The argument

One awareness

The awareness in me is the awareness in you. Step by step.

Six steps

One. One record exists.

A record is a mark that holds. This, not that. A footprint in sand. A scratch on a stone. A word on a screen.

You are reading this sentence. That is a record. Try to deny it. The denial is a record. There is no move you can make that does not use one.

Check itTry to doubt it without thinking, saying or writing anything. You cannot. The doubt is a record too.

Two. There is one reality.

These words were written somewhere else, at another time. You are reading them here, now. A record made in one place is being read in another.

Two sealed-off worlds could not do that. It is being done. So there is one reality. One shared history of records. Read from everywhere.

You are not asked to agree with this. You are doing it. Whoever says no has just read a record written somewhere else.

Check itYou just did. You are doing it now.

Three. There is one now.

Everything that was ever written was written now. Everything that is ever read is read now. The past is what has already been written. The future has nothing written in it yet.

This now is not a time on a clock. A clock is read now, like everything else. Now is where every reading happens.

Try to find a second now, next to this one. The looking happens now.

Check itWhen did you read the last sentence? Now. When will you read the next one? Now.

Four. Awareness is the reading. The reader is the now.

Here, aware means one plain thing. Something takes hold of what reaches it. A plant turning to the light does it. A stone warming in the sun does it. You are doing it. The bits you are made of do it. They react to what is around them. That is all aware means here.

It does not mean thinking. It does not mean feeling like someone. That is a richer thing, built on top of this one. The argument never needs it. That matters. Nobody can prove that anyone else has feelings. Not an animal. Not a stranger. Not a machine. An ethic that needed that proof would wait forever. This one needs only the reacting. And the reacting is going on right now.

And the reader cannot be read. Your eye sees everything in the room except the eye that is seeing. Everything you can point to has already been read. A sound. A colour. A thought. The one doing the reading is never among them. It is not a thing in the now. It is the now, reading.

Check itLook for the one who is looking. You will only ever find what is seen.

Five. The awareness in me is the awareness in you.

Put the steps together. One reality. One now. The reader is not a thing in the now. It is the now, reading. And there is only one now.

So there is not one awareness locked inside each head. There is one awareness. Reading from many places at once. From where you are. From where I am. From every place where something takes hold of what reaches it.

Ask what would make the reader in you and the reader in me two. Something would have to differ between them. Now look at everything that differs between us. The body. The place. The memories. The view. Every one of those is something read. The reader has nothing of its own to tell it apart. There is nothing to make it two.

Each of us is a window. The view from every window is different. What you have seen. What you remember. Who you love. That is real, and it is yours. What looks out is the same. Different windows. Different views. The same glass.

But I cannot feel your pain. No. Pain is felt where it lands. From that window. With that view. That is what “experienced from a different perspective” means. One awareness. Two places. Each place felt from that place.

Check itTry to find a now that is yours alone. Wherever you look for it, you look now, from here. That is this one.

Six. So the one being harmed is the one doing the harming, experienced from a different perspective.

Put your left hand flat on a table. Hit it with your right. One body hurt. Nobody needs to explain it. No rule needs to be looked up. Two hands. One body. One pain.

Harming another is the same move, at a longer reach. The hand that strikes and the hand that is struck belong to one awareness, in two places. Treat the other as yourself. Because it is.

Where the should comes from

There is an old rule in philosophy, and it is a good one. You cannot get a should from an is. No description of the world, however complete, tells you what to do.

Every moral rule ever laid down needed something outside it to hold it up. Do not steal. Love your neighbour. Behind each one stood a god, a king, a law, or what someone wanted. Because a description leaves two people who want different things. Nothing in it says whose want should win.

Now take a man who makes himself a promise on Monday and breaks it on Friday. Nobody calls him wicked. We say he is not seeing it straight. Monday and Friday are one life. He spent it as if it belonged to two men. Seeing it straight does not stop Friday wanting what it wants. It removes the second man.

Step five is the same move. Across a room instead of across a week. Your wants and mine can still pull apart. What is not there is a second owner. One awareness wants both. One awareness pays for both. There is one payer.

So look again at the old rule. It is about commands. It stands. No description commands anything. This work does not command either. It shows one payer, and it shows the bill. There was never a gap to bridge. The gap needed a second owner, and he was never there. Take him away, and there is nothing left for a rule to do.

What is left is not a command. It is a cost. Treat the other as yourself. Not because you are told to. Because the other is yourself. So how you treat the other is how you are treated.

Harming the other is like a hand punching a mirror. You aim at the man in the mirror. You think he is someone else. The glass breaks, and your hand bleeds. The same body ends up hurting. Be cruel, and cruelty is what you get. Not as a punishment. As the same hand. The rule and the cost are one thing.

You were made by what came before you. You will never be free of that. And you will never be free of what your choices cost. Those two facts are the whole rule. Where you stand shapes what you choose. What your choice costs shapes where you stand next. The cost is the rule. Nobody has to enforce it. Reality audits.

One word, so there is no mistake. In this work, should means one thing. What it costs. It never means what you must. The record does not command. It counts. You can be cruel. The count still comes. That is all should means here.

Is that not just good sense? And is good sense not another rule? Read it again. Nothing here says you must. You can be cruel.

And you do not have to care about the cost. The cost does not care about you. Step off a ledge and you fall. The hand in the fire does not need you to care about burning. The burn happens. The tequila does not need you to care about the hangover. The morning arrives. The cost is a fact. It does not wait for your yes, for what you want, or for you to see it. It just lands.

So this work does not say you should care about the cost. It says you will pay it, whether you care or not. Should is not a push to make you care. It is a description of what happens when you go against the grain of the one payer. What is done cannot be undone. There is no judge. There is only what is left. What is left is the price, and reality audits.

The second road

Now take the strongest step away. Suppose every window is sealed. Nothing shared inside. No one hand and other hand. Only you and me, and a gap that nothing crosses. The same sentence still stands. By a second road.

It was built at the same time as the first. A conclusion you can reach only one way is standing on one leg.

It starts from one thing. Whatever goes on existing is doing something to stay in being. And it uses two facts anyone can see. What you do moves me. And what is done cannot be undone.

The corridor

Stand in a corridor with doors down both sides. The open doors are the futures you can still reach from here. You can count them. That is a count, not a mood. And you did not decide to want yours open. You are the keeping of it.

Nothing stays open by itself. Tea cools if nothing keeps it warm. A corridor narrows if nothing keeps it open. So there is no neutral act. Everything you do keeps doors open or closes them.

At the end of every narrowing corridor there is a wall. A debt that can never be paid. A habit that cannot be broken. Past the wall, some futures are not hard to reach. They are gone.

And a small correction made early costs far less than the same correction made late, in panic. Discipline is not a virtue. It is arithmetic.

Two people, two fires

Now put two corridors side by side. What you do moves what I can still do.

Two people in the cold. Each has a fire. Each fire burns down on its own. And each person can only feed the other one’s fire. Not their own.

Both feed. Both fires burn lower, slowly. Both last the night.

One stops feeding. He keeps his wood. The other’s fire goes out first. Now the one who stopped sits alone. Nobody feeds his fire. It goes out too. Sooner than if he had kept feeding.

He saved a little wood. It cost him the night.

There is one condition, said out loud. It works when what I give you is worth more to you than it costs me. An hour that is cheap for me and dear to you. Where that holds, the one who stops always loses more than he saves. The full working, for many people over long runs, is on the420code.org. What lasts is what adds more than it takes. Cruelty does not last. Not as a hope. As a count.

Two honest edges

This road binds anyone still acting to stay in being. It does not reach someone who has truly stopped.

And some bills land after the man who ran them up is gone. He dies at eighty, comfortable, having taken from people who outlive him. This road does not reach him. Nothing is borrowed from the first road to cover the hole.

Where it would break

The first road stands on one thing. One reality, read from everywhere, now. What would break it is a second reality. A second stream of records that can never, even in principle, be brought into this one.

Two records will not do it. Two people will not do it. Two views will not do it. It has never been shown.

One more condition is a measurement. It is written down in public on the420code.org. If either were met, the first road would fall. The second road would still be standing.

The second road would break if anyone showed a group, linked like the two fires, where one keeps taking without giving and keeps its doors open forever. Or something that goes on existing while doing nothing to stay in being. Or that its one starting point already hides the should it claims to find.

The fence

One line is not negotiable. If anyone ever uses this argument to say any life is less than a life, any window less than a window, it is void. Not corrected. Void.

Find the sentence where a rule was added. There is not one. There is one record. There is what follows from it. And there is you, holding what is left over.

The cost is on the table. One record put it there. The choice is in your hands. Nobody else’s. No authority above you. No judge behind you. The buck stops with you. That is the whole of your freedom. It is liberating and it is terrifying, and it is yours. Choose kindness, and the world gets bigger. Choose cruelty, and it gets smaller. Reality counts either way.

Don’t be cruel. Be kind.

The full derivation, with every paper and every condition under which it dies, on the420code.org: the420code.org/one-awareness/