Why Is There a Particular Me?
Your resistance is why you’re a you.
In music, a movement is a complete piece that belongs to a larger work. It has its own shape. It was never separate.
These are passages from the book, word for word: a few of the questions in each chapter and the answers to them. Each chapter has more.
1 If It’s All One, Why Am I Me?
If everything is one awareness, why don’t I hear your thoughts?
Resistance.
That’s the short answer, and most of this book unpacks it. There are two environments, the physical and the nonphysical, and they’re mirror images of each other. The physical is limited, resistant, and it radiates. The nonphysical is limitless, receptive, and it collects. Those three pairs aren’t three separate rules—they’re one condition seen three ways. Resistance creates a boundary, which makes a thing limited, and bounded things can only reach each other by radiating across the space between them. Take resistance away and there’s no boundary, so the nonphysical is limitless, and with nothing held apart, it collects instead of radiating. Everything else in TSR comes from what happens where they meet.
Resistance is the thing the physical has that the nonphysical doesn’t. Physics measures one form of it every day and calls it mass: a thing’s resistance to a change in its motion, its inertia. Resistance is what lets something hold a shape. It gives you a body that stays yours from one minute to the next. It gives you a history that stays behind you, and a point of view that nobody else can stand in. Your resistance is why you’re a you.
It’s also why you don’t hear my thoughts. My resistance and yours keep us distinct. We meet, but we have to meet. Nothing flows straight through.
So resistance is the problem.
No, and this is where a lot of spiritual teaching goes wrong. Without resistance you wouldn’t exist as a particular person at all.
There are two kinds of resistance, and we’ll spend a lot of time on the difference. One kind makes you a definite someone. The other keeps you from changing when a change is already wanted. I’ll call the first your shape and the second holding on. Your shape is what makes you particular, and it stays yours as long as you have a body. Holding on is where most of the suffering in a life comes from. When I talk about lowering resistance in this book, holding on is the kind I mean. For now, just know that resistance itself isn’t the enemy. It’s the price of being particular, and being particular is the whole point.
2 The One Rule
You said everything follows from one rule. What is it?
The main difference between the physical and the nonphysical is resistance. That’s the rule, or the start of it.
Physics already measures resistance to a change in motion. It calls it mass. So you take the world Einstein described and reflect it: keep each relationship, and flip the condition. Resistant becomes receptive, limited becomes limitless, radiating becomes collecting. What comes out the other side is the nonphysical version. Every term reflects; that part always happens. What you have to know is whether the relationship keeps its shape or turns around. If it depends on resistance, so that more mass means more of something, flipping resistant to receptive turns it around: more Movement means less of that thing, or it gets easier instead of harder. If it’s an identity or a definition, two names for one thing, the way mass is density times volume and force is mass times acceleration, there’s nothing to turn around, even with mass in it; the terms reflect and the relationship keeps its shape. That’s the one rule. You’ll be able to run it yourself by the end of this chapter, and I’ll run it on Einstein’s own list later in the book. And almost every time, the right word for it was already sitting in the English language, meaning exactly what it needed to mean.
Can you plug numbers into it?
No. The nonphysical doesn’t hold still to be counted. It has no dimensions, so there’s nothing to measure it with. The relationships carry across the mirror. The quantities don’t. What you can do is look at the qualities and see whether they behave the way the relationships say they should. That’s what the rest of this book does.
3 Isn’t That a Hierarchy?
But something is bigger than me. You just said so.
Something is more encompassing. That’s a different thing from being ranked above you. Nesting, yes. Authority, no.
A symphony contains its second movement. Nobody says the symphony outranks its second movement. The symphony is just more of the work. The movement is completely itself and completely part of it at the same time.
The Current includes everything around you, your whole world and everyone in it. So it will always feel larger than you, and it is more than you. It isn’t your boss.
Why does it matter whether I call it a hierarchy or not?
Because of what people do with hierarchies.
Religions have been describing the more encompassing for as long as there have been religions. Most of them are beautiful translations of it. And a lot of them, over time, put people in between you and it. Priests, ranks, levels, gatekeepers, a hierarchy of spiritual power laid on top of the human. Some of that was control, plain and simple.
If you believe the nonphysical has ranks, you’ll hand your connection to it to whoever seems to be standing higher up. A teacher, a guru, a church. Eventually, maybe, me.
Don’t. There’s nobody between you and the Current, and no ladder to climb to reach it. You’re already in it. TSR doesn’t own it, and neither do I. Everything in this book is a description of something you already have.
