On Meeting

On Meeting

To those who struggle to find the light in any given day. Life can be crazy, but you don’t have to be crazy in it. There are people who love you enough to help you, but be patient with them. Free counseling programs often have waiting lists. Find solace while you wait, and make the most of when you’re there. Sooner or later, you’ll get to pick where “there” is, and it won’t be where you’re at. I promise. Trust in the design.

If you need someone now and you live in the United States, call or text 988 (the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or chat at 988lifeline.org: free, confidential, and there at any hour; you can also text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. For treatment referrals, the SAMHSA National Helpline is 1-800-662-HELP (4357), day or night. The NAMI HelpLine, 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), is not a crisis line; it offers information and support on weekdays, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern. Dial 211 for local services. Anywhere else in the world, findahelpline.com can match you with a helpline in your own country.

I

What draws you to someone?

Lately I’ve been on the other end of that question. Over the last several days, friends from my past have reached out to me seeking advice on various things. Partly due to the philosophies of mine they’ve read, partly due to my altered presence on social media, and a select few are curious about my plunge into depth psychology and the analytics of Jung’s work.

I claim no proof of anything with this reality, other than that dissolution of ego draws people to the I. The explanatory gap is almost magnetizing, when someone stands in it and speaks.¹

I continue to remain sober, make changes to my life to increase my mental and physical health, and pursue avenues that create coherence within my personal framework: my family, and my job.

I intend on using what I’ve learned in life to help others. The reasons why are irrelevant; the outcome will very likely change a life or two, if it already hasn’t. I’m only now in college, at Maharishi International University, and going this long without a degree never barricaded me from being a father, a husband, a family member, or a friend.

But what drew me to meet people?

I imagine it’s the same forces that draw quarks together to form reality. Or the other pull, the one that isn’t really a force at all, at work in every meeting, where Jays are made: moments as one person lives them from the inside, each with its own feel and weight, leaning toward coherence with the gathering there or away. There is much history about the opposing pulls, but one thing I hold dear to my heart through all my work, and I’ll state it clearly before I proceed:

Light dictates everything that we see, mortality dictates everything that we feel.²

II

I don’t know what to make of that, and I’m not sure I ever will.

What draws any thing to something else? In On Magnetizing we talked about how iron doesn’t draw itself to other pieces of iron unless a field has turned it first.³ The iron was always magnetized, down in its domains; it was just misaligned until it was shown how to be aligned.

But what draws people to other people?

The mirror, I would imagine.

I suspect that when two people meet, one consciousness is looking into a mirror and doesn’t yet know the face is its own. If so, the Golden Rule, in both its forms, means treating your reflection as it would want, from its side of the glass.⁴

I know I have many readers who know me personally, people who have followed and shaped my growth over the past forty-two years. Family, friends, loved ones. These people weren’t “drawn to me”; their existence in my life was circumstantial. But I can’t argue the depth at which their involvement in my growth has taken root.⁵

The saying goes that it takes a village; you can only imagine, for a brain like mine, it took a small army. I was nothing short of a wild child who knew everything better than everyone else. Not because I experienced it, learned it, was ready to teach it, but because my mind had collapsed on that reality, and I couldn’t be told otherwise.

An unadulterated mind.

Children are the future. If we can show them a world without evil, they will grow up to a world without evil. But it’s going to take far more than a village. Or an army.

III

Let’s zoom back in for a moment.

I was just eating what was left of my wife’s pudding. One vanilla cup, one chocolate cup, each half eaten. I didn’t want to bother with dealing with them separately, so I allowed them to “meet” in the same pudding cup.

One swirl of the spoon and I was awash with more inspiration for duality explanations, and sat down to write this piece about how even though the flavors were different in design, when mixed together they still taste really good. A shared world, I think, is that cup: everybody’s flavor of one moment, swirled together.

There’s a synesthesia joke in there somewhere.

Let’s zoom out a little bit.

I don’t know what to make of my recent revelations, but I can assert this much. I aim to be published by a press or journal someday, but pursuit of knowledge is my goal, not accumulation of wealth. It is by this logic I have avoided predatory publishing practices, and patiently wait.

I don’t know what I’m waiting for.

I said earlier that many of my readers know me personally, but I’ve organized my work in such a way that it can be seen by many more.

So this is my draw.

IV

If you want to meet me, please don’t hesitate to reach out.⁶ I have no qualms about what you have to say; as a matter of fact I would love for you to materialize in my life so we can talk about why I may or may not be right, or wrong.

If you want to meet me and ask about my cat, I have a whole book I can talk about that hasn’t hit the world yet.

I absolutely love people. Nothing you bring to my table will be something I’m above eating. The pursuit of knowledge is lifelong, but the pursuit of happiness seems to be fueled by a source greater than life.

A light in the dark, a reason to wait.

I don’t know where my path goes from here, because I’ve come to the end of putting thirty years of independent research on paper.

Actually, I do know. Why would I falsify that? I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to meet people who think like me, or don’t think like me. From them, I’m going to learn and grow, and continue to work toward being a better, kinder, and more understanding person when it comes to other people’s viewpoints. We get coherent with each other a conversation at a time.

By this logic, living inside the framework I’ve described is how I test it on myself. It can’t review itself, though; it can only pose questions, and checking them takes other people, which is part of why I’m writing to you.⁷ But that’s simply my philosophy about existing within my own explanatory gap. The reality is, the future is unwritten.

So if I speak to you in a way you can’t explain, write me. Let’s continue this expansion of knowledge together. Let us become — coherent. Whether or not you agree with me, I’m going to agree with you.

Win-win.

So what draws me to someone? The side of the mirror I can’t see from here.

This is my call to you, the unknown reader. Let’s talk. About anything you want. I have a little bit of knowledge about a few things, if you can’t tell by my work.

I’ll just have to bring most of it with me, because I have a bad memory.

Notes

1. The explanatory gap is the distance between what a brain can be shown to do and what it is like, from inside, to be the one living through it. The phrase is Joseph Levine’s: however completely the physical story is told, it leaves open why any of that process is felt. Levine, “Materialism and Qualia.”

2. The line is my own. I’m not aware of a prior instance, and looking did not turn one up.

3. A bar of iron gains no new magnetism when it is magnetized. Each of its domains was a small magnet all along, and in an unmagnetized bar they point in so many directions that they cancel; an applied field moves the walls between them, so the domains already facing its way grow and, in a strong field, the rest turn, until they agree; that aligning is what magnetizing is. Johnson, On Magnetizing, reads that aligning as a picture of alignment.

4. The Golden Rule has two forms. The positive is Luke 6:31 (KJV): “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” The negative is Hillel’s, given to a man who asked to be taught the whole Torah while standing on one foot: “That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a. Here I mean both, each read from the side of the one it is done to: what that person would want, or would hate to have done. That the face across from you is the same consciousness looking back is my suspicion, offered as a question.

5. On meeting as the relation that makes both parties what they are, see Buber: the I of I-You is not the I of I-It, and neither term comes before the relation. Levinas presses further: the face of the other arrives as a claim on me before it arrives as a fact. Buber, I and Thou; Levinas, Totality and Infinity.

6. Write to me at author@legibletraces.com.

7. Peer review exists to catch the errors one mind cannot see in itself, and no framework can do that for its own author. The sentence in the body describes how I hold the work, and it stands in for no one’s checking of it. Journal Four makes the same point at the scale of a whole discipline: on its reading, no result becomes real on one person’s word; it needs a community that can criticize it. Johnson, Alignment, the Triad, and the Architecture of Shared Mind, “The Third at the Scale of a Discipline: Consensus, Multiples, and Testimony.”

Bibliography

Babylonian Talmud. Shabbat 31a. Sefaria, William Davidson edition. https://www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.31a.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. Alignment, the Triad, and the Architecture of Shared Mind: The Convergence of the Branches. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal Four. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20523385.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Magnetizing. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20821000.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Levine, Joseph. “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 4 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.1983.tb00207.x.

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