Codex of the Synapse: Folio C2.1

Here/Thereness: Portals and Portality

So tenaciously do we cling to our familiar local-world images, that we could enter the Synapse or a neighbor-world beyond it without even being aware we have done so. A sign is often necessary, a marker, to show that a border has been crossed, a wall breached. The portals that pervade the Synapse - as visions of gates, mirrors, doors, windows, eyes and eyepieces, wells, stages, fireplaces and even toilets - serve as those markers. The presence of a threshold is essential when the walls themselves are invisible or inconceivable.

The Synapse is often described as a hall, a vast place with many doors. Other accounts say the Synapse is not the hall, but the doors themselves, and like all thresholds, dimensionless, not really a place at all. In either case, the Keepers place little emphasis on what one discovers behind these doors. The contents of the neighbor-worlds hold little interest for them. For them, the crux of the Synapse experience lies in the act of passage. In a navigating their labyrinth of recursions, through doors that lead into rooms of doors, the real revelation lies in the structure that gradually unfolds, not in the wallpaper adorning the rooms.

ADJOINING FOLIOS: A2.5 Pattern Language Reclamation C2.2 The Guide-Entity C2.3 Toilets as Thresholds: The Profane and The Sacred C6.1 The Synaptic Fugue: Recursion of Reals D2.1 The Codex: Reference Labyrinth and Memory Palace