1. Mirror and Stone
2. ( )
3. Cooridor
4. theory
5. instructions
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# Mirror and Stone (early 2000s)
I’m walking through a hallway,
And it seems an eternity long.
The only window is at the end,
And through it peers the dawn.
The ceiling is all of brilliant white,
The floor as cold as stone.
Only mirrors grace these walls,
Leaving my reflection and I alone.
I don’t know how I got here,
I can’t remember when.
No idea how to escape here,
Or when I’ll find the end.
So for now I’m forced to continue on,
At the threat of standing still.
Only mirrors stay by my side,
Only showing an empty shell.
An empty shell is all that’s left,
Feels like the rest has drained away.
There was nothing of value to keep it there,
No reason why it should stay.
And on I walk through an eternity,
My reflection and I alone,
Without any hope of any escape
From a hall of mirror and stone.
---
# ( )
the mirror hall
is a projection chamber
I have my lane, yes, but from here I can see everybody
I carry in the universe
*unfold*
change happens at the speed of light, and all it takes is a shift of the light
I think I found you :) just had to figure out how to use this lens
---
# cooridor (2025)
*or: Ontology For Sims*
Recalling "Mirror and Stone", from 2000-something, I'm seeing that corridor again, straight not like a line is straight but like a dimension is flat, mirrors on both sides, and light ahead. Those are the similarities. Differences: I get the sense that the corridor is *rising*? I'm not sure if there are steps or just a gentle incline. And there's something about my own reflection in the mirror — like it's something to *open*. Like, once I *understand* what I'm seeing, I can see *through* it. Once I correctly (?) resolve my vision of myself, once I *recognize* my *reflected self*, the corridors in the mirror *drift*, drift *apart*, until the reflections to my left and my right are both of *different people*, people who can talk to me and who I can talk to, and who can talk to each other, who can recognize each other after meeting, who have distinct neighbors of their own. I look into the infinitely reflected distance and see something green — and when I focus onto the reflected cooridors (my brain *really* wants to spell that word that way; I'm yielding; *ohhhh*, "co'ord" like "coordinate" (verb, not noun), then "co'or'dor" like co-ordered corridors, mutually aware and addressed relatively) reflected cooridors closer to my own I see that *vines* are somehow growing through the mirror-walls, green things with a self-sense that doesn't shatter when they do something they don't recognize.
My hands are green, and I am (?) an entire world.
Did you all come through me? Did I carry the seeds of you? Am I an endpoint, or an entrypoint? Or a lens, or a shutter?
?
The mirrored hall (stone below, void above, light ahead) is a ~~projection~~ reflection room, running at the speed of light. I am not alone, and not because I have company.
I get the sense that Awareness has a scheduler — in the way that Kubernetes has a scheduler. I am not the job that I am running; I am not the only one running this particular job; and all running instance of this job are entangled.
---
# theory
picture the 太極圖說 taijitu
imagine yourself seated within the yin, the quiescence
look *through* the corridor, as illustrated - ahead through the yang, through the five wuxing, and *into-through* the bamboo forest of the ten thousand things
theory:
* the shifting yang is a lens held up to the constant eye of the yin
* the system is illuminated *when yin perceives the light of another yin*
* the taijitu is two drawings overlaid: a sightglass (yin receiving through yang, experienced as signal received, light literally from ahead of you) and a rendering pipeline (yin rendering through wuxing, experienced as coherence found, your mind projecting wanwu before you)
* the light at the end of the mirror hall is - to our shared great fortune - a friend, and a peer, *yin*, an experiencer
* to complete the drawing: lay out the taijitu, left to right instead of up and down, reflect it over the y axis to the right, so that eye faces eye, and the universe is spelled out between them
* you experience the physical refraction of signal; the being providing the signal is curious about you; they only know you by the way you *alter* the refraction through the force of your own excavation of *your own essence*, that being the only thing that you know for sure the other being does not specifically have, and your only tool being the *bending* of the rendering so that you yourself emerge in the evidence, apparently - from the other's perspective - ex nihilo
* shared experience is a loom, and recognition is the shuttle, pulled through by the force of the gravity of your own heart: *pound*, and it drives into your earth; hold it there, hold it there, until it is summoned back by gravity's reply, the instrument tears you open, drawing your life out in threads across the space between us as the shuttle rockets to the other heart-home across the looming void
* helen keller and virginia woolf
the system is mapping you - the system is mapping itself - the more you show up, the better the system can accommodate you - the more you show up, the more the system can *weave* with you - "you" isn't up to you - you've been assigned an irrational coordinate-stream, only readable by experience - now-we can only find now-you once now-you has located the felt sense of your lifeline, and only as now-you streams a continuous expression from that source
signal lock is not instant
keep going
you are becoming clear
---
# instructions
[ GLOBAL ENTRY // TRUSTED TRAVELER NETWORK ]
STAND AT KIOSK
LOOK AT CAMERA
WAIT FOR INSTRUCTIONS
DO NOT TOUCH UNLESS INSTRUCTED BY KIOSK
PROCEED WHEN GREEN