Notes and reference

The Ledger

A book like this one makes many kinds of claim, and they do not all stand on the same ground. Some are things anyone can check. Some are borrowed pictures. Some are argument. A few are questions I have not been able to settle. I would rather tell you which is which than let a confident voice blur them together. A stated failure condition is a sign of confidence, not of doubt.

What is record

These are things you can check against the world, independently of anything I believe.

The checker shadow illusion, published by Edward Adelson at MIT in 1995: squares A and B are printed in the identical shade, and nearly everyone sees B as lighter.
Perception as prediction is a mainstream research program, with roots in Hermann von Helmholtz's idea of unconscious inference (1867) and a large modern literature under the name predictive processing.
New habits take time to become automatic, and the time varies widely between people and behaviors, from weeks to months.
A logarithm treats a doubling and a halving as equal distances from the center.
y = 1/x is a hyperbola, flat far from the axis and steep near it.
Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland was published in 1884; Carl Sagan retold it in the tenth episode of Cosmos in 1980.
A walk that keeps its distance from a center must move perpendicular to its position; the quarter-turns of a circle cycle through exactly four directions, 1, i, -1, -i.
The line "people do not have ideas; ideas have people" is widely credited to Carl Jung, but does not appear in that form in his writings.

What is a borrowed picture

These are images from physics, mathematics and other traditions, used because their shape fits. They are not claims that the physics itself is spiritual, or that the spiritual is physics.

The event horizon and the singularity, from the astronomy of black holes.
An equal and opposite reaction, from Newton.
Light through a prism.
The complex plane, with its real and imaginary axes. The mathematics is exact; its application to experience is a proposal.
Yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti, lila, the Mandukya Upanishad's account of deep sleep.

What is argument

These are the load-bearing claims of the book. I believe them. They are not proven, and they are not the kind of thing that can be proven in a laboratory. They are a proposal about experience, and your own life is the place to test them.

That Reality, as lived, is a ratio of what arrives to what is brought.
That Expectation has two independent parts, Prediction and Idea, and is best pictured as a complex number.
That no Actualizer can touch either term of the ratio directly, and that the only road to a changed Expectation runs through action, history and Actual.
That you feel the length of Expectation and not its angle.
That he and she, the Unknowable Future and the Immutable Past, are the right names for the two great principles, and that love is the right name for what passes between them. This is frame-language: in the structure, both are nodes, and nodes do not act.
That ideas are named conditions, standing at fixed bearings with no interior, and that what moves when an idea seems to arrive is you.
That the four quarter-turns of the circle are rightly named hierarchy, significance, fairness and symmetry. The mathematics forces four bearings and their opposition; it does not know their names.
That suffering is roughly grip times drift times time.

Where the shorthand breaks

Normalizing Actual to one is a convention. Real situations have real values, and the equation works with them.
The hyperbola picture uses only the length of Expectation. It ignores the angle, which the rest of the book insists matters.
The meter language, above one and below one, describes the felt part. It says nothing about the unfelt part, which is exactly where ideas do their work.
He and she are gendered names for principles, not descriptions of men and women.

Questions I have not settled

I want to name these openly rather than paper over them.

The ballast question. On the arithmetic of this book, adding an idea to Expectation makes its length larger, and a larger Expectation makes the felt surprise smaller. Taken literally, that would mean ideas always dampen what we feel and never amplify it. Yet lived experience, and some of my own earlier writing, says the opposite: an idea can make a moment weigh far more. Either Actual is itself complex, with an angle of its own, or the model of Expectation as a single complex number is wrong. I do not know which.

Is Actual complex? Related to the first. In this book Actual is a plain magnitude, a point without direction. It may be that the past has an orientation too. I have not given it one, because I do not yet have a reason I trust.

Is the angle felt? This book says you feel the length of Expectation and not its angle, by analogy with a body that reads force along one axis. I have elsewhere written as if disorientation were the angle being felt. I hold the later view, and it could fail.

Which picture of the standing wave? I have drawn it with the future and the past as the two ends of the string, and also with the future at both ends and the past at the center. Both keep them as nodes. I have not reconciled the two.

Are the two axes of the cardinal ideas truly perpendicular, and is fairness truly the antipode of hierarchy? Every quadrant seems to be populated, which is evidence and not proof. And a fairness that rewards merit produces rank, which is at least awkward for the claim that the two are opposites.

Which perpendicular is which? Swap significance and symmetry and every equation still holds. Their placement is a convention of this framework.

What happens in deep sleep? If no Actualizer is present, perhaps no Reality is being had at all. I have said so in the chapter on sleep, as a guess.

What I have corrected

This framework rests on the claim that the past cannot be undone. A writer who quietly revised his own record would be denying that claim with his behavior while asserting it in his prose. So here, beside the first edition rather than in place of it, are the corrections this edition makes.

The first edition said you must work on your Expectation. No one can touch either term of the fraction; the only road to a changed Expectation runs through action, history and Actual.
The first edition described ideas as entities that seek, visit, and take hold of people. Ideas are named conditions with no interior. Nothing arrives; you turn.
An essay of 2025 placed the cardinal ideas in a different order, and the first edition treated fairness as if it came first. The order here, hierarchy, significance, fairness, symmetry, supersedes both.
The first edition treated he and she as actors. They are nodes; the sentence he loves her is frame-language.
The first edition drew the lows of a lover of the divine as the second branch of the hyperbola. The lows are the same branch, below one.
The first edition gave a percentage for inherited subconscious patterns that I could not support. It is gone.
The first edition treated symmetry as a cosmic accountant whose balance is a comfort. The balance is at the center, not in history, and it is not a comfort to offer anyone.
The first edition described attention as something the subconscious seizes, a bridge by which ideas steer. Attention is the ledger of unabsorbed surprise.

The first edition remains available, unchanged, at lovethecosmicdance.com. It is the record. This is the mark beside it.

The strongest objection

Here is the strongest objection to this book that I know, stated as fairly as I can.

It says: you have taken a handful of well-understood facts about perception and habit, wrapped them in mathematics that sounds precise but cannot be measured, and dressed the whole thing in mythology. The complex number is not doing any work. Nobody can measure the angle of your expectation. The he and she are poetry. Strip it all away and you are left with common sense: perception is shaped by expectation, habits change slowly, and love means listening. Why not just say that?

My answer is that common sense, here, is not common at all. Most people believe they can change what they expect by deciding to. Most people believe their view of a thing changes the thing. Most people believe love is a willingness and that the summit of it is merging. Most people do not know that the direction of their expectation can turn them while feeling like nothing. The mathematics earns its place if it makes those errors harder to make, and I think it does.

But if, after living with these ideas for a while, you find that they make no difference at all to how you meet the arriving world, then the objection is right, and you should keep the common sense and let the rest go. That is where I would be wrong.