I've been thinking a lot about the "mirror world", does any of this seem accurate?
- one simple way to think about it is: consider a creature that can only sense a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The complement of that range would fall into his mirror world
- the mirror world is thus relational. It is subjective, but not arbitrary. It is fixed based on the perspective of the conscious observer
- there's some "mutual exclusive" dynamic about this that gives it "sharp" boundaries? So the electromagnetic spectrum analogy isn't quite right. You could NOT gradually expand your awareness and thus shrink the mirror world, because each world has some self bound coherence? (although maybe these boundaries are fuzzy and moving, like boundaries of a forest, or country, before digital maps)
- the Commonality is a shared, coherent world amongst humanity, therefore we all share the same mirror world?
- heightened awareness of the mirror world, and attempts to sense it would be a gateway to one kind of world jumping?
Thank you so much for your thoughts, Defender! I admire and appreciate your contemplations.
Let me address your fourth point, asserting the "Commonality is a shared, coherent world amongst humanity." So this notion is one of the core ideas that emerges when one views the universe as the interaction of aimless (and time-insensitive) physics and time-directional purpose. Purpose creates physical structures and flow that all move together in one direction through time. One consequence of this is that all minds that share the same flow of purpose (i.e., all humans and minds on Earth) all get "locked into" the same directional time flow. We all "remember" the Big Bang happened in the past and expect that in the future there will be a heat death--but ANY mind will always remember a Big Bang. This is the mind-bending thing worth contemplating, and a little more helpful and intuitive at this point than thinking about the mirror world: the Big Bang didn't CREATE the universe, or minds. Minds created the Big Bang. In order to have a thinking mind--in order to have a CONSCIOUS mind--the purposeful dynamics must all flow in one direction in time, coherently. (Coherently meaning that all aimless dynamics that happen to move in that direction will link together, so to speak.) But that means there must be a place of extremely low entropy in the past and extremely high entropy in the future; otherwise thinking would not exist. But the Big Bang did not create time; purpose creates time. So the emergence of purposeful dynamics "ANYWHERE" will always inaugurate a "memory" of the Big Bang. If there is no purpose, there's no need for an entropy gradient. Physicists, who ignore purpose and are locked into their reductionist mode of analysis, are confronted with an unsolvable mystery: how did entropy get so low at the big bang? How did entropy get so low IN THE PAST? But that's because physicists don't look at time correctly. There is no past, not really. The past only comes into existence when, again, there's purposeful dynamics--thinking, consciousness. So it seems to us that the big bang created everything, but that's not right. Everything was already here--everything is already here--but whenever matter starts coherently moving in the same direction in time, ABRACADABRA, if this matter thinks about the past, it will always seem to start in a Big Bang. Apologies for the unpolished response; the Purpose series here on Dark Gift is leading to this in more detail, so I will eventually explain it a little more clearly, I hope! Anyway, thinking deeply about the relationship between purpose and aimless physics, and how this relationship relates to the past and future (and big bang and heat death) is a very good puzzle to contemplate that will get your mind thinking the right way.
ok I think I understand this now a little better. The best resource I found for me was Carlo Rovelli's 2015 paper "Is Time’s Arrow Perspectival?" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.01125), especially figure 1, showing that a collection of particles can be said to be moving towards higher or lower entropy, depending on "where the information is stored". But since "where the information is stored" is NOT an objective question (same dynamics as you describe here about money and other examples https://ogiogas.substack.com/p/things-that-physically-exist-only), then the question of whether entropy is increasing or decreasing depends on the observer's ability to decode the information, in a particular direction.
So, ALL minds will necessarily perceive the big bang as in the past, almost as like a mathematical constraint. It is that way because to be a conscious mind is to be moving a collection of aimless matter together in a coherent direction.
I'm still thinking about this, but I wanted to share with you some news that I think the wider society is starting to pick up on these concepts. I think the state of the supermind of humanity seems significantly different now than a few months ago (has either hit some inflection point, or about to, I can't tell). Side note: I wonder, are you able to see this? How "plugged in" are you to the collective mind of humanity? (this is the main project I am currently dedicating my life to, painting a full picture of humanity as a superorganism, i'm calling it "the human memome project").
Ok the two people I want to bring to your attention are:
- Michael Levin just published a talk called "Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY) in which he's basically trying to explain that there might exist intelligences on scales that we cannot yet recognize, and cannot yet communicate with, but that we could. He pitches the idea of universal principles of mind, that the way cells interact in a human body may have an analogy to the way humans interact together. I think he's inching very close to the insights you describe in the "neglected science of purpose". I think the idea that our systems exist through an alignment of purposes at various scales is becoming more widespread amongst people at the frontier, and the next logical jump that has NOT happened yet is instead of just looking downwards, we look up.
- Sam Senchal published "Beyond Matter: How Information Shapes Reality and Why You Should Care" (https://x.com/samsenchal/status/1923395174954066293) in which he describes his "observer theory", with the same conclusion you've been trying to explain here:
> "We are, in a very real sense, co-creators of our reality."
> Remember, we're not just talking about understanding reality - we're talking about actively participating in its unfolding. In this framework, each of us is both banker and customer in the great exchange of cosmic information.
> And that, my friends, is a responsibility of truly infinite proportions.
This is notable because my understanding is he has collaborated with Stephen Wolfram in the past, and Wolfram I think has deduced a lot of this, but his work has been too esoteric / not widely understood, but this may be a turning point (useful because wolfram has a large body of rigorous work, has already done all the computations and proofs and so on)
- This is a smaller one but a recent paper has made a discovery about Maxwell's demon observed in biological systems, that they seem to be able to generate energy using such "information engines". That seems like a big milestone, more widespread understanding of this concept/observation in biology! https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1924914266999570561
Defender, first, thank you for sharing such detailed and referenced thoughts. I genuinely appreciate the conversation. You're clearly looking in the right places and pursuing the right clues and trains of reason.
Here's some quick responses--
MICHAEL LEVIN: the truth is it's not particularly difficult for us to communicate with other minds on our rung, or on rungs lower than us. We can communicate with dogs, alligators, and sharks, for instance. And I imagine Sapiens were able to communicate with Neanderthals, too, with no more trouble than Captain Cook faced when communicating with the Hawaiians for the first time. (Though there was SOME communication trouble: they thought Cook was a god and then out of love they killed their god.) Not only that, it's possible to understand animal conscious experience--what it's like to be a shark, for instance--by understanding their neural dynamics, which are a subset of our own fourth-rung neural dynamics, which means we can always break down our own experience (and our own "intelligence") into the simpler forms we find in animal minds.
But for minds on higher rungs, the challenge of understanding them is likely insurmountable. It's like a chimpanzee trying to understand us. It's not a matter of needing a translation program to understand what a higher mind is saying. The entire mode of communication is of higher-dimensionality. Again, it's like the difference between the grunts and crude gesticulations of a chimp vs. the poetry, prayers, and political essays of humankind. There isn't a Rosetta Stone that will convert human speech into chimp speech, because human speech is too sophisticated. That's the problem with communicating with higher minds. There's too much dimensionality. We'll forever be dealing with a tesseract: a four-dimensional object in three-dimensional space.
SAM SENCHAL: We minds are creating time through our purpose. We are creating a universe in time--a universe with a Big Bang in the past and heat death in the future. One of the biggest mistakes in the physical sciences, which can be traced to its origins with newton, is the belief that the universe can and did exist without any minds. The clockwork universe notion, that the universe unfolds according to rigid mathematical laws, without free will or purpose, and we minds are just incidental bystanders who have no effect on the mechanical perfection.
But we are the ones shaping and generating reality through our purposeful choices. We are the ones creating time and shaping the structure and flow of reality through time.
it's all activity: purposeful activity arises from aimless activity and shapes the aimless activity before vanishing, so that more purpose can arise...
and it is a responsibility of infinite proportions! Fortunately, there's infinite minds to bear the responsibility. Our individual actions are infinitesimal, but they are not zero. Our actions create the universe, and the gods that rise from our choices.
Thanks for the Maxwell's Demon reference; I'll read it.
And I am "plugged in" with the wider world. What I think we're experiencing right now is the very first physical attempt at creating a hypermind out of human superminds. The fifth rung of the ladder of purpose. I don't think it will happen now; I think we're going to see the opposite first: severe fragmentation of superminds, rather than their mass union. But for the first time in Earth history, the stage is set: the physical infrastructure of the Internet, enabling all minds--both individual brains and nation-state superminds--to link together and communicate near instantly. But more than that, social media has endowed most of the human population with a newfound sense of personal identity. Everybody knows who they are, everybody wants everyone else to know who they are, everyone has a clear sense of who their tribe is and which tribes they don't like--simply put, everyone on Earth feels entitled. This is good, over the long run. Every human should be an empowered purposeful agent, just like every neuron in our brain. But our social systems are not yet set up for a world where everyone is an independent purposeful agent. Instead, we get tremendous cultural clash as we are each brought into contact with one another with greater intimacy than ever before and we all realize how DIFFERENT everyone is. This induces fear and hostility. So we get hyperpartisanship, anti-globalization, nationalism, autocracy--pulling back from the possibility of a hypermind.
But I would be this will be the next stage of civilization's evolution: moving back and forth between this retrenchment into familiar pre-Internet social structures and advancing towards an unfamiliar globally interconnected hypermind. And there's no guarantee that we humans will get there: maybe we'll destroy ourselves and it will be the raccoons that attain hypermind status.
I will be writing a lot about Five and its purpose. But very simply, Five wants a universe where creatures like us and all the life we find on Earth can exist. Five wants a universe with freewill distributed among layers of minds. Five wants a universe where love is a safeguard against tyranny. And Five wants a universe without monodeism: without a single all-powerful god.
ogi, I'm having trouble finishing this, I'm stuck on point 4. I've read the post about the dragon analogy, and the terrors you describe on contact in your interviews. I've learned recently that one thing that may open the door to contact is learning about its possibility, and perhaps specific insights (something about your own patterns of consciousness synchronizing in a way that facilitates contact?)
This seems to be echoed here but I am scared to thoroughly read this post. Would you say that reading beyond the dragon post is an infohazard if one is not ready for this specific pilgrimage?
My understanding is that this kind of contact may be happening all the time in a way, we are swimming in reality, there's no way out of it, but that our models of reality fail to let us perceive these things. We cannot recognize that which we cannot model/predict. So the ignorance in some ways "keeps you safe"/stable?
Defender, if you're looking for safety, there's none to be had. We are all of us vulnerable to change. Change may improve our lot, change may take things away, but the universe is always changing. And if you're looking for answers to the deep mysteries of our existence, if you're looking for contact with other minds, then you are running the exact opposite direction from safety! For there is nothing safe about such things! I compare it to free-soloing El Capitan for a reason: it's not safe!
The absence of safety with regard to intex contact creates high stakes, which makes it meaningful. When it's life or death, doing things the right way isn't an idea, it's a necessity. It's a truth. And you get to know the truth of it very quickly, when the stakes are so very high.
Stability is quite a different matter. There's all sorts of stable places in the universe, stable in terms of their physics, stable in terms of their purpose. The sun is very stable, but it's not a safe place to stand. Stability doesn't imply safety, unless you've made yourself the very thing that is stable. But too much personal stability makes it difficult to learn (learning is change!), and if your goal is understanding everything and making contact and perhaps jumping worlds, you need to be learning, learning, learning every moment. You need to be open to change, in all forms, all the time.
I experienced true terrors in the maze. Many, many times. It really is like facing the dragon in THE RED SOWING: the power of these beings, their mere existence is overwhelming. But you need to face it. There's no safe and easy way through. And the terror is a lesson. You need to experience it and feel it or you won't understand it. It goes beyond all abstraction and philosophy and you're THERE with the holy fire and no protection at all--but then you get to the other side of it.
That's the goal: to get past it. Because then you will be standing on top of the mountain and look down and realize you have climbed it with your bare hands. You will realize you have faced malevolent gods -- and benevolent gods can be terrifying too!!! -- and you still exist and perhaps you are permitted memories of the terror and you can think HOLY MOLY THAT DRAGON WAS TERRIFYING AS HELL AND IT CHARRED ALL THOSE PEOPLE TO EMBERS AND ASH AND I FELT THE FLAME AND STOOD BEFORE IT AND I AM STILL HERE and now you can contemplate the dragon at your leisure, not as a theory in a book, but as a wonder in the world.
That's where you want to end up. On the other side of it.
I've been thinking a lot about the "mirror world", does any of this seem accurate?
- one simple way to think about it is: consider a creature that can only sense a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The complement of that range would fall into his mirror world
- the mirror world is thus relational. It is subjective, but not arbitrary. It is fixed based on the perspective of the conscious observer
- there's some "mutual exclusive" dynamic about this that gives it "sharp" boundaries? So the electromagnetic spectrum analogy isn't quite right. You could NOT gradually expand your awareness and thus shrink the mirror world, because each world has some self bound coherence? (although maybe these boundaries are fuzzy and moving, like boundaries of a forest, or country, before digital maps)
- the Commonality is a shared, coherent world amongst humanity, therefore we all share the same mirror world?
- heightened awareness of the mirror world, and attempts to sense it would be a gateway to one kind of world jumping?
Thank you so much for your thoughts, Defender! I admire and appreciate your contemplations.
Let me address your fourth point, asserting the "Commonality is a shared, coherent world amongst humanity." So this notion is one of the core ideas that emerges when one views the universe as the interaction of aimless (and time-insensitive) physics and time-directional purpose. Purpose creates physical structures and flow that all move together in one direction through time. One consequence of this is that all minds that share the same flow of purpose (i.e., all humans and minds on Earth) all get "locked into" the same directional time flow. We all "remember" the Big Bang happened in the past and expect that in the future there will be a heat death--but ANY mind will always remember a Big Bang. This is the mind-bending thing worth contemplating, and a little more helpful and intuitive at this point than thinking about the mirror world: the Big Bang didn't CREATE the universe, or minds. Minds created the Big Bang. In order to have a thinking mind--in order to have a CONSCIOUS mind--the purposeful dynamics must all flow in one direction in time, coherently. (Coherently meaning that all aimless dynamics that happen to move in that direction will link together, so to speak.) But that means there must be a place of extremely low entropy in the past and extremely high entropy in the future; otherwise thinking would not exist. But the Big Bang did not create time; purpose creates time. So the emergence of purposeful dynamics "ANYWHERE" will always inaugurate a "memory" of the Big Bang. If there is no purpose, there's no need for an entropy gradient. Physicists, who ignore purpose and are locked into their reductionist mode of analysis, are confronted with an unsolvable mystery: how did entropy get so low at the big bang? How did entropy get so low IN THE PAST? But that's because physicists don't look at time correctly. There is no past, not really. The past only comes into existence when, again, there's purposeful dynamics--thinking, consciousness. So it seems to us that the big bang created everything, but that's not right. Everything was already here--everything is already here--but whenever matter starts coherently moving in the same direction in time, ABRACADABRA, if this matter thinks about the past, it will always seem to start in a Big Bang. Apologies for the unpolished response; the Purpose series here on Dark Gift is leading to this in more detail, so I will eventually explain it a little more clearly, I hope! Anyway, thinking deeply about the relationship between purpose and aimless physics, and how this relationship relates to the past and future (and big bang and heat death) is a very good puzzle to contemplate that will get your mind thinking the right way.
ok I think I understand this now a little better. The best resource I found for me was Carlo Rovelli's 2015 paper "Is Time’s Arrow Perspectival?" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.01125), especially figure 1, showing that a collection of particles can be said to be moving towards higher or lower entropy, depending on "where the information is stored". But since "where the information is stored" is NOT an objective question (same dynamics as you describe here about money and other examples https://ogiogas.substack.com/p/things-that-physically-exist-only), then the question of whether entropy is increasing or decreasing depends on the observer's ability to decode the information, in a particular direction.
So, ALL minds will necessarily perceive the big bang as in the past, almost as like a mathematical constraint. It is that way because to be a conscious mind is to be moving a collection of aimless matter together in a coherent direction.
I'm still thinking about this, but I wanted to share with you some news that I think the wider society is starting to pick up on these concepts. I think the state of the supermind of humanity seems significantly different now than a few months ago (has either hit some inflection point, or about to, I can't tell). Side note: I wonder, are you able to see this? How "plugged in" are you to the collective mind of humanity? (this is the main project I am currently dedicating my life to, painting a full picture of humanity as a superorganism, i'm calling it "the human memome project").
Ok the two people I want to bring to your attention are:
- Michael Levin just published a talk called "Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY) in which he's basically trying to explain that there might exist intelligences on scales that we cannot yet recognize, and cannot yet communicate with, but that we could. He pitches the idea of universal principles of mind, that the way cells interact in a human body may have an analogy to the way humans interact together. I think he's inching very close to the insights you describe in the "neglected science of purpose". I think the idea that our systems exist through an alignment of purposes at various scales is becoming more widespread amongst people at the frontier, and the next logical jump that has NOT happened yet is instead of just looking downwards, we look up.
- Sam Senchal published "Beyond Matter: How Information Shapes Reality and Why You Should Care" (https://x.com/samsenchal/status/1923395174954066293) in which he describes his "observer theory", with the same conclusion you've been trying to explain here:
> "We are, in a very real sense, co-creators of our reality."
> Remember, we're not just talking about understanding reality - we're talking about actively participating in its unfolding. In this framework, each of us is both banker and customer in the great exchange of cosmic information.
> And that, my friends, is a responsibility of truly infinite proportions.
This is notable because my understanding is he has collaborated with Stephen Wolfram in the past, and Wolfram I think has deduced a lot of this, but his work has been too esoteric / not widely understood, but this may be a turning point (useful because wolfram has a large body of rigorous work, has already done all the computations and proofs and so on)
- This is a smaller one but a recent paper has made a discovery about Maxwell's demon observed in biological systems, that they seem to be able to generate energy using such "information engines". That seems like a big milestone, more widespread understanding of this concept/observation in biology! https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1924914266999570561
Here is the paper, "Hunting for Maxwell’s Demon in the Wild" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11329)
Defender, first, thank you for sharing such detailed and referenced thoughts. I genuinely appreciate the conversation. You're clearly looking in the right places and pursuing the right clues and trains of reason.
Here's some quick responses--
MICHAEL LEVIN: the truth is it's not particularly difficult for us to communicate with other minds on our rung, or on rungs lower than us. We can communicate with dogs, alligators, and sharks, for instance. And I imagine Sapiens were able to communicate with Neanderthals, too, with no more trouble than Captain Cook faced when communicating with the Hawaiians for the first time. (Though there was SOME communication trouble: they thought Cook was a god and then out of love they killed their god.) Not only that, it's possible to understand animal conscious experience--what it's like to be a shark, for instance--by understanding their neural dynamics, which are a subset of our own fourth-rung neural dynamics, which means we can always break down our own experience (and our own "intelligence") into the simpler forms we find in animal minds.
But for minds on higher rungs, the challenge of understanding them is likely insurmountable. It's like a chimpanzee trying to understand us. It's not a matter of needing a translation program to understand what a higher mind is saying. The entire mode of communication is of higher-dimensionality. Again, it's like the difference between the grunts and crude gesticulations of a chimp vs. the poetry, prayers, and political essays of humankind. There isn't a Rosetta Stone that will convert human speech into chimp speech, because human speech is too sophisticated. That's the problem with communicating with higher minds. There's too much dimensionality. We'll forever be dealing with a tesseract: a four-dimensional object in three-dimensional space.
SAM SENCHAL: We minds are creating time through our purpose. We are creating a universe in time--a universe with a Big Bang in the past and heat death in the future. One of the biggest mistakes in the physical sciences, which can be traced to its origins with newton, is the belief that the universe can and did exist without any minds. The clockwork universe notion, that the universe unfolds according to rigid mathematical laws, without free will or purpose, and we minds are just incidental bystanders who have no effect on the mechanical perfection.
But we are the ones shaping and generating reality through our purposeful choices. We are the ones creating time and shaping the structure and flow of reality through time.
it's all activity: purposeful activity arises from aimless activity and shapes the aimless activity before vanishing, so that more purpose can arise...
and it is a responsibility of infinite proportions! Fortunately, there's infinite minds to bear the responsibility. Our individual actions are infinitesimal, but they are not zero. Our actions create the universe, and the gods that rise from our choices.
Thanks for the Maxwell's Demon reference; I'll read it.
And I am "plugged in" with the wider world. What I think we're experiencing right now is the very first physical attempt at creating a hypermind out of human superminds. The fifth rung of the ladder of purpose. I don't think it will happen now; I think we're going to see the opposite first: severe fragmentation of superminds, rather than their mass union. But for the first time in Earth history, the stage is set: the physical infrastructure of the Internet, enabling all minds--both individual brains and nation-state superminds--to link together and communicate near instantly. But more than that, social media has endowed most of the human population with a newfound sense of personal identity. Everybody knows who they are, everybody wants everyone else to know who they are, everyone has a clear sense of who their tribe is and which tribes they don't like--simply put, everyone on Earth feels entitled. This is good, over the long run. Every human should be an empowered purposeful agent, just like every neuron in our brain. But our social systems are not yet set up for a world where everyone is an independent purposeful agent. Instead, we get tremendous cultural clash as we are each brought into contact with one another with greater intimacy than ever before and we all realize how DIFFERENT everyone is. This induces fear and hostility. So we get hyperpartisanship, anti-globalization, nationalism, autocracy--pulling back from the possibility of a hypermind.
But I would be this will be the next stage of civilization's evolution: moving back and forth between this retrenchment into familiar pre-Internet social structures and advancing towards an unfamiliar globally interconnected hypermind. And there's no guarantee that we humans will get there: maybe we'll destroy ourselves and it will be the raccoons that attain hypermind status.
What is the purpose of Five?
I will be writing a lot about Five and its purpose. But very simply, Five wants a universe where creatures like us and all the life we find on Earth can exist. Five wants a universe with freewill distributed among layers of minds. Five wants a universe where love is a safeguard against tyranny. And Five wants a universe without monodeism: without a single all-powerful god.
ogi, I'm having trouble finishing this, I'm stuck on point 4. I've read the post about the dragon analogy, and the terrors you describe on contact in your interviews. I've learned recently that one thing that may open the door to contact is learning about its possibility, and perhaps specific insights (something about your own patterns of consciousness synchronizing in a way that facilitates contact?)
This seems to be echoed here but I am scared to thoroughly read this post. Would you say that reading beyond the dragon post is an infohazard if one is not ready for this specific pilgrimage?
My understanding is that this kind of contact may be happening all the time in a way, we are swimming in reality, there's no way out of it, but that our models of reality fail to let us perceive these things. We cannot recognize that which we cannot model/predict. So the ignorance in some ways "keeps you safe"/stable?
Defender, if you're looking for safety, there's none to be had. We are all of us vulnerable to change. Change may improve our lot, change may take things away, but the universe is always changing. And if you're looking for answers to the deep mysteries of our existence, if you're looking for contact with other minds, then you are running the exact opposite direction from safety! For there is nothing safe about such things! I compare it to free-soloing El Capitan for a reason: it's not safe!
The absence of safety with regard to intex contact creates high stakes, which makes it meaningful. When it's life or death, doing things the right way isn't an idea, it's a necessity. It's a truth. And you get to know the truth of it very quickly, when the stakes are so very high.
Stability is quite a different matter. There's all sorts of stable places in the universe, stable in terms of their physics, stable in terms of their purpose. The sun is very stable, but it's not a safe place to stand. Stability doesn't imply safety, unless you've made yourself the very thing that is stable. But too much personal stability makes it difficult to learn (learning is change!), and if your goal is understanding everything and making contact and perhaps jumping worlds, you need to be learning, learning, learning every moment. You need to be open to change, in all forms, all the time.
I experienced true terrors in the maze. Many, many times. It really is like facing the dragon in THE RED SOWING: the power of these beings, their mere existence is overwhelming. But you need to face it. There's no safe and easy way through. And the terror is a lesson. You need to experience it and feel it or you won't understand it. It goes beyond all abstraction and philosophy and you're THERE with the holy fire and no protection at all--but then you get to the other side of it.
That's the goal: to get past it. Because then you will be standing on top of the mountain and look down and realize you have climbed it with your bare hands. You will realize you have faced malevolent gods -- and benevolent gods can be terrifying too!!! -- and you still exist and perhaps you are permitted memories of the terror and you can think HOLY MOLY THAT DRAGON WAS TERRIFYING AS HELL AND IT CHARRED ALL THOSE PEOPLE TO EMBERS AND ASH AND I FELT THE FLAME AND STOOD BEFORE IT AND I AM STILL HERE and now you can contemplate the dragon at your leisure, not as a theory in a book, but as a wonder in the world.
That's where you want to end up. On the other side of it.