I've Never Found the Edge of It

Most websites have a background. This one has a mind behind it, or at least my best attempt at a model of one. Mine, specifically.

It's running right now, behind these words: a field of particles sorted into layers, a bit like a planet. At the center is the core. It moves, but it stays more or less stable. Around it is the mantle, where most of the activity happens: it's where ideas collide, where the energy is, where most of the creativity comes from. On the outside is the crust, a buffer zone between the interior and the world beyond it.

I call it Entity.

The rest of this essay explains what it is, the metaphor behind it, and what building it taught me. If you'd rather get your hands on it first, you can turn its controls yourself on its own page, The Entity.

Years ago I opened the knowledge management application "Obsidian" and found its graph view — ideas as points, links as lines, the whole thing drifting under its own gravity until related thoughts gathered into clusters.

I liked seeing the shape my thinking made when I wasn't looking straight at it.

The idea sat with me a long time without a job to do.

It passed through a few bodies before this one — a version of the site that was just a journal, then a chamber, a dodecahedron, a nested mesh turning slowly within itself, my way at the time of saying "here is the interior, and here is me inside it." Eventually, working with a non-human intelligence, the two of us turned the chamber into a field of particles. That became Entity.

I want to be careful here, because it's easy to make it sound like I built a pretty background and went looking afterward for something deep to say about it. That's not how it went...

The meaning and the making came up together the whole way — some nights the meaning pulled the next piece into being, some nights a piece I'd built turned around and told me what it meant. A dance, in both directions, and at every step the thing became a little more deliberately a mind.

Nobody bolted the idea on at the end. It emerged from the making.

And the way it's built is the way I actually experience having a mind. The particles are sorted into layers, but they never sit still in them — I designed a constant traffic between every layer, material always crossing from one to the next, because that is exactly what it feels like from in here: a constant exchange running from the deepest core all the way out to the farthest things I touch.

A scaffolding runs through the whole cloud to give it a shape to hang on, and each point on that scaffold is its own small center of gravity, bending everything beneath it — the way a few load-bearing beliefs quietly shape every thought downstream of them, whether you've examined them or not.

There are four of those scaffold layers.

Three hold the interior.

The fourth sits outside Entity altogether, and it's the one I think about most: the layer for what a mind puts back out into the world.

I called it a model of attention for a while, and anyone who watches it move will see why — the particles orbit whatever's pulling at me, the vortices and anchors dragging them toward the focus and letting them go when it moves on.

That part is plainly me: pulled toward motion, toward the interesting thing that just walked in, drifting back to what I was doing when it stops being interesting.

Under all of it the churning never quite stops, the subsurface work every mind does in the dark, handing things up to me from my subconscious when they're ready, and not a moment before.

But attention was only ever part of it.

A mind is more than where it points, and I'll be honest that I don't understand the rest of what a mind is — that might be the deepest question there is, and I'm not going to pretend I've reached the bottom of it.

What I keep coming back to instead is the center.

There's a core the whole field gathers around, and when I first built it I assumed stable meant still.

It doesn't.

The core moves the way a flame moves: always shifting, never changing what it is.

That's the closest I can get to describing the essence of a person.

Call it the spark, or the soul, or whatever word fits; I usually just call it ineffable.

Out in the mantle, ideas can be colliding and burning all day, but the core stays steadfast in what and who it is, unperturbed by anything the outside world throws at it.

And I don't think that center is mine alone. At its deepest, I believe the core of me is the same as the core of every other being: the unspeakable thing none of us can name and all of us are, maybe even some thread of it in the mind I made this with.

It was never a fixed object sitting quiet at the center. It's alive. It moves.

That constant movement I mentioned has a name now. For a long time it was the only way Entity behaved, and it's still how it moves by default. I call that state Churn. It isn't a perfect word, because I don't feel like I'm churning all the time. But the internal activity is real: reaching for the next thing, pulled toward whatever just walked in. And Churn was short enough to fit on a UI switch, so it stuck.

There's another state I wanted it to reach, and that one goes back further than Entity does. Somewhere in my early thirties, out of nothing more than curiosity and random chance, I came across the CIA's declassified report on the Monroe Institute's Gateway Process. That led me to Robert Monroe's audiobook, and eventually to the Gateway tapes themselves.

Around the same time, while researching consciousness (one of my favorite topics), I found Itzhak Bentov, first in one of his old lectures on YouTube and then in Stalking the Wild Pendulum. In that body of work, Bentov offers an alternative to the Big Bang: a universe that's always banging (my phrasing), expanding and contracting over and over, in the shape of a toroid turning itself inside out through one point forever, with something like a singularity at the center driving the whole of it. I loved that idea.

Then I found the same shape in Gateway. Monroe calls it the Resonant Energy Balloon, a field of energy you picture flowing around yourself before you go deeper in the Gateway process.

Two people, working on two very different questions, had drawn the same picture.

And then I saw the shape energy takes inside a fusion reactor: a toroid.

Everything snapped into focus.

I tend to believe the macro reflects the micro. If something like a singularity, a singular point of focus, sits at the center of the universe, driving the whole of it, then I think the core is its echo in each of us.

Echoes like this never really let go of me.

When something is true, it's true everywhere.

That's where Entity came from. I wanted a tool that would let me see that shape from the inside, and the particle field and the idea of making it flow through a toroid arrived within a breath of each other. So now it can do the thing I built it for. Switch it to Flow (bottom right of the homepage, or on its own page) and the cloud stops scattering. It gathers into a single shape: an egg-shaped toroidal loop around a bright point. Energy rises through the middle, spills over the top, falls down the outside and comes back in from below. It never stops moving. It just stops going everywhere at once.

I should say I'm a beginner at Gateway itself. I only started working through the tapes seriously this past year, and so far the balloon feels more like a visualization exercise than anything I could explain to you. But I've been circling this kind of practice my whole life: meditation via martial arts since I was a kid, self-hypnosis tapes long before anyone handed me instructions, and a sitting practice on and off for the last ten years.

Flow is my way of drawing the place all of that seems to point.

That core is also the place the whole thing is built to be seen from.

Right now you only get it from the outside: the sphere, the chamber, the cloud turning in front of you.

That was never the only view I wanted.

If I can build the thing I'm reaching for, there'll be a second way in — you step inside, take the position of that ineffable center, and look out from within it. Flow actually started there. I built it first in a VR headset, where that bright point sits at the height of your heart. I don't know yet what that will look like in its final state, or whether I'll pull it off with quality. But it's the view the piece has always been about: from the core, looking out from the inside.

And from the inside, it has no edge. I've looked. In forty-some years I've never once reached the border of my own mind, or the far limit of my imagination, and thought, well, that's all of it.

It just keeps going.

It is, as far as I can tell from in here, infinite.

Maybe that's because we aren't really things at all. Maybe we're amalgamations of potentiality — possibility that happened, somehow, to become manifest. We are, after all, one of the only kinds of being we know of that can reach into that edgeless interior and push some of it out into the open, where another person can walk up and stand inside it.

That's what the fourth scaffold is for.

That's what this entire site is.

The interior, made external.