Stories

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes Endlessly Repeating - Scale

Scale:  The relative size or extent of something.
The first thing you should consider when you ask yourself how something works is at what scale. A grain of sand is the same as a rock or a planet, it is our specific experience that renders it minute. Our sense of proportion, rooted in our own size, makes some processes obvious and others obscure, we can only perceive things based on our own scale. Our mind has a broader view, but it too is limited. We are range bound to the things we can observe, either through our own senses or through the use of instruments. There are things in existence we can never see, not even when given all of time and when eliminating all of the limitations of space: things from before the universe began, things that wind up so tight that even time and light can’t escape them, things from places that are not reality, if they exist.
The reason we don’t know the last fact for sure is that the scale of the thing we are observing, existence itself, makes it impossible for us to see outside it.
We live in a flatland of perception, where things, speeds and concepts that are very large or very small do not exist. Take, for instance, our perception of time: things that move at speeds faster than of our range are invisible and things that move at speeds much slower than it we consider still. Nothing is really still, even the North Star moves. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Clarity

Clarity: The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible.
[Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the handwriting clearly indicate it. Even the rose seal looks tentative, as if a child had gotten permission to use it and felt overwhelmed by the responsibility and afraid of making a mistake.
This page is illuminated to a much greater degree than the others, a task made easier to accomplish due to the sparseness of the text, which is restricted to the center of the page. It looks like there have been temporary lines to demarcate a box for the content, maybe to help the young scribe maintain clean text edges; there are also lines to keep the writing straight, and the calligraphy clings to them with tormented intensity.
The experience of reading the content of this document presented in the handwriting of an eight or nine-year-old is surreal.
The more I advance into the manuscript, the more this question weighs on me: who was this person who wrote it down? 
She was a woman as far as we can tell, but there are no traces of her passing through this world, outside the conversations included in this manuscript. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Constant

Constant: A number expressing a relation or property which remains the same in all circumstances, or for the same substance under the same conditions.
The universe is a living contradiction, and I stopped trying to reconcile its paradoxes a long time ago, so I will state this knowing it doesn’t yield to logic. 
Existence is constantly in motion, endlessly transforming and renewing itself, and yet, throughout its churning essence there are fixed points, constants, fundamental invariants.
They are not fixed in the sense we normally understand that word, so things appear to us to be changing, even though in a larger sense they are not. There is a fine structure of constants underlying existence, a structure that governs it discretely and throughout. 
For example, we can see every system in creation at a large scale, where we can measure its energy and its movement, and at a small scale, where we can define its essence. 
These two values, the measure of its energy and the measure of its substance, are always in the same proportion, no matter what system you are contemplating. 
This is not something reality makes obvious to us, from our standpoint all we see is matter, constantly decaying, recombining, bouncing into other instances of itself. 
We can’t see the law behind its apparent chaos, the law that says that the energy of a system and its temperature are always relating to each other in the same way.
Constants like that are few, but together they are enough to define our reality, and if we were to alter even one, whatever we know of it would cease to exist. No need to worry, though, this is impossible.

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Rapture

Rapture: A state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.
I will describe a personal experience for you, because it is the best way I can think of to illustrate the concept we’re about to discuss. 
I went out into nature just before dawn, during that ghostly hour that puts a chill through one’s bones no matter what the season. It is unfamiliar, that hour, a time when we’re usually asleep, and that made me uncomfortable to be out, among the shadows and the creatures of the night. There was something different about that early morning, a strange stillness, like all existence had come to a stop - no sounds in the branches, no gusts of wind, no calls. 
I couldn’t feel the air against my skin, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. The light switched gradually from violet to gray, enough that I could distinguish the things around me, and be astonished even more by their strange stillness.
I sat on the ground, and I couldn’t feel the coldness of the earth beneath me, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. It didn’t feel like one usually expects, and you know exactly what I mean if you ever had to sleep on the ground. 

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero - Revelation

Revelation: The divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something unexplainable relating to human existence or the world.
The expectation to understand everything, while worthy, is unreasonable. Some things can’t be counted in the time frame of existence, some knowledge is so alien to our mind we can’t put it in a structure of understanding.
Don’t shun such knowledge and such things. It is pure vanity to believe we have a grasp on reality just for understanding a few of its laws.
Think about it. 
We can only understand the things close to our scale, everything that is significantly larger or smaller is outside our grasp. 
We can only see things that get revealed by the light, everything that is finer than the top if its range or coarser than its bottom is invisible to us. 
If I were to move so fast that, as you blink, I shifted my position from this side of you to the other, your mind could not find a reasonable explanation, and would think me magical. 
Faraway things may look real to us, when in fact they are just mirages of light. 
You say that the mirage phenomenon is not foreign to our understanding, and that we all heard about the strange tricks eyes play on weary travelers when they’re lost in the desert, thirsty and exhausted. 

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.