Consciousness and the Universe

Back on Earth, the little acrobat is set to feel all the feelings. With the help of the Questioner, it hopes to craft a coffee table book with portraits of all it meets. It wanders along a four-mile stream on the Earth's surface and marvels at a long-legged bird wading through the shallow waters. As it observes the great egret, it wonders what it is to be a dazzling white bird standing still. Time surely must feel different to the slow-moving bird.

The Juggler, as it is also known, follows the stream flowing into the river that slowly merges into the vast Ocean. There, sea lions blow bubbles just like it does. Whistling dolphins and flying rays show the same free will to explore, breaking up and down surfaces. It meets a castaway crab on a flotsam waiting for a chance to hop on a passing turtle. Time surely feels different to the patient little crab. It then dives deeper into the uncharted forest beneath the surface of the waters and crosses paths with a tiny jellyfish, no larger than a fingernail, whose species, Turritopsis dohrnii, is swarming the Ocean. 

The moving carriage of time places us all in a constant state of transition that, for most, goes in one direction, except for the Turritopsis jellyfish repeatedly turning the clock back. Yet, even as it uses tricks to rejuvenate, its surroundings do not reverse. Time exists both externally and internally in a somewhat dissociative way. Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka achieved a similar process when he made an adult cell return to an earlier stage, a biological age close to zero. 

Surely, time must feel different for a cell and a tiny jellyfish. To be individually conscious of time is to be confined in solitude. Going upwards and downwards, the little acrobat can’t quite figure out what they feel. Shapes and colors of cells and jellyfish merge in its head with those of clouds of cosmic gas. If all those it meets would communicate, they certainly have stories to tell about time, the Universe, and Consciousness.

It hits the trail at the bottom of the Earth’s Ocean, where it bumps into a weird-looking frogfish with leg-like thins using its own built-in fishing pole. Time surely must feel different to the bottom dweller that lies still, relying only on its lure pole to catch prey. All of a sudden, the frogfish lunges forward and snatches in its mouth a fellow urchin whose time has just come to an end. Wary that the frogfish might feed on it next, our little ‘street urchin’ scurries away. 

Despite all the twists and turns, it persists and squeezes into every nook and cranny of hydrothermal vents that well up transitional beings. They remind the little acrobat of the outflows of gas pillars. It asks each of those strange beings whether, to them, time feels different, hoping that they could somehow communicate. Sounds, modulated up and down in pitch, postures and gestures relay the expression of their inner beings. It hopes to learn, from creatures that eat their own bodies and those that regenerate after being torn apart, how to let go of its own parts. Surely, time is right in their wheelhouse.

Taking a page out of their playbook, it blows and pops its parts ceaselessly. Ultimately, it realizes that what it really needs to build is resilience, also known as ‘riding it out’, ‘being patient’, and ‘waiting for better circumstances’. Whether to redirect its focus on every ounce of its bubbles or make them all disappear, it pledges to hold onto its head. With its last remaining bubble held up high, three red ‘dots’ are added to its soup for a thought as if actual eyes and mouth grew in its pursuit of evolution. 

It names them LBCA, LACA, and LUCA, otherwise known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), the Last Bacterial Common Ancestor (LBCA), and the Last Archaeal Common Ancestor (LACA). LUCA, to which time certainly feels different, is a 4.2 billion-year-old thermophilic anaerobe with an early immune system. It was thriving in one shallow hydrothermal vent that the little acrobat had earlier explored. It tagged along like a crab hitchhiking a ride. 

LUCA had sent messages about the newly found home to its closest relatives, LBCA and LACA. They, too, came along, delighted to find each other growing and evolving on the acrobat’s head. A series of exchanges develop between them and their host. With its new features as conduits for feelings, the one-head acrobat becomes increasingly aware of what it feels like to be others — a community of universal shapes. Reflecting on the patchwork of posts assembled by the Questioner over the years, it remembers those she has encountered so far, from the circle of poets to the scientists’ corner. 

    It mumbles through its new-found mouth, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘I’.” 

At the Boundary, the breath of nothingness fades in a sequence of events while the flow of things emerges. A unitary evolution unfolds, allowing humans to inherit the psychological trait of their inner child from a tiny jellyfish that ages backwards. Above and below, is time nothing more than an ability to withstand?

      “Surely,” it murmurs, “one is eventually followed by many.” 

Awaiting better circumstances, the one-head acrobat misses its body parts. Together, they have gone a long way from necklace beads to nebular Queen. Truth be told, each has a purpose. Feeling safer, it grows new ones — fungus-like cones on a pine tree — and returns to its old shape. It happily shakes its feet grounded in light, sound, and water, tapping intuitively into the divide between agency, sentience, and consciousness. In the end, it never lingers in one place for too long, investigating each microcosm as if it were the whole Universe. Trees breathe in the heat as the ozone spikes. Geese, ducks, and seagulls live side-by-side in the four-mile stream. The great egret walks slowly through the muddy water. 

“How does it feel like to breathe?” The little acrobat wonders. 

It leaves them all behind and flies off, reaching for stars.  From above, resting trunks and bare limbs on the ground resemble an elephants’ cemetery. It distinguishes no more between the deep fissures of the Grand Canyon and those of Victoria Falls, whose resounding waters have left the imprint of a ringing echo in the haunting silence that fills its head.

Nicklas Brendborg, Jellyfish age backwards

Arik Kershenbaum, Why animals talk

As the tinkering acrobat runs about revising its body parts, it recalls confessing to an interstellar visitor how hard it had tried to escape the pull of abstract thinking, only to fail each time. It feels at home among circles of concepts, dancing words, and geometric drawings. Yet, circles are merely oversimplified figures trembling into imperfect orbits. It had hoped to pop all its bubbles. Instead, it leaves them as they are to pursue writing a book about Nothingness.

Still holding its red balloon of dark energy, it bumps into Gustave, a well-known dreamer, after Maria, the Nantucket astronomer, has vanished into thin air. Gustave sees himself in the little acrobat and decides to stick around, at least for a while. As they begin their journey together, like two ducks gliding across the water, he says, “Indeed, what seems beautiful is a book about nothing, a book without external attachment… a book which would almost have no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible.” 

Nothingness, the strongest attractor of all, is winning back the little acrobat’s heart. They decide to pick up where it left off: exploring the predicament of an 'absolute' vacuum and the fundamental emptiness deriving from it. Whether it lacks a medium that can slow down light or any matter or energy capable of bending space, if gravitation and electromagnetism are two facets of the same underlying structure, the distinction between gravitational vacuum and electromagnetic vacuum becomes irrelevant. 

This ‘absolute’ is simply geometry stripped of any substance. It precedes the onset of 'matter' conditions, marked by a subtle presence of low energy and a slight indication of gravitational interaction. While emptiness fluctuates, geometry creates matter. It is the emptiness’ fluctuations that stir the layout of all things, essential to the formation of atoms and the expansion and contraction of distances in between. 

From an old Nature article, our two amateur ‘sleuths’ infer the existence of a gravitational dark energy connecting our world to the ‘hidden’ sector. The vacuum energy which may be all that is referred to as ‘dark energy’ has an incredibly small value, if not zero, compared to the bulky Universe. It lies at the Boundary, like an in-between entity with one foot in the hidden sector and the other on the ‘matter’ side.

They can’t quite wrap their heads around how negative energy and entanglement are intimately related, only that energy levels in a vacuum may fluctuate from zero to negative numbers. They know by experience the great impossibility — that a simple sequence of events dipping below the ground could induce the quantum vacuum to release energy it didn’t appear to have. They swear that a deep resonance brings information across.

Our two imaginary characters are dwellers of their own topological space. They are intimately aware that the hidden sector pertains not only to the realm of consciousness filled with dreams and probabilities but also to the realm of the unseen where extra dimensions reside. Are there gatekeepers to those higher dimensions? Photons maybe, as their flickering lights induce consciousness. The distinction between gravitation and electromagnetism becomes clearer when the degree of separability between them increases. As quantum entanglement decreases, ‘matter’ conditions get a start. 

After much sleuthing, the Juggler and its ghost friend are in a bind. They recap what they have learned so far: ‘Below the ground’ sounds a lot like what poets, painters, and composers alike have conveyed before with verses, paint brushes, and musical notes. Gustave, a writer during his lifetime, is very familiar with the process: at every burst of inspiration, words rise through.  If you ask them, they would say that all the extra dimensions, compactified in the quantum vacuum of spacetime, unfold before their very eyes.

The little acrobat knows too well what fills its head, the togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe. Humans, however, it’s a different story. Shedding light on human thought, Gustave says, “The future torments us, and the past holds us back. This is why the present escapes us.” Despite the present being the only reality humans physically experience, even the night sky seems stuck in the past filled with compelling stories of astronomical events frozen in time. 

In the ongoing debate over the nature of reality, the extra dimensions may be what is ‘hidden’ from humans’ view and experience. If on all of those different dimensions, there are a lot of other fields, then the labyrinth of particles is a multidimensional one. Humans however can anchor local appearances against the backdrop of time. To some, those dimensions marked with different time stamps, look like a light cone structure that extends between past and future with both ends in infinite shadows. 

Those shadows are out-of-focus projections showing snapshots, in the present, of their timeless inner being, one photon at a time. Time is revealed in the threads that weave the present into a monster blueprint of space, melting past and future into an invisible web full of dynamics pulling and repelling, splitting apart humans’ bodies and souls, keeping tight invisible cords while mounting scaffolds of consciousness breaking up beneath the surface of things. 

Time ignites movement in all dimensions, prompting objects to rotate, vibrate, move up and down, forward and backward. By connecting past, present, and future,  humans create a mental image of an intricate manifold. From afar, spacetime looks the same in all directions on large enough scales. In close-up, the quiet Milky Way is a neutrino desert, contrasting with large-scale clustered structures filled with exploding stars and binary objects merging, all bursting with gamma rays. If those large-scale structures leave aligned footprints in the night sky, is it merely by chance?  And if one gazes back at this corner of the Universe, would they make the same observation?

Gustave and the little ‘street urchin,’ lost in the Quantum Universe, swim through the deep Ocean and find themselves stranded on a different type of island. Whether it is outside or inside the horizon of a black hole, they are unable to know its exact location. They follow the cross-dimensional trails, dream of the Higgs field and the strong force dancing with geometry, and visualize matter mounted on a brane embedded in a five-dimensional bulk space. 

Our little acrobat has become a stargazer in the Universe’s Ocean where shapes of nebulae and supernova remnants compete with those of translucent jellyfish and squids. Gustave sees genuine happiness in his friend’s eyes and says, “Humans, too, will be filled in the future with immense joys. They will travel among the stars, with air pills in their pockets. Unfortunately, the rest of us came either too early or too late. We will have done however what is most difficult and least glorious: the transition.” Already contemplating its next adventure, the little acrobat vows to dip deeper below the ground, and wonders whether the Earth's oceans’ floor holds the key to the mystery. It hopes to one day ask jellyfish and squids whether, in their own experience, time feels different. 

Gustave, the Dreamer of balloons, bids his companion farewell with these concluding remarks: “The most beautiful works are those in which there is the least amount of substance. The closer the expression comes to the ethereality of thought, the more the word adheres to it and disappears. The future of the Arts lies in these paths, where form no longer knows any orthodoxy and is as free as the will that produces it.” Free will leads the way beneath the surface of things. He, too, vanishes beyond the Boundary. 

Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 1850-1854

The little acrobat travels far among stars through colliding galaxies as their ballooning bubbles of wavicles stretch and expand. It turns around and jumps over the Moon to reach its home base where it grows wings and flies high through the realm of human thought. Wishing to connect dots, clarify points, and make corrections, it pauses and reads a detailed record of waves’ whereabouts in an impossible Sea by Matt Strassler.

On the deeper patterns of the Universe, it learns about the existence of an amotional medium — a space pervading everything, including humans. Unseen and barely perceived only in some indirect ways, such a space gives itself away by its physical and structural ‘void patterns’. Our face-blind acrobat who unknowingly juggles principles, fundamentals, and properties returns to the drawing board, hoping to make sense of its body parts. The chest bubble ‘Freedom, Essence and Existence’ wraps its heart as those of ‘beauty and melody’ and ‘feeling of space and emotion of time’ balance at its hips and knees. 

In part, what makes it impossible is that we lose ourselves in a sea of words. The word ‘energy’ applies to different processes. Most of the internal energy of ordinary objects — that is most of their rest mass — is stored in protons and neutrons. Space however entails the existence of a ‘vacuum’ energy which may be all of what is referred to as ‘dark energy’. Our wriggling acrobat is clueless about whether ‘energy’ should rise to its chest or even to its head. It is however acutely aware that naming is the art of actualization. 

Our leading character in the infinite game is as conceptual as it is representational. In a theory of everything, abstract and actual components must combine. Lifted to its chest, a ‘vacuum energy’ may be the hidden essence in existence while freedom derives from Nothingness and precedes essence and existence. The difficulty of placing ‘vacuum energy’ in the acrobat’s body is twofold: If there is a vacuum energy, does it imply the existence of an ‘absolute’ vacuum? And if space is inferred in the idea of vacuum energy, then the word ‘space’ should suffice since it has already such an intended meaning. 

Vacuum energy participates in the process of becoming. It is involved with all this changing across microscopic distances and times. It is the code of a hidden order that stems from the dark sector. As if it were a primer used by painters on a macroscopic canvas, such vacuum energy is the cause of the fundamental emptiness of atoms and when stars collapse under their own gravity crushing the space within to form denser and smaller entities. Any field stiffened by the Higgs field, Strassler explains, has vacuum energy that depends on the Higgs field’s value. If it didn’t exist, atoms would never have formed.

Against all odds, the acrobat finds its way back to the labyrinth of particles. Elementary particles are tiny quantities — parts of a field. A photon, gluon, or even ‘graviton’ comes into being in the shape of a field. Once named, each ‘individual’ whose related energy and/or associated mass is measured becomes a ‘field’ as if it were a collective noun. From neutrinos to Higgs bosons, fields are properties of the amotional everywhere medium. Their wave frequencies intertwine. 

The word ‘frequency’ defines the vibrating energy of a quantum. Things don’t just flow, they vibrate. The faintest possible tremor that is the minimal vibration, with the smallest possible amplitude is a quantum, may that be light. The higher frequency is, the larger the mass. The rest mass represents the energy needed for the wavicle to exist — which in turn is set by the resonant frequency of its field. 

There is a temporal order in the layout. Time invites motion whether things flow or vibrate. Wavicles roll, pitch, and yaw on the ‘plane’ surface. Motion allows them to oscillate back and forth. As if the ‘glue’ precedes what glues together, gluons and quarks get trapped before protons and neutrons ever exist. A greater impossibility lies in the existence of an energy field in which positive-energy particles scatter backwards in time with negative energies. Quark fields and electron fields contain particles and antiparticles while there is only one type of photons. 

Wavicles pop in and out in their fields of operation as if they were fireflies lightning in the dark. Subatomic structures decay while others form. In step with ‘energy', ‘mass’ refers to different kinds of processes. While the Higgs field gives quarks and anti-quarks their rest mass, any ordinary object obtains the majority of its rest mass through the strong nuclear force.

Fields have their own rules of engagement. The everlasting Higgs field is a strange space-suffusing entity, an elusive presence and a sort of stiffening partner, unaware though of whether it is an ‘agent’ or a ‘patient’. Strassler explains that it does not interact directly with the electromagnetic field, provides electrons with the entirety of their rest mass while ignoring photons altogether. The electromagnetic field, for its part, has no interaction with any of the neutrinos' fields. The Higgs field isn't either the carrier of gravity. Still, light and gravitational waves travel at the same rate. They are profoundly interrelated. Perhaps they are different facets of a single, underlying structure.

Certainly, we may be able to capture the internal view of the Milky Way, but we remain the outsiders to the inner experience of writhing particles and scattering elements as much as we are to merging stars and colliding galaxies. To the little acrobat, a ‘field’ has a dimensional aspect. The cosmic field encompasses a bundle of one-dimensional experiences. Each individual experience is unidimensional in how the subject finds itself experiencing, as when the light is absorbed one photon at a time. 

Dimensions feature a whole and a series. A whole refers to the entire medium of a ‘star’ or the reduced scale of a ‘wavicle’. A series represents each category of a particular medium or field. On a cosmic field, host of many others, resonance is the echo of an information shared on the same wavelength through the twelve fermionic fields primarily composed of one neutrino field, one electron-like field, and two quark fields. From wavicles to the vibration frequencies of carbon-based lifeforms, all that talk about fields makes the little acrobat wonder whether there is such a thing as a field of consciousness with its own terms of engagement. 

It has flown high in the realm of human thought and appears tired from travel. It lands on a sandy shore covered with slipper shells to catch its breath and watch the sunrise. “Nothing is what it seems,” it sighs, “Even an edge-on view of the Universal plane is only an imperfect line between a field of existence and a rhizomatic Nothingness.” An old lady named Maria who walks by has the biggest smile on her face. It gathers the courage to ask: “If whatever moves is something that feels, is there a wavefunction that describes the field of consciousness — the vibrating energy of its wavicles?” 

“Without feelings, there is no resonant form,” she kindly replies, “Consciousness is a web of resonance chains. It, too, is vibratory. While humans hold an insignificantly small place in space, the field of consciousness overlaps all the other fields that have allowed them to be recipients of the same elements and trace minerals as stars and nebulae. Farewell, Little acrobat!” She then continues her stroll along the shore and floats into the air.

Matt Strassler, Waves in an impossible sea

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

Catherine Zucker, Mapping our galactic backyard

Zach Cano, Adventures of a Millisecond Magnetar

Arwen Rimmer, Largest-ever Catalog of X-ray Sources Tests Cosmology

Monika Young, Neutron Star “Glitch” Precedes Mysterious Radio Flash

If imagination is more important than knowledge, rolling waves of time, sound and matter translate and rotate, swirl and tremble at the surface and on the horizon. At daybreak, when the dim sky barely shows its colors and spirits wait around a while longer before the rising sun, deep memories are passed on ethereally “How could one who has never felt the rain cherish waterlilies?” A surrealist mind asks. It has intentionally chosen imagination over reason, fearing that reason is self-stultifying.

Like an evolutionary makeshift of older stars and younger stellar activity, nebulae offer a landscape of timelines. As orbits align with orbits and spin with orbits, nudged by chance, spinning and rotating objects are global manifestations of outflowing particle chains transitioning and drifting, polarizing and circulating. They are the macroscopic appearance of spinning particles in gravitational fields. Gravity surfaces at boundaries, crystallizing and splitting forms and shapes, opening up geometrical degrees of freedom.

A surrealist mind departs from this shore to a space of time where revelations are made. Yet, it harbors doubts. If there is no place in the Universe where gravity does not exist, and if there is no consciousness without gravity, then consciousness may rise even out of the accretion disk of a black hole as it falls into singularity. The greater the force reality exerts, the more it hinders the mind’s ability to draw from the invisible which, in turn, ceases to yield anything of a conscious nature. 

If imagination is more important than knowledge, the mind should find inspiration in the knee and ankle of the energy spectrum of cosmic rays isotropized by magnetic waves. It should visualize massless gravitons propagating on the boundary of cone-shaped black holes, and electron-positron pairs interacting with rings of magnetic fields off their mouths. The Event Horizon Telescope has revealed twisted bundles of strong magnetic fields around the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. Its mass is connected with the luminosity, mass, and velocity dispersion of the galactic stellar bulge. Most black holes are surrounded by a non-zero magnetic field, although we have not yet detected one as strong as a magnetar’s. When host galaxies collide, binary formations and triple dynamics can occur during the merging of their black holes.

If imagination is more important than knowledge, then layers upon layers of the mind’s and the Universe’s imaginary time rule over the real time. Intuitively, a surrealist mind senses that these layers collapse into one ultimately. As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, it holds the hand Mirror of the mind and the Universe. Knowledge is the outward form of imagination when it translates to the real world. 

When gravity couples with spacetime, it becomes chiral. Chirality is the expression of free will, a choice between right-handedness and left-handedness in a Multiverse made of an infinity of opposite directions. Chirality nudges the ins and outs and evokes the breaking of the Mirror. Between negative and positive energies lies infinity. Between beneath and above, there’s a surface and its boundaries. Even time has left-handed and right-handed orientations. Chirality enables the directional flow of time, with chiral gravitational effect tilting in one direction. 

From dust lanes to dust rings,  clouds of spin-waves scatter left and right, making a 180-degree cut into the roundness of the Multiverse. The chirality of elementary particles extends into macroscopic manifestations,  as in the ciliary force. Chirality relates to topology when stars and planetary systems surface in clusters, hot stars spin and rotate in super-bubbles. While chiral plasma instability may be the origin of primordial magnetic fields, magnetic fields seem to have favored and amplified homochirality, a single image forming on the surface and, down the roads, the left-handedness of amino acids and proteins and the right-handedness of DNA, RNA and their building blocks.

The stellar mass and star formation rate are indicative of a galaxy’s metallicity. Low-metallicity systems with lighter elements such as hydrogen and helium dominated the landscape at early epochs of ionization. While the number of massive black holes may be reduced by up to a factor of ten at high metallicity compared to metal-poor, low-oxygen ancient systems, approximately one out of every thousand stars will still end their lives as evaporating black holes. This suggests that the Milky Way potentially contains hundreds of millions of black holes of which we are currently aware of only a few hundred of them. 

At any level of metal enrichment, minerals and elements are left to themselves or placed at the disposal of volitional bodies, as it is for seeds dispersed by the wind. While magnetite may be cause for an initial, albeit minor, bias toward one form of a chiral molecule, the Moon could provide evidence for deposits, such as iodine, a key mineral in the biological evolution of life, dispersed from nearby collisions of neutron stars caused by gravitational waves. 

The eclipse briefly reversed roles as the Sun became a crescent. Switching places, the Sun and the Moon turned the Universe upside down. “Imagination,” they said at once, “holds the key.” The Sun hovered over the Earth’s canopy, resting atop tree rings as if they were rescalable slides of nebulae. “ Elephants, too, are contagious,” it mumbled to itself, recalling a white elephant Charlemagne had around the time that it struck the Earth with a powerful storm. 

In the constellation of Cepheus lies the over 20 light-years long Elephant's Trunk Nebula. Edward Emerson Barnard commented about the dark markings on his photographs of the sky. “There seems to be no question,” he wrote, “that some of them are real objects which are either entirely devoid of light or so feebly luminous when seen against the Milky Way as to appear black.”

The roads of the Universe are lined with symbolic events, some otherworldly, others in real time, in sofar as a surrealist mind cannot tell them apart. Some believe that dreams allow time reversal like a bursting white hole turning the clock backward while others see them as prophecies. In any event, they provoke in one’s mind the collapse of spacetime and the riddance of scale. Once scale falls from the inner eye, physical and non-physical symmetries and synchronicities emerge along cross-dimensional lines, merging into a shapeless Universe.

A surrealist mind dreamt of an elephant on a basketball field, a giant bear snoozing on a rooftop, the Earth quaking, and tornadoes looming in the distance. In real time, elephants cross the Zambian River with their calves close by, a young bear strolls the neighborhood and a sculpture of a white elephant stands in a distant land off the coast. Dreams and reality are asymptotic symmetries. They move along with each other and may fuse randomly. Yet, they remain apart. Dreams follow the same paths as the waking mind. It is how the inner process of imagination works. A dream nonetheless is a shadow — an abstract line etched deep in the recesses of the mind until imagination frees the absurd and allows the dream to take on a physical form. 

John Herbert Matthews, The surrealist mind

Benjamin Peret, Paul Éluard, and Ela Kotkowska, 152 proverbs brought up to date. Chicago Review 50, no. 2/3/4 (2004): 173–84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40785372.

The Saturday Evening Post, What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck, Saturday Evening Post Society, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1929 October 26

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Rudolf Steiner, An outline to the Occult, 1922

Attracted by the moonlight, the Eagle flies out of the Nebula to rest on the Moon as if it were on a limb. There, it spots the Time Mind balancing on a string hanging from the Moon. As long as the Sun lasts, they watch the Horse-drawn carriage with wheels of emergence spinning eons apart. Baffled by the Horse’s freedom, they hop on the moving carriage, eager to see where it is going. 

The Time Mind, enjoying the ride, asks its traveling companion: “Do feelings of Absence and degrees of Sentience occur within clusters of magnetic fields and depend upon gravity shifting?” The Eagle cannot answer. Silence is deafening. Wisest among birds, it finally says: “Imagination rides the waves of Time.” It flies away and returns to its nest, leaving the Time Mind alone on its quest.

The Time Mind visualizes magnetic fields and celestial bodies.  It draws doves and swans through cones of light. Sound and color become components of electromagnetic phenomena carrying stacked signals from distant stars and planets to the circuitry of human comprehension, telling stories of photons dancing at the touch of gravity. Swells and ebbs in the traveling electromagnetic waves occur because gravity wraps the fabric of spacetime, influencing the human mind’s timely observation as a result.

In Deep time, gravity and magnetism conceal their beginnings. As gravity affects quantum entanglement, does the initial seed field imprint its memory in macroscopic magnetic fields around and between planets, stars, and galaxies and in cosmic voids? Their mere amplification and spread, perhaps in the midst of photon-graviton fluctuations and polarization processes, do not ensure that the initial quantum sparks survive the sprouting stage nor that magnetic seeds, dynamically enhanced, wrap themselves in and around filaments, clusters, and bridges. It merely suggests that primordial fields may have played a role in the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry by their influence on baryogenesis.

No single self-evident scenario fits all in the evolutionary stages of planets and stars. Freedom prevails. Myriad processes give rise to scattering waves that travel through spacetime without little regard for obstacles they encounter. While the effects of imperceptible magnetic fields are felt with each interaction,  physical and non-physical aspects of a cosmological origin are drowning deeper with each accelerating mass, intensifying field, and resonant event. 

Gravity and magnetism, gradually changing over time, interact at various scales. In the collapse of a high-mass star-forming region (G327.3), gravity and rotation dominate the dynamics and shape the magnetic field. And while a magnetar evolves with continuous accretion, its magnetic field decays as it spins faster. Even the Earth’s magnetic field is intricately linked to its gravitational force. In a complex planetary environment overwhelmed with force fields from stimuli sources, the blue planet responds to impulses from solar winds.

On April 8th, the Moon will briefly chase away the Sun, eager to tell her side of the story. From her vantage point, she watches coalescing black holes, supernova cores collapsing, and bursts of light never vanishing. She hears rhythmic waves from pulsars, magnetic fields blowing around magnetars. Time has not been kind to her, leaving her bare, marked by underlying magnetic anomalies perhaps due to impacts, volcanic activity and remnants of an ancient magnetic field. Her environment appears dormant, a bit like Mars depleted of its magnetic field 2.6 billion years ago. Despite lacking a large iron core, her ferromagnetic components link her to the large-scale magnetization process of intergalactic magnetic fields. 

Whether magnetism can be modified by gravity, it creates light swirls on the Moon’s crust and dust lanes in the Milky Way. The intergalactic magnetic field acts as an aisle for material while gravity drags the field and aligns it with the dust lanes. They serve each other purpose until filaments accrete enough mass to collapse and form cores of stellar objects. Recalling last month’s narrated story, the magnetic field is akin to the wind and the dust lanes to the banner. Dust has its own intrinsic properties, enabling it to interact with the magnetic field in such a manner. The challenge is going beyond the illusion of the mind to accurately detect and fully interpret signals sent and received: “ No, not everything is the creation of the human mind,” the Time Mind contends, “There is a holistic truth that is valid independent of it.”

In the debate over magnetic fields and consciousness, are there bits of awareness and threads of communication not readily decipherable by the human mind? A point of contact — akin to a bow shock event — invites waves to bounce back and stir an inner resonance. What happens when the magnetic moment of a celestial body reacts to the magnetic field tied to a star? And when an object succumbs to the gravitational pull of another? And when an asteroid is accreted by a magnetized white dwarf, does it lose its essence, swallowed in the course of evolution?

The Moon hangs onto the Earth’s magnetotail for the continuing hydration process of its nearside surface. What sort of a physical thing she is mirrors how she resonates with her surroundings, from the near howling winds and roaring plasma to the distant humming sounds of the Universe. The sentient Moon contents herself, knowing that a sound only requires the existence of the one hearing it. She has learned over billions of years what meaning to attach to each bit of feeling released. From her point of view, she witnesses humans bustling and hustling, oceans’ surface struggling to absorb electromagnetic radiation, and legions of falling trees sending waves of compressed air. All combine into the sometimes harmonious, other times discordant soundscape of the breathing ecosystem to which the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon all belong.

Interactions, transfers, and exchanges impact the levels of minerals and metals across spacetime. The interplay of stellar and planetary magnetism provides a basis upon which biological evolution becomes possible. As millions of solid particles enter our respiratory system with each breath we take, the human brain shows magnetosensory capabilities. It harbors two distinct types of magnetite, one formed by biological processes and the other from air pollution. Does the brain owe its own experience of an inner chatter to magnetite crystals paving the path of evolution? Be that as it may, trace metals and minerals sunk into the human brain and heart preserve the physical and non-physical bonds humans share with the Earth’s core and the Moon’s crust. 

The Neophyte relates the story of a Dialogue between Consciousness and the Universe to a gathering of empty chairs that ghosts and spirits use without anyone knowing.  He has the free will to speak yet much difficulty expressing himself, for his soul is the one channeling the Dialogue. He gives his hands the freedom to write down the exchange, yet his written words hardly reveal his soul within. Should he burn them all only to keep the simplest expression?

Breaking the silence

Of an ancient pond

A frog jumped into water

A deep resonance.

There is something utterly poetic about verses stripped bare that cut through a profound idea, seemingly dropping an anchor in our minds. What is it about an ancient pool, a frog leaping, and a splash of water that awakens our souls? Here, certainly, another encounter of kindred spirits took place beyond time. Long after the Poet Bashō described his awakening, the Poet Tagore commented: “An ancient pool, dark, silent, … As soon as a frog leaps into it, sound is heard… The picture of this old pool must be sketched in the mind; consequently, only that much has been suggested by the poet; anything more would be unnecessary.” And so understood it the translator Nobuyuki Yuasa.

Tagore and Einstein once touched upon the role of chance. They debated the nature of reality. Could reality resonate with the soul as simply and clearly as an ancient pool, a frog leaping, and a splash of water? The simplicity of its basic foundation may look vague, for neither cycles nor causality prevent the elusiveness of reality. The Juggler, built of bubble-like concepts, carries the weight of its vague expression on its shoulders. 

By hinting at the shadowy knowledge of what is yet to be discovered, vagueness is subject to interpretation for words as much as concepts and the ‘beyond’ itself remain vague. Is reality a construct of the human mind or independent of it, something beyond human understanding, consequently without mathematical expressibility? Observers generally identify reality as conventionally agreed upon, reasonably accepted, and empirically accessible. 

The Universe, though, reveals itself in a precarious state.  At some point, we jump off the train of human existence while it is still going so that no one knows its destination. All along, our souls reach out to other souls — ephemeral beings who have long moved on peacefully — to hear their take on the laws of Nature. In spatiotemporal terms, what is reality? And what is the extent of its reach? Linked by a bond of spiritual unity, Einstein and Tagore disagreed, for they tackled the problem from two different angles. Einstein’s mission was to answer the question of what sort of a thing the Universe is in its ultimate and simplest nature, while Tagore addressed the question of how it feels like to be the Universe. Both perspectives mirror each other. 

Does our collective state of being imply the sameness of our experience? Our reality is filled with multiple layers that are deep and dynamic, like the movement of a wave. While observers above the surface calculate its "statistical order," beneath the surface, they estimate its probability. Not only does reality reveal itself in such a sectionalized way, its state of being is not numerically alone but a crowding of ghosts. Reality does not exist in isolation. It is 'haunted' by spatiotemporal points, parameters, seeds, and remnants.

Yet, in a most unlikely way, we experience it one world at a time. It is the unique character of the experience that refutes the possibility of different states of the same system or different states of the same observer. The clouds, Einstein argued, look like one from a distance. But if you look closer, they are “disorderly drops of water.” They, too, point to the coexistence of antecedents in multidimensionality. Could it be the perfect comprehension of the nature of reality? 

Legend has it that monks engaged in perpetual debates about the nature of reality found themselves entangled in discussions about a banner swaying in the wind. The first disciple asserted, "The banner is not sentient; it is the wind that propels it." The second countered, "Both the wind and the banner aren’t sentient; how then can they generate movement?" The third observed, "In harmonious alignment of conditions, the wind and the banner collaboratively bring forth motion." The fourth contended, "The banner is not waving; it is the wind circulating naturally."A fervent and endless debate ensued within the community. In hindsight, Tagore would have agreed with the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, who intervened at last by saying, "The banner, like everything else, is not waving. The perceived movement is a creation of the human mind itself.”

Does the mind comprehend our shared observed reality? Does the Universe, “whose experiences are through our experiences,” comprehend the mind? Or do they intertwine endlessly? Tagore believed that there is nothing outside of a conscious experience. What he called the infinite human personality is the individual merged in the infinity, the greatly elongated human form with its considerable extension in time that holds within strings of resonance. Einstein was convinced that “truth must be conceived as a truth that is valid independent of humanity,” Regardless of how deep we feel immersed into its infinity, reality involves on its outskirts a rhizomatic Nothingness and a historically recorded Universe whose web-like structure weaves spacetime points with lingering feelings. The randomness of every throw of dice dislocalizes the continuous rhizomatic domain of Nothingness.

On a foggy morning where ground, water, and sky blur together, the Neophyte, feeling the expanse of the Universe, answers its calling. He squints his eyes, hoping to cut through the blanket of fog to see the calligraphy of stars on the universal sheet that hangs beyond the light of day. In and out of the human gaze, he spots from afar starburst-driven galactic outflows and hears the fainting heart of neutron stars. At his feet, all the empty chairs float in the mist. Feeling out of place, he asks, “Do drops of water speak? Do they communicate when water boils, ocean waves rise and swell, snow crunches, ice cracks, and waterfalls plunge?”

Pouring rain dripping makes the wood expand and swell. The wooden floor becomes the surface of a pond under which lies the bottom of the sea. The Neophyte has shrunk into a tiny frog dreaming of being human at the edge of the Unseen, quenching his thirst at every fountain — even those entrenched in the divide. He breaks the silence of an ancient pond where wiser frogs once dwelled. He is a frog-poet who hopes to wade across the Ocean to faraway shores. Waves rock the Neophyte to sleep.

Eugene Ionesco, Les Chaises, Farce tragique

Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and other travel sketches translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa

Thomas Merton, Woods, shore, desert: a notebook, May 1968

Rabindranath Tagore, A Tagore reader

Kanako Nishi, "Burn" translated by Allison Markin Powell in Freeman's Power

Alix Paré & Valérie Sueur-Hermel, The Fantastic Gustave Doré

The Questioner thought that time moves forward, but these days, she eerily feels that time moves backward. From the standpoint of her inner feelings, she struggles to understand why they say time is uniform. From D.C. to San Francisco, from the Carina Nebula to the Earth, time feels different. On this foggy shore, she has gone nowhere, unable to cross the transcendent bridge to the other side from where her wounded spirit heeds a beckoning call. 

Like Vedder’s pilgrim clothed in rags, she embarked on an arduous journey, hoping to hear the elusive Truth from the East to the West. Success seems uncertain, for skulls of past questioners are washed away on this shore, buried by the shifting sands of time. Undeterred, she persists. What matters, after all, is the process itself. While the pilgrim on the East Coast leans in to hear the Sphinx’s enigma, not a person is left on the West Coast to answer her riddle. The Sphinx has surrounded herself with shipwreck remnants, amid which dice are fatefully tossed into a Truth that cannot be no matter how much it is better defined. 

The Questioner follows the poets’ lead who live in dreams where signs and symbols are more real than words they hear and images they see in their waking hours. Since crossing the threshold, she lingers at the boundary. Immersed in the Quantum Forest, she loses track of time and meets a quantum Observer. Together, they witness time fleeing the house of everything to join Nothingness and the Quantum Universe in the infinite circle of the three Universals, imprinting itself in gravitational wave echoes. 

In the making of a universal symphony involving information resonance,  relic gravitational waves lie beneath the cosmic microwave background. Trembling waves date back to the breaking of spherical pressure waves transitioning asymmetrically. Gravity is the tie connecting with the visible matter through only very tiny interactions, if at all.  Fermions are musical notes that strengthen and amplify in the process.

In Barbour’s realm, expansion occurs simultaneously on either side of the Big Bang. The two futures in the two directions are independent. From the standpoint of the rhizomatic Nothingness,  however, no singular or Janus point exists. Across the Multiverse, time is local, seemingly evaporating like droplets. It lives in minds, suspended memories, and curved space. Whether quantized gravity or gravitized quanta, time unravels from the rhizomatic Nothingness. On a line interval flowing endlessly, compactified three-dimensional forms touch the trail of feelings while carrying within a lingering sense of absence at the juncture of Nothingness and Being. 

The Questioner asks, “If the universal organism reveals itself in plain sight where structures and objects enjoy a fragile taste of free will, so when does the planning occur?” The Observer answers, “A transformative process is hidden in multidimensional layers of the overlapped, intricate Multiverse.” He offered her a clue before parting ways: “Given the predictable arrival of pulsar radio signals, any delay or acceleration in the timeline of electromagnetic waves traveling through the cosmos is a telltale sign of the interrelation between time, gravity, and space.”

It remains difficult for the Questioner to entirely grasp the extent of the meaning of multidimensionality. She goes on to meet again the oddly balanced character who comes to life only to experience the fear of its collapse. Staring at its head, the Questioner ponders, “If Nothingness is a time domain, isn’t it akin to Timelessness?” The Juggler — as it is otherwise known — scratches its head and replies: “Timelessness is the feeling of eternity. By suggesting a simultaneity and unification of temporal moments, it characterizes time positively above the surface while the rhizomatic Nothingness as a time domain refers to the so-called imaginary time, layers of the Multiverse below the surface.” Delving deeper into the Truth, the Questioner wonders how to bring into light the shadowy time zones.

The Juggler’s head is filled with the hush of silence. In Nothingness, silence rules. Concepts of distance and length find no place. Their very mention is absent. How, then, could a sound so faint be whispered in its ear? Recalling an old manuscript from the East, the Questioner asks: “Where do sounds come from anyway? Nature, Being, or something else?”  In its heart, the Juggler dreads the collapse of its parts and responds: “While the sounds of the Universe surface over time, the hushing silence influences the quantum system, and in turn, the quantum system influences the hushing silence. When bound to mass and volume, the sounds of the Universe translate into frequencies. Entropy gauges the random changes in the symphony. Beauty is the qualitative property necessary for the Universe to feel its beat. With gravity, the symphony gains in amplitude, form, and texture.” 

Musicians and Poets who reached the land of dark sectors before she did gained a timeless knowledge of sounds, encouraging her to assimilate the subtleties of rhythm, frequency, amplitude, texture, and structure. The texture reveals layers of low-frequency waves originating from distant astrophysical sources and high-energy processes separated from her by eons. Sounds from afar appear random, in sequence, or changing. 

The Questioner continues her journey, three steps forward and two steps back. A roadblock obstructs her path. Since the arrow of time gets into things through the touch of gravity, if repulsive gravity is discounted, could it mean that antimatter — whether in atomic confines, undiscovered patches, or in exotic dimensions — isn’t going backward but shares our thermodynamic arrow in a symmetrically forward motion? If repulsive gravity is ruled out, does that suggest that there is only an irreversible series of events producing asymmetric outcomes?

In this realm of multidimensionality, past, present, and future weave a continuum paved with footprints seemingly pointing in one direction, even those of ubiquitous neutrinos and their counterparts throughout their lifetime. Arrows of perspectival time in all the many layers do not cease to exist even if they cease to be there. With a smile, the Juggler bids her farewell, stating: “Once and for all, on this shore, time comes first, but, in all truth, what is left of time passing?” 

She pulls her head above the surface and watches a fox crossing her path as it returns to the forest den, urging her to do the same. Words have formed a pit in which she drowns herself. At the pit’s base, she takes time to reassess each drop-like word, anchoring them one by one onto a makeshift ladder that she climbs to emerge into the sunlight. She remains not a bit tamed, unwilling to do as she is told by the fox. 

In the deceptive cycles of Nature, the Questioner takes stock of all things, realizing that, ultimately, no conditions or entities truly replicate themselves. They disperse across time and space, expelled as transcendent structures through shattered patterns. While entities — and their identities — diverge from each other, physical and non-physical traces blend, negating isolation. Outside the Questioner’s own line of sight, crisscrossed lines fade into a multidimensional whole from which the holistic Nature arises.

A bird singing leads her along a rocky path over the mountain toward the setting Sun. It is not that she wishes to orchestrate a symphony but to pursue the making of a melody that unravels within her quantum mind, guided by memories of an ancestral passage ringing louder and louder. Amid forms and lines, kindred spirits murmur in her ear: “Agency coexists with space, sentience with time, consciousness with gravity.”Wary of missteps, the Questioner follows the moonlit trail, sensing time through fingering sounds. By now, her mind has pushed the door of her cell, unchained by the four-dimensional boundaries. ​​​​​​​

Reaping intervals disappear in the silent blanket of Nothingness while lines cut through the chaos mounting above the dimly lit surface in a cadential hierarchy of events. The tuning of the Multiverse as it expands and evolves pluridimensionally occurs with the adjustment of interval sizes so as to fit the scale for use and meet specific sounding and echoing requirements from the rhizomatic Nothingness to the far reach corners of the Multiverse.

We suggest that Nothingness is a time domain. There exists a deep connection between island universes, and ways in which imaginary time and real time are encoded into each other. The search is on for missing links in a symbolistic language across the Multiverse. The communication rests upon a repertoire of markings carved into the canvas of time. Mathematics, starting with algebra and geometry, offers symbolic means. It reveals a creative expression caught by the human gaze of preexisting feelings. While its expressive power opened a passage, a system of forgotten signs built a graphic support and an archive of a vibrational dialogue within the biology of the mind. 

In 1927, Alfred North Whitehead wrote in Symbolism: its Meaning and Effect that there is one great difference between symbolism and direct knowledge. Direct experience is Infallible. What you have experienced, you have experienced. As we tread waters to better challenge ourselves, we become wary of using familiar colors to paint across the line all that we have not yet experienced. Retracing one’s steps through the muddy waters of memory, we look back at the shadowy symbols sprung out of Nothingness. Inside the mind plays out the collective Unconscious while the inner ear hears keys of a whispering silence. It is aware of time passing, and deciphers the profound subtlety in evolving shapes. Dots, circles, and lines of the gaseous medium contract and expand into spiral galaxies and wiggling nebulas. Itinerant lines, coming and going, sustain a geometric awareness.

 Perception is multileveled. Beyond screening the presentational immediacy, it involves sensing Nature's intrinsic meaning as if all grains of sand were catching the same breeze. Poets are commentators of aesthetics. They force surfaces and depths, drawing inspiration from symbolic references. Poets are Nature's heirs. As such, they feel a direct connection through the symbols of the Universe. Symbols, poets argue, write the code behind dissonant notes that rattle the Universe to the point that it may be out of tune. Dissonant notes, they feel, play a role they are born in, clueless of what they are yet to become.

A transfer of feelings takes place by means of communication. When poets habit themselves to the dazzle of light, they see shiny beings playing peek-a-boo in the woods over the hills, flights of fiery birds above the shore, spirits through the double mirror, flashes of cosmic energy, particles’ trajectories extending across islands of the Multiverse and a celestial bridge at the collapse of time. The late James Hartle wrote that there is an ensemble of alternative possible universes, whether they arise at every quantum state or follow their specific evolution, as in the case of the Universe that we experience.

Alfred North Whitehead furher explained that symbolism is very fallible, in the sense that it may induce actions, feelings, emotions, and beliefs about things which are mere notions without that exemplification in the world which the symbolism leads us to presuppose. He added that it is the task of reason to understand and purge the symbols on which humanity depends. Nonetheless, tomorrow’s realism is today’s foretelling tale of future explorers stretching arm and hand to lift the veil, hoping to shed a bright light on the outline of a dim reflection beyond the Earth’s blue dome. Pushing further the four corners of reality, poets chase the manifestation of concealed elements and hidden signals. Their inner ear touches the trail of feelings at the intersection of Nothingness and Being. 

For the transdimensional Consciousness, Nothingness coexists as a fundamental constituent of reality. Dreams evoke an ancient path. They are filled with abstract lines etched deep in the recesses of the Unconscious. They speak of an eagle watching over two raging dragons and tell a mental riddle of the Queen ant in a cave at the center of the Multiverse, guarding watchfully the entrance of a celestial portal. A spiritual ballad composed, like a medley, from musical sounds, painted lines, and carving void recalls the story of stars born out of giant molecular clouds, that passed unto planets and their ecosystems their magnetic energy.

The provocative effect of Nothingness is evidence of the ontology of absence and entails a necessary shift in human consciousness. In the search for the first moments and the origin of our Universe, I noodled on the idea of the red maple being the first tree to wake up in Spring. Still, it is not the source of everything, just a sampling of what is yet to come. No single point of emergence exists out of the rhizomatic Nothingness.

Underneath is a continuous, rhizomatic domain of the imaginary time seemingly prior but actually intertwined in the very manifestation of discrete quanta. The rhizomatic approach brings up the image of a young pianist performing Bussotti’s piece, who bends forward to reach under the lid and plucks the strings before straightening his back up to strike keys on the keyboard. It describes countless streams of a watershed irrigating the above layout of a physical landscape. The topology of a rhizomatic Nothingness hinges on non-locality and continuously draws a map of extensional forms and shapes as entangled points rise. Spooky action at a distance refers to the coexistence in multidimensionality of underground stems connected to each other in such a way as to constitute the rhizome of Nothingness, any point of which is and has to be connected to another. 

The main characteristic of a rhizome is that it is not made of units but of dimensions, or rather of moving directions. Like the sharp spines of a porcupine, lines move in all directions from the Quantum Multiverse. Whether they are pointing horizontally or transversally, orthogonally to each other, or vertically, they thicken into broad strokes and bundle themselves up from microscopic to macroscopic objects, swirling and rotating so that they transmit the motion of time. 

How can we move away from the conundrum of something appearing out of nothing? Compositional redundancy in the poets’ bodies of work is only a stepping stone in the collective learning process. A standstill becomes a platform upon which the eye contemplates the interplay between the mind and time. It serves the purpose of reshuffling thoughts so as to return to the essence of the dialogue, the framing of a resonance. The mind, granted with a kaleidoscopic field of vision, is bound to look into each reflecting surface.

The Art of the line is the skillful dance of the imaginary pen whose calligraphy follows the pace of instantiated bits of time, drawing beable shapes. The Art consists of converting time from a non-linear to an observably linear form that scatters in all directions. It presupposes not the prior probability of antecedents but their coexistence as pluridimensional components of actual subjects.

Chimerical 

             Enigma of the First

                                                  Moments

Primary

              Lines elongate and become

                                                       Alive

Vertical

             Bodies with a horizontal

                                                       Gaze

Graceful

             Lines from which the light spills

                                                         Ink

Poetic

             Abstractions draft and trace the

                                                   Unseen

                                                                           The Art of the Line

James N Bennett, Motivic Trees, Network Analysis, and Bartók’s Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Folk Songs, No. 5, Music Theory Spectrum, Volume 45, Issue 1, Spring 2023, Pages 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/mts/mtac015

Bogue, R. (2014). Scoring the Rhizome: Bussotti’s Musical Diagram. Deleuze Studies, 8(4), 470–490. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45331729

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux

I once stumbled upon The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám through the artist Elihu Vedder who wrote about how we each are a connected piece of an intangible chain, a link among kindred spirits. Whether they are encounters in real time or whose legacy we inherit, they sow in our hearts lingering feelings about a kind of collective thinking that blossoms in time and space. Consequently, we are also convinced that our words, actions, and existence will plant a seed in future minds. 

John Locke wrote that something has existed from eternity, something that has always been there as if it were by the necessity of its own nature (1). Three hundred years later, Max Plank argued that something may be a chameleon force by which all matter originates and exists. Within such a prerequisite relationship of reference (2), whatever exists should have in time and space cause of its existence.

Words, signs, and symbols that we consciously select as a vehicle for expression and their translation into terms of reference depend upon the freedom of the acting being fueled by an inner feeling stitched in the depth of time. Reason would have us believe, however, that as much as we cannot anticipate the future, the accidental character of events does not allow us to conceive all the stages and occurrences the Universe has gone through from its initial conditions, let alone at its quantum state.

No matter how hard a knot it is to untie, the Universe is a beautiful story that each generation stubbornly keeps writing in the course of its exploration. At each fork in the road, its history is endlessly splitting, adding details to the story. It does so, Steven Weinberg pointed out, every time a macroscopic body becomes tied in with a choice of quantum states. Choice breeds a kind of hesitation observed by Georges Lemaître when the early Universe was not hurried into existence between two distinct periods of rapid expansion. Could there have been periods of stasis at other points during its evolution?

The choice of quantum states offers a rationale for the formation of a Multiverse. To the mind’s eye, it is a string of universes brought into being at every knot made on the thread of time through chains of past, present, and future events, and so creating a tightly knitted patchwork. Whatever the mirror faces of the first kaleidoscope-like moment, a thread was sewn through the shadows, on which universes expand. 

A theoretical debate over the structural composition of such a landscape involves questions such as whether fundamental components vary across the Multiverse. Is there an overarching set of laws and means and a relation to each other? Beyond boundaries, emergence occurs at junction sites like the tunneling of black holes. And so we wonder whether there is such a thing as a simple event at the core of it all. 

But the more we dig in, the more we unearth compound events whose shape and form are polydimensional. If not a real physical entity, the Multiverse is a polydimensional structure across which transmogrified particles and transposable forces resonate with echoes sent around and through. The various dimensions contained in such a resonance chamber ring through invisible walls. 

Polydimensionality describes how universes — physical or otherwise — are capable of complex resonance in proximity to each other. If chance is an extensional criterion, what is, then, worth valuing? The eye catches words like component and extension. It remembers the sight of feelings. Inside the polydimensional structure of the Multiverse, integrated components like matter and spacetime transmit motion to one another. 

Without feelings, the Multiverse would have no resonant form. In The Parable of the Apple (3), matter wraps geometry as with the dimple that arises in the apple because the stem is there. Reality appears when spacetime tells matter how to move and matter tells space how to curve, as if they were aware of each other. In reality, matter is an outward appearance, a physical manifestation of spacetime which responds with periodic disturbances.

When we say that no belief is an island, we imply that no probability is an island either. Ideas have context. When we say that universes in the Multiverse are like islands in an ever-inflating ocean (4), we mean that they are seemingly detached and even isolated but intrinsically connected. Each given position in the Multiverse reflects the range of probabilities that a particle is at that position until the probability fades away and is replaced in real time by an observational fact. 

The Multiverse describes a spray of possible axes of association, whose relations to one another are not necessarily in real time. Physicality is not what I have in mind. Concepts of polydimensionality and probability relate to each other in the imaginary time.  Perception is multileveled. There exists an information resonance above and beneath the surface. While it is revealed in real time through symbolic means of geometry and complex numbers, the source lies in imaginary time. 

The process of assigning a fixed interpretation becomes an extension of a theory of probabilities. It is an argument in favor of existentialism whose basic principle of freedom allows to confer a degree of reality. It entails the manifestation in real time of spacetime,  a fixation of a momentary phase (2).  In the exploration of the Universe/Multiverse, science and philosophy together aim at deciphering the conditions of attunement within such a resonance-body (5). 

Information runs through a web of symbolic means dependent upon the appropriation of elements to be components of reality. It is indeed a consequence of human perception that we interpret the Universe in real time.  In the end, what we question is the concept of reality itself. 

(1) George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are founded the mathematical theories of logic and probabilities

(2) Nelson Goodman, Languages of art: an approach to a theory of symbols

(3) Charles Eisner, Kip Thorne, Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation

(4) Thomas Hertog, On the Origin of Time

(5) Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy

Expectations are the mind’s determination of what is possible. As if they were passing comets, fleeting and transient, ideas pierce through the thick coat tagged Not Knowing. Clarity is imprisoned, clouded by layers of emotions. The mind pushes the bars of its prison, unaware of how much it wants to free itself. The discussion circles back around the spatiotemporal frontiers of the Universe, whether the four-dimensional features are all that there is, and how far the boundaries of the ontological realm extend. 

The Universe is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact. Spacetime continuum in which entities are inherently alone in their inner process defines a collection of local matters drawn in spatiotemporal patterns with invisible lines and spiraling wells. Entities, such as those with a repeatedly identifiable nature, enjoy bits of feeling. Feeling, I recall, is the appropriation of elements to be components in the internal constitution of an actual subject. In isolation from all the conditions under which they exist, each local matter cannot be fully comprehended. Knowledge, Meaning, and Existence are intertwined. As boundaries shift deeper into the realm of possibles, they uncover a codified language, a celestial writing about events pertaining to the Dialogue between Consciousness and the Universe.  

All things, including the Universe, convey an incomplete meaning in and by themselves. The holistic nature of meaning entails a necessary connexion of content. Within its boundaries, the Universe is an organism showing peculiar facts based on spatiotemporal location, with its faintest and most distant galaxies bursting with star formation far away from the quiet Milky Way. Beyond its borders, even it may not be solitary but a tessera in a mosaic of universes — a member of a species.

From the surface of a page to the surface of a painting, poets and painters describe what rises from beneath the surface of things. Philosophers identify it as the realm of potentiae. Below the tip of the spacetime iceberg are possibilities waiting to exhale at the stroke of spontaneous symmetry breaking. They are measured by their corresponding probabilities. What it means to exist within the realm of possibles is tantamount to what we call the Multiverse that ultimately predicts the infinity of adjacent possibilities. From our side of the Boundary,we see it as the realm of uncertainty where unactualized possibilities are stranded. 

As for the Universe, the freedom of its acting Being is held hostage by all the things that reside in it. It is a permanent mismatch of ephemeral states — whether they are milliseconds or billions of years. Sequences of elements graft themselves to its stratified layers, allowing stability levels to form irregular steps. Periods of equilibrium punctuate such imbalance, giving a false sense of knowing while hidden gestation occurs in the shadows. The holistic nature of meaning follows a beat hidden in the course of time. 

Those elements whose identification precedes any appropriation have an independent existence of their own. But from what, though, has the Universe appropriated to itself the course of its uncharted destiny as it reveals itself by expressing itself and knows itself through every bit of experience? From what has it inherited its internal logic? There are ways to look at the rules of the game. From our point of view, the Universe is governed by laws that match its content, and through its content, it sets the corresponding laws. 

In the timeline set by the Sun, we caught a glimpse of longer cycles. Changes unfold while structures expand, shrink, and crumble. Open splits let entities, events, and selves seep through. As we look through the anthropic lens at the entire biosphere, no single event or entity is isolated from the Universe. We peek at chance rising unceasingly among the flows and anti-flows, through the magnetic and gravitational fields, between the expansive and cohesive forces. 

The biosphere has built a nest in the midst of the Earth’s magnetic field in constant fluctuation. Does the model upon which evolution proceeds in short bursts of change separated by long periods of stasis apply to the life of galaxies whose periods of rapid formation were interspersed with quiet periods in the far past when fewer stars formed? Do humans, individually or as a species, experience prolonged stasis until they leap forward?

To an idealist, there is a deep connectedness. Nothingness and the Quantum Universe give rise to chance that is all at once Freedom, Essence, and Existence. It is a threshold between many Universes — an interuniversal medium. It is a process aimed at creating multiple outcomes, beyond which the macroscopic features of our Universe do mean something to the underlying quantum setting from which they emerge. 

The quantum Universe assigns probabilities to the definite values of the observables of every system. It brings us to what means probability: something which acts on the outside according to its laws, which are supposed to govern facts that do not follow laws with laws that are not. The peaks of probability density mark the point at which systems structure themselves to rise above the surface.

 What is always in a state of becoming refers to the time notion in which quantum systems evolve — a spatiotemporal non-locality at which all circumstances originate. One thing after another, evolution adds complexity and substance to the ontological realm. Chance from which events arise is the extensional criterion. Within and beyond our Universe’s frontiers, the overarching principle remains: determinism, which underlies the evolution at the structural level, does not negate a profound indeterminism due to the contingency. 

And so, we question whether what lies dormant at the center of it all is ontic or nomological. The Multiverse’s wave function describes the position of every particle in the Multiverse. The observable quantum Universe that defines our frog’s perspective is no more than a tiny section of the Multiverse’s wave function which may well be both a nomological and ontic representation of an effective field generated by the motion of particles. In the field of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe, the wave function acts as a law for particles that are yet to exist for such a law to govern. The collapse of the wave function sets the actualization in the Multiverse. 

While the bird’s eye catches the exchange of mass and energy in our Universe’s inflows and outflows, the frog sees a quantum transactional exchange at the edge of the unseen where initial conditions meet multiple possibilities conducive to their existence, after which possibilities and actual events part ways. The increasing distance in all directions creates the conditions under which sub-systems form in a non-equilibrium state from which time rises again.

The holistic nature of meaning arises from the morphology of time, for multidimensional boundaries are fluid. Along the morphological roads, the idea of multiplicity emerges, overcoming the duality between what is and what is not. The mind, may it be called Consciousness, digs holes at the bottom of a higher dimensional pit in which lives on the extension of ourselves. Existence arises from crossing the Boundary and the path of others, emitting flickering signs of consciousness. 

Entities go one way as if entering through revolving doors but still reflect a behavioral symmetry.  As they cross the threshold into their own time and space — from which they inherit their haecceity — they hold onto the inner presence of mirror selves. To an idealist, the concept of transcendence implies that more degrees of freedom are projected on every side of the Boundary. 

A small, 'quantized' wavelike excitation of the quantum field is a dice thrown on the board of the infinite game. It is the tree of Blackburn’s island as we wonder whether there is even an island on which the tree falls. Once a system structures itself,  chance presides over entities and their identities. The rules of the game in the Multiverse might explain why there is an apparent pairing problem when it comes to explaining why certain pairings happen but not others, why some particles or fields don’t interact with each other as if those non-events were relegated to the shadows. 

The entities of the Multiverse are packed into groups accordingly, falling under categories upon categories of denominations. Whether the crisscrossed lines of existence are outside our line of sight, the dice are thrown unceasingly. Chance and fate, cyclicity and randomnicity take turns. On these shores of the infinite game, recurrences alternate with thresholds to higher dimensional universes. Lines of existence see their ends fading, smothered with a thickening coat of complex multidimensionality, allowing only the nowness to occur actually.

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Jose Diez Faixat, Beyond Darwin: the Hidden rhythm of evolution

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Harold H. Joachim, The nature of truth : an essay

Ruth Kastner, Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles

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Lombardi, O.; Fortin, S.; Pasqualini, M. Possibility and Time in Quantum Mechanics. Entropy 2022, 24, 249. https://doi.org/10.3390/e24020249

Quine, W. V. (1948). On What There Is. The Review of Metaphysics, 2(5), 21–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20123117

Simon Saunders, Space-time and Probability

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. La place de l’homme dans la nature. Le groupe zoologique humain.

Edmond Wright. “The Entity Fallacy in Epistemology.” Philosophy, vol. 67, no. 259, 1992, pp. 33–50. JSTOR