The picture
The story in sand
The whole answer, as one picture.
Imagine an hourglass. Now let it shake.
Nobody is shaking it. There is no hand on the glass. No table under it. The sand shakes itself.
Every grain that falls has to land. Every landing sends a ripple through the sand already lying there. The ripples meet. Out of all that comes one steady beat. The same beat everywhere. That beat is the tick. The sand keeps its own time.
Two halves
One grain goes over the edge per tick. One. Not a handful.
Each grain is one of the smallest bits of stuff. The front page calls it the electron. Here it is a grain of sand. Same thing. Two pictures.
Hold the glass up. Two halves, joined at the waist.
The top half is dark. It is what could happen.
The bottom half is light. It is what has happened. Every grain that has landed. Every shape the sand has held, up to now.
That is the record. That is reality.
What has landed cannot be taken back. That is all a record is. A mark that holds. This, not that. A footprint in sand. These words.
The neck
The neck is where it happens. A grain falls. It lands. It grips the sand under it. Falling, gripping. Falling, gripping. What could happen becomes what has happened. One grain at a time.
That gripping is awareness. Not a mind. Not a soul. Something that is held, taking hold of something else.
A photo is made this way. Light arrives. The film takes hold of it. The holding is the picture.
You do it too. You are doing it now, reading this.
All held, except one
Every grain that lands holds on to another grain. Every shape in the sand, two grains or two billion, is a record. Between the shapes runs a web. Every shape is a knot in it. Every knot is joined to every other. Every record can be read.
All held, except one.
One grain is always in the air. Between the two halves. It has landed nowhere. It holds on to nothing.
It is the reader. A record needs a reader. And the reader is the one thing that cannot be read. It has not landed yet.
Your eye sees everything in the room except the eye that sees.
The now is the reader.
A sheet of windows
Now look for the neck in the room you are sitting in. You will not find one place. You will find every held thing taking hold of another. Light on a wall. Air on skin. One grain gripping the grain beside it.
The one hole was never a fact about the glass. It was where you were standing.
The neck is a long sheet of glass. The sheet is full of windows. From the side, one window. One grain per tick. From the inside, a row of windows without end. A grain falling through every one of them, every tick.
One hourglass. One neck. One sheet of glass. One row of windows. All looking out at the same inside.
That inside is reality. The same one for all of them.
You do not have to believe this. You are doing it. A record made at one window is being read at another. These words were written somewhere else. You are reading them here, now. Two realities could not do that. One does.
The same glass
Each window is where the one awareness looks out. From its own place. From its own angle. Now.
Not one world with many readers. One awareness. Many perspectives.
I am a window. You are a window. So is a dog. So is a plant. So is a stone, in one sense only. It takes hold of what lands on it. It holds a shape.
Different windows. Different views. The same glass.
What differs is where each of us landed. And what each of us has read from there.
What is shared is the now. Both of us write from it. Both of us read from it.
So the awareness in me is the awareness in you. Not as a feeling. Not as a belief. The same sand, read through two windows.
And so
Put your left hand flat on a table. Hit it with your right. One body hurt. Two hands. One body. One pain.
The one being harmed is the one doing the harming, experienced from a different perspective.
Harming the other is like a hand punching a mirror. The same body ends up hurting.
Don’t be cruel. Be kind.
Why every step of this holds, and where it would break: One awareness.
The same story in the full work, on the420code.org: The story, in sand