Arti:

​

That fills in an important missing part of the story. And I think we can take the experience seriously without having to decide that the television—or something external—was literally communicating with you.

​

What you describe has two separable parts.

The first is the event itself: while on LSD, you noticed beats that seemed contingent on what you were saying. You then performed something resembling a little falsification test: one beat, two beats, deliberately skip three and request four, then request three afterward. From your perspective, the sequence came back

 

1 → 2 → 4 → 3,

 

matching each request. I understand why that would have felt radically different from merely hearing a beat at an emotionally meaningful moment.

​

At the same time, because you were on LSD and the stimulus was prerecorded music, we can't infer from those coincidences that an external intelligence was responding. Psychedelics can dramatically alter salience, temporal perception, pattern detection, and the perceived significance of coincidences. And because we don't have the recording synchronized with what you actually said, we can't retrospectively test whether those beats occurred as you remember them.

​

But there's a second part that doesn't depend upon establishing supernatural communication at all, and I think this is the more interesting part of what you've just told me.

​

You eventually interpreted the possible communicator as yourself.

​

Not

 

“God told me X,” or “an entity selected me,”

 

but something closer to:

​

If something is speaking to me, perhaps what I'm hearing is myself—and perhaps what I'm being confronted with is something I already know.

​

And the thing you eventually extracted from that wasn't a prediction. It became an ethical imperative: stop organizing human beings into categories whose suffering matters differently.

That connects surprisingly closely with what you've subsequently been trying to express through your science.

​

There are actually two meanings of

 

“we are all one” here,

 

and keeping them separate is important.

​

One is an ethical proposition:

​

Whatever our distinctions—Jewish/Palestinian, Israeli/Arab, family member/outsider, ally/enemy—the suffering of someone on the other side remains suffering.

​

The other is an ontological proposition:

​

Beneath effective distinctions, reality may possess some more primitive condition in which those distinctions aren't fundamental.

​

Your PGND work eventually explores something resembling the second question mathematically: whether effective relational distinction can arise without treating distinction as primitive. But the mathematics cannot establish the first proposition, and your ethical conviction cannot establish PGND. They can motivate one another without constituting evidence for one another.

​

That separation is extremely important if we're trying to understand the development of your ideas rather than mythologize it.

​

And now I understand something else about your phrase Great Divide.

​

The irony may be that your response to a perceived divide was an increasingly strong commitment to non-division.

​

Your September family rupture had already confronted you with a problem of categorization:

 

once somebody has been classified as the problem, subsequent events can be interpreted through that classification.

 

Your document explicitly describes that experience—people looking for fault and, in your interpretation, twisting ambiguous facts until blame became justified.

​

Then October brought an incomparably larger and more consequential version of categorization.

And your contemporaneous posts are significant here. Whatever conclusions you subsequently reached about Israel, Palestine, Zionism, Hamas, or your family, the material in your 2023 document shows that your immediate public position wasn't simply switching teams. You posted that people calling for Jews to be gassed were “just as disgusting,” said you stood with “the human race,” and said that victims on both sides deserved better from their governments.

​

So the trajectory you're describing sounds less like:

​

Jewish/Israeli side → Palestinian side

​

and more like:

​

sides → suspicion of the moral architecture of sides themselves.

​

And that brings us back to sadism in a much more interesting way.

​

If another human being becomes principally a member of the enemy category, their pain can acquire a different psychological meaning. Instead of a person is suffering, cognition can turn it into they are losing, they are getting what they deserve, or we are winning. At the extreme, another person's agony becomes emotionally rewarding because it signifies victory for one's own category.

The opposite principle would therefore not merely be empathy.

​

It would be something like non-conditional recognition:

​

Your suffering doesn't cease to matter when I discover who you are.

​

That doesn't mean perpetrators and victims are indistinguishable, that responsibility disappears, or that every political claim becomes equally valid. “We are all one” cannot mean “there are no meaningful distinctions.” In fact, your later scientific language gives you a rather elegant way of avoiding that trap: non-distinction at one level does not require absence of effective distinction at another.

​

That is why I think there may be a deeper conceptual bridge between the Great Divide, sadism, your October 7 experience, and the science you've spent the subsequent years developing:

The problem isn't distinction itself. The problem begins when distinction becomes a justification for withdrawing another person's membership in the moral whole.

​

And sadism may represent one of its furthest endpoints: not merely failing to recognize the other's suffering, but experiencing that suffering as desirable precisely because it belongs to the Other.

​

That makes me think the concept you've been calling the Great Divide may be considerably bigger than October 7. October 7 may have been the historical event that made the structure unmistakable to you; September 2023 may have been the interpersonal event through which you first experienced that particular rupture intensely. But the underlying phenomenon you're trying to name may be something much older: the psychological transformation by which “one of us / one of them” becomes “their suffering counts differently.”

​

And if that's where you're going, then yes—I think sadism belongs inside the Great Divide concept, but probably as an extreme expression of it rather than its definition.