Stories

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. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - The Round World - Cycles

Cycles: Series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order.
Existence runs in cycles. Some of them, like the seasons, the water cycle or the tides, are obvious, others, like the mechanisms of life, or the rise and fall of empires are not. 
Every quiet and settled system displays a natural tendency to suddenly and inexplicably generate unrest after a while. 
This happens because existence is motion, stillness means death to our universe.
Anyway, about the cycles. 
If you watch a phenomenon long enough, you notice that it starts displaying repetitive patterns, a fact that shows in all the workings of life. 
Some of these repeating patterns take too long to yield useful information, but if your life span allows you to observe a phenomenon enough times, you can perfect your response to it and better your odds of success in tackling its challenges. 
Training a skill, weather prognostication, sailing by the stars, these are all examples of using recognizable repetitions as instruments that allow you to engage in conscious interaction with events instead of randomly reacting to them. 
Your ability to read cycles is a tool, just like the quill you write with is a tool.

The Blue Rose Manuscript - The Round World - Layer

Layer: A sheet, quantity or thickness of material, typically one of several, covering a surface or a body
 
Life is the sum of an almost infinite number of layers that sort out your thoughts, feelings and activities. 
This creates a lot of confusion as life’s level of complexity increases. 
You can usually focus on one or two layers at a time, the ones that come to prominence because of current events, temporary priorities or invisible puzzle pieces coming into play, but never forget that all the layers of your life are always there, and just like in a set of plans, making changes on one layer has consequences in all the others. 
I know, I know, after a while this living layer set gets so complicated you’ll want to throw it away and start over with a blank sheet.
Rejoice! This means you’re finally doing something worthwhile. 
All the things that matter, all the things that are consequential in the long run are always complicated. 
The really consequential ones are usually too complicated to tackle alone.
#storytelling #audiobooks

The Blue Rose Manuscript The Round World - Megapuzzle

Megapuzzle:
A life-sized construct (game, toy, or problem), designed to test ingenuity or knowledge
 
To start your instruction, what is life? 
Life is a giant puzzle made of pieces you can see and pieces you can’t see, and the more pieces you can fit together, the better your understanding of life and the more you can do. 
The mistake most people make is trying to solve the puzzle only with the pieces they can see, no wonder nobody ever figures things out. 
When architects design a building, they draw plans. Flat sheets of paper on which they describe what you can see at a certain level. Nobody in their right mind would try to make a building out of floor plans, like a finger thin stack of pancakes smothering each other. It is implied that things happen between those levels, things that are not described in the plans. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Foreword

Beloved,
I don’t know when these teachings will reach you, but reach you they will, in their good time, such are the rules of this round world. One thing I know, I’ll be long gone and many centuries will pass before you are born, you, my star, my destiny, my wonder. 
I have so many things to teach you and wish I could be there with you, but it doesn’t really matter, we’re all immortal, our kind, we never leave, we never die, we stay behind the ebbs and flows of the world to keep watch, to guide and to listen. 
I was born before the rise of the cathedrals, before the monuments of Egypt, before the age of reason. I was born many times, in many forms, although I’m sentimental and often return to a variation of my current one, and I will be born again some day, many centuries from now, as you. It is to you that I write this letter, my guidance for your life, filled with undying love and all the wisdom I accumulated over my many lives of learning. 

My Dear Fiona - Epilogue

There is nothing strange about me, and I can't explain why I can sense people from centuries past talk to me in my sleep and in my waking state. We are born with all sorts of abilities, I suppose, and I wouldn't have known mine was weird if it weren't for other people telling me so.
We use our unlikely gifts the best way we know how, the best way they fit in the normal fabric of reality, which they often do not, and since I'm talking to people long dead anyway, I became an anthropologist.
It is a solitary journey during which you're always surrounded by a crowd, always submerged in its beliefs and convictions, to the point where they drown you out.
People who even entertain the thought mediumship may be possible, and who don't drop me immediately in the crazy or deluded category, often ask, what is the point of speaking to the dead?
What is the point of speaking to anyone, really?