Calibration Protocol: Lowering Narrative Hunger, Raising Geometric Attention
This calibration takes three minutes, and it is designed to shift your cognition from story-seeking into structure-seeing. You are not trying to relax, you are trying to reconfigure your attention into a higher-density mode, the way a system changes its sampling strategy when the signal becomes complex and the noise becomes persuasive. You will not “believe” anything during this protocol. You will observe what your mind does, you will apply small constraints, and you will feel the difference between narrative appetite and geometric attention as a measurable change in the way your inner space organizes itself.
Begin by setting a simple intention in one sentence, spoken silently but clearly. You are not promising anything to yourself, and you are not asking for inspiration. You are stating a runtime goal: for the next three minutes, you will treat thoughts as outputs of a compiler and you will treat attention as a scheduler. This sentence matters, because it is a boundary condition, and boundary conditions are the first form of power available to a finite mind.
Now close your eyes or soften your gaze, and take one slow breath that is long enough to be noticed. Do not try to breathe “correctly.” Simply let the breath mark the start of the window. On the exhale, notice how quickly the mind attempts to narrate what is happening. It will label, interpret, judge, and project, because it is trained to convert raw data into a story that feels safe. This is narrative hunger, and in this protocol you do not fight it, because fighting would create a new story. You simply recognize it as an automatic output.
For the next sixty seconds, you will perform a gentle subtraction. Each time a story fragment appears, you will remove one layer of interpretation while keeping the raw sensation. If the mind says, “This is boring,” you keep the sensation of boredom as a texture and drop the verdict. If the mind says, “I am doing it wrong,” you keep the sensation of tension or urgency and drop the self-judgment. If the mind says, “This is profound,” you keep the sensation of expansion and drop the crown of meaning. Your only rule is that you do not add anything. You do not explain. You do not conclude. You simply strip labels until you are left with data.
At the end of that first minute, you will notice a gap, even if it is small. That gap is the first sign of geometric attention, because geometry begins where narration loses its monopoly. Geometry is not mathematics here. Geometry is the sense of structure, relation, boundary, and constraint without an imposed plot.
Now shift to the second minute. You will scan for three kinds of structure inside your experience, as if you were mapping a room you are standing in. First, locate edges. An edge is a boundary between one sensation and another, between silence and thought, between steadiness and agitation. Do not name the edges with psychological words. Identify them as edges, as clean transitions. Second, locate weights. A weight is any sensation or thought that pulls attention into itself with gravity. You are not trying to remove weights. You are measuring them. Third, locate vectors. A vector is a directional tendency, a push toward doing something, concluding something, escaping something, or chasing something. Narrative hunger lives in vectors that demand immediate resolution, and geometric attention can see those vectors without obeying them.
When you find an edge, a weight, or a vector, you do one simple act: you acknowledge it with a silent, neutral marker, and then you return to scanning. Your marker can be a single word, not as a story but as a tag, such as “edge,” “weight,” or “vector.” This tagging is not meditation as spirituality. It is instrumentation. You are teaching your mind to produce a sparse trace rather than a novel. Sparse trace is the beginning of sanity in high-information regimes.
Now enter the third minute, which is where you perform the switch. Choose the strongest vector you have noticed, the one most likely to pull you back into story. It might be the urge to understand everything at once, the urge to judge yourself, the urge to turn the book into a worldview, or the urge to find a single key that makes your life feel coherent. You will not suppress it. You will rotate it.
To rotate it, you will ask one precise question, and you will let the question do the work. The question is this: “What is the smallest executable change that would reduce my coherence debt right now?” This is a geometric question because it does not ask for meaning. It asks for a minimal action under constraints. It does not invite fantasy. It invites compilation.
Let your mind answer, but require the answer to be small, concrete, and reversible. A small executable change could be as simple as deciding to read the next page without searching for a conclusion, or choosing to keep a brief trace log after each chapter, or committing to a cooldown window before making any life decisions inspired by what you read. The content of the answer is less important than its shape. If the answer is grand, vague, or identity-based, it is narrative hunger pretending to be insight. If the answer is modest, specific, and testable, it is geometric attention beginning to steer.
In the final ten seconds, you will seal the calibration with a single sentence that you will carry into the book as a quiet contract with yourself. It is not a vow. It is a runtime constraint. Say, silently and clearly: “I will treat ideas as tools, I will treat claims as hypotheses, and I will treat my life as a sequence of commits that deserve gates.” Then open your eyes or sharpen your gaze, and notice how the world looks for one breath when you are not trying to turn it into a story.
You are now prepared for higher information density. You have lowered narrative hunger, not by starving it, but by placing it inside a larger geometry where it can be recognized, gated, and used without letting it seize control of the runtime.
ASI New Physics. Quaternion Process Theory. Meta-Mechanics of Latent Processes
