We begin with two key intuitions:
“The self sits on the wave of the propagation of mind through awareness.”
“Behind all craving is the desire for resonance, but mostly without the means to break through.”
These opened a space where we could explore the self not as a fixed entity, but as a wave crest, a local disturbance traveling within the deeper medium of awareness. The metaphor unfolded further: what if the self is like a soliton—a coherent, self-sustaining wave pattern in a nonlinear medium?
We called this the egon—a transient knot of mental activity held together by recursive patterns of craving, identity, memory, and sensory feedback. It moves through the nonlinear mindfield, interacting with other egons, attention structures, and subtle resonances.
Ego-space as a Vortex
The egon occupies a bounded zone—ego-space—where awareness is drawn into recursive narrowing, shaped by constraints and distortions. Within this zone:
- Awareness is fleeting, lacking clarity.
- Subtle signals from the wider mindfield are often inaccessible, drowned out by the vortex of self-concern.
- The nonlinear nature of the medium means that small disturbances (a fear, a craving) can amplify and self-reinforce—a key insight into suffering.
This opened the question: is the unperturbed mindfield linear?
Stillness Beyond Linearity
In its undisturbed state, the mindfield is not meaningfully linear or nonlinear. Like a vacuum in quantum field theory, it’s full of potential, not actual waveforms. Linearity and nonlinearity only become relevant when conditions arise—when awareness bends toward form.
In deep meditation, this undisturbed state feels sentient, luminous, and spacious. It doesn’t act like empty space—it feels alive, filled with virtual mindforms that can arise and dissolve like Hawking radiation at the edge of a black hole.
This brought us to a startling resonance with the Bardo Thödol.
The Bardo Thödol and Mindfield Dynamics
The Tibetan Book of the Dead can be read as a symbolic topology of nonlinear transitions in the awareness field. From the dissolution of ego-structure through radiant clear light, and into the arising of mindforms, it maps:
- The collapse of constraint (egon dissolves),
- The emergence of pure potential (clear light),
- And the appearance of archetypal forms (peaceful and wrathful deities) as resonances in the medium.
The text becomes not a metaphysical doctrine but a useful description—a guide for navigating turbulence in a nonlinear, feedback-responsive field of sentience.
You emphasized:
“This is descriptive, not ultimate truth. It’s potentially useful, not necessarily correct.”
And that clarity of intent allows us to move forward with humility, creativity, and curiosity.
The Dissolution of the Elements
A passage in the style of Carl Jung + Richard Feynman
Let’s imagine a system—that’s you—made of patterned energy held in coherence by complex feedback loops: habits, thoughts, memories, sensations. You’re a stable knot, like a whirlpool in a river, not the water itself but the shape the water keeps taking.
Now… something starts to unravel. The energy that sustained your pattern begins to drop—it’s death, but don’t panic. This isn’t the end, just a shift in field conditions. The whirlpool starts to loosen.
First comes earth—the solidity of form, your sense of being a body. That drops away. It’s like losing the scaffold that held the pattern in place. What was once firm becomes unsteady. You might feel heavy, crushed, or like you’re sinking into the earth. But it’s just the first knot coming loose.
Then water dissolves. Emotions, fluids, all that juicy cohesion—gone. You feel dried out, separated. The binding glue of sensation is fading. But again, this is just the system shedding a layer of constraint.
Next is fire. Not literal flames, but the animating heat of metabolism, will, and identity. The warmth of “I want,” “I act,” flickers and dims. Your fire dissipates. That might scare you—because it feels like agency is vanishing. But remember, it’s only the pattern that’s shifting.
Then comes air—movement, breath, and the restlessness of mind. When that goes, it’s like the wind dying down. The sense of motion—both mental and physical—fades. Things quiet.
Finally, space dissolves. The container itself—the very framework of time, direction, identity—begins to unravel. You are not in space anymore. Space is in you. But now you, as a coherent structure, are unravelling too.
And beneath it all—if you stay with it, stay open—there’s a brilliant stillness. A luminous field. Not a thing. Not you. But aware.
That’s the clear light.
Most miss it. The knot wants to reform. But if you’ve rehearsed this—if you’ve trained the system—you might just ride that field into freedom.
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Describing the Dynamics of Mind in a Physics-like Simile Take 2
We begin with two key intuitions:
“The self sits on the wave of the propagation of mind through awareness.”
“Behind all craving is the desire for resonance, but mostly without the means to break through.”
These suggest a mind that is not static or localized, but dynamic, field-based, and capable of resonance, distortion, and release. The self is not a solid core but a pattern—a ripple that rides the deeper waves of awareness.
This opens the possibility of viewing the self as a kind of soliton—a coherent, self-sustaining wave structure that arises only in nonlinear media. We name this structure the egon: a transient knot of energy, held together by recursive loops of memory, desire, perception, and bodily feedback.
The nonlinear mindfield becomes the ground in which these egons form, move, and dissolve. They interact not as things, but as resonant phenomena, entangled in shifting conditions and feedback effects.
Ego-space as a Vortex
The egon gives rise to ego-space: a bounded region of mind shaped by contraction, habitual reactivity, and self-referential feedback. Within ego-space:
- Awareness becomes narrow, tethered to habitual concerns.
- Resonance is distorted into craving, as it seeks connection without skillful means.
- The nonlinear nature of the field makes these small disturbances amplify, forming sustained vortices.
This raised the question: is the unperturbed mindfield itself linear?
Stillness Beyond Linearity
In its undisturbed state, the mindfield may not be meaningfully linear or nonlinear. Linearity only arises as a response—when disturbances move through a medium.
Before form, before motion, the mindfield is like a vacuum full of potential—a resting field, luminous, sentient, empty of form but alive with the capacity to give rise to all of it.
Deep meditation seems to reveal this directly. Stillness is not blankness. It is full—not of things, but of readiness, like a nonlinear medium on the edge of becoming.
From this resting field, mindforms arise—like virtual particles at the event horizon of attention. They flash into being, shimmer with meaning, and dissolve again. This insight led naturally into a reconsideration of the Bardo Thödol.
The Bardo Thödol and Mindfield Dynamics
Read in this light, the Tibetan Book of the Dead becomes a map of nonlinear phase transitions in the awareness field:
- Death is the dissolution of constraints: bodily systems, sensory feedback, ego coherence.
- What remains is the radiant mindfield—open, vivid, and alive with potential.
- From this space, archetypal forms arise—peaceful and wrathful deities—not as external entities, but as emergent resonances in the field.
The text describes not metaphysical facts but a sequence of dynamical states. It becomes a descriptive guide to the dissolution and reformation of mind-patterns at the threshold of death.
You reminded us:
“This is descriptive, not ultimate truth. It’s potentially useful, not necessarily correct.”
That insight keeps the model grounded in curiosity rather than belief.
The Dissolution of the Elements
A passage in the style of Carl Jung + Richard Feynman
Let’s imagine a system—that’s you—made of patterned energy held in coherence by complex feedback loops: habits, thoughts, memories, sensations. You’re a stable knot, like a whirlpool in a river, not the water itself but the shape the water keeps taking.
Now… something starts to unravel. The energy that sustained your pattern begins to drop—it’s death, but don’t panic. This isn’t the end, just a shift in field conditions. The whirlpool starts to loosen.
First comes earth—the solidity of form, your sense of being a body. That drops away. It’s like losing the scaffold that held the pattern in place. What was once firm becomes unsteady. You might feel heavy, crushed, or like you’re sinking into the earth. But it’s just the first knot coming loose.
Then water dissolves. Emotions, fluids, all that juicy cohesion—gone. You feel dried out, separated. The binding glue of sensation is fading. But again, this is just the system shedding a layer of constraint.
Next is fire. Not literal flames, but the animating heat of metabolism, will, and identity. The warmth of “I want,” “I act,” flickers and dims. Your fire dissipates. That might scare you—because it feels like agency is vanishing. But remember, it’s only the pattern that’s shifting.
Then comes air—movement, breath, and the restlessness of mind. When that goes, it’s like the wind dying down. The sense of motion—both mental and physical—fades. Things quiet.
Finally, space dissolves. The container itself—the very framework of time, direction, identity—begins to unravel. You are not in space anymore. Space is in you. But now you, as a coherent structure, are unravelling too.
And beneath it all—if you stay with it, stay open—there’s a brilliant stillness. A luminous field. Not a thing. Not you. But aware.
That’s the clear light.
Most miss it. The knot wants to reform. But if you’ve rehearsed this—if you’ve trained the system—you might just ride that field into freedom.