Reference: Postulate Mechanics
All my life, I wanted to make sense of the world. There were so many things I didn’t understand, and that bothered me. I had spent years studying the physical sciences, but the mathematics of quantum mechanics still went over my head. Life was exciting, but its complexity left me feeling like I’d never catch up. When I retired in 2012, I finally had time to look for answers. I decided to research the boundary between physics and metaphysics.
The best place to start seemed to be the things I had never properly understood — especially from my school years. So I went back to basics: mathematics, physics, and the religion of Hinduism. I also returned to subjects I had explored in college and on my own, like Buddhism and Scientology.
From Scientology, I had learned a study method built around looking up the meaning of words. That method became the foundation of a Math Club I ran from 1995 to 2010 at the Safety Harbor Library. It also shaped the self-learning blog I started in 2010. I kept tutoring math privately, and eventually published The Book of Mathematics on that blog.
In 2015, I got a chance to work with high school dropouts preparing for their GED tests. I started visiting a facility in New Port Richey, Florida, run by Metropolitan Ministries of Tampa. The facility had computers loaded with learning software, but the students just sat there, fidgeting and staring at the screens. They weren’t making progress, and their frustration was plain to see. All they wanted was to get their GED and move on with their lives.
It was an interesting experience working with 20 odd young adults who were surviving under tough conditions. Here was a wealth of experience with life that I could only imagine. It was amazing that they could even think of learning math. The study technology and word clearing techniques of Scientology were supposed to handle this kind of situation. So, I worked with them individually trying to “clear their misunderstoods.” But they were just so overwhelmed with all the things that were coming at them, that it was difficult to have them “go earlier similar” and find their basic misunderstood. It reminded me of my own difficulty in learning the subject of quantum mechanics.
The physicist Richard Feynman once said his father taught him an important lesson: knowing the name of a bird in twelve languages tells you nothing about the bird. Real understanding comes from watching what it does, not from memorizing its label. I had come to believe something similar about mathematics — the words and symbols only matter when they point to a real idea.
It was under these desperate conditions that a breakthrough occurred. I organized a series of lectures that explained the most basic concepts in mathematics first, and then gradually built up logically to explain more complex concepts. I kept the lectures sharply focused on the definition of key words in mathematics, with scattering of interesting puzzles. I used an abacus to explain the numbering system. It was interesting to see the relief on the face of these students when they realized that only ten digits (0 to 9) were used to write all possible numbers, just like only 26 letters of alphabet were used to compose all words in the English language. I explained how the place values were based on ten. I got them to read and write large numbers with confidence.
Something unlocked. It reminded me of Helen Keller at the water pump. The moment her teacher Anne Sullivan pressed the word “water” into her hand while water flowed over it, a door swung open and she became hungry to learn. For these students, those ten digits were their water-pump moment.
This sparked an interest that I still remember to this day. These were the basics these students had never understood. So, they didn’t even know what they were missing. Their interest shot up, and now, as a class, they were full of questions. This helped me organize the subsequent lectures. This is when Subject Clearing was born. This experience taught me the valuable lesson that there is an inherent logic in every subject. The understanding of a subject seemed to depend on establishing a smooth gradient among all the concepts involved. A subject was best taught by starting from the most basic concept and then teaching more complex concepts on a gradient leaving no logical gaps.
Plato showed something like this in his dialogue Meno. Socrates guides an uneducated slave boy — using nothing but patient, well-ordered questions — to discover a geometric truth the boy didn’t know he had. The knowledge was already there. The right sequence of questions drew it out. That is exactly what a well-built subject can do.
It took some time before I could fully grasp the power of this approach. But when I did, it simply blew my mind. I began to wonder whether you could treat the entire universe as a subject to be learned this way. Was that a crazy idea? Maybe — but it wasn’t any crazier than searching for an interface between physics and metaphysics, which I was already doing. I was retired and had all the time in the world. So I kept going. Gradually I realized that the “interface” I had been searching for was hiding in plain sight: a clear definition of the word “Substance” — it is anything that is substantial enough to be sensed.
It was not just matter that could be sensed as substance; thought could be sensed too, and so it was no less a substance. That became the starting point for this book on Postulate Mechanics. The ideas in this book may only scratch the surface of the universe. They may not mean much in the grand scheme of things. But here they are.
More than anything else in these pages, I want to highlight the power of Subject Clearing as a method. It has helped me understand, on my own terms, so many principles discovered by great minds throughout history. I feel very fortunate to have had the education I did, and to live in a time when anyone with curiosity and an internet connection can reach that same knowledge.
I can’t help but feel delighted by what Subject Clearing has opened up for me. I hope it does the same for you. It is a privilege to share it with you.
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