Influences

None of the ideas in these letters are mine. I found them, tested them on my own life, and wrote them down in smaller words. This page says where they came from, so you can go to the source when you’re ready.

The science

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for showing how systems that are kept far from equilibrium, with energy flowing through them, build order instead of losing it. He gave the whirlpool its physics and the word “bifurcation” to the fork. The one-line version I keep coming back to is his: the future is not given.

Dr. Bob Melamede (1945–2023), molecular biologist and my teacher, took Prigogine’s physics into the body. His claim was that life is a far-from-equilibrium process, that the endocannabinoid system is the machinery that keeps it there, and that most of what we call health is that machinery doing its job. He coined the forward-looking and backward-looking person. Rule one and most of the letters about the body are his, in my words.

Karl Friston is the neuroscientist behind the free-energy principle, which is the formal version of rule two: a brain is a prediction machine that keeps itself alive by minimizing surprise. Jakob von Uexküll gave us the word umwelt, each animal’s private world, a century earlier.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934–2021) named and studied flow, the state where attention and action lock together. Nassim Taleb named antifragility, things that get stronger from stress, and much of rule five’s attitude toward small bets and honest failure is his. Karl Popper (1902–1994) is behind the idea that a belief only counts as knowledge if it could be shown wrong.

The old ideas

Taoism, through Lao Tzu and the idea of wu wei, effortless action, is the oldest statement I know of rule one: the sage flows like water. The letter about not pushing the river is Taoist in everything but the words.

Huna is the source of the shape of this whole site, and it deserves an honest account. The seven principles, the three selves, the four levels of reality, the garden, and EWOP came to me through a podcast called HunaTrainer.com, run from 2005 to 2009 by a teacher who went only by the name Pohaku. He taught the version of Huna developed by Serge Kahili King, whose seven principles (“The world is what you think it is,” “Energy flows where attention goes,” and the rest) are the direct ancestors of my five rules. If you have read King, you will recognize the skeleton.

Huna itself was assembled in the 1930s by Max Freedom Long, an American schoolteacher who lived in Hawaii, out of Hawaiian words, New Thought, and his own reading. Native Hawaiian scholars have long disputed that it is Hawaiian at all, and I think they are right. That is why the Hawaiian words don’t appear in the letters: the ideas are good and tested, the costume isn’t mine to wear, and the words King chose are his. What I kept is the operational part, the part you can try on a Tuesday, translated into the physics that I believe explains why it works.

The pictures

The borders, initials and scenes are made in the manner of the Books of Hours painted in France and Flanders in the 1400s, and the dark pages follow the Black Hours made in Bruges around 1470, written in gold and silver on black-dyed vellum. The images were generated for this site; no real folio was copied.

The earlier site

Before the letters, this site was Far From Equilibrium, 169 articles about thermodynamics, the endocannabinoid system and adaptation. They are still here at their old addresses, and they will be folded into the letters one by one.