The Round Year

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A breeze quickens in the middle of the forest, and all the tree branches turn in unison, revealing the undersides of the leaves and changing the color of the canopy. 

The birds startle and take flight together, suddenly, and your heart gets startled with them, surprised by their sudden motion.

You look up at the sky through the branches, taken by their beauty, feeling the light dim as clouds pass across the sun, and instinctively monitor the fussing in the branches, relieved to hear it subside when the sun peeks out again from behind the cloud cover.

We are nature, just like the birds, the clouds and the trees, we’re made of the same elements, we engage in a free energy exchange with our world when we breathe and when we eat, we’re tuned into nature’s cycles, we return our substance to the earth when we die.

Once this realization kicks in, reality looks a lot friendlier, a kindred spirit of sorts, in whose essence we partake without even realizing. Home.

We feel a storm approaching in the tense stillness that precedes it. We learn the movements of the sun so we can tell the hour and the season, we know higher ground by the direction of a stream.

Poets said we are stardust, but we needn’t go as far as the stars. We are of the Earth, and that should be enough.

We are attuned to the places we inhabit and synchronize with their rhythms, crops and weather; we unconsciously align ourselves with our surroundings, pick up on their subtle cues and act upon them without thinking, with a shiver, a startled gaze, a reaction to a sound.

Because everything is made of matter, the things inside our world, as well as us, we tend to forget the other half of being, energy, which runs through everything, animating life and motion, and knows no boundaries in its endless movement, connecting all the components of reality, be they inorganic or alive, in its cohesive web.

Pay attention to this energy exchange, to the heat of a stone baked in the sun warming your hands, to the spark of static energy you discharge when the air is dry, to your pruny skin, proof that your body has relinquished its water to the larger volume surrounding it.

We share energy with the air when it’s too hot or too cold, or when we hear a sound.

If you sit still with your eyes closed and try to feel the world around you, you may sense this invisible pulse of life surrounding you and passing through you.

Our ancient instincts are still there, buried under centuries of civilized behavior, and we’re not that different from the wildlife when it comes to feeling the unseen shifts of energy around us: we still feel safer with our feet on solid ground and our breath still matches its rhythm to the wind.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

* We share the same building blocks with everything in nature, be it life or inorganic matter.

* We are constantly engaged in an energy exchange with our environment.

* Our bodies unconsciously align themselves to their surroundings to live in balance: we adapt to the local weather, crops, daily rhythms, and landscape.

* We are in nature, and we are nature.

* Energy moves freely around us, through us, and through everything else.

* At a basic level, there is no real boundary between us and our surroundings.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

We live in our own perception of reality, where our level of knowledge is the real constraint on what we can see. 

This is the kind of knowledge that makes us understand the sun, moon and stars are not really in the sky, but very far away, that roads don’t taper off to a fine point on the horizon, and what we think we see is not necessarily what’s actually there.

We run on assumptions, because we’d be hard pressed to make decisions otherwise, in an environment that asks them of us relentlessly fast. 

We build mental models, shortcuts, categories and safe zones, in order to function, but that’s all they are, models, interpretations of our perception of reality, not accurate descriptions of reality itself.

Nothing is impossible. Nothing is absolute.

When our perception changes, reality follows suit, rushing to catch up with the new perspective, and then we have to accept things we’d have thought absurd only moments before. 

We are, in the deepest sense of the word, reshaping our world.

Outcomes are not fixed in place. We live a dynamic range of possibilities which shift without notice and require effort to maintain.

In this world where the merest change in thinking can completely overhaul one’s life, the only currencies we have are focus and will.

Of course, we’re social creatures, and need approval, love and support to thrive, so we all unconsciously trade off some of the latter in order to gain acceptance. 

We all yield to currents of opinion and social norms and accept the current scientific views as valid, with various degrees of pliability, according to our temperaments.

Soon, this social scaffolding of common opinions becomes more important than the construction it supports, which is our mind. 

We become too agreeable, allowing society to direct us to its common denominator, so we can ride its mainstream views to our graves, or too unyielding in our beliefs and we make it our life’s purpose to impose them on others at any cost.

In the fast flow of ideas that defines our age, we are constantly dragged, both intellectually and emotionally, by strong currents – the points of view of people we admire or despise – and end up paddling in place just to maintain our position, exhausting ourselves.

We forget the most important truth: our lives are personal experiences, and all we have are those experiences.

We are not here to execute a pre-owned list of standards, we’re here to develop our own.

Any choice, even a bad one, is superior to submissive quiescence. There is no progress in endlessly replicating thought processes that have already run their course.

Consciousness should have no slaves and no masters.

Any assertion of will is challenged by default, because society has a strong inertial drag on ideas that clash with the status quo. 

Whether that means revolutionizing propulsion or changing your hairstyle, it’s irrelevant: all new ideas are unconsciously evaluated for their threat potential and rejected.

A plethora of assumptions and defensiveness emerges instinctively to preempt your dissent, and your wish for a hairstyle change becomes a recalcitrant idea and one you can’t be allowed to entertain.

That’s why intentions yield the opposite result in the beginning (one can’t affirm this with absolute certainty, because there is no such thing, but it works reliably enough). 

There seems to be a threshold of resistance that must be overcome before reality yields to one’s will, and it miserly guards the door on small wishes and on lofty ones just the same. Persevere.

Will is empowered by use, like training a muscle, and will be reduced to the strength of a wet rag if left idle too long.

You make an impossible wish from your heart, one that does not track in reality, and because we’re all conditioned regarding what is and is not acceptable to aspire to, we sigh and soon forget it.

That wish never goes away. It sinks below the threshold of consciousness and continues to exist in your choices, thoughts, and social interactions. It slips out of your mind and into the world, a surprising echo of your retired mental process.

We don’t stay the same as we grow old, and neither does our focus. We evolve a constantly shifting perspective through time.

Will is not intended to be a rigid thought prison, but a swift and maneuverable craft for life’s journey. Change your mind often. Being able to do so is an expression of will.

The outcomes are often surprising, because the results of our wishes and desires rarely look in the world like they did in our head, but they stay within the range of the original intent.

For good or ill, focus draws one nearer to one’s vision, and that is as true for negative results as it is for positive ones.

People don’t think of negative emotions as free will, they consider them externally imposed and impossible to overcome.

While social pressures and dissenting opinions help to shape negative expectations, fear and doubt are, in fact, expressions of one’s own will, and sadly, they are powerful.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

* Intent will always be challenged by the ingrained societal instinct to keep things from changing. Persevere.

* The will which is not exercised loses its strength.

* Will is a personal tool, not to be imposed on or be wielded by others. No slaves, no masters.

* Just because you rationally let go of a wish, that doesn’t mean its pursuit became an abandoned track. It may be out of sight, but it’s still active and your reality will reflect it in surprising ways.

* Being able to change your mind often in response to changes in your perspective is an expression of will.

* Intentions are imprecise, because reality rarely matches our mental model of it. Don’t aim for a specific outcome, but for an acceptable range.

* Fear and doubt are also expressions of will, and they are powerful.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

A symbol is a stand-in for something else. What? Anything you wish and anything your mind can conjure: ideas, feelings, objects, events, shorthands, messages, memory aids.

We use symbols to condense meaning into its smallest form, for immediate reference, portability, and emotional impact.

The main purpose of a symbol is to evoke and reinforce memories and feelings at lightning speed. Even a casual glance will retrieve the message it was meant to convey.

Unlike words and numbers, which are primarily designed to communicate meaning to our rational mind, even though they too can be used as symbols as well, the latter reach much deeper into our emotional core and evoke automatic responses often beyond our control. 

This is their power and their failure: once a symbol was associated with a certain meaning, it is nearly impossible to disentangle it from that meaning.

When we hear the word symbol, we immediately relate it to the common language of symbols we are all familiar with, a cross, a ring, a heart, mean the same thing to everyone, in every language, but the most powerful symbols are personal. 

Personal symbols are subtle but powerful motivators, and their significance is usually shielded from the gaze of a casual observer. They act like emotional armor; they keep us confident and focused as we venture out into the world.

Sometimes these loaded objects are valuable heirlooms, but most often than not they are just humble containers for the meaning we chose to pack inside them: a common pebble picked off a beach during a happy family vacation embodies more emotional power than a precious jewel.

Symbols can be anything that speaks to the heart, although for practical purposes it helps if they are small and portable, so you can carry them with you wherever you go. 

Over time, personal items like religious pendants, wedding bands, heirloom rings, become so closely associated with the person who wears them they get infused with his or her personality and become expressions of it in and of themselves.

Once a symbol is loaded with significance, its message delivery becomes automatic.

This is the way symbols are supposed to work: they cut through the narrative to reach emotions directly. 

Their powerful trigger mechanism was not lost on faith, advertising, politics, and the military, all of whom extensively use symbols to create commonality of thought and evoke positive feelings about the object of their focus.

Some symbols, like logos, religious artifacts, or insignia, are powerful motivators, used to sharpen focus and return the attention to the message they’re designed to convey, while others act in more subtle ways to evoke elusive feelings hard to put into words – a cozy blanket by the fire, a flock of seagulls, the sound of the rain.

We rarely think of these as symbols, and that makes them even more powerful – they appeal to desires and emotions we’re unaware we have.

I’ll quickly run through a few more examples, and as I do, I’m sure you’ll recognize them, because you saw them countless times, in stock photos, advertisements and social memes – a shell on a beach, rain on a windowpane, a campfire at night, a solitary tree, a lightning bolt, a steaming cup of tea, a Christmas decoration, joined hands, a budding branch, children playing with puppies.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

* Symbols are compact carriers of meaning.

* Once a symbol is loaded with significance, it’s almost impossible to dissociate it from its message.

* Personal symbols empower and shield people emotionally, especially during difficult social interactions. Status symbols are very good examples of that.

* Symbols are fast acting and provoke reactions before the rational mind has time to check them. The emotional response they evoke is usually beyond our control.

* Personal symbols are usually small, inconspicuous and portable, and their meaning is kept private.

* The significance of a symbol worn on the body increases in direct proportion with the time it was worn. Symbolic items bond with their users. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

There is an old Navajo blessing that starts with ‘may you walk in beauty’, a reminder to appreciate what a gift it is to belong in the world. 

The beauty of existence runs deep beneath its surface, into its structure and even into our perception of it. 

Things aren’t beautiful because we perceive them as such. We perceive them as beautiful because they align with the way reality, and our own beings, which are part of it, organizes itself.

Everything participates in this giant quest for harmony and order, everything, from our mental constructions to our visual patterns, to our emotions. Everything we perceive as beautiful just fits effortlessly into the larger frame of reference.

Beauty springs secondary aspects by association, aspects like peace, love, virtue. 

We’re often unaware of those unconscious associations and we nod knowingly when they’re pointed out to us, still in the dark about the fact the associations themselves are an expression of those same underlying principles we call beauty.

Walking in beauty is not a happy accident. It’s a way of being in which the viewer is in harmony with his or her surroundings. This harmony casts back upon the viewer the beauty we often see in saints, sages and artists. 

Such beauty is so overwhelming our souls can’t fit it all in, and it spills back into the world in creative form.

People will object that beautiful things are so in different ways, that artful pottery, a sunset or a piece of music don’t share features. 

What they share instead is the underlying structure of beauty, the one we perceive before we’re even conscious of it, reflected in proportion, symmetry, consistency, scale, rhythm, function, balance, harmony. 

These are the verbs of reality, its connective tissue, the relationships between its many parts.

Their orienting principles, which command instant recognition, are ingrained in instincts hundreds of thousands of years old, as old as our senses and our capacity to emote, and found artistic expression on cave walls and hill sides before the development of language.

We walk in beauty every moment without seeing it, the beauty of a humble weed, the tiny dust particles hovering in a ray of light, a soap bubble. 

How can we be too busy for the only thing that matters in the world, the drive to evolve order that reality so generously lays before us in ways that align with our senses so we can understand it?

In beauty we see more, first because we’re naturally repelled by ugly things and second because we want to know beauty, we want to know what makes the image, piece of music, dance, or landscape extraordinary, so we can recreate it.

We yearn to replicate beauty, whether or not we realize it, we always want more of it.

Reality started with the most basic building blocks, which allow us to share essence with the rocks and the air, and from this essence it built different types of things, and refined their characteristics until the things themselves could not be thought to belong together anymore, but at the core of this drive to refine complexity there is always the same principle: things can not embody an essence different from that of the material of which they were made.

Beauty rebuilds that bridge of unity inside of being, with invisible connections between its seemingly unrelated parts, so we can see the world as a continuum of transformation, not a discordant jumble of discrete parts. 

Is there any difference then between beauty and organization or structure? 

Isn’t there beauty in chaos too, sometimes?

There is no chaos, my dear friend. Everything is order, just not the kind that you’d expect.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

* 1. Beauty reflects the organizing structure inside things and inside our perception of things.

* 2. Our concepts of beauty are hard-wired in our brain, they are not a matter of individual choice. We use our unconscious understanding of the way things fit together at a basic level, which we call beauty, to orient ourselves in the world, just like we use our senses and emotions.

* 3. Perception is a two-way street: what we touch with our senses touches us back. When we recognize beauty, we become its mirrors in the world.

* 4. Things can not embody an essence different from that of the material from which they were made. Beauty is an intrinsic quality of reality.

* 5. Beauty brings up the desire to make more of it.

* 6. At the most basic, there is only one creative principle – evolving complexity from simple forms – and we understand it as beauty.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

We’re all many people, spun together in a bundle of threads we call the self, a constantly changing manifold that gains and loses components like a branching river with tributaries and deltas.

We don’t think about how much we change throughout our life as these pieces of ourselves get swapped and replaced. We never analyze their mix, which we unconsciously accept as our self.

Every morning we wake up different people.

We’re not the people we were the day before and we don’t even realize it, because the instinct to accept change at soul level is deeply embedded within our survival mechanism.

We can feel those changes, though, which are too subtle for our reason, and turn to our emotions to transcribe them into the myths, metaphors, patterns and models, the denizens of the realm of archetypes.

Those are the threads we weave into the ever changing fabric of our lives: the age of innocence, the stages of womanhood, the golden years, the prime of life.

We exist as shifting clusters of archetypes, and we can’t even see it, for the same reason we can’t see our own eyes: they are the windows we look through in order to see the world.

Where do they come from? I don’t know.

Psychology says archetypes are common patterns of behavior, so old we feel like they’ve always been there, in the collective unconscious, fashioned from our basic drives and ideals; in real life they’re highly interconnected structures, which, like complex organic compounds, are often too intricate to sort out.

A small but steady stream of these personality components carries us through our life changes; we call those our core personality.

They are the reason we remain recognizable to our friends and loved ones as we churn through being different people, like mail sorters dispatch envelopes to destinations.

Archetypal complexes are living evolving things.

Just like biological entities, their thriving depends on a world of unconscious, simultaneous processes too fast and convoluted for our rational control.

They are not abstract, inanimate objects by any stretch of the imagination, their number and structure changes all the time and, like all living things, they naturally mutate and crossbreed. The sum of their individual instances makes up its own species: the species of non-embodied drives.

New members of this species are born all the time, and they get more sophisticated as time goes by, progressively harder to understand and virtually impossible to control.

They visit your mind, they stay, they leave, they inspire, they destroy. They are loud, quiet, high-minded, and dumb.

They cover the gamut of human experience.

Their many threads shift like the weft of a loom, through the warp of your core personality, and weave the fabric of self, a beautiful tapestry of experiences and emotions you can only see looking back.

They are your best friends and your worst enemies, your trusted allies, your muses, your teachers and your tormentors, and you can’t live without them anymore than you can live without breathing.

You can’t chase them away, they are you, they are as much you as you’re ever going to experience as your self, that great mystery of life.

We rely on this society of archetypal complexes to develop our thought processes, and pick up on subtle, silent cues, like body language, or facial expressions.

They drive our affinities and dislikes and they are more powerful than we think because we have so little control over them.

Your knotted and incomprehensible bundle of archetypes decides which you shows up for social functions and intimate experiences, which movie makes you cry and which words wound you, and the more you try to turn them away the more insistent they get, because they feel perfectly entitled to live inside your head, and they’ll leave when they feel like it, and not a moment sooner.

It is an enchanting experience, watching the many sources of your self come together into a more or less harmonious and hopefully integrated whole, although you have to appreciate the irony your detached observer self can’t be as objective as you think, given it too is part of the set of archetypes and, as such, biased towards its kin.

What is a self to do, lost in this imaginary meta-society that runs circles around the rational mind?

Don’t worry about it.

It will silently run your mind for you and make you who you are, and if you’re really good, it will let you watch.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

* We are complex bundles of selves which constantly join and leave our consciousness in a continuous smooth flow.

* These bundles are living entities, developing so many individual instances inside a set of common characteristics we can think of them as a species.

* Their complex patterns of thought and emotion run the same on all human brains and that allows them to bind to people and to each other and facilitate deeper levels of understanding.

* We become different people with each passing day, based on what components are currently in the bundle.

* Who we are depends more on our affinity for specific threads than on our circumstances. It’s all in the chemistry.

* Stable and long-lasting components make up our core, that which keeps us unique and recognizable through all the changes.

* Just as there is no such thing as music, only a collection of harmonic frequencies assembled in a specific configuration, there is no you, only a uniquely assembled and wonderfully complex bundle of personality threads.

* You can’t grow beyond their reach because there is no you outside of it. All the components of the set are inside the set.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

The seasons, the revolution of heavenly bodies, the water cycle, circadian rhythms, the endless chain of births and deaths, the structure of the atom, reality is made of circles.

Some are obvious and some are set to time frames that differ significantly from our lifespan, which makes them difficult to see.

If you look at life from a distance, you are going to notice things repeating. Older people have the field advantage here, because they had a slightly longer running time for this experiment called life.

Reality is stingy with its resources, it doesn’t like to waste energy (which gets recycled anyway, as you recall), so, when it finds a working structure it repeats it forever. Speaking of the Big Bang and the heat death of the universe, neither of which benefit from a before or an after, respectively, in the eyes of science. I’m going to go out on a limb here.

Endless Cycles

Things are fated to run in circles: you start something, you do it, you end it, and then you start it again. Look, it’s summer number forty-five, it’s Christmas number seventy-two, it’s sunset number eighteen thousand nine hundred and four.

You’d think we’d be annoyed by the endless repetition of events, but we are not, we revel in anticipating it, the sense of familiarity we derive from it gives as confidence and makes us feel safe: we too run in circles and the recognition thereof makes us at ease in the world.

Variations on a Theme

We don’t get bored, probably because the circles have minor variations, no two are ever the same, and that slight difference, the surprise, together with our familiarity with the theme, makes us eager to experience them again.

Repetition Equals Stability

We record the number of repetitions proudly; they make us feel accomplished and wise, and they are ever more precious to us as our own cycle unfolds, like rare artifacts the kind you say they don’t make anymore, while in the back of the shop new batches of those rare artifacts are being produced as you speak.

There is no end to energy and reality has all the time in the world, endless time; it never needs to rush, and it never runs out of resources. Everything it will ever need is available and everything it will ever create is of itself.

We often mistake its drive for efficiency and its occasional fluctuations for lack, and forget that the end of a cycle always brings about the beginning of a new one.

Coordinate Systems

These cycles provide us with a system of reference; they help us orient ourselves and are part of the larger map of reality we slowly put together over the course of our own cycles – our lives.

They help us remember things have a beginning, a middle and an end, and when that end comes there is a new beginning, just like the old one, but slightly different.

They help us realize anomalies are natural occurrences in these cycles, which can be assigned a probability, and which we can anticipate, just like we do the hundred year flood, or the latest snow on record.

They help us accept we can never wade in the same river water again, but that what flows around us right now is water just the same.

Specific natural cycles impact our lives in meaningful ways, and as a result they have been attributed spiritual significance and found their way into the realm of legend, into the myths of creation.

The circle of night and day became personified, and, as it is the case with everything there is, its symbols were assigned genders.

The circle of the seasons became the ages of a goddess.

The circle of life became the wheel of life and death.

We celebrate meaningful moments in this round year we live forever, we landmark its times, for harvest, for planting, for breaking things down and for building them back up, and we rejoice in the knowing there is always a beginning.

As we grow older, we start appreciating the subtleties of this endless repetition.

We stop skipping through the boring parts to get to the good stuff and understand there are no boring parts, everything is an extraordinary display of order and directed potential if you take the time to really see it.

There is an entire world of processes in motion in every mundane detail.

Like pieces in a gigantic puzzle, we too are made to fit, while we travel our wheel of life and death, riding an ancient ball of stardust revolving around a star, revolving around a black hole, in a universal cycle that has been running for billions of years, and which, according to scientific estimates, is still in its infancy.

We belong.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

* There is no such thing as scarcity, existence can’t, by definition, run out of itself.

* Reality runs on infinite time.

* All energy is recyclable energy.

* Every end brings a new beginning. Everything running in the present will end, eventually. Nothing ever stands still and all processes in motion are at specific stations in the cycle which can be assessed.

* Our own life cycles intermingle with the ones that surround us in the fashion of wave interference: some influences are constructive, some influences are destructive. Ride the wave, so to speak. This is the meaning of being in harmony, or in balance, with the universe.

* Some circles are so large we mistake them for straight lines.

* Our experience of time is subjective: the older we are the more we put things in perspective and the faster and rounder lines get.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theroundyear.substack.com

By definition, order is the condition in which everything is in its correct or appropriate state. That is just one of the many meanings of the word, and a misinterpreted one. Our love for symmetry, our desire to complete the picture, created an expectation of order not held up by reality.

Just as you can’t point to something and declare that’s the color blue, but you can easily identify all the blue objects in the room, you can’t describe natural order, which is elusive, chock full of obfuscating exceptions and impossible to maintain, but you can find endless examples of it working through every aspect of reality.

Reality is Motion

That’s one of the few statements we universally accept as true, and one which, faithful to the paradoxical nature of reality, starts throwing exceptions before it leaves our lips. But what about the state before the Big Bang? But what about the heat death of the Universe? What about them?

In the endless motion of existence, order equals high probability, events whose predictable nature yields relatively stable states.

We consider those states permanent: planetary orbits, chemical elements, states of matter, the speed and direction of time, even if upon further analysis we immediately notice they are nowhere near unchanging. We need to hold on to high probability states as permanent in order to function.

This thinking shortcut makes our life easier, but also blinds us to the true nature of reality and denies us the deeper understanding of its laws.

No Absolute Truths

In the reality continuum things get reshaped and transformed into other things all the time, especially the things we take for granted, like our bodies, continents, or stars.

Elementary particles, light, spatial geometry, time, there isn’t one among them that yields to our concepts of order.

Our mathematical models are exclusively abstract. A perfect circle is an impossibility, if there is such a thing as the impossible in existence. I’m not so sure about that either.

Science begrudgingly lowered its expectations of order to indulge the whims of a natural world, which, for lack of proper instruction, constantly disregards its laws, but it did so only out of necessity and steeped in frustration.

To reconcile two states of organization that seemed incompatible, science conceded there is such a thing as a self-replicating blueprint for nature, but stubbornly denied it the status of order and relegated it to a quasi-mythical state between dimensions we call fractal.

Flaunting Order

If order is the state where everything is in its right place, we live in absolute and perfect order at every point in time. Everything is always exactly where it’s supposed to be, otherwise it wouldn’t be there. You can’t let go of a glass and expect it to stay suspended in thin air, it will fall to the ground, shatter and make a mess: that is the perfect order for that object and that circumstance.

The ironic thing is, the sun, which was held as the standard of perfection for thousands of years, is an object lesson in chaotic behavior, albeit self-contained.

So, if absolute order is not available, what can we rely on?

Skeleton Patterns

In everything there is, from the smallest to the largest scale, there is an underlying skeleton pattern, an organizing diagram.

These patterns form a giant library of reality blueprints, which display significant similarities, such as evolving from the simple to the complex, comprising simple repeatable units which allow for great flexibility of assembly, a tendency to decay, commonality of substance, and requiring a threshold of energy, which is never zero, in order to function.

These tendencies and characteristics are not bound to the pattern they belong to, they flow freely between systems and make the endless reshaping of reality possible.

Energy Expense

Change happens at an expense of energy, and that energy can come from various sources, ranging from nuclear power or sunlight, to good old fashioned elbow grease.

Reality is parsimonious with its resources and never uses more energy than it needs. The rest gets recycled into other actions, not necessarily desirable from our point of view, like an overflowing bucket that spills on the floor, for instance. Reality has no outcome bias and puts all leftover energy to good use, yielding perplexing arrays of unintended consequences.

It doesn’t care what energy source kicks it into action either: energy is energy, neither good nor bad. A black hole and a supernova are two states of the same exchange system and running around in circles will work just as well as a battery when it comes to turning your gears.

Cut From the Same Cloth

We extract energy from animals and plants all the time, and plants extract it from the earth, which extracted it from the sun, and we can go all the way back to the beginning of time this way, the point is all these substances and energetic patterns are compatible with each other, their substance is more or less the same, and they all coexist in a harmonious approximation of order we call nature in ways we find beautiful and awe-inspiring.

Energy and matter, action and potential exchange signals and turn into each other all the time through the play of probabilities, but those, as we know, rely on the law of large numbers to make sense.

Playing the Odds

There is no such thing as the probability of one instance. In individual instances we concede defeat and throw ourselves at the mercy of chance, and that’s where the crazy stuff starts to happen. How many tosses do you think it would take for a coin to fall on its edge? For the fans of the impossible, would it surprise you to learn it is only 1 in 6000? What will happen if you toss it just once? I guess we’ll never know.

Some things are highly unlikely, of course, and not something we feel the need to dwell upon, but nothing is impossible.

Everything in reality works at this level of precision, as far as we know, of course. (We may be surrounded by intelligent life which exists in the seventeenth dimension and vibrates beyond the wavelength of gamma rays for all we know. How are we going to check?)

If you give up the expectation of precision, reality is pretty dependable in its approximate outcomes, and its patterns work consistently in all directions of time, which is why we can make predictions of future states based on past events.

Black Swans

There is no such thing as zero probability: given enough repetitions of an event, the most bizarre, unthinkable outcome is likely to occur.

What are the odds the sun will not come up tomorrow? Not zero. That’s all there is to it.

We are always unprepared for these occurrences, not because we don’t believe them possible, but because their sheer craziness is so far out of our range of reasoning, we can’t think them at all.

As an example, imagine people who had never seen a tsunami before, walking on a beach on a beautiful day, in disbelief the ocean had retreated hundreds of feet, leaving behind a treasure of marine life.

This unreal image doesn’t trigger the fear response, as we all wisely want to believe, rather a frozen state of awe in which the brain struggles in an infinite loop with an option that wasn’t part of its programming.

Assume Nothing

Faced with things that are just too improbable to have happened, we adapt by creating looser structures for organizing knowledge.

Our minds, which are wonderfully plastic, construct logical systems that allow for options beyond true and false, free associate between things that seem to have nothing to do with each other, except for our perception of them feeling the same, create hierarchies based on frequency of events rather than abstract rules, prioritize response speed over accuracy.

Our mental libraries get dumped on the floor in a giant messy pile and we scramble to re-shelve their contents based on cover color and frequency of use. If it sounds schizophrenic is because it probably is.

In Conclusion

After the geocentric model of the universe failed to bear true, biology disappointed…

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