“Reality isn’t what it seems. If you’ve ever sensed this truth beneath your everyday experience or felt a quiet knowing that there must be another way to see, think, and live, this book was made for you.”
— Luiz von Paumgartten, The Abstractionist
We enter this world already spiraling.
Everything we learn comes in fragments. We receive them separately, trusting they’ll somehow form a complete picture. Usually, this works.
Until it doesn’t.
One day we notice the parts were never meant to fit together. A belief that once felt unshakable wavers, or a path we’ve been following stops leading where we thought. A body long taken for granted falters. Someone we love disappears, and the absence carries a weight nothing prepared us for, until one day we wake up and no longer recognize the life we’re in.
The same thing happens at a larger scale. Wars drag on without resolution, institutions fail the people they serve, and the systems we depend on turn unstable.
Still, we carry on.
Here’s the first paradox. Humanity keeps advancing, and each leap arrives faster than the last. Agriculture took millennia to anchor us to land and build lasting communities. The Industrial Revolution took a few generations to move us into cities and swap muscle for machines. The Information Age took a single lifetime to make knowledge instant.
Progress now moves faster than we can absorb it, and the faster we go, the more disoriented we feel. Medicine keeps extending our lives while burnout and loneliness spread like diseases of their own.
We’re healthier and better informed than any generation before us, and less sure of anything, too. Knowledge has never been so plentiful, and belonging has never been harder to find.
We’ve built so much, yet none of it shows us the path to what’s real. Science builds better maps every year, and we keep mistaking them for the territory. Philosophy keeps asking questions that arguments alone can’t settle. Every doorway opens onto another, and behind it another story.
Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong places.
The Search for Reality
This sense of incompleteness has driven us since the beginning. From our earliest civilizations, we’ve tried to reconcile experience with what lies beyond.
Ancient Greeks argued about whether reality flows or stays fixed. Plato described prisoners watching shadows on cave walls, convinced the shadows were real. We’re having the same argument.
The 17th century gave us a new tool, the scientific method. Observation replaced myth and speculation with testable theories, and our powers of measurement expanded fast.
The 1800s matured chemistry, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism into rigorous disciplines. Each leaned on Newton’s mechanics, which treated space and time as absolute.
By the early 1900s, Einstein tore that foundation up. Space and time bend with motion and gravity. Quantum theory went further still. Particles behave like waves as much as solid matter. Across cosmic and quantum scales, the contradictions persist.
At the edge of understanding, every model breaks down. Are we running into reality, or just the limits of our interpretation?
What’s Been Missing
Physics, biology, chemistry, and psychology each study something inside reality. Philosophers have asked what reality itself is for 2,500 years, and arguments have carried that inquiry a long way. What’s been missing is a working model of how reality operates, one you can test against ordinary life.
This book is that model.
Every natural process has an inside and an outside, separated by a boundary. The inside is where individual meaning lives. The outside is where shared happening occurs. Meaning and happening are different categories of things. Light is the mechanism that bridges the two domains without one ever touching the other.
Darwin made “how species change” a subject before anyone knew about genes. Shannon did it for “information” before computers caught up. Both times, a new field opened. Natural Reality aims to do the same for reality.
The Mind’s Role
What we experience depends on how we interpret it. Understanding our inside matters as much as studying what’s out there.
Look at this:
A flat black circle sits at the center of a static image. Most people see it expanding anyway, as if it’s pulling them forward.
Your pupils dilate. Your brain reads the spatial and contrast cues, predicts darker light ahead, and adjusts your body before you know anything has happened (Laeng, Nabil, & Kitaoka, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2022). Neuroscientists study illusions like this because they expose what usually goes unnoticed. The mind is an interpreter. It builds what it takes to be true, and what it builds is not what’s in front of it.
If you saw it expand, your pupils dilated. Your mind braced for a darkness that never came. Every perception works this way. You can’t pause it, bypass it, or catch it in the act. The mind reading these words is constructing what it examines, right now.
From galactic drift to your own private thoughts, everything you know arrives this way. Existing maps are useful, but they show you how you see, not how things work.
How Natural Reality Came About
After a divorce, I couldn’t give my children the guidance my father once gave me. They were too young to know what they were missing. Understanding would take time.
I wasn’t doing well, and I spent a long stretch trying what other people had to offer. None of it matched the problem I was facing. I put it all down and turned to what I knew. Years of patent work had taught me how to abstract a problem down to its essential parts, and that’s how I found my way through.
I started writing to the people my children would eventually become, talking to them as if they were sitting right beside me in an ever-present now.
The first attempt, The (Un)happiness Letter (2017), explored expectation and outcome. It hit a wall almost immediately. How do you learn to balance expectations and outcomes without perspective, when perspective only comes from learning to balance them?
That chicken-and-egg riddle started everything. I’d found Incoherence, though it felt like a glimpse of something bigger, and I didn’t yet know what.
From then on, ideas came like misfit puzzle pieces. Instead of throwing them away, I kept each one, let them circle back, let them evolve. New pieces arrived and combined with what came before. I could see patterns everywhere but had no way to explain them yet. It took seasons for them to crystallize into a framework I could share.
A year after the letter, I turned to storytelling.
Nimbin and The Abstractionist
Stories were my laboratory. The ideas I’d been collecting needed room to develop, a fictional space where they could bump against each other without having to be finished.
Nimbin and The Abstractionist (2018) came out of that. The short story introduced Red Spaces and the Blue Space. What we perceive is an interpretation, and it sits on top of a shared, causal reality.
The Puppet King said:
“Wrapped inside its veil, all one can experience is a Red Space of their own making. Each puppet spends its days alone in a different abstract reality that does not otherwise exist, blindfolded to the Blue Space.”
— Nimbin and The Abstractionist
In the plot, escape came when each puppet realized the limits they faced were inside their own mind.
It works the same way for us.
Our minds veil what’s there and build an internal world that feels external. Once that view sets, it becomes our environment, and we stop questioning it.
Contradictions get set aside. Even when something feels off, ignoring it is easier. The mind favors efficiency over clarity. It maintains itself so well that it resists anything that might change it.
Pull the first thread, though, and paradoxes turn into invitations. The completeness shows its gaps. You can’t look away anymore.
The Intact and the Flightless
If Nimbin and The Abstractionist was the beginning, The Intact and the Flightless brought everything full circle. These two stories bookend the work you’re reading.
None of this was clear at the outset.
I spent too long in school and was a B student on my best day. I never considered myself well-read. I hadn’t studied complexity, systems theory, philosophy, or cognition.
That turned out to help. The book grew apart from conventional ideas and carries none of the inherited assumptions that keep most of us bound.
In The Intact, the odd bird returns with the yellow triangle, the symbol of Incoherence, and the story ends.
The Abstractionist’s Papers is that triangle, returned.
Five hundred years ago, realizing Earth wasn’t fixed at the center of things reframed our whole place in the cosmos. New views changed the answers and opened questions nobody had thought to ask. If the ground beneath us wasn’t central, what was? If Earth moved, what else might be moving?
The discovery of Incoherence sets up everything that follows, and to see it clearly we need a map first.
The Journey
Here’s where we are inside the picture we’ve been living in:
The Blue Space is the Causation Domain, where happening takes place regardless of interpretation. It exists beyond the mind, but how we engage with it defines what we’re able to do. Each of us lives inside the Red Space of our own mind.
In broad strokes, it works like this:
⓵ The Mind: Everything you access, every thought, memory, image, sound, and emotion, exists within you. Your Red Space is this world as it presents itself to you.
⓶ The Journey: Life happens through experience. Each event molds expectations, assumptions, and beliefs, either reinforcing what’s come before or putting it under pressure.
⓷ The View of Others: Every interaction depends on interpretation. We share the same universe, but not the same Red Space. Each person lives inside a version their mind made, and the Red Spaces of others stay hidden from inside ours.
⓸ The Obstacle: A disruption shakes the mind’s existing model of reality. This could be a significant loss, an unexpected change, or a contradiction too great to ignore. Most people reach ⓸ and turn back, reinforcing what they already knew.
You’ve crossed the hardest part. On to Step ⓹.
⓹ The Search for Resolution (You Are Here): Your mind is reorganizing itself as you read. It’s working to reconcile contradictions it can no longer hold apart. Familiar ideas loosen their grip, and what once felt certain makes room for something new.
From this point forward, we’ll walk together.
⓺ The Discovery of Incoherence: You find Incoherence by dealing with paradoxes. Sometimes a lifetime of them. Each paradox is a gap between what happens and what it means, with Incoherence sitting right under that gap. This yellow triangle is the key to a hidden passage in the mind, one that’s always been there, just outside awareness. Find Natural Reality and the passage opens, connecting your personal experience to the process universe beyond it. Through it, you gain the ability to participate in reality in new ways.
⓻ Becoming Free of Mind: You move past Red Space, through the gap. No longer confined by your earlier assumptions, you start working with causal and interpretative realities beyond the mind’s original limits. Natural Reality becomes a map you use.
⓼ & ⓽ Transcendence: The map becomes second nature. You can see how your Red Space and the shared Blue Space relate to each other. You see your own mind as a process that induces and creates realities.
You’re watching emergence, the process that lets natural systems grow past their original boundaries. It runs through the whole reachable universe. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s how becoming works. By the end of this book, you’ll be fluent in Natural Reality.
After ⓼ & ⓽, how you interpret and how you act become deliberate choices. Like packing for a trip, you decide what to carry forward, what to set down, and how you’ll engage once you get there, now that you have the tools to do it.
An Extra Push
Look at the coffee cup in front of you.
Point at it.
Now point at the cup you see.
Did you point at the same thing twice?
Stay curious. Nothing you’re reading is being transferred to you. All of it arises through your own thoughts, induced by the same principles this book explores.
The Abstractionist’s Papers
From February 2024 to February 2025, I published the papers that formed this book’s foundation. The ideas had grown for years before that, first as crayon sketches in a lab notebook, then as blog entries and social media posts.
One thing stood out. Nobody had drawn the boundary between causation and interpretation this way before. Traditional divides (subjective and objective, physical and abstract) got us halfway there. Separating causation from interpretation goes the rest of the way.
Where Natural Reality came from is a longer story than this introduction tells. After The Papers came out, readers kept asking how a patent attorney ended up here. The Only Show in Town is the long answer, running from the first letter in 2017 through the crayons, the false starts, and a book I published in 2023 and then pulled.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re ready.
How to Use This Book
This work took years to develop. Getting value from it won’t take nearly as long. You’ll find something useful in the first five minutes of Chapter 1, which you can verify and try in your own experience right now.
The full book is substantial. Thirteen chapters plus the materials at the end. That’s why Glitches in Reality exists. It compresses the framework into ten minutes and shows you what Natural Reality can be, without the same depth.
The Practice is the Win newsletter applied the framework month by month. You’ll find the archive here.
Natural Reality works like a map. As you move through your days with it, things either line up with what you see or they don’t. That’s the test, and it happens immediately.
This is a first-principles book. It doesn’t assume specialized knowledge. The framework builds its own foundation, then continues from there.
Everything here rests on one distinction, between meaning and happening. It sounds simple. Learning it takes work, and it has to be built from the inside, the way we learn anything that matters. Between Meaning & Happening is a set of thought experiments that build it, one step at a time. You don’t have to start there. If the distinction gives you trouble, that’s where to go.
Part I. The Mind
We start from within. If we don’t start from the mind, we never learn to escape its confines. This section draws the line between causation and interpretation, what happens versus what it means, and shows how the mind builds a working internal model. It covers how experience gets constructed (Chapter 1), how internal models develop through contradiction (Chapter 2), and how personal worlds create predictable patterns (Chapter 3).
Part II. Natural Reality
Now we step back and look at how nature behaves, beyond humans. This section maps natural process itself. We build the Natural Reality Framework (Chapter 4), model how change happens through General Selection (Chapter 5), and show how light bridges the two domains (Chapter 6).
Part III. Causality
With the framework in place, we formalize how causation works. This section covers the mechanics of the Blue Space. Chapter 7 shows that traditional causality assumes direct transmission, while Natural Causality models a receptive, responsive kind of propagation. Chapter 8 formalizes causal spaces and how different environments enforce different rules. Chapter 9 develops the mathematics of impedance, admittance, resonance, and emergence. Chapter 10 applies all of it to complex systems.
Part IV. Engagement
We come back to everyday life, holding causation and interpretation in view at the same time. We reinterpret space and time (Chapter 11), take the universe as an ongoing process (Chapter 12), and offer tools for participation (Chapter 13).
The journey starts in the mind, moves out into the world, and comes back to experience with more clarity than before. When the loop closes, you’re not where you started. It repeats, and each turn takes you a little further.
These aren’t circles. They’re spirals.
The Practice is the Win™
Natural Reality applies everywhere. The same patterns show up across disciplines: potential and flow, disruption and stability, the harmonizing of Incoherence.
Someone who sees beyond their Red Space engages differently. They work with the world’s dynamics instead of against them. They recognize influence, create meaning that holds up, and let natural processes run.
Adaptability replaces certainty.
The Abstractionist Movement is individual work with collective impact. Everyone who practices this distinction, who sees their own thinking as thinking, and who holds space for others working from different internal worlds, is part of what comes next.
The more you use it, the more intuitive it becomes.