Read the opening

When I was in fourth grade, in a YMCA league in Denver, I played a basketball game where I couldn’t do anything wrong. My mom and dad and my sister were in the bleachers. By my coach’s stats I had a quintuple double that day: points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks. Nine years old. I was in the flow, the way athletes talk about it, and somewhere in the middle of it I noticed a voice. It wasn’t quite mine. It was quieter than mine, and simpler. It told me where to go and what to do, and every time I followed it, something good happened. A basket. An assist. A steal.

It happened a few more times over the years I played, the last time around eighth grade, while the game was still nothing but fun. But that one was the first time I really noticed it. Afterward I told my mom. I said I could hear another voice in my head, a quieter one, and when I followed it I was always right.

My mom was a great mother. She was loving and caring, and she took me to sports and school events and everything else. She listened to me. Then she told me I should never tell anybody else about that voice, because they would think I was crazy and lock me up.

So I didn’t. For most of my life I never told anyone.

This book is me telling.

The voice at that basketball game turned out to be the smallest piece of something much bigger. I call the bigger thing the Theory of Sovereign Reflectivity, TSR for short. It describes how that voice was possible, why it only showed up when I was having fun, why it vanished whenever I tried to force it, and why it’s available to you too.

I’ve tried to write this book several ways. The first time, in 2020, I snuck the whole theory into a book about project management, because project management was what I knew. Since then I’ve written primers full of tables and definitions. People who read them could repeat the definitions back to me. Almost nobody could see the whole thing.

What finally worked was conversation. For years I’ve explained TSR to anyone who would sit still for it, and lately to AI, every generation of it. Each one started where any smart skeptic starts. It asked a reasonable question. I answered, and the answer broke something in the picture it had built. So it asked a better question. Somewhere around the twentieth question the pieces started holding each other up, and it stopped seeing a list of strange words and started seeing a system.

That’s this book. The questions are real ones. People have asked them, machines have asked them, and I asked most of them myself years ago. I kept the ones that were wrong in useful ways, because you’ll probably ask them too. The questions are in bold. The answers are mine.

One thing I’ll say once, so I don’t have to keep saying it. I’m not a physicist. I’m a computer systems engineer. I barely graduated high school and I dropped out of college, and a lot of that was reading. I was never diagnosed with anything. Letters and words transposed on me, and I could make out the words well enough but I couldn’t hold their meaning for more than a few at a time, so by the end of a sentence the beginning was gone. I didn’t do homework. I collected zeros and passed on tests, because a multiple-choice test rewards intuition. When my mother sat me down to read a book and write the report, what came out was a story I’d made up, because I had no idea what I’d just read, and she filled in the rest to get me through. It worked. The verbal section of my ACT came back in the single digits, doing my best, and I remember her crying at the number. I’m not an avid reader and never have been. Almost nothing in this book came from other people’s books; it came through thought games and conversation. Most of the lineage you’ll meet in Chapter 9 was shown to me after the fact, and so were the Buddhist terms in Chapter 10 and the biology in Chapter 18, much of it while this book was being checked, and I checked it. Over the years I taught myself a way of reading and learning that works for me, mostly one precise definition at a time, and I mention it here so you know what kind of mind this came through. When I lean on Einstein in this book, I’m using the shape of his thinking to look at the other side of it. I’m not adding to his physics. Obviously the nonphysical isn’t physics. It’s the inverse reflection of it, and that is the whole claim: the table borrows the shape of physics, not its authority, and every row has to earn its place by holding the rows around it up. To me, what follows isn’t speculation. It’s a translation of something I understood whole, and I’m going to tell it to you the way I understand it.

I’m not asking you to believe it because I received it. I’m asking you to understand it. What you do after that is yours. The theory insists on that part. And if the two ever pull against each other, if what I understood whole disagrees with what your own life shows you when you look carefully, your life governs. That’s true for you, and it’s true for me; the last chapter is me holding myself to it. And if you’re waiting for the part where I say people cause their own illnesses, or that someone’s suffering was their own doing, it isn’t coming. Chapters 13 and 19 say the opposite, and I’d rather you know that now than wonder for the rest of the book.

You say awareness comes first. Why?

Because starting anywhere else gave me the wrong problem.

If you start with matter, you have to explain how awareness shows up out of things that aren’t aware. Atoms become molecules, molecules become cells, cells become a brain, and somewhere along the way the lights come on. People have been looking for that switch for a long time. Nobody has found where awareness is. You can’t put your finger on it. You can’t see it or hear it or taste it. Everything you’ve ever sensed, you sensed with it, and you’ve never once sensed it.

So I stopped trying to build awareness out of stuff and ran the game the other way.

What game?

A thought game. Einstein ran them. He imagined riding alongside a beam of light and asked what he would see. Mine went like this.

Assume awareness was first. It was whole, but it didn’t grow. It knew itself the way an awareness would if there were nothing else to be aware of: completely, and with no surprises. Now assume it made parts of itself. Particles. Each particle stayed bound to the whole through a vibration of its own, a kind of awareness of its own. The first of these, it seems to me, is light.

Once there are parts, there are relationships. The particles moved and bounced off each other, and every collision made a new combination of vibrations. More combinations meant more particles bonding together, and bonded particles bent the paths of other particles. And it kept going like that. Every particle’s path was shaped by its relationships to every other particle, and by how those relationships expanded and aligned on the side you can’t see.

And what came before awareness?

I don’t know. I can’t get behind it. Awareness is where my thinking starts, the way the speed of light is where Einstein’s starts. Everything I’ll tell you follows from that starting point and one simple rule, which we’ll get to.

So the universe is awareness making parts of itself so it has something to be aware of.

That’s close. I’d put it this way: the parts are how the whole gets to experience difference. A whole with nothing outside it can’t bump into anything. It can’t be surprised. Give it parts, and suddenly there’s something to meet.

Before we go further. Who are you, and why should I listen to you about this?

You shouldn’t, yet. Here’s who I am anyway.

I worked in restaurants for years as a waiter, a busboy, a bartender. I worked at so many of them. I’d dropped out of college, and I didn’t stay anywhere long until I found a place where the tips were good. In my first few cars I listened to cassette tapes: Tony Robbins, Napoleon Hill, and Abraham-Hicks, which you’ll hear more about. Think and Grow Rich got to me, and I did what it said. I wrote down what I wanted, how I’d get there, and what it would feel like. I wanted my first million by thirty-six, and I wanted to be the chief technology officer of a company by then too. At the time I was carrying plates.

I missed both goals by about a year.

I did become a CTO. Bermuda is how. In my late twenties my mother was very sick, in and out of the hospital for the better part of three years, far more in than out. She was living with me in a third-floor walk-up in Denver with no elevator, and every day I carried her down the stairs to her appointments and back up again. The bills were serious, and my job at HP had been under a pay freeze for years. So I put my résumé online, and a consulting firm on an island in the Atlantic offered me a job. When I was about six, watching a television show about Bermuda, I’d told my parents I was going to live there one day. You can’t just move to Bermuda. There’s a work permit and a dozen hoops. I moved to Bermuda. I went to pay off what her illness had cost and to support her from there, and I could only go because a friend of hers offered to take her in. Keep that detail. My ease was somebody’s weight, and I’ll come back to what that means. By 2016 I was running technology at a hedge fund, and for the ten years before that I’d been watching projects and people go through cycles. The same cycles of change, over and over, in projects and in people. Once I’d noticed them I couldn’t stop seeing them.

In 2017, in the middle of my second divorce, a short marriage that had nothing to do with my son’s mother, who had left years earlier, I started meditating and painting to get through it. In 2019 I went on a cruise, sat in a comfortable chair on a stage in front of a room full of people, and came home with something I’ve been trying to put into words ever since.

That’s a strange résumé for a theory of consciousness.

It’s the résumé of somebody who spent twenty years forcing things to happen. That turns out to be decent preparation for noticing what happens when you stop.

I never set out to write TSR. It came through me. I’ll tell you how, but it makes more sense in pieces, at the points where the story explains something. So let’s start with the obvious question.

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.

I’ve spent years carving words into oil pastel with a knife. The pastel pushes back against the blade, and that’s why the words stay. Try carving a sentence into water. A surface with no resistance can’t hold a mark.

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.

And on the other side? The nonphysical side?

On the other side, there’s no separation. Not really.

I call it the Current of Consciousness. Picture a river so smooth it looks like it isn’t moving. Engineers call that laminar flow: every layer sliding past the next without any turbulence. From the outside it looks idle, still enough to reflect the sky. It’s moving the entire time.

If the river is that smooth, what makes a vibration in it?

Expansion does. That’s what a vibration is, here or anywhere: a disturbance of an equilibrium. A still pond is in equilibrium. Drop something in and the surface has to answer, and the answer is a ripple. The Current is the smooth surface. A new desire arriving in it is the stone. The disturbance is the expansion, and the ripple it leaves in the flow is the vibration. You can’t expand the Current without setting up a vibration, and every vibration is the record of an expansion. That’s why, when we get to the mirror, space and time come across as a single continuum and not two separate words: Expansion is the act of disturbing the flow, and Vibration is what the disturbance leaves in it.

And here’s the part that matters most, and I’ll come back to it at the end of the book. In water, a ripple dies out. Friction and viscosity flatten it, and those are forms of resistance. The Current has none. Disturb a flow with no resistance in it and nothing is there to damp the ripple. It never decays. It culminates: the Current takes the new vibration into its new baseline and goes smooth again, one desire larger, ready to be disturbed by the next one.

The Current is always the furthest point the whole has reached, and expansion is what moves it. My expansion moves it. So does yours. The vibrations I expand aren’t separate from the vibrations you expand. We’re both adding to the same flow. What differs between us is how aligned each of us is with where the Current has gotten to, and you feel that in your frequency.

So on that side I’m not an individual at all.

You’re a part of the whole. On this side your resistance lets you identify the part as you, and that’s accurate as far as it goes. You’re a particle of the whole, and you have edges here. But the other side of you, the nonphysical side, is flowing as part of the whole the entire time, because over there nothing individualizes the way it does here.

Think about the particles in that thought game. Each one had its own path and its own collisions. None of them ever came loose from the whole it was part of.

Where is the Current, then? Where would I point?

Nowhere, and everywhere. It doesn’t have a location. A location is a physical idea, and the Current isn’t physical. It runs through everything.

What lets you feel it is your own perspective. Your sovereign perspective, I’d say. Nobody can feel it for you, and nobody can feel it from where you stand except you. All any of us can ever know about the whole is the connection we feel with it. Everything else reaches us through that same perspective.

People sometimes want me to prove the Current exists first and then talk about feeling it. I understand why. But it’s a bit like arguing with water that it’s wet. You’re in it. The question is how much of it you let yourself feel.

You keep using that word, sovereign. What does it mean here?

It means you have your own point of view on the whole, one nobody else can have. It doesn’t mean independence from the whole. Every one of us is fully inside it. Sovereignty is that each of us is inside it from somewhere, and nobody else gets to be there.

That matters later, when we get to how you should treat other people. Everyone you meet has their own Movement, their own place in the flow, and nothing I want or feel entitles me to theirs.

Have you ever felt it? The no-separation part?

Once, very strongly, for a few minutes. I was on that stage on the cruise. For the first time in my life I felt like I could hear all the thoughts in the room.

I’ll tell you that story properly when we get there. I mention it now because it’s the one time your question stopped being theoretical for me. For those few minutes my resistance was so low that the separation got thin. Then I walked back to my seat, and I was me again.