[In November 2015 I finished my pre-practice book Meetings of Possible Ways which was meant to be a baseline of my belief system. I wanted a baseline because my belief system was expected to change due to experiences I would have after beginning my unworlding practice. This chapter is an excerpt from that book, unedited. I've since learned about 5ness, 6ness, 7ness and 8ness, whose existence I only suspected during the many years that I knew what oneness, twoness, threeness and fourness were. The best part of making myself write a whole book before beginning my practice was not the book itself; putting off the doing of the practice built up a lot of enthusiasm, so that when I did finish my book, I was really rarin' to go. And long before that, I'd saved unworlding--which I still called 'OBE' in 2015--for a retirement project. Besides writing a book to inaugurate my practice, I also gave up two or three intense and long-held hobbies in order to have the time and energy to try and become an unworlder.]
When you walk past a mirror, if you look into it you will see the world backwards. So the most perfectly reflective surface still gets part of its description as wrong as possible, completely backwards. We will learn that everything involves a paradox.
Starting with: "Parallel lines meet at infinity." Which seem to point at infinity itself as the culprit for all this pesky paradox we are always having to slog through. I mean, those of us who are paying attention. While the store dummies and clothes horses slide through life like it wasn't there...
When someone makes a flat, neutral statement, it might be absorbed as is, while a stronger assertion tends to generate "yeah but" from the audience. As soon as an opinion about what's true raises its head above the level, a counter-argument appears automatically to try and cancel it out. This is a manifestation of duality or twoness. In terms of arguments it can be called "disagreement". In terms of trying to get somebody to do something--a child to go to bed, an employee to do better work, a boss to pay more money--it can be called "resistance" or "rebelliousness". In terms of my wife, it can be called "chronic inborn contrariness".
In wave science, a high pressure peak is always followed by a low pressure peak, a trough. This is so automatic, so universal and pervasive at every level of experience, that a very general term "twoness" is needed to cover the whole field. As another example of this--the second harmonic of reality--Eastern philosphy gives us "karma". Science gives us "For every action there is a reaction," etc. There is no end to the ways that twoness expresses itself in our world.
When it comes to my word against yours, proof doesn't actually exist, though there is such a thing as overwhelming evidence--depending on who you believe (agree with).
Reality's larger picture is not what people generally choose to see. We limit our vision to protect our sanity. I shut out certain things, you shut out certain things, our differing sets of certain things miss each other when we try to communicate but collide when we try to stay apart. My sanity or sense of well-being is offended and attacked by your differing defenses from the onslaught of infinity against the senses. Friction and disagreement arise upon the instigation of any and all activity. We even argue with ourselves incessantly.
One thing is certain: agreement, or Threeness, or the coming together of differences, is only part of the big picture. Because, speaking of certainty, nothing is 100% except the universe itself, or Oneness, and it is 100% certain only because, due to its infinite nature, it cannot be described, so it can't be denied. There's nothing to argue against.
All our differing descriptions of the world, our differing identities, our different strings of memories or experiences, serve to make us individuals. Without our differences, we would all experience the exact same world. In that hypothetical world, which would be composed of undifferentiated awareness, we would be one entity with no division, no boundary, no beginning or end. Experiencing the fundamental directly would dissolve one's sense of identity, so it can't really be called a world or an entity, though many call it "God" for lack of imagination. Worlds are variable places seen through us portals, filtered through our personalities and habitual ways of interpreting things.
In our respective physical worlds, we each exist as separate viewports upon the same infinity. By definition, we each create a different world by so experiencing it.
The worlds are fluid, ever-changing, dynamic constructs made of pure awareness, but experienced in infinite ways. Imagine straight lines filling all of the universe with possible realities. Some of these lines are parallel; they will never meet. But many can more or less briefly meet. But at each junction there is a decision to be made: do I go left or right? Up or down? In this way we create our own worlds which only intersect with the worlds created by others. Each of us lives in a separate reality, and even this reality changes from moment to moment. To rationalize all the ridiculously unbelievable stuff that happens to us and to others, we invent the past and future as explanation. All very spontaneously, like a flower that started blooming at the dawn of time and will never stop.
Oneness, or the universe, splits into separate possibilities, or twoness, like the lines of the world. The lines meet and part, meet and part. The meetings are where we agree--partially and temporarily--with each other about what is real. The agreements and togetherings and solid facts and communications are threeness.
Then we head down our path, a long dusty road that never ends, encountering this and that along the way. Experiencing things in order, which we call "time", is fourness. All kinds of hierarchies exist in our thoughts, our preferences, routines, and societies' structures; all are fourness.
That is the world in a nutshell. The universe-as-one gives birth to differences which join as agreements and we experience it all in a certain order. But behind and under the infinitely complex human form is an infinitely simple, pure awareness that is the only ingredient of everything.
