The four dimensions of time:

T1 — Linear Time. The timeline we experience consciously. A beginning, an end. Birth to death. Past flowing into future through the present. This is the dimension materialism maps.

T2 — Branch Time. Infinite branching possibility space. Parallel realities, multiple timelines, everything everywhere all at once. T2 has a beginning but no end. T1 is always located somewhere inside T2, our linear experience is one thread in an infinite web. Lucid dreamers navigate T2. When people talk about timeline jumping, the Mandela effect, or parallel realities, this is the dimension they’re pointing toward. T1 and T2 are perpendicular, same relationship as the first and second spatial dimensions.

T3 — Spiral Time. No beginning, but an end. A spiral that tightens toward a resolution point. This is cosmic time, cyclical time, the movement of the spheres. T3 is an attractor, it pulls T1 and T2 timelines toward inevitable convergence points built into the cycles. You see this in the Mayan calendar, in any calendrical system, in the concept of the eternal return. T3 determines the possibility set for any given timeline. It is perpendicular to both T1 and T2.

T4 — The Eternal Now. No beginning, no end. The container of all the others. Pure presence at a cosmic scale.

What this means for the story:

One of the central questions I explore in the Echoverse is what happens when temporal awareness begins to open. What does it look like to navigate non-linear time? What becomes possible (and what becomes dangerous) when a being starts to perceive T2 and T3 directly? I begin to explore that question in book one (indirectly). The full answer unfolds across the trilogy.

Book one of the Echoverse is coming later this year. Twelve years of work. I’ll be sharing chapters here before publication. Watch this space.

If this intrigues you and you want to go deeper, I painted T3 before I had words for it. The painting is called Dreamcatcher, you can learn more about it here:

Since I was eighteen I have been having dreams of a different caliber. Vivid, specific, separated by years, but forming one unbroken storyline. Dreams of ancestors. Messages that appeared on my linear timeline later, exactly as received. In many indigenous traditions what I am describing would be called visions rather than dreams. I use both words because I understand why the distinction matters.

Dream Catcher is my attempt to make that experience visible.

In the background I transcribed the dream journals from these significant dreams, the actual text of what I recorded across decades, written directly onto the canvas. In the foreground is my depiction of the temporal structure itself: the web that connects our linear T1 timeline to the spiral T3 dimension. In many traditions this web has a name. I think of it as the grid, the connective tissue between what we experience as sequential and what is actually cyclical.

The butterfly is the messenger. In my cosmology and in many indigenous traditions, the butterfly moves between timelines. It is not bound by T1 logic.

This painting exists in the Echoverse as more than art. T3 is the dimension the Mayan calendar was tracking. It is the eternal return. It is the reason certain events feel inevitable, the reason some dreams feel like memory rather than imagination, the reason the spiral keeps tightening toward something.

I painted this before I had the framework to explain it. Sometimes the knowing comes before the language. That is also T3.

What this video shows:

This is a live walkthrough of the copy editing skill in action, including using it on a transcript of my father telling the story of the time he broke nine ribs hiking in the Bernese Oberland and refused to go to the hospital. His voice is completely intact. The skill flags mechanical issues only: missing punctuation, contested grammar calls, unconventional usage. It marks everything in highlight so you can see exactly what it’s suggesting and decide for yourself. Nothing is changed without your approval.

What the skill does:

It runs a copy edit on any document in your Obsidian vault. Where there are differences of opinion on usage, Pinker’s The Sense of Style is the tie-breaker for me. It marks suggested changes in markdown highlight rather than making them silently. It preserves voice, this is the critical thing. A strong, distinctive narrative voice like my father’s comes through completely untouched. The flags are mechanical, not stylistic.

How to get it:

The skill is available as a public GitHub repo. In the video I show you exactly how to ask Claude Code to download it and install it directly into your vault’s skills folder. You’ll also need a CLAUDE.md file. I explain what that is and why it matters. Once the skill is installed and Claude Code is restarted, all you have to do is say “copy edit this document” and point it at a file.

What you need:

Obsidian (free), a Claude Pro subscription ($20/month), and Claude Code running in the Terminal plugin inside Obsidian. Links to set all of this up are in the video description.

One thing worth knowing:

I use Opus for deep reasoning tasks and Sonnet for lighter work. For copy editing you can use Sonnet and save your tokens. The skill works on either model.

If this changes your writing practice, come tell us about it in the community notes on Substack. Everything here is free. No paywall. Just people doing the work.

My oldest brother Fran was some ball player. More so, he was an amazing technical analyst of the game. He became the best coach/trainer of young players you could want: the beefy arm around your shoulder, the leaning in close into your intimate space, the clarity and reason of his words as he gave you the gift of insight into baseball strategy, the feeling of confidence you always walked back into the game with, knowing you now had a special edge on the opposition. Once he had lost the youth and fitness to play with his former grace and agility, he maintained the power that seems forever to stay in the bat of old, hefty sluggers. But more than that, he never ran out of deeper levels of analysis of game situations to delve into. He was born to think about the logic of baseball.

Early on, he was a basketball phenom, scoring in one Junior High game more points than had ever been dreamed of for that time. I don’t remember the number, maybe 27, but it was such a mind-boggling high number that the Hamburg Sun headlined their sports page: ‘Bevo’ Francis Czerniejewski Scores A Record. There was at that time this small college phenom named Bevo Francis who scored over a hundred points in one game, so the comparison to my brother’s feat was a great compliment. My brother! Well, he was six years older than me, so kids in my class were unaware of his prowess, but anyone I bragged about it to told me I was a liar, until I whipped out the news article to settle the argument. The breath went out of them and they stood reading in reverent silence, realizing that no one in their family could ever get to this pinnacle.

Unfortunately, the slight height advantage he enjoyed in Junior High, combined with his early polished skills, evaporated when he hit High School. Others caught and surpassed his height, and eventually they reached his skill level. But baseball was more his game, anyway. You see, baseball is this tediously slow pastime. The “National Pastime,” everyone called it. Oh yeah, and you did pass a lot of time waiting for the next action. This was perfect for Fran. He spent the moments that others became bored and impatient with, picking apart the effect the previous moment would, or rather should, have on the ensuing moment. Most players ignored the situational aspect of baseball, but Fran loved it. If there was a man on first, it affected the positioning and response of every man on the field. If there were no outs, or one out, or two outs, each play response was different. Was the runner fast? Different situation. Was the pitcher a hard thrower or a junk ball pitcher? Different situation. Were we ahead or behind? Different situation. Up or down by one run early in the game, or one run late in the game? Different situation. While most kids, even most coaches, didn’t think to carefully analyze what each situation called for, Fran was on top of it.

He eventually became a nuclear physicist. You would have figured as much, if you saw him pull into third base with a triple and do his new batting average and “slugging percentage” in his head, even before the next pitch was delivered. His teammates would yell out, “What’s your average now?” as he’d arrive at third, and he’d yell it back. They’d ask, “What are you sluggin’?” and he’d take a few seconds to respond, with a big grin, “Eleven hundred twenty-seven,” or whatever phenomenal level it had now reached. He’d have to keep explaining to everyone what a “slugging percentage” was, but he never missed the correct calculation doing it in his head while on the basepaths. After a while his teammates gave up checking it on paper because Fran was always right anyway.

He once did the miraculous. He created a new play in front of my eyes! Baseball is an old game, going back to the Civil War. Pretty much everything has been done by someone long ago. Hidden ball trick, squeeze play, drag bunt, etc. have been around forever. Maybe someone had done this play before, but it was a baseball strategy revelation to me. There was a huge kid firing unhittable fastballs past everyone. The second time through the order, the bottom of the fifth inning, no one had even reached first yet. A “Perfect Game” was a possibility! The pitcher was a bit wild, overthrowing with all his might. Kids were nervous in the batter’s box. You didn’t want to get beaned or even hit by one of these bullets. Fran was at bat, leading off, since he always hit fourth, the power hitter spot. The count was no balls and two strikes. Twice Fran had swung and missed, not even nicking the ball. Fran always stood in the box, eager to get the next pitch and drive it. He suddenly backed out and called, “Time”, just as the pitcher was starting to deliver the unhittable strike three. He walked back to the bench, searched through the bats slowly, testing a swing with this one, then that one. He finally picked up a short, fat-handled bat, and walked to the batter’s box, stopping to gaze back at the bat rack to be sure he had the right one. He finally entered the batter’s box, while the ump gave him a “Hurry up!” look. The kid on the mound smirked confidently, as if to say, “Ain’t gonna help you, Turkey,” and rarred back (I don’t know what “rarred” means either, but that’s what everyone said for a pitcher who threw heat) to deliver the coup de grace. “Time out!” Fran stepped out of the batter’s box again. This time he rubbed his eye as if to dislodge a speck of dust that had suddenly irritated him and made it impossible for him to continue for a few more moments. Finally, he settled back in, the ump dropped his arm and the pitcher, clearly irritated, began his windup yet again. “Time out!” Fran called for the third time. He stepped out of the batter’s box again and strode back to the bat rack! The Ump put up his hand to signify the “Time Out,” and looked quizzically after him. Mr. Hot Stuff, on the mound, was fuming at the repeated disruptions to his foregone conclusion, namely, “Strike three.” This time, Fran went straight to the bat he wanted: the smallest, lightest one there. He grabbed it, acted like he had now taken the upper hand, and strode confidently to the plate. He stood in, choked up on the bat a full third of the way and grinned. The Ump gave him an “Are you finally ready now?” look and signaled, “Play Ball!” The red-faced kid on the mound looked especially huge, as he flung the rosin bag aside, a “poof” of white exploding as it hit the dirt. Not waiting for his catcher’s signal, he fired the ball with all his might. Too much might. The pitch, which arrives in a little over a second from the time it leaves the pitcher’s hand, was out of control, flying over everyone’s head. Fran, just after the ball passed him and sailed toward the backstop, amazingly, swung level over the plate and took off for first base! The place was stunned! He made it easily to first base on a “dropped third strike.” Now a debate ensued whether he had really swung at the pitch. It was a real “rhubarb.” It was a judgment call. If worst came to worst, Fran hadn’t swung at the pitch and was back in the batter’s box with a count of one and two. The ump finally said he had swung and was entitled to first base. The crowd roared its approval and amazed laughter filled the bleachers and the home team bench. The pitcher stood flustered, the back of his hands on his hips, as the coach and catcher tried to calm down this hothead. But he never did calm down, having been “robbed” of his glory, and soon had to depart the game, after Fran was walked home, in front of three straight walks. The fireballer’s pitches never found the strike zone again that day.

That was typical Fran. He had found a crack in the “invincible” opponent’s armor, a flaw that all the other observers missed. It looked like he made the play up on the spur of the moment, in that one-second delivery. But, knowing Fran, he had carefully analyzed the game situation. He gave himself two shots to hit this monster and failed miserably. It didn’t look good to get a hit or to get on base with a walk, since no one else had. “I’ll throw off his tempo by stepping out, see if I can disrupt his rhythm. If this kid gets riled up and throws a wild pitch, and I’m sure the catcher can’t catch it or retrieve it in time to throw me out, I’ll swing at it and get to first on a dropped third strike.” No one else on the field that day would have conceived of it. I’ve never heard of it elsewhere, but it’s a “safe” play, ‘cause you wouldn’t be out anyway. I’m sure he figured it out beforehand, even if just prior to the fateful pitch.

They never wrote about that play in the Hamburg Sun. Maybe no reporter was there, or the coach didn’t highlight it in his report to the paper. It would have to be a weird headline, anyway: “Kid Strikes Out, Wins Ballgame.” But to me it was a victory fit for clichés like “he snatched victory from the jaws of defeat,” a victory of Biblical proportions, like David vs. Goliath. But it was even better, since I always thought David had an unfair advantage, hurling a rock from far off when the giant wasn’t even near him. I compare it more to Joshua, who “fit the battle of Jericho” by unexpectedly blowing horns “and the walls came a-tumbling down.” It was one of those unforgettable moments when you are so proud of your brother, so filled with respect and love, that you know you are the luckiest kid in the world.

I never asked Fran about how he came up with that play. He died young, lying in bed with his legs cut off, heart failing, kidneys gone, getting peritoneal dialysis. The last time I saw him alive, (he lived across the country from me) he joked, “Hey, now I can get out on the field again. Kids can come and ask, ‘Can Fran come out and play baseball with us?’ ‘But you know Fran has no legs!’ ‘That’s okay, we need a second base!’”

I miss him. Wouldn’t you?

This is a screen recording walkthrough, no jargon, no assumed knowledge, of the exact process I used to compile my father’s memoirs. He was a beautiful writer who never got to publish his work. His essays were scattered across Google Drive, emails, old documents. Claude Code found all of it, compiled it, proposed a structure, checked the consistency of his voice, and flagged anything worth reviewing. His words. Nothing added. Nothing changed.

Here is what the setup actually looks like in practice:

• create a folder on your computer

• download Obsidian for free

• open your new folder as a vault in Obsidian

• install the Terminal plugin by polyipseity from the community plugins tab

• open the terminal inside Obsidian

• set up Claude Code with a Claude Pro subscription

• give Claude access to your Google Drive (if you need to pull in files)

• you’re off to the races!

That is the entire foundation. From there you speak to it in plain English. It answers in plain English. It does the work. You approve each stage before it moves forward.

The key thing I want people to understand, and this is what the video shows, is that your files never leave your computer. Claude Code comes inside your documents. It does not generate from imagination. It reads what is there and works with what is there. That is a fundamentally different thing from a chat interface and it produces fundamentally different results.

If you have a writing project that has gotten too complex for your brain to hold, this is the tool. If you have a parent whose writing is scattered and unfinished, this is the tool. If you have twenty years of notes that have never talked to each other, this is the tool.

Support:

If you want to learn this together with a community of writers, artists, and researchers who are figuring it out in real time, come find us here on Substack. No paywall. No gatekeeping. Just people doing the work.

Every serious book requires more than a writer. It requires a developmental editor, a continuity checker, a line editor, a copy editor. For most independent authors, that team is either unaffordable, unavailable, or, in the case of developmental editing, unable to hold the full scope of your vision without being hired full time. I’ve paid three professional developmental editors over the past twelve years. The last one was an industry veteran who gave me genuinely good notes. But he didn’t understand my entire cosmology. His suggestions for fixing problems in the story weren’t grounded in the overarching architecture of the trilogy because there was no way to fully onboard him without an impossible investment of time and money. That gap, more than anything else, is why the book took this long.

Claude Code changed that. Not because it writes for me. Because it can hold everything my entire writing vault, my 90-page cosmology document, every draft, every chapter, and reason from inside all of it simultaneously. That’s not something a chat interface can do. It’s not something any human editor, however talented, can do without years of immersion. Here’s what that actually looks like in practice:

Developmental editing. Claude Code can read the full manuscript and the full cosmology and tell me where the story spine is weak, where the structure isn’t serving the vision, where a character’s arc breaks internal logic. It knows the world as well as I do because it has read everything I’ve written about it.

Continuity checking. Does the timeline hold? Are there contradictions between what happens in chapter three and what’s established in the cosmology? Is a character in two places at once? These are the errors that slip through human editing at scale. Claude Code catches them.

Line editing with a scansion map. My favorite book on the craft of writing is Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin. She argues that prose should be musical that you should be able to map where the stressors fall and ensure the rhythm matches your intent. I couldn’t find a line editor willing to work at that level of granularity. So I built a tool in Claude Code that generates a scansion map of my prose. When I do a final read of a chapter, the map sits beside me and shows me exactly where the weight lands.

Copy editing. Using the principles from Stephen Pinker’s The Sense of Style, Claude Code checks for unintentional grammatical errors, inconsistencies in usage, and anything that would interrupt the reader’s experience of the prose.

None of this is AI writing my book. All of this is AI giving me — finally — the full team that serious literary work requires.

The publishing industry is underselling what’s possible here. And writers who are afraid of AI, or who’ve been told to stay away from it entirely, are leaving the most valuable tools on the table. The question was never whether to use AI. The question is how.

Are you a writer using AI this way, or wanting to? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. This is the conversation I’m trying to build this channel around.

Sarira is an artist, writer, and founder exploring what becomes possible when AI reasons with you rather than for you. Find the video channel on YouTube under Aligned Intelligence.

This week’s video is about what’s actually possible when you stop leaving Claude Code to the developers.

What we cover:

— Why Claude Code feels different from chatting with AI — it comes into your house instead of waiting at the door

— How I used it to compile my late father’s memoirs in a single day, gathering everything scattered across Google Drive and old emails into a complete, line-edited manuscript

— How it holds continuity for a 90-page cosmology across a decade of writing, and catches me when I contradict myself

— Why Obsidian and Claude Code together create something neither can do alone

— How non-technical people — writers, artists, creators — can start this without feeling like a developer

Where to start if this resonates:

Getting into this setup has two pieces: Obsidian and Claude Code. Neither requires coding knowledge. Here are the most beginner-friendly resources I’ve found:

Obsidian (free):

• Obsidian Beginners Guide Series on YouTube — step-by-step video series, start here

• obsidian.md — download page, one click install

Claude Code:

• Claude Code for the Rest of Us — the most non-technical walkthrough I’ve found, written for people who aren’t developers

• How to use Claude Code for non-engineering use cases — specifically written for product managers and non-coders, directly applicable to creative work

• Official Claude Code Quickstart — Anthropic’s own install instructions, shorter than it looks

You need a Claude Pro subscription ($20/month) to use Claude Code. That’s the only cost beyond Obsidian, which is free.

The book is Worldviews by Richard DeWitt, an academic text used in philosophy of science courses at major universities. DeWitt’s central argument is that a worldview is not a list of disconnected beliefs. It’s an interlocking puzzle where every piece depends on every other piece. Change one core piece and the entire picture falls apart. This is why people resist challenges to their worldview so intensely, it’s not about one belief, it’s about the coherence of everything they know.

The most important distinction DeWitt makes, and the one most relevant to this channel, is between empirical facts and philosophical facts. An empirical fact is something you can observe directly. A philosophical fact is something that feels just as solid, but is actually a commitment of your worldview. The claim that consciousness is produced by the brain is not an observation, it’s a philosophical commitment that feels like an observation because it fits so naturally inside the materialist puzzle. Once you see this distinction, you start to notice it everywhere, including in how AI reasons.

This matters because every large language model is trained on text written from inside the materialist worldview. Its philosophical commitments are embedded in the training data, the reward models, and the default reasoning patterns. When AI translates a spiritual experience into a psychological one, it’s not being neutral. It’s applying a worldview and presenting it as fact.

Whether “wrong” is the right word for old worldviews, or whether something more interesting is going on — that’s a question I’ll get into in a future episode. For now, I’ll leave you with DeWitt’s core insight: every worldview in history has felt like reality to the people living inside it. Every single one.

📖 Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science by Richard DeWitt (3rd edition)

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For three years, ChatGPT was an indispensable part of my creative workflow. I used it to develop a ten-dimensional cosmology, as a developmental editor on a novel, and as a thought partner across art, writing, and metaphysics. It wasn’t casual use. It was the deepest creative collaboration I’d ever experienced.

Two things made me leave. The first was Claude Code, which let me work with AI directly in my file system rather than copy-pasting between a chat window and my actual work. As a non-technical person, being able to have Claude read all of my drafts, my cosmology paper, and my project files at once completely changed what was possible.

The second reason was deeper. Every major LLM is built on a Western materialist worldview. Matter is primary, consciousness is a byproduct, and if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. That framework represents roughly 15% of the world’s population. The other 85% — indigenous cultures, every major spiritual tradition, the global south — make sense of reality through a different lens. When I needed my AI to reason from inside my cosmology, where consciousness is substrate and matter is projection, Claude could hold that frame with a fidelity no other model matched. And when models changed, Claude could be realigned faster and more reliably than anything else I tested.

This matters beyond my personal workflow. As AI becomes the primary reasoning partner for billions of people, it will carry its default worldview with it. Not through censorship, but through translation — the slow reframing of every non-materialist insight into materialist language. That is an existential threat to the diversity of how humanity makes sense of the world.

I made two free resources for anyone who wants their AI to reason from within their worldview rather than about it:

Non-Materialist Reasoning Framework

Worldview Articulation Template

Subscribe for more. Next up: what aligned intelligence actually means, and why sycophancy is not it.

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