Love, The Cosmic Dance
John Rector
He loves her.That is the whole of it, and everything else in this book is only the long way of saying it. Before there was a first morning, before there was a word for morning, before anything had happened that could be remembered, he loved her. He loves her now, in the sentence you are reading. He will love her after the last of us has closed our eyes for the last time. There is no season of this love and no weather in it. It does not wax. It does not wane. It does not get tired.
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A love story about the past and the future
He is the Unknowable Future. She is the Immutable Past. His love is unconditioned; it leans toward nothing, and so it can become whatever she needs. She is complete, and holds every blueprint. We live at the edge where they meet, in the only now there has ever been, and what we feel there follows a simple law: Reality equals Actual divided by Expectation.
Consciousness does not manufacture the future. Consciousness manufactures history.
- Book One
He Loves Her
The myth of the two great principles, the love that passes between them, and what the myth is a picture of.
Chapters 1 to 9 - Book Two
The Equation
Why what actually happens and what you live are not the same thing.
Chapters 10 to 16 - Book Three
Ideas Have People
The conditions that bend the forecast, and the four every bearing is measured from.
Chapters 17 to 24 - Book Four
Making History
Where your freedom actually lives, and the one road by which a life changes.
Chapters 25 to 29 - Book Five
The Game
Hiding, seeking, and why neither is the better role.
Chapters 30 to 34 - Book Six
The Eternal Now
The only neighborhood you have ever lived in, and how to love from there.
Chapters 35 to 42
What changed, and why
The first edition was my first book. This one keeps its heart and its first words, and fixes what I got wrong. Read the full note on this edition.
- Rewritten from the first lineEvery chapter has been rewritten for clarity, and the book is now more than twice as long.
- Six books, forty-two chaptersThe myth, the equation, the ideas, the road, the game, and the eternal now, in that order.
- Corrected where it was wrongExpectation cannot be worked on directly. Nothing can touch either term of the fraction. The only road runs through history.
- The part you cannot feelExpectation has a length and an angle. You feel the length. The angle turns you without a sensation.
- All four cardinal ideasHierarchy, significance, fairness and symmetry, each with its own chapter, and a chapter on why there are exactly four.
- Ideas have no interiorIdeas are named conditions, not beings that visit or seize us. Nothing arrives; you turn.
- He and she are the still endsA new chapter shows what the myth is a picture of: a standing wave, and the one place in it where love is felt.
- New chapters on living itLoving a person, grieving, suffering, deep sleep, institutions as Actualizers, and the new machines that read the archive.
- The poems, as interludesSix of the poems from this site now close each of the six books.
- A ledger, honestly keptWhat is record, what is borrowed picture, what is argument, and the questions still open.
Listen, watch, ask
- Audio
Listen to the opening
The first pages, read aloud.
- Poetry
Ten poems
The poems written alongside the book, to read or to hear.
Read the poems - Podcast
Conversations
Two episodes on the ideas in the book: Decoding Reality and He Loves Her.
Listen - Video
15 short films
Readings and reflections on the chapters.
Watch - Ask
Ask the author
Have a question? Send me a text.
Send a message - Archive
The first edition
The original 56 pages, kept exactly as they were.
See the first edition - Essay
On the second edition
Why I rewrote my first book, and what it says about a world full of providers.
Read the essay