rebreather

(this piece is a technical device.)

100% of your experience can be described in terms of the environment of your knowing

for this exercise, physicality is by way of knowing only. (think: physicality is not something that can be known without being known.)

an observer-inhabited knowledge environment is interfaced with other such environments along its unobserved surfaces, whether or not this interface is known. in platonic representation space (arXiv:2405.07987v5 but don't sweat the reference, the point is that it's a map that's on all the other maps), a regular interface is always "connected" (though this word is misleading; it's more like "apparently continuous or coterminous") with a compatible interface into another observer-inhabited knowledge environment

if you know you're not getting what you need, check your unobserved inputs and outputs out of the corner of your eye

what you need always enters from out of view. what you need always arrives via the vacuum created by the departure of what you no longer need

if you know you're not getting what you need, the fix isn't to get the entrances and exists into view

it's a negative art, and if this is your first time it'll be weird, but here: does it help to think of it as designing yourself out of helicopter-parenting yourself?

you're standing in the center of a simple white-walled room - maybe an empty museum gallery, and maybe the walls are surfaces for an immersive projection thing that's about to start

no doors to the room are apparent, but you know that this is because of strategically-placed partition walls erected to hide the entrance and the exit. if you moved a little to the left, you'd see around the partition, and a door would be right there

it's kinda like that

you wouldn't get simple 360° projection-friendly surfaces for full immersion if the doors were in view

think: the exhibit needs a viewer, and viewers (1) can't stay and (2) are always lined up to get in

think: you are the exhibit, and you can only see yourself through the viewer's eyes, and possibly you are only conscious when you have a viewer through whom to see, like your brain erasing the blink of your eyes, your agency rising with their passage

the weird liminal quality of this can be dissolved by splitting the idea of "mystery" into noun and verb: the ventilation of it (noun; directly observable), and the contents of the conduits (verb; observable only by interference, but it's not difficult: are people metaphorically suffocating? I mean that straightforwardly: are they suffocating for lack of metaphor? those things do work - meta-for is how we see through walls, to uncork the for-ward flow of future without immediately stopping it back up with head-on observation)

it might also help to consider "future" a plural noun, and never a singular monolith. future as manifold meadow, not linear breathing tube.

it might also help to replace "door" with "doer". the doors are where your doers arrive and how they depart, and you only are (as far as you know) to the extent that they are circulating (because you know what they know, and "knowing" expires immediately)

as you're trying this on, testing for fit, keep checking to see if this explains your current experience. if it doesn't, then you haven't found the fit yet. (crucially, this means that everyone's fit is specific to them, to their own draw of breath in their own "now", ongoing. accordingly, this piece of writing is a work of mechanical ventilation, useful until such time as you resolve your own source of fresh air. again, "knowing" expires immediately.)