The Blue Rose Manuscript — Lesson One — Mirror Reality
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.
You are asking me where all these ideas come from, and I don’t really have an answer, just guesses and personal opinions. I believe they come from all of us, in a way.
A heavy heart, a hideous rain, a malice void. Our thoughts, our feelings, release their personal bonds when they leave our minds, they get stripped of their private meaning and attach to each other unencumbered, to form unlikely structures that couldn’t happen if we contemplated them in their cruder form, the one we hold habitually in our minds.
Inside this world of metaphors you can bend light as easily as you can open your heart, you can drink life in greedy gulps and die inside, no association is contradictory or logically unsound.
It is very much like the world of dreams, where you encounter scenarios that wouldn’t pass the consistency test in real life.
People don’t miss the symbolism of these associations, even if they don’t always derive meaning from them.
Their loose structures emerge in visual form and often appear represented in art, in heraldic compositions, in religious imagery.
These are the closest examples that could vaguely represent the structure of this interstitial world, although they are but a shadow of its real substance, flat images of something we can not describe.
Please don’t misunderstand, I don’t advocate setting your mental compass by this intermediate chaos between expression and understanding, I’m just trying to draw your attention to a thought space very different from reason: much faster, less constricted, more pliable to our imagination and our current state of mind.
It’s a space where a random image, a sound or a scent can bring with it an avalanche of memories and connections, all forged inside the privacy of one’s thoughts over an entire lifetime, and thus impossible to explain to another.
There is extraordinary richness in this no-man’s-land of thought, where every concept expands to reveal an entire array of mental trees, no two alike, infinite in their cumulative complexity.
It is a richness that grows even as we speak, as new concepts and new trees evolve in real time, changing their meaning depending on context, on time, on light, on mood, on company, on knowledge, on the reshuffling of priorities.
There is no end to this world, larger than the universe itself, and just as riddled in mystery.
Where do all these ideas come from? They come from clusters of thoughts that attract each other, that catalyze each other, allowing themselves the indulgence of unlikely interactions. Clusters that combine thoughts which may be a thousand years old with thoughts that just sprouted in the minds of their creators, insights into scenarios we couldn’t possibly experience now, maybe even future thoughts, who am I to know? Time seems to have no meaning in this space either, for what it’s worth.
I have to repeat the fact that often these interactions are like fleeting flashes of lightning, too fast and too short to trigger the logical alerts inside our minds, the ones that have evolved over a long time to weed out unsound thinking patterns.
These creations of the interstitial space are not even thoughts in the true sense of the word, more like shadow structures that overlap the real thoughts and alter their flavor.
Sometimes coherent clusters of abstraction snap in place over long held mental states and shape them into great discoveries, heroic acts, undying devotion, extraordinary skills, the power to emote.
We often ask people who experienced this state how they accomplished what they did and they can’t answer. Not because they are unwilling, but because they are unable.
There is no way to portray a space which, by default, is the opposite of logic, consistency and consequence.
There is only one rule in this realm: it creates, it doesn’t explain. Expect nothing.
You can think of these crazy inconsistent structures as carriers of thought from one mind to another, containers, nothing more.
Once the thought has reached its destination, they disassemble and attach themselves to different structures, in ways impossible to predict.
The same thought that enters your consciousness will open a different door inside your mind than it would in mine. Not only that, but once it takes seed it transforms and bounces back out into the space between, calibrated by the path it took and heavy with your meaning, which it keeps only in the abstract.
Imagine a whole series of these iterations and the scale of the patterns of interference they weave inside the world of thought! They are infinite ripples on a limitless pond.
Between the moment an idea was expressed and the moment it takes root inside our mind it is free of any bonds we can conceive of. Free of context, free of preassigned meaning, free of consistency, free of moral value or emotional load, but most importantly, free of your will. That makes them powerful and useful and creative. You don’t get to will them out of your mind, they’re too fast for that.
This can also be a burden, because since these mind objects don’t care for good or evil, sadness or joy, pleasure or pain, they can reach you in whatever way they see fit and match whatever patterns mold around their meaning, and that is often smarting and intrusive.
Also, because they are not bound by logic, they follow paths that boggle the mind and you come out of them feeling elated, awkward, offended and confused, all at once and for no reason at all.
Many a mind has broken under the stretch and pull of contradicting thoughts that shape its essence with no regard for feelings or logic.
It is better to contemplate these unlikely constructions of thought with detachment, like looking at pictures, or patterns in a field, than to let them grab hold of your mind and wreak havoc on your emotions day in and day out.
That was a mouthful. Let’s take a break and we will continue to questions afterward.
[The concepts above only seem to emerge during times of relaxed consciousness, shall we say, when they join our conversations, attracted by bottles of wine like moths to a porch light.
We hesitate to draw the logical conclusion, which may sound disrespectful, but we have to be faithful to the scientific process so we need to point out that maybe the human mind can not conjure these kinds of abstractions in its normal state, and that it needs the intervention of a lesser substance to do so, a substance that numbs its defenses and allows it to suspend disbelief.]
Can I give you a concrete example of this free association?
The golden ratio.
Nobody arbitrarily decided that a certain proportion is the most efficient and the most pleasing to the eye.
(As a corollary to this broader law of nature it bears mentioning that beautiful and functional usually work hand in glove.
We see the things that work well as beautiful.)
The golden ratio emerged naturally.
The absent mind allows the hand to draw, and the hand draws this golden proportion, over and over, in a way that can’t by any rational standards be arbitrary.
Would you, under normal circumstances, make any connection between the opening of a blossom and the beauty of a human face?
The humorous aspect of this rhetorical question is that I might have stumbled upon a different free association by accident.
The eye sees, but the mind can’t comprehend, because it’s bound by categories and rules: the rules that govern flowers can’t have any connection to the rules that govern facial proportions, and neither of the two have any bearing on architecture.
We use this ratio in the design of buildings all the time, together with other generally applicable forms of organizing matter, such as symmetry, branching, the increase in density at a boundary.
I challenge you to an exercise: get a piece of paper and write without thinking the first things that come to mind and see if you can find a common thread in their bizarre and incomprehensible mess.
What about emotions?
I don’t suppose there is any difference in this half-way state between a thought and an emotion, because emotions evolved to help you anticipate your reaction to things you’ve encountered before.
Let me give you an example.
If you were a sailor, and you experienced a giant wave before, you would recognize it when it comes around again, and you would be afraid, and that would be good for you, because it would propel you to secure your boat and seek shelter.
If you didn’t, you will watch the high formation on the horizon and notice it coming towards you with a mix of uneasiness and curiosity, but you wouldn’t be afraid, because you would not understand what to expect.
Not the most optimistic example, grant you, but it proves a point.
In the space between thought these mental forms are like the giant wave — things you haven’t encountered before. Things you don’t know how to react to. Things that are too improbable to be scary.
You can’t have emotions about them, other than maybe a perpetually mystified state. If you do experience emotions, they are not the kind humans can relate to. For instance, what do you feel when you look at light diffracted through a prism? We all should be in awe of having unraveled light, but we feel nothing, we just stare, dazzled by the phenomenon.
[We must confess we often felt overwhelmed by the glut of unusual occurrences both described and generated by this manuscript: the three dimensional roses, the out of sequence placement of convergent detail, the anticipation of artifacts subsequently found with the letter, the group illusion of non-existent patterns.
While we can explain each of these instances independently, in combination they paint a different image, one which has more connections inside itself than its individual components have with external factors.]
Is this mental state a dangerous place to be? Yes. Absolutely. And not for the faint of heart. You must prepare for anything when you venture beyond the boundaries of what you think you know.
It behooves you to create a special room inside your mind for these kinds of exercises, a pain free, shame free, guilt free, fear free room where anything is possible but nothing is real, and make sure its crazy doesn’t bleed into the real world.
Never confuse your real life with the life of your mind. The two constantly influence and shape each other, that is true, but you must always act and think according to the lay of the land.
Can I give you an example of a free forming concept that involves emotions?
When you have a talent for something, let’s say music, you don’t think a note will sound right, or that a harmony would work in a particular musical context, you just know it, it feels right. We don’t have a name for that feeling, for that tuning of your senses into music itself.
Can I elaborate on this state of mind where you are immersed in unfamiliar feelings and thoughts?
I’m not sure I understand the question. Oh, how do you navigate a realm where your instruments don’t work?
To preempt the easy way out, no, it is not like moving to a new city at all. When you are learning a new city, you can fall back on your knowledge of cities, streets and landmarks.
Unfortunately, in the case you’re asking about you have to do what all the good scientists did throughout history to bring us to this point in our knowledge: rely on your instincts and your power of observation, go through trial and error, extrapolate on situations that feel similar, try to find connections between things, quit going in the wrong direction immediately upon getting proof it is so, no matter how long you took and how attached you are to it, share your theories with others who might have a different perspective.
Even though people’s observations of this unglued realm are often too private to share, you’d be surprised of how much some of them may resonate with you.
It never hurts to ask. There are emotions so weird people don’t think others could have experienced them, so they never talk about them, but they have happened enough times to enough different people to get named. Who would have thought, for instance, that the wish you could go back in time and tell your younger self not to worry about something is a named emotion?
Also, it is not true that your instruments don’t work. The instruments you normally rely on don’t work, but you have other instruments, some of which you may not even be aware of, that come to life to measure and assess unfamiliar states. For instance, you may never pay attention to the wind, but a farmer or a sailor knows its every whim. They can feel the moisture in the air, predicting stormy weather, or the dry hot gusts that rain will surely follow. You don’t know things about the wind because you don’t need to know things about the wind.
(Excerpt from The Blue Rose Manuscript — Lesson One — Mirror Reality)
