Transformation at its root is not the acquisition of new content,
But a reconfiguration of permeability.
Filtering is not passive, it is the structure.
This filtering layer is the self in its functional sense.
At any moment, experience is not “everything that is happening.”
It is everything that is allowed to register.
The transformation does not come from the input alone,
Rather once the input crosses a threshold it previously couldn’t,
The system has no choice but to reorganize.
Reorganization is not a choice at that point.
Participation/Continuity vs Experience/Completion
Participation keeps life going by continuously extracting from the present, so experience is never allowed to finish.
Stillness removes the need to extract, so experience can fully arrive and fully exhaust itself.
Participation converts moments into continuity.
Stillness allows moments to complete.
The ‘prison of time’ document
I used ChatGPT to condense the discussion into a set of bullet points.
Time Prison — Constraints Condensed:
Irreversibility
No undo, no rewind, no trial runs. Every moment binds.
Birth / Non-consensual contracts
Body, species, genome, culture, family, language, historical moment, lifespan.
Accumulation / One-way function
Memory, trauma, obligations, roles, property, reputation, narrative inertia.
Future-time pre-occupation
Biological decay, parental care, death logistics, inheritance, family scripts, social expectations.
Retroactive legitimation by duration
Endurance = consent, survival = endorsement, continuity = justification.
Biological closures
Childhood gone, neuroplasticity decline, vitality decay, hormonal windows close, cognition slows, death inevitable.
Psychological binding
Memory + anticipation loops → regret, dread, narrative persistence, identity persistence.
Social roles and expectations
Time-indexed identities, societal “deadlines,” lagging recognition, role freezing.
Economic/dependency chains
Pre-claimed future labor (rent, property, savings), dependency obligations, accumulation requirements.
Symbolic / destiny / predictive time
Astrology, narratives, cultural scripts occupy imagination and foreclose possibilities.
Absolute endpoint: Death
Final closure, unavoidable, non-negotiable, non-reversible.
The vision vs power problem
With the energy allotments (narrow-range, mostly fixed) coming from each day’s night sleep:
— If you choose vision, you are choosing to live closer to how reality actually is,
But with less capacity to impose yourself upon it.
— If you choose power, you are choosing effectiveness,
But at the cost of seeing less of what is really happening.
The ‘Insulation from nature’ project
I find it somewhat puzzling.
Even though we in theory come from nature,
Most of our endeavor is in insulating ourselves from it as much as possible.
We crave freedom from nature and its restrictions and randomness,
And build ton loads of infrastructure to minimize direct contact and mediate.
We build:
shoes → to avoid touching the ground
clothes → to escape temperature, wind, exposure
houses → to avoid the wild field of sensory unpredictability
walls → to create zones where nature cannot enter
climate control → to flatten the volatility of the environment
cities → to replace nature with controlled artificiality
screens → to mediate reality through safe distance
cars → as moving capsules of insulation
hospitals → insulation from biological randomness
religions → insulation from metaphysical dread
civilization itself → an enormous buffering machine
Humanity’s entire project seems to be buffering, insulating, distancing, and filtering the raw world.
If civilization were built on ‘evolution and transcendence’ vs ‘insulation and survival’
- Cities would be monasteries disguised as infrastructure.
- Technology would aim at cognitive clarity, not dopamine comfort.
- Architecture would support meditative states, not consumer flow.
- Food systems would support energy and wakefulness, not sedation.
- Education would train perception, not conformity.
- Work would be minimal, the body would not be the identity.
- Entertainment would be exploration of consciousness, not numbing.
- Relationships would be energetic resonance fields, not attachments.
- The “economy” would revolve around inner development, not scarcity anxiety.
- The purpose of collective life would be to create states of lucidity, not safety.
- Not a world of insulation, but a world of revelation.
All becoming is a sacrifice
All becoming looks like a sacrifice,
Like there is no way to really win.
Every becoming requires narrowing.
Every mastery requires confinement.
Every identity requires self-limiting.
Every arc demands cutting off infinite other arcs.
Every domain requires adopting its rules.
Every path sacrifices alternate versions of yourself.
Every win is local, temporary, partial.
Every payoff requires giving up some other possibility.
The animal, human, and mystic
The animal wants to survive,
The mystic wants to dissolve,
The human stands between them,
Haunted by the echo of both.
Reflections on the Integration of Life and Death
My grand life’s musing,
Is the integration of life and death,
Where life and death are not 2 separate events,
But where life and death become one.
What is born dies immediately with change.
Change is instaneous,
The very act of perception itself is to see change,
Change as the vibration/alternation between nothing and something,
Happening rapidly maybe 20times a second.
That seems to be the refresh rate of life and change.
All else is the same principle,
Only the scale/degree varies.
Inbreath is the receiving of life,
Outbreath is the exit of life.
Time is this mega-structure,
That rules all meetings and endings,
And rules all becomings and unbecomings.
In a deeper sense,
There is no becoming nor unbecoming,
The same substance just appears to become or unbecome.
In fact becoming and unbecoming are simultaneous in change.
Change instantly becomes the present and unbecomes what was past.
I imagine a large spectrum.
To the left of it are the things most unchanging, very large timescales.
To the right of it are the things that change every millisecond.
Everything lies somewhere in-between this scale.
Whether it is the scale of inbreath-outbreath happening every few seconds,
Or the scale of a relationship like to parents which lasts half a lifetime.
Memory seems to be the only reason for time’s existence,
Without memory time would not exist?
There would only be the instant/now/that.
The layers of time we experience,
Are they not just the layers of memory?
Time is something we know only by its effect.
We cannot perceive time itself.
Time is what forges the memories,
And time is what fades them out.
We only experience what time dishes out to us + our interpretation.
There is more nuance,
Our experience as a subject is because of the lens of our accumulated memories.
There is also the instantaneous perception of time’s immediate action on us – how it affects us.
But we interpret that through the lens of our memories and build even more memory or reshape old ones.
What would be ‘Experience’ without memory is something elusive and I’m not sure it is even possible.
Even something circling close to that would be – Undefinable, Inexpressable, Ineffable directness.
Like what would it be to see without memory, hear without memory, sense without memory.
Is such an impersonal sensing even possible?
Or does the implied “memory lens subject” and “experience” go together?
My highest idea of living in grace,
Is when we let what comes come, and let what goes go.
The non-linear understanding of time
Time can be seen as a kind of a phenomenon in the field of energy – that is, a kind of continuous self-transforming force.
One’s awareness experiences this flow from a specific point in the field – With the body-mind acting as an energy-lens/container.
However, that body-mind lens is not separate from the field of energy/time – It is itself a localized swirl within the continuous flow, like an eddy in a river.
The universe itself can be seen as a self-actualizing field of energy, with subjective “time” arising only as a localized perceptual effect.
The “river” is the singular field of energy/time, and all bodies, minds, and objects are just patterns within that flow, swirling, forming, dissolving, and reforming continuously.
Journey to the Abstract 