There are a host of terminologies trying to make the point I am making here, and numerous ‘spiritual’ approaches as well. Where do the simple assertions of universal template theory fit among the cacophony of paradigms, claims and causes which occupy this space. Arguably, this is the heart of the matter, the heart of all the matters that matter.

In brief, I am terming all self fulfilling prophecies, schemas, ontologies, and projective plans ‘templates’. They share the characteristic that they impose form on a substratum and then self replicate in some way. They have to have the right number of dimensions to fit onto the substratum they model, plus more to make them controlling of outcomes in their dimensional niche.

We live in a four dimensional world, yet have a definite limit to subjective understanding of up to about seven dimensions, plus or minus two (ref). Here I am interpreting the word ‘dimension’ in the sense of ‘variable’ in the modelling of a process. (ref) Although we clearly can model in as many dimensions as we like with the aid of computers, there is a limit to subjective understanding which is well attested .

High Template

It is my contention that when we act, we enlist more dimensions in our modelling activities needed for planning the action than we can intuit. This means that the source of our action has to be opaque to us. It is experienced as ‘direct action on the present’ and is well attested in numerous religious orders, It may be the basis of spiritual insights in diverse religions. It is a central reality of human existence, a design fault, and when properly understood as being a dimensional matter, has wide explanatory power including a theory of speech melody which is ‘non dual’.

Backing this interpretation up unequivocally with science is harder, since it is a paradigm shift and other explanations jostle for attention in the mind -body debate. At the same time it’s obvious. I came across it while studying human interaction. I had done a frame by frame analysis of people chatting informally, and was at a loss to know how to theorise about the melody of speech, which was purported to fulfil so many functions at the same time. These included phenomena such as grammatical parsing, disambiguation, ’emotion’, emphasis etc. I needed a paradigm shift and this came to me in the realisation that the melodic forms made sense in the context of the immediate future of the interaction. My participants were projecting outcomes from their present moments and controlling or attempting to control their shared conversational predicament with the melodic shapes in their song. (insert links).

This blog is ‘work in process’, but it is going to include at some stage discussion of the concepts of ‘intention‘ and ‘projection‘ in relation to text analysis. Text analysis is the scientific discipline that already exists for trying to understand what happens when people talk, at all levels, acoustic, through linguistic, psychological, and physiological variables, and in terms of outcome control and brain science. To summarise and compact all this down to a simple statement, I suggest that ‘intention’ and ‘projection’ are two words describing the same reality, which is our ability to project onto spacetime models of more dimensions than there are on the plane we live on, which means more than four. With our computer modelling, we can have any number of dimensions we like when we model some process in our attempts to control it.

I suggested an explanation for melodic shapes, which is the completion or partial completions of models (link). The melodies are actually the trajectories between stable states in the brains of the participants, and they achieve the mirroring of States of Affairs between the participants. They are quite literally the trajectories of that co ordination.

This formulation actually pulls the secure rug from under us, since it opens up a pandora’s box of possibilities. High Template is my name for the debate about that, about the argument in the philosophy of science (and philosophy generally) on the status of our concepts and models in relation to the external reality they purport to represent. My argument will end with an assertion: we project our realities moment by moment, but are also always caught at the advancing edge of time, always making a construct, but our construction extends right into the most minute details of our physiology. However it is radical doubt that can keep us on the advancing edge ‘without hindrance in the mind and therefore no fear’.