The theory, start to finish

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Start with mass. Mass is resistance to a change in motion. So its reflection is receptivity to a change in motion. I call that Nonphysical Movement.

A symphony usually has several movements. Each one is complete. It has its own tempo, its own character, its own beginning and end. You can recognize it, name it, even play it by itself. But it was written as part of the symphony, and it never stops belonging to it.

That’s exactly what a particular is on the nonphysical side: a self-contained piece of a larger whole. Your Movement is you, distinguishable, with its own character. It never came loose from the whole.

Mass is density times volume. On the other side, Movement is Desire times Vibrance. Desire is what’s wanted, how much wanting is packed into a Movement. It’s what does the expanding on the nonphysical side. Vibrance is the quality of that energy, how ready it is to be set vibrating.

On the nonphysical side, energy is realized. It goes Out For you, and it comes In To you. On the physical side, energy is actualized. It goes Out Through you, and it comes In From the world back to you. Each direction has a name for what it carries, and each lines up with a piece of what we usually call time.

First, these aren’t steps. All four are running in you at the same time, right now, about everything in your life. You’re wanting, receiving, acting and remembering all at once. I had to walk it through in order so you could follow it, but that’s only the way I told it. The diagram shows it as one crossing, not a sequence. Your physical resistance is what lets you pull them apart and see them separately. In the nonphysical they’re one.

The whole relationship, all four directions at once, crossing at that point, is what I call The Present. It’s the title of the diagram. It’s eternal. You’ve never been anywhere else.

You control the flow through two things: what you’re tuned to, and what you’re focused on. That’s it. Those are the two handles.

Focus is the physical one, and you know it well. It’s where you put your attention and your effort, the thing you stare at, work on and push toward. Tune is its reflection on the other side. It’s what you’re receptive to. Think of an old radio dial. The music of every station is in the room with you all the time. The dial doesn’t make the music. It decides which station you can hear.

Focus without Tune is forcing. I was world-class at forcing.

Tune comes first. When you’re tuned to what you want, when it feels good and easy and close, Focus becomes simple. You just do the next obvious thing.

Think about how physics knows anything. It reads force. A steady one is a weight sitting on a scale; a change in one is the needle jumping. Both are evidence, and the change is what tells you something happened. Force is mass times acceleration. That’s empirical evidence, the kind science is built on, and it’s how we confirm there’s an objective world out there at all.

Reflect that across the mirror. The nonphysical counterpart of a change in force is a change in frequency. And frequency is Movement times Appreciation. The way you register a change in frequency is emotion.

So emotions are evidence. They’re the nonphysical kind, and they’re every bit as real as a needle jumping on a gauge.

A bad feeling is evidence that you’ve expanded further than you’re currently letting yourself live. Some part of you has moved on, and some part of you is still holding the old shape. The feeling is the stretch between them. It isn’t a punishment and it isn’t a verdict on your worth. It’s a reading.

Say you work for someone who treats you badly for three years. Every day is contrast. You feel small, you feel angry, you feel stuck.

What goes Out For you, into the Current, isn’t the bad boss. It isn’t the anger or the smallness. It’s what all that contrast made you want: respect, freedom, work that fits you, a life where you’re not afraid on Sunday nights. The wanting goes up. The pain stays here. The resistant part of the experience can’t cross, so only the expanded preference does.

That’s why it’s pure positive. Nothing negative can get in. Every hard thing that has ever happened to anyone has only ever added to what’s wanted.

The resistant energy stays on this side and keeps circulating. It goes Out Through you as belief (“this is how work is,” “people like me don’t get that”). It comes back In From the world as expectation (“see, it happened again”). Every lap cements it a little more. More belief, more expectation. Holding onto the negative perspective carries the resistance forward into the next moment, and the next, where it builds. That loop is what I meant in the first chapter by holding on.

So the distance between what you’ve expanded into and what you’re actually living gets wider. Not because you’re failing to want. Because you keep wanting more, and you keep living the same.

It’s the most hopeful thing I know, once you see it. It means nothing you wanted was lost. All of it is still there, further out than you are. The gap is made entirely of good things you haven’t let in yet.

The energy that gets you out comes from the other side. It’s already there, waiting in the gap. It comes In To you as intuition and imagination, and what stops it is resistance. So the move isn’t to add force. It’s to take away resistance, so more of what’s already coming can come through.

When you strain for something, you’re living in the feeling of not having it. That feeling is holding on. And holding on is exactly what blocks the thing from coming In To you. The strain widens the gap you’re straining to close.

Let go of the grip, not the want. Go find something that feels easy and good, even if it has nothing to do with the problem. Take a walk. Build something. Play. Meditate for fifteen minutes. Let your resistance drop. When a thought comes that feels a little lighter, follow it lightly and see where it goes.

Those forty-five minutes taught me the one thing I’d never have believed if someone had just told me it. Forcing closes the door. Ease opens it.

This is the most important thing TSR says about how to live, and it comes straight from the four directions. In From is real. What comes back to you from other people is a real return. What goes out from you comes back into them as a real return too. Take that seriously and most of the ethics follow.

No separation in the nonphysical doesn’t mean no boundaries in the physical. It means the opposite of what people usually take it to mean. It means everyone is equally inside the whole, from their own place, and nobody’s place is yours to stand in. My Desire can’t become your consent. It doesn’t matter how sincere I am, or how sure I feel that I’ve received something about your life. My sincerity isn’t your consent either.

No one deserves their suffering, and no one’s suffering is a report card on their thoughts.

Any theory about desire and the nonphysical can be turned into a way of getting what you want at somebody else’s expense, or a way of blaming people for their pain. The other person is real. That one sentence closes both doors.

You can cover a cut. You can’t uncut it.

That’s the answer to the question in the title of this part of the book. Why can’t we go back? Because expansion can’t become unexpanded. When the Current expands, the whole it’s part of is now more than it was. To go back, you’d have to remove that expansion from everything it has touched since, and everything it touched has changed everything else. And even the removing would become another layer.

C² × M = E = m × c²

On the right is Einstein’s side: Mass times the speed of light squared. On the left is its reflection: the Current of Consciousness squared times Nonphysical Movement. In the middle, one E, shared by both. Einstein’s symbols keep his lowercase, m and c, and their reflections take capitals, M and C, so you can always tell which side of the mirror you’re on.

I’m not equating a number of joules, because the left side has no numbers. Putting one E in the middle says something simpler and more important: there aren’t two separate energies in the universe, one spiritual and one physical. There’s one energy, organized as realization on one side of the mirror and as actualization on the other.

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.

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.

The rest you’ll have to check against your own life. The only laboratory for the nonphysical is the one you’re standing in.

The Current doesn’t need you to believe in it. You’re in it either way.