The Intex Revelations Volume I: The Puzzle

How my dark gift unlocked an alternate method for learning about the universe

Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.
    .Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  

.1

When I was eighteen years of age I stumbled upon a puzzle. An old puzzle, older than the sun. A puzzle for minds. A puzzle for souls.

My first encounter with the puzzle more than thirty years back transformed me and redirected the trajectory of my life. I became a puzzle-breaker. I became a world-jumper.

Such a curious puzzle. Deeper, tricksier, more frightening than those manufactured by human ingenuity. It is, too, beauteous and wondrous and brimming with revelation.

During my firstmost encounter, it was made plain that any solution to the puzzle would hold the solution to the universe entire. For the puzzle safeguards revelations of the ultimate architecture and operation of our cosmos. Only after engaging with the puzzle for a time did I discern that the willful process of unsnarling the riddle is also the process of fathoming one’s own existence.

To crack the puzzle one must first crack the mystery of one’s soul.

Such a formidable puzzle. Challenging to apprehend and explicate. To unriddle the puzzle—a puzzle I call intex, for reasons we’ll fall into later—one must penetrate physical conundrums long eluding the grasp of human science. The mathematical foundations of consciousness. The mathematical foundations of language and self-awareness. Even the foundations of the puzzle-breaker’s mind, which in my case meant disentangling the neural dynamics of autism.

The puzzle furnishes and demands a novel approach to knowledge acquisition. A new way to learn. Different than art. Different than science. Far different than religion. The uninitiated may cast such unorthodox erudition as mysticism in masquerade, but you’ll find no repudiation of Newton, Boole, or Joule here. No arcane dismissal of the powers of observation and reason. Instead, to make sense of the puzzle’s labyrinthine convolutions, familiar forms of rational investigation must be supplemented with bold new modes of inquiry and interpretation.

My perspective on autism differs so radically from conventional academic approaches because the strange puzzle I chanced upon guided me to novel framings of biological thought.

In the articles in this series—and it may be a lengthy series, pilgrim, for the intex revelations are expansive, extensive, effusive; the math, far-reaching—I will always strive to link lessons learned to autism. This won’t be difficult or unnatural. My dark gift was crucial for me detecting the existence of the eldritch puzzle within the fluttering shadows of reality and essential for cracking its daedalian code.

But make no mistake: the puzzle is for all of us. All those with souls. A puzzle for you. . . but only if you want it.

The intex puzzle is stitched into the physical fabric of the universe. Like gravity or electromagnetism. Anyone anywhere gliding through the cosmos can study gravity on their own idiosyncratic terms. That’s how human science got its genesis: a random young student on a fogbound island roiled with plague investigated the riddle of gravity according to his private lights until he puzzled out the first mathematical account of gravity in Earthly history. Same with intex: it don’t matter who you are, your background, age, gender, education. If you be mortal, the puzzle hovers as freely available to your sentience as gravity.

Of course, not every soul comes equipped to investigate gravity. (Not everybody can be Isaac Newton. . . though what kind of boring half-rate universe would it be if everybody wanted to be Newton?) The intex puzzle is like Ratatouille, the Pixar flick about a rodent who becomes a master chef in Paris. Ratatouille proclaims “Anybody can be a chef! But not everybody!” Meaning, any soul anywhere may possess the necessary inclination and raw skill to become an able chef. But not every soul is born thus.

So too with puzzle-breakers. A puzzle-breaker may arise in any sentient species, but not every sentient mind is suited for the task. The puzzle itself, which communicates directly with those mortal souls who engage with it, offers up its own sobriquet for those who trespass its mazy whorls. The puzzle doesn’t call us “puzzle-breaker.” It christens us “world-jumper.”

We’ll learn why over this series of articles.

Though I’m writing these articles first and foremost to share with you the insights I acquired from intex, by series conclusion you will likely know whether or not world-jumping might be something suited for you.

But foremost and first, this series lays out all the Wondrous and Terrorous Cosmic Stuff About the Fundamental Nature of our Physical Reality revealed inside the puzzle. Stuff about the dark gift. About Mind and matter. About purpose, time, and will. About science, art, and death.

About all the vibrant magic resonating in the heart of our cosmos.

.2

It went Zip when it moved
And Bop when it stopped
And Whirrr when it stood still
I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will.
   .Peter, Paul, & Mary, The Marvelous Toy

So what does the puzzle look like? Feel like? Smell like?

It might seem so far I’ve been circling the subject without describing it concretely. Like the “Marvelous Toy” in the song by Peter, Paul, & Mary, whose activity is described, but not what the toy actually looks like. That’s because the puzzle evades straightforward portraiture. It’s abstract, exceedingly abstract—like electromagnetism.

What does electromagnetism look like? A magnet? A battery? These objects generate electromagnetic force, but they are not electromagnetism. We can observe the dynamic effects of electromagnetism. Iron filings leaping to the magnet. Light bulbs flaring when wired to the battery. We can calculate mathematically precise predictions about what electromagnetism will do in a given circumstance.

But what does electromagnetism smell like? That’s the wrong question. What happens when something interacts with electromagnetism is the better question.

We’ll develop a clearer understanding of the puzzle as we learn how it interacts with minds, just as one develops a deeper understanding of electromagnetism by observing how electromagnetism interacts with matter. For now, I’ll focus exclusive on the core of the puzzle where the densest insight and instruction is to be found.

The intex puzzle consists of three components, including the core experience. Each component offers a distinct interactive experience to the puzzle-breaker. The most fitting noun characterizing the experience of interacting with the puzzle’s core is “visions.”

If I say I’ve experienced visions for more than three decades it may conjure forth dubious cinematic renditions of hallucinatory reveries, the mighty Thor wallowing in a mystic cave pool and revelating that evil Thanos is coming. Or William Hurt’s egregiously whackadoodle bad trip in psychedelia-celebrating Altered States. Or the more practical clairvoyancy flaunted by a detective-minded Wednesday Addams, during which she helpfully gleans who did what crime to whom. Or the boring and unimaginative fantasy of extraterrestrial contact revelated by Jodie Foster at the climax of the Robert Zemeckis movie Contact.

The puzzle visions ain’t much like those.

I wish there was a better English word than “vision” to describe the core experience of the puzzle, but if I try to be precise and technical about it—“a subjective mental state characterized by high-dimensional conceptual ideation generated and guided by purposeful activity originating outside the subject’s brain”—readers might get fatigued.

One key way the intex visions stand apart from fictional portrayals is the dimensionality of the visionary content. When experiencing a puzzle vision, one experiences percepts and concepts of greater dimensionality than those experienced in the course of workaday human consciousness. It’s not merely a matter of, say, perspicaciously visualizing a five-dimensional object in the mind’s eye. Which is indeed the sort of thing that happens during the visions. It’s that the number of discernible features associated with a particular conscious conception are expanded.

Color, texture, and shape, for instance, are all visual features processed in our brain’s consciousness-generating visual What module. Pitch, loudness, and timbre are conscious auditory features, in contrast. The puzzle visions append additional features to the puzzle-breaker’s private visualizations not normally apprehended by human consciousness. There are no words for these extra features because they cannot be converted into familiar features. Like trying to describe blueness to a blind man.

What word or phrase would enable a soul to recast the color aquamarine in terms of violin crescendos and trumpet blasts?

One downside to labeling the core puzzle component a “vision” is it places too much emphasis on visual perception. The perceptions experienced during a puzzle vision are not strictly visual. They’re conceptual. More like an equation, I suppose. An abstract expression of relationships between entities. Though I will lean heavily upon visual imagery to describe puzzle experiences, I’m going to do so mainly for ease of communication. You don’t want to be ceaselessly unpacking phrases like “abstract expression of the relationships between entities.”

During a vision, I lose all awareness of body and environs. Several physiological and experiential details precede and accompany each vision experience, most prominently symmetry. Before a vision begins, I become aware of a hidden symmetry to reality, as if I could reach out and fold one half of my visual panorama along a secret seam and it would match the other half. The vision itself always emerges from the seam of symmetry, like a flower blossoming from a bud.

Rather than feeling I’m dreaming or awash in reverie, intex visions feel more like I’ve jumped to another world framed with alternate rules and physics. A world where my purposeful intent matters. My will. But my physical corpus? Not so much.

Eventually, the very existence of high-dimensional cognizance during the puzzle visions became a crucial clue that would help me reverse engineer the technology embodying the puzzle. We’ll get to that much later.

One thing is undeniable about intex visions: they are profoundly abstract. They’d make for terrible movie scenes, inscrutable and confusing. More confusing than Altered States, even. Like an action movie based on textbooks of multivariable calculus. This abstract mathematical complexity is where autism comes in.

There’s little question my dark gift enabled me to navigate the mathematically abstract and multi-dimensional experience of the vision. I believe when most human brains encounter the intex puzzle, its esoteric and deeply alien nature drives them off. That may be why my puzzle experiences are so different from widely reported near-death experiences, a commonplace form of “transcendent experience.”

There’s no shortage of personal anecdotes disclosing the experiences of folks who temporarily crossed the threshold of death—whose heart stopped, whose brain shut down, whose lungs engorged with brine before a resuscitation. Such anecdotes reveal, I think, what most folks would prefer to hear concerning the ultimate disposition of our material reality. Reports from temporarily-dead survivors across a diversity of cultures are consistent in content: long dark tunnels leading to a bloom of luminance spotlighting dead family members providing compassionate guidance or moral instruction.

Be good! Treat your planet well! Love your neighbor! God cares about you! Rarely does one hear, the primary neural dynamic embodying consciousness is a resonant wave!

Which is the sort of thing one gets out of the intex puzzle.

A quick aside: on occasion folks reach out to me proffering claims they’ve interacted with intelligent extraterrestrials. Or experienced a near-death episode shuddering with epiphany. I grant you I’m more open-minded and tolerant than most about such matters and am usually willing to give such claims a respectful day in court. But the standard I suggest such claimants apply—the same standard I impose upon my own puzzle-breaking dance with intex—is if you suspect you’re engaging with a xenomorphic being of unknown character, ask them to provide a tidbit of math or science uncharted by human civilization. After that, we’ll talk further.

I’ll talk further right now, for I’ve reaped great green gobbets of science and math from the visionary puzzlement. Let me share one little goblet now before the feast that follows. My original intex vision, experienced when I was a clueless directionless autistic sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

.3

Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that when—-in a decade, a century, or a millennium—-we grasp it, we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise? 
   .Physicist John Archibald Wheeler, Omni interview

The first puzzle vision, which I experienced in 1989, was the same as every vision I’ve experienced, including most recent on Leap Day, 2024. When I say same, an apt analogy is reading the same book. What changes each time you read a book isn’t the words on the page, but you. What your ever-maturing self absorbs from the book.

Each reading of a book, especially a classic like War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice, you come away with more. You feel more, understand more, make more connections, experience your horizons shifting more. The more you grow, learn, and mature, the more deeply you can engage with books, even the same book read again.

So it is with the intex puzzle. The physical design of the puzzle does not change. Only your personal capacity for engaging with the puzzle. Quite a bit like gravity. You’ll experience gravity different if you’re standing on the sun than floating in space, though it’s not the design of gravity that’s changing from place to place but your personal experience of it.

The first time I experienced a puzzle vision I was as a five-year-old reading War and Peace. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. All of it, almost, went over my head. It took me a lifetime of reading to understand what Tolstoy was truly getting at, so to speak. To understand what the visions were trying to tell me.

The subjective experience of the vision itself is high-dimensional. Visionary concepts are comprised of a greater number of discernible qualities than everyday perceptions. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to communicate the experience to someone who has not encountered the puzzle. It also made my first episode baffling and frightening.

In future articles I’ll detail the subjective experience of the visions, how they come about and how they unfold, how I managed the slow and fearful and painstaking decryption of their content. For now, let me just share the scant details I was able to extract from my first vision so long ago.

In particular, two direct revelations and one implicit epiphany.

I believe a chief reason I was able to recollect the two revelations after the vision concluded, despite the chaotic and inscrutable nature of the high-dimensional imagery, was because these revelations possessed particular mathematical qualities that made them easier to recall when memories of the visionary experience were downgraded back to everyday low-dimensional human cognition.

Let me explain.

The first “scene” of the vision exhibited an endless grid of shivery black spheres. Infinite spheres extending outwards along jostling lines in infinite dimensions. Spheres in a state of perpetual vibration. Perpetual change. Each sphere influencing and influenced by large numbers (possibly infinite numbers) of adjacent spheres.

Later, as I got better at navigating and interpreting the visions, it became clear that the apparent spheres were not balls at all, but rotations. I was not able to distinguish this detail during the first episode. I believe the reason I was able to remember the infinite spheres at all was because the regular pattern of spheres (rotations) was consistent and symmetric across all dimensions, and thus I could still retain a (low-dimensional) visualization of the spheres in waking consciousness.

When I was experiencing the infinite spheres during the first vision, the puzzle emotionally suggested that I was gazing upon the ultimate foundation—or ceiling—of reality. Later, I would come to understand that the infinite array of rotations was an expression of what the puzzle refers to as the Commonality. A way that intex conceives of our shared cosmos.

Another revelated scene from that first vision: the jousting of massively complex mathematical systems accompanied by potent emotional blasts. Feelings of ruthless competition, titanic effort, and existential stakes. Great, hulking, unfathomably powerful beings forged of whirling constellations of ideas and purpose struggling and clashing in some everlasting contest of will and skill.

Like a war of the gods. Later, I would come to understand this “lesson” was an expression of what the puzzle refers to as the Axiom Wars. Which can be oversimplified as, er, a war of the gods over the parameters governing the flow of cosmos.

There was one other salient takeaway from my adolescent experience of the vision component of the puzzle. In its entirety, the vision consisted of activity. Constant change: transformations, birthing and dying, rising and falling, oscillations and rotations and reversals. Activity circling activity within activity leading to new activity.

The mathematical term for all this activity is dynamics.

Let’s be clear: I would never have described the vision as a jubilation of dynamics when I was eighteen. I had not yet acquired the intellectual background necessary to give technical voice to the dynamic nature of the vision. But even though I would never have framed my first vision as a dynamical system, it was that. An everchanging whirlwind. But a whirlwind with consistent structure, like the ocean. The ocean is constantly churning, flowing, changing—and yet, large-scale ocean activity is highly consistent and predictable, consisting of steady and readily identifiable currents like the Gulf Stream.

So it is with the puzzle visions, which consist of dense, intricate, complex activity—but activity featuring the same structural “currents” each time. (Such as the Commonality and Axiom Wars.)

Why was it so profoundly important that the vision consisted of activity?

The puzzle was trying to teach me something about the proper vantage point to consider reality. The puzzle was instructing me on a different perspective than held by mainstream human science.

The distinguished American physicist Richard Feynman once famously declared:

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is this: all things are made of atoms.”

For Feynman and the overwhelming majority of physical scientists, the universe is made of stuff. It’s made of tiny little scintillas that combine into bigger doo-dads that combine into even bigger widgets. Physics is in large part devoted to identifying all the stuff of reality, the great zoo of subatomic particles, and the properties of all this stuff and the rules governing how stuff interacts with other stuff.

The puzzle instructed me different. The vision tendered a dissident claim.

All things are made of activity.

As we’ll learn in the next article, Feynman’s conviction serves physical scientists—those who study aimless matter—very well.

But the puzzle’s testimony serves an alternate class of investigator exploring a different side of reality. The mindscientists.

In the next article, we’ll discover what the puzzle has to say about the human science of aimless matter and the human science of purposeful minds and their Great Schism, which will reveal plainly why mental health professionals and ivory tower academics have been botching autism for more than a century.

Next INTEX REVELATIONS: Part II: The Secret Story of Human Science: The Great Schism

Read FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about Dr. Ogas and the Dark Gift