupting current activities.