It all began with a simple need: to understand how we navigate a universe we live inside but never see directly.
As a child in Brazil, I’d watch our fish at the glass of their bowl, wondering what they thought about the world moving beyond. To them, everything must have seemed contained in that small space. They had no idea anything was happening outside. Years later, I recognized this as my childhood version of Plato’s Cave. We all start with one way of seeing.
Learning to see differently takes effort. Picasso created eleven lithographs of the same bull, each one simpler than the last. He kept removing details until just a few essential lines remained, and somehow that captured the bull more truly than the realistic version. Abstractionism strips away what obscures until what matters stands alone.
Patent practice produces many abstractionists because it trains three critical skills: perspective-switching, seeing the same situation from every actor’s viewpoint at once; examining across layers, like how a computer has hardware and software as distinct realms that interact without collapsing into one thing; and distinguishing causation from response, the difference between “the music made me dance” and “I danced in response to the music.”
When life got complicated, I started applying this thinking to personal situations and relationships. That’s where I discovered what I eventually named Incoherence. The more I practiced, the more I saw.
Perspective hopping proved anything can look entirely new depending on your viewpoint. Examining across layers revealed that different types of activity follow distinct rules. Most importantly, I learned that what happens and what we think happens are orthogonal things. Influence propagates by induction, not the direct contact most people imagine.
What started as personal exploration became Natural Reality, a way of understanding our process universe. My children were the original audience. The starting point was simple: if we could see that we build our reality, we could understand how to participate more deliberately in what’s happening.
“Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.” (Happy is the one who has been able to know the causes of things.)
— Virgil (70–19 BCE)
Recognizing the causes beneath our perceptions changes everything. Once we see how our experiences get built, we stop chasing what we think should make us happy and start cultivating the conditions that do.
New ideas about Natural Reality still keep forming within my Red Space. Many arrive backward, the way abstractionists work.
“Abstractionists, of which there are very few, specialize in solving problems in a backward fashion, and from a distance.”
— Nimbin and The Abstractionist
That’s just one approach. Everyone makes sense of the universe in their own way.
Neurodivergence describes minds that function differently from what we consider typical. But there is no center. The ‘neurotypical’ brain is itself a construction, a useful fiction. When we miss the diversity of cognitive paths, we treat difference as disorder. Natural Reality shows each person building their own inner world.
Once we understand this, we worry less about what consciousness and free will mean in theory, and instead pay attention to how we interact: how we create our perceptions and influence what’s around us in each moment.
The Abstractionist Movement continues with you. In a place where billions of us perceive uniquely every day, we need better ways of navigating that complexity. The tools you now carry change how you participate.
My parents tell me that before I could speak, I’d grab their faces with both hands and make sounds directly into their eyes, desperate to be understood. I’ve spent decades since learning what that toddler couldn’t know: all meaning lives inside.
Why did I dedicate so much of my life to this project? The face-grabbing toddler and the cartographer of hidden dimensions are the same person, spending a lifetime closing the same gap.
And the solution to the paradox in the (Un)happiness Letter, how we gain perspective without experience? The answer turned out to be Natural Reality.
Welcome to the Blue Space.
/Luiz von Paumgartten, The Abstractionist
The Abstractionist’s Papers 