Foreword

How can It-All fit in? It is certainly a bit of an absurd question. It-All, by definition, cannot fit anywhere, since it has to fit itself; there is no way around it. And yet we still strive and dream to fit It-All into our minds, seeing the ball of reality from all angles and maybe, after a thorough examination, accepting that it is round.

This book begins from that desire, not as a final conquest, but as a work of fitting. The aim is not to shrink reality into one slogan. It is to see how its recurring structures may belong together in one intelligible picture.

The books already written approach that picture from different entrances. One asks what reality is. Another asks how flow persists and closes. Another asks how such closures become selves. Another asks how selves recognize, encode, know, and are moved. This small book belongs between them. Its task is not to replace any of them, but to fit them together.

One way to hold that fitting in mind is to begin from unitary flow. If one flow is primary, then its two complementary aspects should first be read in a symmetric relation, one to one. A non-unit split can then be read not as two different substances, but as the same flow entering a loaded region and being skewed there, much as light is refracted on entering glass. It is the same self-refraction principle: the denser energetic region resists the flow and forces an angular change. What standard electromagnetism calls impedance can, in that rough picture, be read instead as the measurable skew, and therefore the measurable resistance, of one flow passing through a denser energetic field. The flow changes angle there, and that value is the measure of the resistance it encounters.