We were speaking about consciousness together, and, as usual, I was biased toward a principle I was shown by a nonhuman intelligence. The principle seems utterly foundational to human thought and activity, but it can be difficult to explain without visualizations, which were directly involved in my learning it.

The idea involves a naive mode of the concept of ‘a manifold’. In this mode, the concept loosely corresponds to the idea of ‘a structure of many bubbles linked together along intersections’. What humans are trained to do, in language and physical behavior, is ‘collapse this manifold to a derivative’. I am doing this right now, in fact, it will seem from some perspectives that no other option is possible. I am taking the manifold of ‘all things it is possible to say in English’ and collapsing that to the specific results I emit in text, here, now. One can imagine that this process often involves ‘throwing bubbles away’ until a structure of ‘intersections’ remains, and this tree-like structure is the result of the collapse of the manifold. Unfortunately, we are scripted to enact ‘traditional’ versions of this process. If we could resist this, and were, instead, trained to utilize the actual potentials of this feature of consciousness, prodigy would naturally emerge as the most common result. This simple idea, little more than ‘a notion’ is absolutely foundational to human behavior. Yet we are nearly never trained in it, and almost all examples of human superfuction utilize it… especially physical examples such as advanced martial arts, solo climbing, etc.

During our conversation, we began to speak about lightning and the notion of ‘runners’, this was our private conversational term for what are often called ‘leaders’ which are features near the ground of ionized air that ‘attract’ or potentiate lightning. We began to speak, then (and we were collapsing manifolds to do this), about the perspective that the forms and kinds of thoughts we ‘think’ are, somewhat like lightning, and generated by specific ‘runners’ (leaders), which potentiate a particular »form of the collapse of the manifold. These ‘runners’ are habits, favored perspectives, and especially »the purposes for which we collapse the manifold and produce speech, ideation, and so on.

Both of these principles are extremely useful to anyone interested in »regaining cognitive (and behavioral) liberty due to the unfortunate fact that most of the ways we are trained to collapse the manifold(s) of awareness, thought, and consciousness are intrinsically crippling. They are ‘traditional’ modes that exclude most of our creativity, potential intelligence and capacity for insight. The same is true of the ‘runner’ model. Both children and comedians use the same principles to produce insight, laughter, play, and ‘broader understanding’ in ways that transform consciousness immediately. Part of how they accomplish this is by »adding new dimensions of meaning or identity »while they are at the same time »removing traditional bubbles in the manifold.