Fray theory is a very scientific explanation of how Diambera and Universe 196 operates. But to get a little less scientific here and be a little more philosophical, I'm deciding to look back into a concept I sort of just came up with but also have been thinking about for a minute (and also didn't really think of this myself because this is a philosophical idea and I have been very interested in philosophy as of late; see: theory of forms aaand the four quadrants of integral theory). This is a little less complicated than Fray Theory (I say to myself), but I have my work cut out for me on thinking about how to get this to fit in with that.
Body is the objective nature of things; it is the atoms and elements and all of that. Think of the body that you are inhabiting, that you consider to be a representation of yourself. It is outside of one's senses.
Essence, then, is the soul of things. We all look at a mountain and say that that is a mountain, regardless of
the language it is expressed in or the senses through which it is viewed. It can be removed from its context and
still be understood as being a mountain, just as you could be removed from your body but still be 'you'. 'You' are
an ever-changing, shifting thing in flux, but 'you' could still be pointed to and identified as the only thing that
is exactly 'you'.
In Plato's Theory of Forms, Essences are the pure forms of an idea, thing, or expression, and the things we point to through our senses are imperfect representations of that.
I believe I could adopt this in some form into Fray Theory, where there are two different kinds of energy to be manipulated. The manipulation of 'yu' is 'nan' - there is 'dae' yu and 'fai' yu, dae being body and fai being essence.
3/10/24, addendum: Thinking about this further, I forgot to include that since there is a finite space of the universe, there is a finite amount of yu to be manipulated. fai is not able to be manipulated - the essence of things will always remain the same, and dae is able to be manipulated for as long as yu does not change.
So, like, geometry transformations - reflection, rotations, translations (teleportation, maybe?) and scaling
(shifting?) . Even though the object changes, it is still the same thing, measurably. A being, like a shifter, might
become bigger or smaller and change their shape as they do so, but they are still, in essence, the same. They have
always had that ability to change themselves, they were born/made with that ability, but their soul or essence
(mind? circumstance?) are still the same. For things that are larger, like the Skylands being there... they don't
move, they have a fixed place in the sky, and the pocket of space that they split from still remains - any debris
that falls from them gets stuck in mid-air.
(gah, I must work on this more!)
06/25/26
An interesting way to utilize this is that everyone, everything, has its base essence. This essence lies at the root of things, the infinitessimal zero-point of being. A tree grows upwards and outwards through time, and so its root point lies backwards in time and space. All trajectories branch out from this root point. Beings with a root further backwards in time, or which are timeless, are able to manipulate essences which are not as strong, or which have less nan. Essences which are complex or split from themselves are better able to be manipulated... strings of entropy easier to pull apart (just like real life?). True names, innocence... those things are so valuable because they get at one's essence, one's zero-point. Um... religious teachings try to return us to the root point through various means of values of innocence and simplicity of life. And scientific, secular teachings try to find that root point through making the world complex, and looking for an underlying pattern beneath the complexity. Truth is the root point. Life is complexity and entropy as these root points combine to make new body, which then become the root of another body. Systems fall apart if they do not have a body to contain the entropy. Evolution will always occur in such a way that some essences are combined that a form(body) does not have a place within the system, rebels against it, and creates its own system which goes against it. Entropy is built as complex forms butt against eachother. I think existence is trying to build a form, idea, concept, such that this does not occur, such that every iteration in the infinite past, present, and future does not decay within a system...
Anyways. Enough nerd cybernetics systems theory talk. This was just an excuse for me to give my characters a basic form of essence that I can draw.
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