The Solarium is devoted to the Solar mode of mind.
Across many traditions, the analytic faculty has been associated with the Sun: illuminating, separating, naming, defining. In modern terms, this corresponds roughly to what is often called the left hemisphere — not as a location, but as a style of attention.
(Note: this page is deliberately written in a Solar tone of voice.)
The Solar mind excels at structure. It builds models, systems, classifications, and explanations. Much of civilization depends on it.
But this mode of mind tends to overreach.
When left unchecked, it mistakes clarity for completeness and explanation for understanding. It forgets that every map leaves something out.
Rather than rejecting analysis, the Solarium takes a different approach.
Inspired in part by Robert Anton Wilson’s strategy of cognitive overload1—the idea that when the analytic mind is given more structure than it can manage, other modes of perception are allowed to re-enter. The Solarium exists to give the analytic mind more than it can comfortably handle, so those other modes of mind can re-emerge.
Nothing here is meant to be believed — or disbelieved.
Nothing here is meant to be solved.
Believing and solving remain entirely appropriate — elsewhere.
The instruments found here are precise, finite, and internally consistent — and yet they do not converge on a single meaning.
In this sense, the Solarium stands in quiet dialogue with Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game: a vision of pure symbolic play that is both beautiful and insufficient. 2
The Solarium exists to honor structure fully — and to reveal its limits.
What remains belongs elsewhere.
Focused explorations that use constraint to reveal how meaning emerges.
Questions that invite analysis, then refuse completion. They are not meant to be answered, but to be lived with. More....
We count using ten symbols — ‘0’ through ‘9’ — largely because we have ten fingers. Had we evolved with eight or twelve, our arithmetic would look very different.
Changing the base of a number system does not merely change notation. It changes what is easy to see, what is hard to express, and what patterns emerge at all. More...
Generate titles in the GrailHeart mood.
Notice which ones feel meaningful.
More....
1 For more about R.A.Wilson's thinking on this subject, see:
2 Hesse, Herman, The Glass Bead Game. Hesse received the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature for this book.