This manual tells you what’s in each chapter. Use it to navigate the book or locate specific concepts. The book works better on multiple readings.
Remember: The Practice is the Win.™
Introduction
What you get: The contradiction driving everything, the complete map of Natural Reality, and the personal origin story behind the framework.
The Introduction opens with humanity’s central paradox: unprecedented material progress paired with deepening disconnection. Agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Age each accelerated advancement while increasing isolation. Why does progress create disconnection?
You encounter the intellectual history behind this question, from Heraclitus and Parmenides debating change versus permanence through Plato’s Cave, Newton’s mechanics, Darwin’s evolution, Einstein’s relativity, to quantum mechanics. Each framework pushed understanding forward while leaving fundamental questions unanswered.
The work began personally. Divorce led to The (Un)happiness Letter (2017), which hit a chicken-and-egg riddle about expectation and perspective. That contradiction revealed Incoherence. Ideas arrived like misfit puzzle pieces over seasons before crystallizing into something shareable.
Two stories bookend the work. Nimbin and The Abstractionist (2018) introduced Red Space (Interpretative Domain) and the Blue Space (Causation Domain), revealing how minds veil reality by creating internal worlds that seem external. The Intact and the Flightless (2024) returned the yellow triangle, symbol of Incoherence and key to emergence itself.
You learn Natural Reality: the Blue Space where things happen, Red Space where meaning gets made. These domains interact continuously but never merge. The nine-stage development path runs from mental imprisonment (①) to transcendence (⑧⑨). You start at stage ⑤. Stage ⑥ brings discovery of the yellow triangle. Stage ⑦ is freeing yourself from your thinking’s limits. Stages ⑧ and ⑨ bring transcendence.
The book has four parts spiraling upward: The Mind (consciousness), Natural Reality (processes beyond minds), Causality (mathematical formalization), and Engagement (living with both domains visible).
What this changes: This book documents its own emergence through the mechanisms it describes. The same approach that revealed Natural Reality can spark transformation in others. These aren’t circles. They’re spirals.
Part I: The Mind
Why minds come first: You can’t understand reality until you see how interpretation works. Everything you access happens inside your thinking, including “the external world.”
Chapter 1: A Natural Theory of Mind
What you get: Parallel realities, orthogonal domains, and the blindfold that hides the construction process.
Key concepts you learn:
- The blindfold: Why minds forget they’re interpreting. Evolution selected for action, not self-awareness
- Red Space: The domain where meaning lives and gets created
- The Blue Space: Pure interaction without meaning
- Orthogonality: How these domains stay completely separate while enabling each other
- Parallel Realities: Why each mind creates its own version of reality
- Internal Models: How your thinking constructs everything you experience
What this changes: Paradoxes show the edges of your thinking. Arguments turn into opportunities to understand how other minds work.
Chapter 2: How the Mind Works
What you get: How your mind works: building experience, handling contradictions, and enabling transcendence.
Key concepts you learn:
- The Four-Component Model: How interpretation, expectation, logic, and perspective work together
- Red-on-Red Interaction: How you simulate others inside your own mental space. Your model of someone else lives in Red Space, not the Blue Space
- The Human Condition: How familiar struggles (loneliness, anxiety, depression, contempt, control) map to specific blindfold effects
- Contradiction Resolution: How learning happens through resolving contradictions
- Model Adjustment: How minds handle mismatches between expectations and encounters
- Transcendence: When you participate purposefully in your own change
What this changes: You see how your mind works and can work with it instead of being trapped by it. Transcendence is accessible.
Chapter 3: The Realities We Build
What you get: How your contradictions create collective realities, and how invisible rules get created.
Key concepts you learn:
- Layers of Meaning: How base, general, and personal realities interact
- The Human Transformer: The process of converting raw events into meaningful experiences
- Blue Space Crossover: How behaviors cross from individual minds into shared space
- Entangled Loops: Self-reinforcing patterns that span multiple people
- Invisible Rules: How minds create and enforce shared systems without coordination
- Rule Conflicts: How most conflicts stem from incompatible rules
What this changes: Individual loops turn into collective patterns. You see the gap between reaction and response.
Part II: Natural Reality
The scientific shift: Once you understand how minds work, you can examine what continues beyond them. This part maps the causation domain, interaction that needs neither meaning nor observation to proceed.
Chapter 4: The Natural Reality Framework
What you get: The architecture of Natural Reality, from how individual processes work to how new Natural Spaces emerge.
Key concepts you learn:
- Natural Spaces: Distinct contexts (physical, biological, cognitive) with their own governing principles
- Emergence Conditions: How Natural Spaces form when processes accumulate enough resistance to existing rules
- Incoherence (Δ): Orthogonal deviation that enables emergence, the mathematical measure of creative resistance
- Causal Impedance (Z_Ψ): How processes resist governing rules in measurable ways
- General Selection: The mechanism driving both adaptation within spaces and transformation between spaces
- Harmonized Incoherence: How specific patterns of resistance and harmonization create new Natural Spaces
- Scale Independence: How the same emergence principles operate from quantum to cosmic levels
What this changes: Everything works like your mind does. Every process builds its own reality while participating in causation. You understand how Natural Spaces emerge.
Chapter 5: General Selection and Emergence
What you get: The unified mechanism behind both evolutionary adaptation and transformational leaps.
Key concepts you learn:
- Boundary Crossing: How General Selection explains what Darwin couldn’t, how boundaries between Natural Spaces get crossed
- Multi-Dimensional Selection: How selection operates across interaction, variability, selection, and accumulation, plus the hidden causation axis
- The Spiral Path: How what looks circular from above reveals upward movement through Natural Reality dimensions
- Emergence by Incompleteness: How contradictions drive transformation
- Harmonized Incoherence: How misalignment becomes sustainable innovation
- The Natural Reality Axis: The hidden dimension along which emergence happens
What this changes: Evolution is one case of a universal mechanism operating everywhere. You recognize emergence conditions across biology, technology, and culture.
Chapter 6: A Natural Theory of Light
What you get: Light as the mechanism of electromagnetic causal induction, resolving quantum paradoxes.
Key concepts you learn:
- Light as Enabler: How light enables interpretation
- Electromagnetic Bridge: How electromagnetic waves operate at the boundary between the Blue Space and Red Space, making causation available to interpretation
- Causal Induction: How influence crosses between processes without transferring substance
- Causal Propagation: How effects turn into new causes across Natural Spaces
- Wave-Particle Resolution: How the duality dissolves when you recognize different domains observing the same phenomenon
- Quantum Measurement Solution: How the measurement problem gets resolved through domain separation
- Space-Time Independence: How causation operates independently of space-time frameworks
What this changes: Quantum paradoxes resolve. You understand how light bridges causation and interpretation.
Part III: Causality
The mathematical turn: You learn to model Natural Causality with equations that work across physics, biology, and cognition.
Chapter 7: Natural Causality
What you get: Mathematical tools for modeling how influence propagates across different contexts.
Key concepts you learn:
- How vs. Why: How “How?” exposes mechanisms while “Why?” creates complete-feeling narratives that reveal nothing
- Causal Spaces: Environments where specific rules govern interaction, each with measurable properties
- Impedance and Admittance: Measures of how easily influence flows between processes
- Cross-Impedance: Mathematical description of resistance encountered between different spaces
- Induction and Readiness: How events trigger responses, the mathematics of cause and effect
What this changes: Natural Causality is mathematically modelable. Physics, biology, and psychology use the same equations.
Chapter 8: A Theory of Causal Spaces
What you get: How different contexts enforce different causal rules, and why that matters for understanding paradoxes.
Key concepts you learn:
- Paradox Resolution: How every persistent paradox results from applying rules of one space to another where they don’t belong
- Multi-Space Phenomena: How light (wave and particle), logic (statements declaring themselves false), and identity (ships remaining identical while changing completely) involve multiple causal spaces
- Ideal vs. Interdependent Spaces: How causal boundaries vary, some spaces operate independently, others require interaction
- Propagation and Impedance: What determines whether influence flows smoothly or meets resistance
- Potential and Flow: The dynamic tension sustaining all Natural Spaces, the yin-yang mathematics
- Energy Across Domains: How readiness in one domain relates to action in another
What this changes: Paradoxes become diagnostic tools. You can identify which causal spaces any phenomenon involves. You gain tools for working with complex, multi-context problems.
Chapter 9: Causal Dynamics
What you get: Mathematical tools for modeling how causation propagates, rather than statistical estimates of what probably caused what.
Key concepts you learn:
- Processes and Propagation: How impedance and admittance quantify resistance and flow within and between causal spaces
- Resonance Mathematics: How aligned processes amplify effects, eight types of resonance with full equations
- Phase Alignment: How synchronization between different rule systems affects causal flow
- Quantified Incoherence: Mathematical measures of deviation from normal decay patterns, the causation axis where emergence happens
- Emergence Equations: Formal models of transformational change that researchers and engineers can use
- Harmonization: How processes align their governing rules to reduce cross-impedance and enable emergence
- Implementation Mathematics: The technical details needed to build Natural Reality applications
- Theoretical Case Studies: Concrete examples showing how the mathematics applies to real systems
What this changes: The mathematics works like electrical engineering for causation. You calculate resistance (impedance), flow efficiency (admittance), and when systems amplify (resonance). Emergence is a calculable threshold.
Chapter 10: Emergent Complexity
What you get: How complex systems reveal elegant patterns when viewed through causal dynamics.
Key concepts you learn:
- Simple Rules, Complex Behavior: How Conway’s Game of Life and the Three-Body Problem demonstrate that simple rules create apparently unpredictable behaviors
- Hidden Selection: How complexity emerges from invisible selection pressures operating across the Causation Domain
- Causal Impedance: How processes handle their own rules differently based on context
- Contextual Modulation: How the same rules produce different outcomes in different environments
- Harmonized Incoherence: How stable formations emerge when impedance patterns align, still lifes, oscillators, gliders
- Adaptive Dynamics: How systems reorganize while maintaining continuity, the mathematics of change without loss
- The Second Layer: Steinhardt’s recognition of emergent patterns, order appearing where chaos was expected
- Multi-Context Operations: How selection and impedance operate simultaneously across different causal spaces
What this changes: Conway’s Game of Life and the Three-Body Problem make sense. You see the selection pressures and impedance patterns that create complex behavior from simple rules.
Part IV: Engagement
The practical turn: The earlier parts built understanding. These chapters show how to live with both domains visible.
Chapter 11: Space and Time
What you get: Space and time as interpretative tools, and how to use them.
Key concepts you learn:
- Classical Paradoxes Resolved: Zeno’s and the Twin Paradox
- Space as Field: Relationships between processes
- Time as Impedance: Measures participation in causal rules
- Little Now vs Big Now: Sequential coordination versus continuous causation
- Déjà Vu: Glimpses of timelessness
- Death Reframed: Organization dissolves, effects persist
What this changes: You move between Little Now and Big Now deliberately. Classical paradoxes resolve.
Chapter 12: The Process Universe
What you get: Reality as continuous process rather than fixed things.
Key concepts you learn:
- How Progress Happens: Changing the question, orthogonal thinking
- Ocean Metaphor: Red islands (interpretation) emerge from Blue sea (causation)
- Multiple Existence: You exist in your Red Space, others’ Red Spaces, and Blue Space simultaneously
- Natural Transforms: How processes create new realities dynamically
- The Reachable Universe: Our electromagnetic limits
- Living as Process: Recognizing continuous causation in daily life
What this changes: You see yourself as both island and ocean. Problems that seemed impossible dissolve when you change the framework. You recognize you’re always participating in causation.
Chapter 13: What’s Next
What you get: Natural Reality in practice and the technologies being developed.
Key concepts you learn:
- Opera Glasses: AR technology making Natural Spaces visible
- Sticker Book Lesson: Seeing parallel Red Spaces in parent-child interactions
- There is No Defect: Cognitive diversity as natural variation
- Love, Art, Invention: Human Incoherence that drives transformation
- How Ideas Spread: Through induction and daily practice
What this changes: The framework becomes daily practice. Theory stops being abstract and turns into how you engage.
Where You End Up
By the final page, you engage with reality differently. You recognize when you’re interpreting versus participating in causation. You see parallel realities in daily conversations. You move between Little Now and Big Now deliberately. Ancient paradoxes resolve.
The framework stops being theory. It changes how you see disagreements, handle contradictions, and recognize that others operate from genuinely different models. You watch minds create shared rules without coordination. You see yourself as both island and ocean.
The Abstractionist’s Papers 