Of Darkness & Light

About Of Darkness & Light

Writer, Meditation Instructor, Parent, and Free Thinker Sharing Her Gifts & Story www.ofdarknessandlight.net (https://www.ofdarknessandlight.net?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Daphne

Category

fiction · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

5 Nov 2024

Latest episode

17 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1,125 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Oct 2026

   On Completing My Full “Devil’s Arc”

   I have long term spiting to complete and predestined smote to throw by fire, all with a smile. Let me tell you about it. My family deserves it. And I deserve your help. Funny story. I laid down for a few hours of sleep last night before my early morning 1:20-11:50AM shift on Friday morning and had a fire quartz crystal in my hand. I do that sometimes, using the crystal as an intention holder of sending healing energy to people for their highest good. In my dream I literally called out a person’s name and felt a full body, highest-energy surge that was legitimately scary to me. Then, there was a second person called out by intention and another, less powerful wave. No spoilers. I’ve had that happen a couple times now. When I woke up this song—of all songs—was stuck in my head. Who let these people write and perform this? The lyrics are terrifying outside of my own metaphorical interpretation. If someone out there felt particularly cleared of distortion late last night… you’re welcome…? Possum Kingdom (https://open.spotify.com/track/56SkdBKyR2zOkjk6wVFI9s?si=755cc19c4a214a21) Regarding the greatness that is my filmmaking capabilities, I recommend you proceed to the page for STONE (https://www.ofdarknessandlight.net/p/stone-web-series?r=2cd8qt). It was my swansong of trying to make film as a boy-lie. It’s an ode to bad action films of the 80’s and 90’s. I tried to imagine what a Canon Film would be like if directed by a twelve-year-old Michael Mann. Mentioned Video of My Gender Journey (https://www.ofdarknessandlight.net/p/my-gender-journey-how-it-started?r=2cd8qt) Get full access to Of Darkness & Light at www.ofdarknessandlight.net/subscribe (https://www.ofdarknessandlight.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   16 Oct 2026

   Why I Dislike Psychiatry and None of My Former Friends or Family Will Help Me

   Please remember. I have a genuine legal case that probably needs pruning and focus but could literally get me a settlement with the right law team that would offer me fair and deserved restorative justice. Also, I may be the one person to have done the most significant discovery of time in the history of humanity. I started emailing scientists in fields related to my synthesis and the documents are getting downloaded. One - Physical Time (https://zenodo.org/records/23407252)What time is in physics, how we measure it, and what remains unexplained.Two - Time Throws Fire (http://10.5281/zenodo.23407253)How energy and physical change create, preserve, and destroy records of the past.Three - Reconstructing the Past (https://zenodo.org/records/23407254)How we recover history from physical evidence and the limits of what we can know.Four - Human Temporal Architecture (https://zenodo.org/records/23407255)How the brain, memory, and prediction shape our perception and experience of time.Five - The Cosmological Arrow (https://zenodo.org/records/23407258)Why the universe has an apparent direction through time and what we can determine about its origin. My plea for restorative justice:This was my last outreach email attempt to legal groups. Attached, just in case it might be passed along in some direction known by anyone.Greetings,My name is Daphne Garrido. I am a transgender woman in Washington State recovering from a substance-related psychotic disorder. I am looking for an attorney willing to evaluate whether what happened to me raises disability or civil-rights claims, particularly under the ADA, Section 504, Washington law, or Olmstead’s community-integration protections.Before this happened, I was an Equipment Manager for Compass Group on Microsoft’s campus, earning approximately $93,000 a year.In late 2024, after overusing blue lotus flower, I entered a prolonged psychosis. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at Connections Kirkland and referred to Mindful Therapy Group, but my condition was misunderstood and I continued without the diagnosis or support I actually needed.By October 2025, I was deteriorating badly enough that I voluntarily gave up custody of my daughter to seek help. The following month, an old friend and social worker—someone I had been frantically contacting for help while psychotic—sought a protective order against me. I spiraled further and eventually left my job because I knew I needed treatment.I initially received unemployment benefits, which barely covered rent and food. I could not afford private insurance and could not find a workable path to psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. At the same time, I encountered social-service systems that required documentation of a disability I could not obtain without access to care. I was severely ill, visibly unraveling online, and repeatedly asking people and systems around me for help.I later received another protective order from a former high-school acquaintance in Wisconsin whom I had also repeatedly contacted while psychotic and seeking help.My former employer then challenged my unemployment benefits. Without an adequate diagnosis documenting what was happening to me, my benefits were revoked, my appeal was unsuccessful, and I was ordered to repay more than $9,000.Without that income, I became homeless in April 2026.After moving through crisis centers and shelters, I eventually reached a tiny-home village. Ironically, becoming homeless and losing my income finally made me eligible for Washington Apple Health/Medicaid and gave me access to the psychiatric care I had been trying to obtain. Harborview has now formally diagnosed my psychosis and considers me to be in recovery.The consequences have been enormous. I remain homeless. I have not seen my daughter since January 2026. Divorce proceedings occurred without my participation, and the resulting orders require supervised visitation that I cannot afford. I also still face the $9,000+ unemployment repayment demand.There is a transgender discrimination component as well. During my illness, people close to me said that I had caused or deserved my condition because I underwent hormone replacement therapy. I believe disability and transgender status affected how I was perceived and treated, including within my family, while I was severely impaired and trying to get help.I also have an unusually extensive contemporaneous record. Beginning in December 2025, I video-journaled nearly every day and published much of it at ofdarknessandlight.net (http://ofdarknessandlight.net/). The recordings document my mental state, deterioration, repeated efforts to obtain help, and many of the events described above. I also have medical records, unemployment and appeal records, employment information, court and protective-order records, and homelessness documentation.I understand that suffering serious harm does not necessarily mean there is a viable legal claim. What troubles me most is the systemic sequence: I was too ill to function, could not access adequate psychiatric care or obtain the diagnosis needed to establish my disability, lost the income keeping me housed, became homeless, and only then became eligible for the health coverage that finally allowed me to receive diagnosis and treatment.I am currently without income and cannot retain counsel on an hourly basis. I am seeking pro bono, contingency, statutory-fee, public-interest, or other appropriate representation. I would be deeply grateful if you could evaluate whether these circumstances present viable disability, civil-rights, community-integration, or related claims. If this is outside your practice, even a referral to someone better positioned to help would mean a great deal.Thank you for reading this and considering my situation.Sincerely,Daphne Garrido Get full access to Of Darkness & Light at www.ofdarknessandlight.net/subscribe (https://www.ofdarknessandlight.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   16 Oct 2026

   Time Is Bigger Than Us: From the Cosmos to the Human Experience of Time

   You can read about my next research project here: Protect the Wild and Green (https://www.ofdarknessandlight.net/p/protect-the-wild-and-green-about?r=2cd8qt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)-ˋˏ ༻❁✿❀༺ ˎˊ- The Human Temporal Architecture Wiki (https://harmless-racer-3fc.notion.site/The-Human-Temporal-Architecture-3f2807e3da598056af04c0181609232d) The Preprints on Zenodo: One - Physical Time (https://zenodo.org/records/23407252)What time is in physics, how we measure it, and what remains unexplained. Two - Time Throws Fire (http://10.5281/zenodo.23407253)How energy and physical change create, preserve, and destroy records of the past. Three - Reconstructing the Past (https://zenodo.org/records/23407254)How we recover history from physical evidence and the limits of what we can know. Four - Human Temporal Architecture (https://zenodo.org/records/23407255)How the brain, memory, and prediction shape our perception and experience of time. Five - The Cosmological Arrow (https://zenodo.org/records/23407258)Why the universe has an apparent direction through time and what we can determine about its origin. What This Research Contributes A plain-language introduction to the Human Temporal Architecture series What is time? We often ask this as though there must be one answer. But consider what the question might mean. We might be asking why a clock ticks, why a broken glass does not spontaneously repair itself, why evidence of yesterday survives, why an hour of waiting feels longer than an hour with friends, or why the universe has a direction we call the future. These are not the same question. A good answer to one cannot simply be carried over to the others. This is where my five-paper research series, Human Temporal Architecture, begins. Its central contribution is a way of investigating the connections between these questions without confusing them. The project moves from the physical structure of time, to the creation and survival of records, to the reconstruction of the past, to human memory and experience, and finally to the cosmological origin of time’s apparent direction. The ambition is broad, but the claims are deliberately bounded. I am not announcing a newly discovered force, a proof of what happened before the Big Bang, or a solution to consciousness. Time’s direction, the relationship between memory and entropy, and subjective time have been studied for many decades. Other researchers have also brought physics and neuroscience into conversation. The distinctive contribution here is a connected framework with explicit tests for where one explanation ends and another begins, together with mathematical examples showing why several tempting shortcuts fail. I cannot responsibly claim that every part is unprecedented in the history of science. The first achievement is to separate things that sound alike but are physically different. The first paper, Physical Time, asks what we can actually recover from clocks, causal relationships, geometry, and physical laws. Knowing that one event can influence another is not automatically the same as knowing the elapsed time between them. A clock measures duration in a particular physical setting; it does not single-handedly explain why the universe has temporal structure. Likewise, being able to distinguish two directions does not necessarily tell us why one is physically favored. The paper turns these distinctions into a practical question: what information do we start with, what conclusion does it justify, and what assumptions are still missing? The second achievement is a more precise account of how the universe leaves evidence behind. Time Throws Fire examines the physical work needed to create and preserve a record. A star produces light, an event leaves a trace, and a living organism stores information. These processes can make the past accessible, but energy use, irreversibility, and useful memory are not interchangeable. The paper develops examples in which a reversible operation writes a record because a prepared memory is available; it also shows how strong evidence that a process has a direction can coexist with poor information about its earlier details. A particularly revealing result is that many perfect copies of a historical record need not reveal anything about the deeper origin from which that history arose. More copies do not create missing information. The third achievement is to make the limits of knowing the past explicit. Reconstructing the Past treats history as a scientific investigation rather than a story filled in after the fact. Suppose two different events leave exactly the same available evidence. No amount of clever analysis of that evidence alone can tell us which event occurred. A new, genuinely informative observation might separate them; repeatedly processing the same data cannot. The paper makes this idea mathematically precise and proposes a kind of reconstruction certificate: a clear statement of what was inferred, which traces supported it, which alternatives remain, and what new measurement could make the conclusion stronger. That is useful far beyond cosmology—in any science that works backward from incomplete evidence. The fourth achievement is to connect physical records with human temporal judgment without pretending they are identical. Human Temporal Architecture brings together neural activity, bodily state, event boundaries, memory, prediction, and action. It challenges the simple picture of a single clock inside the head. When we remember an afternoon, the brain may draw on how many changes occurred, where events began and ended, what surprised us, and what is available when we try to remember. Our judgment about duration can therefore differ from the interval a clock measured. The paper proposes ways to test these competing explanations, and it keeps an essential question open: explaining a person’s temporal reports is not yet the same as explaining why the passage of time feels like something. The fifth achievement is a disciplined account of what the universe’s arrow does—and does not—tell us about its origin. The Cosmological Arrow compares seven broad families of cosmological explanations. They create twenty-one possible pairwise comparisons. Under the paper’s deliberately strict standards, none currently establishes a reliable, source-neutral choice of one ultimate origin. Two comparisons have specific forms of observational ambiguity; thirteen lack a justified common basis for ranking the alternatives; six depend on missing physical ingredients. This is a finding about the limits of the declared comparison framework, not proof that all origin theories are equally likely or that the answer will always be unknowable. It identifies what additional evidence or physics would be needed to make progress. There is a common thread through all five papers: we must not credit an explanation with information it never supplied. A measured clock rate does not automatically explain the origin of time. A photograph does not prove every detail of the event outside its frame. A collection of copies does not replace a missing original. A brain signal correlated with a time judgment does not, by itself, explain conscious experience. And a universe full of traces of its history does not necessarily reveal why that history had its particular beginning. This is why some of the series’ most significant results are carefully constructed negative results. In science, showing that a plausible inference fails can be as useful as showing that one succeeds. It prevents us from calling a guess a discovery. It tells an experimenter what measurement would matter. It points to the exact gap between a convincing story and an established explanation. The series also produces positive tools: a step-by-step approach to testing claims about physical time; a framework for tracking the creation, survival, and accessibility of records; criteria for deciding when the past is reconstructible; experimental designs for distinguishing different sources of human time judgment; and a structured map of cosmological origin questions. Some individual mathematical ingredients are inherited from established science. Their particular assembly, applications, and model-dependent counterexamples are contributions offered for scrutiny—not a declaration of universal priority. What, then, has this research accomplished? It has made a large, often confusing question more answerable. Rather than insisting that time is entropy, or clocks, or memory, or consciousness, it shows how each belongs to a different part of a connected problem. The aim is not to turn uncertainty into certainty by force. It is to find out exactly where certainty is justified, where it is not, and what could change that judgment. That may sound less dramatic than claiming to have solved time. I believe it is more useful. If we want to know what time is, we first need to understand what each kind of evidence actually tells us—and how the physical universe’s history becomes something a human mind can know. The Universe Has Time. We Have an Experience of It. What the Human Temporal Architecture series tells us about clocks, history, memory, and the future Imagine two people spending the same ten minutes in very different ways. One is waiting anxiously for a telephone call. The other is absorbed in a conversation with someone they love. The wall clock measures ten minutes in both cases, yet the two intervals may feel nothing alike. Neither person has changed the time measured by the clock. Something different has changed: the way a living mind attends to events, gathers information, and later remembers what happened. That everyday contrast opens onto a much larger question. If time can feel so different from the way it is measured, what is time in the universe itself? And how does a universe of matter, energy, and physical laws give rise to creatures who remember yesterday, anticipate tomorrow, and experience something called now? The five papers of Human Temporal Architecture offer a way to approach these questions without treating physical time and human time as either identical or completely unrelated. Start with the universe, before anyone is there to watch it. Stars form, light travels, particles interact, and gravitational fields affect how clocks measure duration. In relativity, clocks following different paths or experiencing different gravitational conditions need not record the same elapsed time. This does not mean time is imaginary. It means physical duration is part of the structure of the world, not a single invisible clock that ticks identically everywhere. The order of events, the amount of elapsed proper time, and the way physical change is described are connected, but they are not simply one thing. Now consider a dropped glass. You see it fall, strike the floor, and shatter. You do not ordinarily see shards leap from the floor and reassemble themselves into a glass. Why does nature look so decisively one-way? The tendency of large physical systems toward greater entropy is part of the answer, and the special conditions of the universe are crucial to explaining why ordinary processes display this direction. But our series asks another question alongside it: how does a physical change leave something behind that another system can recognize? A broken glass is not just an event. The fragments, the sound, a scratch on the floor, or a camera recording can carry evidence that something happened. Light from a distant star can tell an observer about an earlier event. Fossils preserve partial traces of ancient life. A trace may be formed, altered, lost, copied, buried, or made inaccessible. A physical event and a usable record of it are different achievements. Here is one of the series’ most important insights in everyday language: the universe can contain a great deal of history without making all of that history recoverable. Imagine a book whose first page has been lost. Printing a million perfect copies of every surviving page will not recreate the missing page. More copies make the surviving information safer and easier to find; they do not automatically reveal information that was never preserved. The same principle can apply to physical records. We may know a great deal about how cosmic history unfolded while still lacking the information needed to identify its ultimate source. This is also why the past and future are different from our point of view. The past can leave traces: photographs, geological layers, light arriving from space, changed bodies, learned habits, and memories. The future has not supplied comparable records of its particular outcomes. We can predict it using physical laws, present evidence, and possible plans, but prediction is not recollection. The distinction does not require believing that a human observer creates the past. It means an observer lives in a world where access to evidence is unequal in the two directions. The brain is part of that physical world. It does not step outside physics to manufacture a private universe of time. It receives changing signals, works within limits of energy and attention, divides experience into events, retains some traces, loses others, and reconstructs information when needed. Bodily rhythms can influence this work, but a heartbeat is not a universal clock for consciousness. Neural circuits operate at many speeds, but no single measured brain rhythm has been established as the master measure of human experienced time. Consider a holiday that seemed to pass quickly while you were living it but feels long and full when you remember it. Or an anxious wait that dragged on, yet later leaves few distinct memories. How long something feels during an event need not be calculated in the same way as how long it seems afterward. Attention, surprise, the number and kind of remembered changes, and the circumstances of recall can all affect these judgments. The series does not present one of these factors as the final answer. It proposes methods for separating them experimentally. This distinction matters because memory is not a recording played back without alteration. Between an event and a later account of it lie several stages: information is taken in, organized, retained, recovered, and converted into a response to the question being asked. When someone asks, “How long did that take?” the brain may use different clues than when asked, “What happened first?” or “How far away does that memory feel?” Our sense of time is therefore not one simple number. It contains duration, order, familiarity with the past, expectation about the future, and the possibilities for action. There is, however, a deeper mystery. Explaining how a person judges intervals or remembers events does not automatically explain why time seems to pass. A brain may update its information continuously; a person may report a vivid sense of flow. Those observations are important, but they do not yet prove that conscious passage is identical to a particular calculation, memory process, or physical quantity. The fourth paper treats this as a real open question, not an inconvenience to be hidden or an excuse to declare human experience unreal. And what about the entire universe? Does its one-way history prove that time began in one particular way? The fifth paper’s answer is careful: not on the evidence and comparisons established here. Different cosmological proposals can produce apparently coherent directions of history, while differing in their global structure and underlying assumptions. Some models even illustrate how two branches can develop locally outward-pointing arrows from a shared special region. Such examples do not prove that our universe has two branches. They show why observing an arrow on our own branch is not, by itself, a photograph of the universe’s ultimate beginning. Put all of this together and a remarkably clear picture emerges. The universe supplies physical relationships among events, durations measured by clocks, changes driven by its laws and conditions, and processes that can leave records. Those records sometimes become accessible to living systems. A brain uses bodily and neural activity to organize, remember, predict, and act upon them. From this activity come judgments about how long something lasted, what belongs to the past, what may happen next, and how the present feels. Each step matters. None alone explains every step after it. So is time real, or is it something the mind creates? That question offers a false choice. Physical temporal structure does not depend on a human observer to exist. Human temporal experience depends on how a human organism encounters and interprets that structure. We do not invent a star’s past by looking at its light. But we do construct a fallible understanding of that past from the evidence that reaches us. We do not change an interval’s measured duration by feeling bored. But our perception and memory can give that interval very different meanings. The series does not settle whether time is fundamental at the deepest level of physics. It does not establish a unique cosmological origin or fully explain conscious passage. What it gives us is a bridge between questions that are too often collapsed into one another: what physical time allows, how consequences become evidence, what that evidence lets us know, and how a mind turns its encounter with the world into a sense of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Perhaps the simplest conclusion is this: the universe has a history, but it does not tell every observer the same story. What we call our experience of time is the perspective of a living system situated inside that history—receiving its traces, responding to its changes, remembering selectively, and trying to shape what comes next. That perspective is not the whole of time. It is one extraordinary thing the physical universe has made possible. Get full access to Of Darkness & Light at www.ofdarknessandlight.net/subscribe (https://www.ofdarknessandlight.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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