The Abstractionist’s Papers · Part IV · Chapter 13 of 13
I wrote a letter to my kids.
“Good News! My General Theory of Reality will give you an understanding of how every environment works, and it serves as a guide for the amelioration of the human condition. (It also reconciles quantum physics with relativity using the Principle of Causation Incoherence.) I’m coming home to share this with you.”
— The (Un)happiness Letter (2017).
A year later it turned into a story about puppets.
“If the puppets realize they’re toys, they’ll try to escape the model.”
— Nimbin and The Abstractionist.
Six years after that, an odd bird came back carrying a yellow triangle.
The Abstractionist’s Papers is the orderly version of what happened between the puppets and the bird. It started with a question, ran into the mechanics of paradox, and came out as Natural Reality.
The Abstractionist Movement is still in its early stages.
How far it goes depends on selection. So far it fits the model, a quiet induction phase, mostly invisible.
Natural Reality is recursive. It’s a body of ideas about emergence that emerged the same way, and it now helps others do the same.
Contents
13.1 The Abstractionist’s Papers
13.2 Opera Glasses
13.3 Video Games
13.4 At Home
13.4.1 Never Late, Always On Time
13.4.2 A Hidden Lesson
13.4.3 Two Worlds, One Sticker Book
13.4.4 Like a Box of Legos
13.5 There Is No Defect
13.6 Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns, and Unknowables
13.7 The Abstractionist Movement
13.8 Closing Remarks
13.1 The Abstractionist’s Papers
The Abstractionist’s Papers was written over years of observation and iteration. The work is a record of Incoherence, built to resolve real problems.
The Incoherence placed here may sit unnoticed until it’s needed. When our models no longer explain what we experience, we’ll need new tools. This book is one of them, produced through the kind of change it now supports.
Everything in this book was developed from first principles, guided by engagement with paradox and by comparing resolution across different contexts. The result is a working map of Natural Reality, tested through selection.
Today more than eight billion human beings interpret the world at once. Each operates within their own Red Space. Most believe they share at least some aspect of the same abstract reality. That belief will break when individuals learn to see each other.
13.2 Opera Glasses
In Nimbin and The Abstractionist, Opera Glasses were first imagined as a way to look past interpretation, to pierce the red veil of perception and engage more deliberately with the Blue Space. The patent application that follows lays out how technology could build them.
U.S. Patent Application No. 18/092,317, filed on January 1, 2023, describes an augmented reality (AR) system designed to display Natural Spaces, layers that exist but stay unseen. This patent application has been dedicated to the public. If the technology is developed, it will belong to all of us.
Conventional AR puts virtual objects into the room. This one shows the conversation itself. You’re sitting across from someone in a conversation, and you see what you always see, the words and the face and the hands. You also see where their attention is going, where their interpretation and yours stop matching, where the two of you are building different versions of the same exchange.
The glasses counter the blindfold by making some of it visible. What took years of study becomes something you look at.
Nimbin didn’t need them by the end of the story. That’s the point of the tool. You use it until you can see without it.
13.3 Video Games
Human experience gets compared to a game, one where each person plays by their own set of rules, unaware that others may be in entirely different games.
U.S. Patent Application No. 18/587,034, filed on February 26, 2024, describes the use of multiplayer sessions between players of different video game titles to promote awareness and encourage the practice of holding space.
Two people sit down to work on something together and it goes badly, and neither of them is wrong. One is playing a long strategy game where resources accumulate and patience pays. The other is in a fast action game where hesitation kills. Both are playing their own games correctly, and neither is in the other’s.
The Reality Translation Engine sits between them. A strategic player’s long-term resource reads as an immediate power boost to the action player, and each version holds true inside its own game.
The system has modes. Blindfolded, where everyone assumes one shared game, which is where we live now. Sharing, where you get a glimpse of how someone else’s world works. Holding Space, where you watch without interfering. Harmonization, where two realities line up on purpose.
Nimbin’s Opera Glasses exposed the hidden layers of perception. The Reality Translation Engine brings those layers into the space between two minds.
13.4 At Home
Natural Reality is meant to be lived. It shows up in the spaces between people.
13.4.1 Never Late, Always On Time
By the time my son was nine, he had already noticed that he was never late for school anymore.
One morning, over breakfast, he said, “Mom used to say it’s not fair. She said we were never late because you live close to school. But with her, we were always late.”
I paused. “She’s not wrong about what she felt. But the reason, the story about fairness and distance, that’s what we call a why. And a why gives you a because.”
I told him about the third pig.
He built it while others were playing, not just one afternoon but day after day, season after season. He missed games, skipped naps, made mistakes. There were days he didn’t feel like building at all, and even when he did, things went wrong. Walls collapsed, plumbing exploded. He had to start over again and again until he began to understand how things worked. That house didn’t come together because he knew what to do. It came together because he was willing to learn. Even now, it only stands because he keeps it that way, showing up, fixing what breaks, making quiet adjustments no one sees. That work was, and still is, the how.
To build anything worthwhile takes the kind of quiet effort that doesn’t show up in stories, done consistently and at a big cost.
The first piggy never saw that. Her story made perfect sense to her. And stories, when they feel complete, make it hard to see anything else.
So she stayed in someone else’s house.
The third piggy didn’t argue. He just let her in.
My son sat with it.
“So the first piggy didn’t ask how?”
“No. She was sure she already understood.”
He nodded, then went to brush his teeth.
13.4.2 A Hidden Lesson
My son is at the table, ten years old now, arranging stickers, characters, obstacles, a scene before drawing the world around them.
I watch for a moment. “Why don’t you tell a story about this?”
He says, “The bear can jump over this rock and be eaten by the carnivorous plant, or it can climb the rock and go around it.”
I nod. “But where’s the story?”
He looks surprised. “That is the story!”
I hold the page upright, showing him a top-down view of his project.
“Right now, we’re looking at a flat world. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what our minds do. Let me show you a different way to see.”
I lay the sticker-covered paper flat on the table.
“Let’s look at it sideways.”
“There are two different layers when we look at it from the side. First, there’s what happens.” I point at the page. “This is where all the rules live. It tells us what happens if the bear jumps over the rock and gets eaten by the plant, or not. That’s the world you described to me. But that’s only part of it.”
I lift the page to his eye level. “When the paper is flat, what happens disappears. This is how our minds present what we see: the world of ‘if this, then that’ stays hidden.”
“So where does the story go?” he asks.
“A story lives in what it means. It sits above the world of happening. It floats above the paper. These two layers are very different. The top layer isn’t drawn or fixed to the bottom layer. It moves with it, but stays independent. Sometimes they can even contradict each other.”
“Like what?”
“Well, we have to create the world of meaning.”
Then, after an awkwardly long pause, “Maybe the bear is on a quest to find an apple tree, and the carnivorous plant is trying to stop it because it’s the guardian of a magical forest.”
Another pause.
“Or… maybe the plant is lonely. It’s never seen a bear before. So instead of eating it, it lets the bear pass. And to show thanks, the bear carries the plant to the top of the mountain so it can finally see what the bear sees, just like in the song.”
I turn the page back upright. “The point is, this is how we were looking at it before, everything as one jumbled world.” Then I turn it sideways again. “Now we see there are two.”
I tell him that seeing things this way gives him more ideas to play with.
I don’t say orthogonality.
No need to.
13.4.3 Two Worlds, One Sticker Book
How did we end up with a sticker book full of bears and carnivorous plants, you might ask?
Earlier that day, we were in the grocery store when he spotted it.
“Can we get this?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“If we get it, we’ll have a lot of stickers to play with,” he insisted, as if the answer were self-evident.
In his world it was simple. A sticker book meant more stickers.
My world, the world of the parent, spun a little differently.
“Do you know how a parent makes a decision like this?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“So you’re speaking to the version of me that lives in your mind, the one who sees the world the way you do. The real person making this decision isn’t in your head. They’re in their own. In my world, ‘more stickers’ isn’t a reason to buy stickers. I’m using different rules.”
Within the same underlying reality, his world was one of play. Mine was one of parenting logistics, balancing wants and needs, trying not to give too much or too little. Both were equally real within their own context.
“In my world,” I continued, “I see a cost. Do you? So I try to figure out the benefit. How long will this keep you busy in a focused, productive way?”
He thought for a moment.
“Between two and four hours,” he said.
And that’s how we ended up with the sticker book, so my child could learn that other worlds matter.
These kinds of moments have become part of how we learn to hold space for each other. Across generations, the differences may seem obvious. The principle of parallelism doesn’t change with age.
13.4.4 Like a Box of Legos
My son was almost twelve when he asked me how people decide what to do with their lives.
“There are different ways to live,” I said. “Can I show you one way to think about it?”
He nodded.
“What does your mind do all day? Whether it’s taking you to the mall or to the moon?”
“It makes problems.”
“And what do you do with them?”
“Solve them all.”
I laughed. “You should. You’re in middle school. Now picture a box of Legos. Your mind is the box, and every piece is a problem. Who puts the pieces in the box?”
“I do.”
“You do. So what happens when you pull one out?”
“I fix it.”
“Absolutely. Maybe it’s too orange. Maybe it’s too long. Maybe it’s dented or scratched. You fix it and pull out the next one. You can fix pieces your whole life that way. That’s one way to live.”
“What’s the other way?”
“You still fix them. But every so often you look at the pieces you’ve got and ask which ones go together. Then you build something with them.”
“Like what?”
“Before you were born, people had three problems. How do I call someone? How do I bring my music? How do I look something up? Each problem had its own gadget. A phone, a music player, a computer at home. Every year each problem got fixed a little better. Then somebody combined those three problems into one. The solution?”
“A smartphone.”
“The thing you just call a screen. It turned into something else entirely, and the rest is history. Do that with your own pieces and you start building your own reality.”
He thought about it. “What about the ones that don’t go with anything?”
“Keep them. Never throw one away. Set it off to the side. You don’t know what’s coming next, and the piece that doesn’t fit today might be the one you need later.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“If all you know is that problems need fixing, it’s easy to spend your whole life fixing, and a lot of the fun goes missing. Some of us are building. Others are fixing one piece at a time. Most are somewhere in between.”
He’ll decide what to build.
13.5 There Is No Defect
There’s another way to divide a life. Somebody once said you can live as though nothing is a miracle or as though everything is. Natural Reality shows the miracle was always there.
The sun touches our skin. Its light meets us at our own boundary, however far away we model the sun to be. A bird sings, and what we hear is the mind’s quiet work of building sound from signals. We flip a switch, and in that instant, we’re linked to spinning turbines and a humming grid.
Everything connects. Each action ripples through layers of difference until it induces meaning somewhere. Even the simplest interaction carries influence from far away.
As the Abstractionist once said,
“Incoherence… is what gives rise to the human condition you once wished upon the original puppets.”
— Nimbin and The Abstractionist
The differences between processes, the places where they don’t align perfectly, are incompleteness, and incompleteness is generative. Without Incoherence, there would be no space for new responses, no harmonization, no emergence.
The more we understand, the more of the extraordinary we find in what’s already here.
We seek harmonization now. Alignment, when it comes, is dynamic, and it lives in how processes find ways to work together across their differences.
A word of caution. When we begin finding the miracle in everything, it’s easy to think we’ve found the final answer. That’s another story the mind tells itself. There’s always a next question waiting.
The loop stays open.
13.6 Unknowns, Unknown Unknowns, and Unknowables
We don’t know what anything is. Everything we know points to something else. Words define other words. Models describe the behavior of other models. Even our most advanced theories rely on concepts inherited from earlier ones.
We haven’t found a bottom yet.
There are unknowns. Things we know we don’t know. The exact number of stars in the Andromeda galaxy. The cure for certain diseases.
There are unknown unknowns. Things we don’t even know we don’t know. Before the discovery of DNA, no one was asking questions about genetic code. The questions themselves didn’t exist yet. These gaps show up only after breakthrough moments.
And there are unknowables, limits built into being inside what we study. A mind can’t get a full grip on itself, and an observer can’t measure without interpreting. Some boundaries are permanent features of how knowledge works.
Knowledge is always relative, defined by context. Natural Reality describes how the process universe works while acknowledging the open-ended nature of ultimate reality. It lets us act without needing final answers.
Science, philosophy, and religion have all told us what the world is. That got us here, and it’s where we’ve gotten stuck. They’re maps that forgot they’re maps. Each says “this is reality,” when all any map can give is “here’s how it works.” When a system talks like that, it asks to be followed. Nobody knows, so the moment someone, a scientist, a philosopher, even an Abstractionist, presents their map as the territory, we can recognize they’re still interpreting from within their own Red Space.
Natural Reality is a map too, born ready to be replaced by the next one.
13.7 The Abstractionist Movement
An Abstractionist is anyone who has noticed the blindfold and started working with it, holding the distinction between meaning and happening long enough to act from it.
The work is individual, and so is the compounding.
A parent who sees parallel Red Spaces hears what their child is saying. A manager who understands the blindfold stops correcting people and starts asking what world they’re operating from. A partner who accounts for both domains creates room the other person didn’t know was missing.
The book, Opera Glasses, and the Reality Translation Engine are the early instruments of something that belongs entirely to the people who use it. General Selection does the rest.
The practice is the win.
13.8 Closing Remarks
The school mornings, the sticker book conversations, the grocery store exchanges, the box of Legos. Natural Reality shows up in all of them. It shows up the next time someone’s behavior only makes sense from inside their own world, the next time you catch yourself mistaking a why for a how, the next time you notice the space between reaction and response.
The world keeps moving through causation you participate in and live inside. Natural Reality gives you tools for making sense of what’s happening and sharing your humanity with others. The map works because it describes how things operate, and that’s what makes it useful anywhere, from a single conversation to a whole life.
Thirteen chapters built the map. Use it. Something personal now belongs to everyone willing to see both worlds, the world of meaning we build and the world of happening we belong to.
The letter said I was coming home to share this. The bird came back carrying the triangle. Now it’s ours.
What we harmonize becomes.
Chapter 13 in the Chapter Manual · Study questions