Chapter 1 — Qualia, Pressure, and Hiddenness
Sense the world. What are you sensing?
Visual images? Sensations of touch, pressure, temperature, and the feeling of where your hands and feet are? These are common sensations, but they are not indivisible. Experience can be broken into smaller experiential units. We will call these units Qualia.
You already use something similar in ordinary life. When you look at a digital image, you see many dots, pixels, or points of light arranged together into a larger picture. Qualia are like pixels of consciousness. Vision can be divided into smaller points of color and brightness. Touch can be divided into smaller points of pressure, texture, warmth, or pain.
Perhaps you cannot directly sense atoms or particles themselves, but you can sense the Qualia produced through interaction with them. Qualia are not limited to the physical world alone. You can also experience them in dreams, memories, imagination, anticipation, and thought.
These small units of sensation can be arranged together into larger experiential structures. We will call such an arrangement a Q-config.
For example, imagine holding a red fruit in your hand. The redness, shininess, shape, pressure against your palm, coolness of the skin, and scent of the fruit are all composed of Qualia arranged together into a unified experiential configuration: a Q-config.
Experience is therefore not made from isolated Qualia alone, but from organized patterns of Qualia.
Sense the world again.
You can notice that you do not experience only one Q-config at a time. You can sense many at once. You can see walls, hear distant sounds, feel clothing against your skin, and remain aware of your posture simultaneously.
Yet your awareness has limits. You can only see so far, hear so much, remember so much, or imagine so much at once. These limits form a kind of experiential boundary.
Inside this boundary are many sensations and many Q-configs. We will call the entire field within this experiential boundary an encompassing gestalt.
Within the encompassing gestalt, you can direct attention toward a particular object, sensation, or configuration. The primary area of focus will be called a positive gestalt.
When you focus on something, you are implicitly saying:
“This is what I want to attend to.”
At the same time, you distinguish it from what surrounds it. The border separating the focused object from its surroundings can be called a negative gestalt.
The negative gestalt helps define where the positive gestalt begins and ends within the encompassing gestalt.
Imagine a ball resting in front of a wall.
You can sense the ball. You can sense the wall. The ball may become your positive gestalt, your main focus. The surrounding region helping define its boundary becomes part of the negative gestalt. The rest of the environment remains within the encompassing gestalt.
Now imagine rolling the ball behind the wall.
Where did the ball go?
You no longer see or feel it directly, yet you still assume that it exists. Although the Qualia of the ball are no longer present in your immediate experience, something remains: a subtle mental tension or expectation.
We will call this pressure.
Pressure is the feeling that something exists, may exist, or is likely to exist even when its Qualia are not directly present.
The wall hides the ball spatially, but the mind continues to maintain pressure regarding the hidden object.
This is a pressure of hiddenness in space.
Hiddenness does not occur only in space.
It can also occur in time.
Imagine that someone tells you they will clap in ten seconds.
You wait.
You anticipate the clap before hearing it. The sound has not yet entered your senses, yet the expectation already exists in experience as pressure. The future clap is hidden behind a boundary dividing the present from the future.
Then the person claps.
The anticipated pressure converts into audible Qualia.
You hear the sound. You see the motion. The hidden future event becomes present experience.
Moments later, the clapping stops.
Where did the clap go?
The sound is no longer directly present, yet you still know it happened. The experience leaves behind memory, association, and residual expectation. The Qualia of the clap convert into pressure again, now hidden in the past instead of the future.
If you intentionally remember the clap, you partially reconstruct its Qualia through imagination and memory. If you do not actively recall it, the event may still remain as weaker background pressure.
Experience therefore consists not only of present Qualia, but also of pressures generated by hidden, remembered, anticipated, or assumed Qualia.
Pressure can exist in space and time, but also in energy.
Imagine plucking a string on a musical instrument. If the string vibrates slowly enough, you may see its motion clearly. But if it vibrates extremely rapidly, its exact position becomes difficult to perceive.
Or imagine a lamp with a knob controlling the energy of its light. As the energy increases, the color changes from red to orange, yellow, blue, violet, and eventually ultraviolet.
Ultraviolet light still exists physically, but it moves beyond the range of visible Qualia available to ordinary human vision.
You no longer see it directly, yet you still assume its existence through pressure.
Unlike the hidden ball or future clap, nothing is concealed behind a wall of space or time. Instead, the Qualia become hidden through energetic limitation.
Qualia can therefore become hidden in at least three major ways:
- hidden in space
- hidden in time
- hidden in energy
Later we will see that these three are deeply interconnected. We will refer to this interconnected structure as STE: space-time-energy.
Sense the world again.
Right now, you are experiencing physical sensations. But human experience is not limited to the immediate physical environment. You can also dream, imagine, anticipate, remember, plan, and mentally simulate.
These processes do not require direct engagement with the present physical world.
The ordinary flow of physical sensation forms a kind of experiential stream. Present physical Qualia emerge from anticipated pressures, become directly experienced, and then fade into memory and residual pressure once again.
Most people unconsciously treat this ordinary physical stream as the primary flow of reality.
We will call this stream the Ordinary Samadhi of the Present, or OSP.
OSP is the familiar stream in which:
- anticipated physical experience becomes present Qualia
- present Qualia become remembered pressure
- hidden physical surroundings remain as spatial pressure
Yet consciousness is not strictly confined to OSP. During dreams, imagination, planning, and memory, attention partially disengages from ordinary physical Qualia and begins operating through alternate pressures and alternate Qualia.
Experience flows in streams.
Instead of describing experience only through ordinary physical coordinates, we can describe it through degrees of definition and hiddenness.
To do this, we will introduce an I-axis.
The I-axis is not merely a timeline. It represents changing degrees of definiteness surrounding Qualia and pressure.
Imagine a region of highly familiar experience. Nearby pressures are strong, detailed, and easily converted into Qualia through memory, imagination, or direct perception. Further away from this region, pressures become weaker, vaguer, and less definite.
A cluster of Qualia together with nearby strong pressures forms what we will call an I-space.
For example, imagine two familiar locations: Location A and Location B.
You know both places very well. You can mentally navigate them. You can imagine their Qualia with relative clarity.
But the regions between them may be much less definite in experience. You may possess only a weak mental map of the connecting space.
This weaker region is not empty. It is simply less definite.
A similar phenomenon occurs in memory. Two strong memories may exist as relatively stable I-spaces, while the temporal regions between them remain vague or weakly reconstructed.
An energetic example can also occur in the rapidly vibrating string of an instrument. The edges of the vibration may become more perceptible than the rapidly moving center.
The closer a pressure is to stable Qualia, the more definite it becomes. The further away it moves along the I-axis, the weaker and less certain its conversion into Qualia becomes.
Between two or more I-spaces, connections can form.
We will call these connective regions S-spaces.
S-spaces allow pressures to flow between regions of experience that may not be adjacent in ordinary physical space, time, or energy.
Experience therefore becomes a landscape of varying definition:
- some regions vivid and immediate
- some hidden but assumed
- some weak and uncertain
- some connected through pressure rather than direct physical proximity
Consciousness continually moves through this landscape, converting pressure into Qualia and Qualia back into pressure.
Chapter 2 —
In your visual field, a single unit of Qualia is a dot. You can see more than one dot at a time, and your focus, your positive gestalt, can have more than one dot inside it.
So let's combine Qualia, combining dots.
A dot or a single Quale (the singular of Qualia) can be thought of as having zero dimensions. Neither width nor height. A dot is 0D.
And the next structure you’ll experience is a line, making a line with a row of dots. The dots extend in a row. An idealized line has length but no width, or a width but no length. It’s very thin. A line is one-dimensional, 1D. A 1D line is a row of 0D dots or Qualia.
A square is the next structure you’ll experience. A filled-in square is a row of lines. 1D lines in a row make a filled-in 2D square.
A cube can be thought of as many squares stacked together. A cube is 3D. It has length, width, and depth.
You see 4D objects often. A moving 3D object can similarly be thought of as many 3D moments stacked through time. 3D movie animators use this technique. They make each frame a 3D moment in time. They play the frames quickly, one after the other. That timeline sequence or row of 3D objects and 3D spaces, makes a sense of motion and a sense of passing time even if an object has the same position in each 3D moment. This animation is a 4D row of 3D cross-sections. You can choose any 3D moment-frame of a 4D animation, and observe it has its own height, width, and depth. A 4D object is made of a row of 3D objects that each live inside 3D spatial moment-frames.
With a row of 3D objects and their 3D spatial moment frames that they live in, we have time. With time, comes memory.
What if you have a 3D ball, and you roll it? There is one 3D ball at the beginning of its roll, and one 3D ball at the end of its roll. Memory connects the two 3D balls. Without memory, the ball that rolls from one position to another may seem like two different balls: a person without a good memory may say that when the ball was rolled, the original ball disappeared, and a new, second ball appeared. Memory connects one 3D object to another, across its 4D path.
A person does not experience a moving object as a completely new object in every moment.
A car seen from one angle, then another angle, then another distance, is still recognized as the same car.
Even memories, imaginations, and dreams can preserve identity across changing appearances.
Consciousness therefore groups changing cross-sections into persistent structures.
Without object permanence, this persistence, experience would fragment into unrelated moments.
What happens when a 4D path of a 3D object, and the 4D path of its 3D moment-frames are separated? This creates pressure. Pressure can then be converted into imagination or memory Qualia.
When you remember something, you take only a part of the past and put it into the present. The entire past, with all of its details, does not replace everything in the present.
For example: you want to remember a ball, so you cut out the ball’s 4D path from the 4D path of the 3D moment-frames it lived in. Then you put the ball’s cutout 4D path into the 4D path of the present 3D moment-frames. First, the ball’s 4D path, which was cut out from past, becomes pressure to the present 4D paths. The present 4D paths already have an obvious past and future. Inserting any 3D objects or spaces from the past would be competing with the 4D rows that are already flowing. The ball you want to remember becomes competing pressure first, and then it can become Qualia. Before it becomes Qualia, it has to knock out and replace pressures of the very next moment and of the very previous moment of the present Qualia. When you stop remembering or imagining, you stop competing between those pressures, and your focus returns back to the flow of the physical present, to OSP. Memory and imagination bring other Qualia to the foreground of perception, while the physical present Qualia then becomes pressure. When memory or imagination is stopped, the pressure of the physical present changes back into Qualia.
When imagination becomes vivid, physical sensation may fade into the background.
When fear dominates attention, neutral surroundings may disappear from awareness.
When dreaming, imagined Qualia may almost completely replace physical Qualia.
Experiential streams compete for foreground depth.
Not all experiential streams exert equal influence.
Pain, fear, desire, familiarity, emotional attachment, novelty, and expectation can all increase the likelihood that a stream becomes foreground Qualia rather than background pressure.
Consciousness therefore negotiates among competing streams according to salience.
Signals and Stream Selection
- A signal is a directed update that helps decide what becomes Qualia and what remains pressure.
- Passive signals report or preserve where something is, what state it is in, or how it is changing.
- Active signals spend Dq to change, move, select, or redirect a stream.
- Cq (contentment) stabilizes or replays a stream.
- Dq (discontentment) alters or redirects a stream.
- When too much signal content resolves from higher dimension into lower dimension, only some becomes Qualia; the rest becomes pressure.
Some streams become dominant positive gestalts. Others recede into pressure.
This competition resembles a form of higher-dimensional layering.
Not all salience becomes Qualia at once. A stream may be important, but only part of its content can fit into the foreground of experience.
This means that consciousness needs signals.
A signal is a directed update that helps determine what becomes Qualia, what remains pressure, and what changes in the next cross-section of a stream.
Some signals are passive. A passive signal reports or preserves a state. It tells where a body part is, where an imagined body part is, where a PVU is, or what condition a Q-config or P-config currently has. Passive signals are like updates returning from a 3D cross-section inside a 4D row. They help consciousness know what is already happening.
Other signals are active. An active signal spends discontentment, or Dq, to change the next 3D cross-section of a 4D row. It may move a body part, redirect attention, modify a PVU, alter a michmach, or push a pressure toward becoming Qualia.
Contentment, or Cq, stabilizes a stream. It allows a pattern to replay, remain coherent, or continue as the “same” object across changing cross-sections. Dq changes a stream. It pushes the stream away from mere replay and toward alteration, movement, or selection.
When a higher-dimensional structure resolves into a lower-dimensional experience, not all of its signal content can become Qualia. Some of it becomes direct sensation, and the rest remains as pressure. This is one reason why consciousness must negotiate among streams. It cannot display every possible signal at once.
A currently salient 4D row therefore continues by some mixture of Cq and Dq. Cq helps preserve the row. Dq helps alter it. Passive signals report what the row has become. Active signals help decide what it will become next.
This will matter later when we discuss superlag, superlead, and higher Jhanic Masses. For now, it is enough to say that salience is not only emotional importance. Salience is also signal priority: which signals are allowed to become Qualia, which remain pressure, and which are used to change the next moment of experience.
What would a 5D object look like? If a 4D object consists of many 3D moments arranged through time, then a 5D structure may consist of many related 4D experiential streams arranged together.
These streams may include:
- present perception
- memory
- imagination
- anticipation
- dream imagery
Consciousness often places these streams “beside” each other in experience, allowing one stream to dominate, replace, hide, or reinterpret another.
How could multiple 4D trajectories, paths, or animations be placed beside each other to make a row of 4D objects – a 5D object? You may do this more often than you think.
When you remember something, or when you imagine something, you often occlude or hide physical Qualia behind Qualia of imagination or memory. Those are two 4D rows:
- the “animation” of the imagined or visualized or remembered object
- the “animation” of the physical object
When a physical ball goes behind a physical wall, the physical ball has its 4D path or row of 3D cross-sections hidden behind the 4D row of the wall’s 3D cross-sections. When you remember the ball, when the ball has object permanence, memory and imagination cut out the ball’s 4D path and make it into pressure behind the wall.
Between pressure (like of the ball) and direct Qualia (like of the wall) there exists a transitional boundary where hiddenness converts into experiential presence and experiential presence fades back into pressure.
We will call this boundary a michmach.
Across a michmach, hidden pressure can become direct Qualia, while direct Qualia can fade back into pressure.
An imagined ball may therefore become experientially foregrounded while the physical wall recedes into background pressure.
The wall still exists physically, but the imagined stream temporarily occupies a nearer position in 5D.
When toggling the ball and the wall, those two 4D objects, in 5D depth, across the boundary called a michmach: pressure of the hidden ball converts into Qualia. As if it’s in front of the wall, the hidden ball becomes feelable and seeable. The physical wall behind the imagined ball - is hidden while the imagination brings the ball to the foreground.
How can the 5D depth of an object be changed or toggled? To do that, we need to hold two or more 4D rows in consciousness at the same time, whether they are pressure or Qualia.
To organize persistent experiential structures, we can introduce the concept of a Jhanic Mass.
A Jhanic Mass is not merely physical matter. It is a persistent experiential structure capable of appearing across multiple experiential streams.
A remembered object, imagined object, dreamed object, anticipated object, and physically perceived object may all participate in related Jhanic structures.
If physical Qualia is displayed by physical mass, then
- imagined
- visualized
- remembered
- dreamed
and other kinds of Qualia can be displayed by a Jhanic Mass.
A Jhanic Mass (JM) can retain some of its data when converted between Qualia and pressure.
A Q-config (a specific instance and assembly of Qualia) may be converted into a P-config, a similar assembly composed of pressures.
Jhanic Mass can be considered to be perceived mass or imagined mass. Artificial Qualia can make Jhanic Masses. When a virtual reality simulation shows mass or depth to a player, that mass is Jhanic Mass. Jhanic Volume (assumed or perceived space, instead of physical space) and Jhanic Mass can be assumed in the physical world in depth perception. The visual field is 2D, but 3D+ distance is assumed and projected from the visual field into your idea of physical space. When looking at a flat screen, you can give the contents a sense of assumed depth or imagined depth, and imagined mass.
Jhanic Masses follow a similar system to the dimensional system described earlier. 1st Jhanic Masses are 1D. 2nd JMs are 2D. 3rd JMs are 3D, and so on.
The points of a JM may - but do not have to - connect to physical Qualia. This way, they make nice bridges for describing relationships between pressure and Qualia.
Returning to the question: How can we hold two or more 4D rows in mind at the same time, in order to toggle between them in 5D depth? Let’s branch from a 3D object into two or more 4D paths for that 3D object. Where do we get 2 4D paths that branch from the same 3D object? Call the 3D object a centroid. There’s already the ordinary 4D path of that 3D object in physical space-time-energy, but let’s add to it, and take a memory of that object and attach it to the centroid. The memory is a different 4D path of that object. Then after attaching, there is the choice of focusing on that object’s past 4D row or on the present 4D row.
No object is experienced identically in every moment.
Lighting changes.
Angle changes.
Distance changes.
Emotional associations change.
Yet consciousness still groups these variants together as one persistent object.
The collection of related variants surrounding a persistent identity forms a variant cloud.
Each 4D animation that emerges from the centroid, is of a variation of that centroid object, not the same exact Q-config as the centroid, but a slightly different version or variation of that Q-config.
A persistent object may therefore be represented symbolically through a convergence point. The convergence point is the centroid. The centroid is not necessarily one exact Q-config or P-config. Instead, it acts as a symbolic compression point through which many variants may connect their 4D timelines.
A 5th Jhanic Mass allows multiple related 4D streams to converge through a centroid and diverge again into variants.
Consciousness uses 5th JMs to transition:
- between memories
- between imagined forms
- between interpretations
- between perceptual overlays
through persistent symbolic structures.
A Q-config or a P-config is chosen as a centroid. It’s used as a point where its 4D row of 3D cross-sections branches. That Qconfig or Pconfig is a centroid of the 5th JM. It is a nice way of making a common meeting point for 4D rows that then become associated and adjacent 4D cross-sections of a 5D object. The streams may have happened at different times, locations, and at different amounts of energy. They all involved the 5D object represented by the centroid.
They did not realistically happen to exactly the same Q-config or P-config, but to variations of it, which is why the variants can form a 5D cloud around the centroid. When the 4D trajectories become related and organized into a 5D object like this, you can choose a 4D variant row to toggle to, thereby accessing the timeline of that memory. 5D depth can be toggled between 4D rows by choosing one to become pressure and another to become Qualia. Now, you don’t have to rely on physical objects and objects hidden in physical space and time. The centroid of a 5th JM behaves like a 5D wall, and you can toggle the 4D rows behind, converting their pressure into Qualia.
Not all experiential streams exert equal influence.
Pain, fear, desire, familiarity, emotional attachment, novelty, and expectation can all increase the likelihood that a stream becomes foreground Qualia rather than background pressure.
Consciousness therefore negotiates among competing streams according to salience.
The previous chapter introduced I-space and S-space: I-spaces can have different 5D foregrounds and saliences, but can be bridged by 5D objects in S-space. I-spaces can also overlap so that multiple saliences can occur in one moment-frame.
The visual field is 2D. Each eye shows visual Qualia in a flat 2D plane. The eyes combine their flat 2D planes into a larger flat 2D plane.
Depth that extends outwards from the 2D visual field is inferred from clues from visual Qualia. But you can modify perceived depth with the same visual clues. An optical illusion or flat picture that looks like it has depth, can be perceived as having depth or not. Really, the chosen operational depth is what matters.
Chosen operational depth is extended into the visual field by proprioception, the sense of where the body is and joints and limbs are in the space. A chosen or assumed operational depth also assumes that the physical body could inhabit the space between the visual Qualia and the physical proprioception Qualia. The potentially inhabitable space, in which your body could be, is therefore a unit of measurement between the self and the assumed distance of visual Qualia. We’ll call this unit of measurement a PVU, or proprio-visual unit. In simpler terms, consciousness does not merely observe depth passively. It actively constructs and negotiates depth using vision, proprioception, expectation, and imagined occupancy.
You could think of PVUs as how many “me’s” would fit between where I think I am in space, and where I think the object of visual Qualia is in space. Or how long it would take to travel or walk to the position ahead from where the visual Qualia are originating. In Chapter 1, space and time and energy were combined into space-time-energy, or STE. PVUs can also be a measure of perceived 4D distance, or 4th JM, because they not only tell you how far away you assume visual Qualia are, but they tell you also the time and energy it would take for a light beam (or just you) to travel. So, not the physical 4D distance but the perceived or imagined 4th JM can be inserted between you and the assumed position of the visual Qualia in the visual field, which adds imagined 4D STE between. This will be useful later on, to move michmaches and to help convert between Qualia and pressure, using different amounts of 4D STE and 4th JM.
A PVU represents not merely distance, but potential inhabitation by experiential perspective.
Once placed, a PVU can be modified, especially a terminal PVU. Modified PVUs are positive gestalts that can affect the body with vicarious feedback sensations and mirror neurons. If you see a human in your visual field, you can choose to put the Q-config of them into your positive gestalt. You make a stream of PVUs that you imagine and put between your physical body and the other person. The last or terminal PVU can overlay onto the Q-config of the other person. When that person waves or moves, the changes to that last PVU overlay, can affect your proprioception at that perceived distance. This can excite mirror neurons. You may feel pressure of what the other person is doing, on your own proprioception, but feel that it is happening at a distance. Not only humans, but any Q-config can be overlaid for results like these to pressure your proprioception using vision and PVUs.
Besides that passive phenomenon, PVUs and modified PVUs can also move michmaches with signals that are originally used for other places at the physical body. Signals meant to move your physical arm, and change its proprioception, can be sent to an off-body PVU or off-body modified PVU instead. Just like how you can move one 4D row in front of another 4D row, PVUs that help perceive propriovisual depth can be moved relative to each other to help change michmaches, and change how and where and when pressure and Qualia inter-convert.
In 6D, PVUs can even be stretched from one another. When two PVUs are stretched from each other, they can make a pocket of 5D depth between them. Like an inserted 5D cross-section. In the ball example, the physical ball can go behind a physical wall, and the ball becomes pressure, a P-config of the ball. The ball as a P-config can be toggled to have its pressure become imagined Qualia in front of the physical wall. After that, PVUs can be interposed between the imagined ball and the physical wall. This makes a longer 4D path (of perceived STE) between the imagined ball and the physical wall, than would be physically possible. This process I call “Taffy”. It causes an imaginary extra space-time-energy, starting between some chosen point, like the ball, and ending at a point that is near in 4D of physical space but distant or further in STE in the variant 4D row. Inserted experiential depth may later allow consciousness to navigate, separate, or reorganize experiential streams in ways not possible within ordinary physical geometry alone. Signal paths and frequencies can change, and michmaches can change when you pull Taffy by stretching PVUs apart to insert imaginary space, time, and energy between them.
Chapter 2 has therefore moved from dots of Qualia to inserted experiential depth. Chapter 3 will ask how signals travel through these depths, and how multiple 5th JMs begin to interact.