Consciousness and the Universe

The universe, sprinkled with islands of agency, sentience and consciousness would be a lonely place if the only thing that we could say is how it feels related to ourselves.

Consciousness is plural.

Yet, because of its many facets, its lack of perceived cohesiveness makes it truly complex. The question of consciousness within the framework of a theory of everything would require us to define what everything is and its evolving nature. 

‘Everything’ is a daunting word meant to refer to the elephants in the room: Time, space and the universe.

Science has been instrumental in establishing how things work and where reality lies. Because it is consciousness reflecting on itself, its main structural defect is the difficulty in differentiating a true depiction of reality from an illusion.

Viewed from the perspective of the universe, consciousness has long been in the making. Assessing its place in the evolution of everything and that of humankind in the evolution of consciousness are hard problems. 

In French, the expression ‘prendre conscience' — seize or catch consciousness (become aware of) — holds time as implicit. The figure of speech posits the before and the after of what is not yet known, not yet experienced and is to be uncovered in its own time and space.

The process of consciousness follows three basic stages: a contact, an interchange and an internal response, may it be profoundly transformative. As consciousness of being intertwines with consciousness of time, each threshold reaches new levels of assimilation and expansion with that which is outside the realm of consciousness.

In the search for a theory of everything that includes consciousness, fundamental patterns of behavior are the first steps towards building an understanding of a communication system on a larger scale. From the parts of an atom to the universal landscape, we seek to pinpoint where consciousness lies. Does it stand on its own feet or is it intricately linked to the evolution of matter? Entities graft onto each other in a spatiotemporal manner. While they’re not here anymore, spacetime is haunted by their presence. They swing between a state of nothingness and one of motion. In the midst of moving pieces, we search for the first instances of ‘that which feels’.

There are various states of awareness, receptivity and sensitivity within and between groups of individuals. Arguably, if entities had truly been insensitive and devoid of seeds, the structured reality at every level would not have produced anything. Not being conscious of how others — whatever we define as such — feel is not evidence that they lack consciousness. 

On the surface of things, time, at the helm of an evolutionary system, is what connects the entity identified as “the me” , or any other spatiotemporal entity as a matter of fact, to the surrounding environment — the Earth, the stars and the universe. Time relates us to everything and each other. It is hardly tangible, though. We only know that motion invites time and posit here that motion is a form of expression.

Within the boundaries of the universe, a feeling is the e-motion involved with time. I suggest considering the motion of any length that is initiated as a telltale for consciousness within a universe-wide communication system. Defining the basic state in consciousness as ‘that which feels’ does not give us a recipe to rewind history but one to understand the far-reaching aspects of relatedness and interconnectedness. Entities have an experiential sense of time. They've inherited the ability to ‘think’ and communicate with their bodies . That is the universal nature of consciousness.

There exists a limited interface, a point of contact at which a human, a star, a planet and even a black hole interact with something other. A transfer of feeling takes place by means of motion and communication. All entities henceforth enjoy bits of it.

Events in spacetime occur and evolve differently, not directly related to each other in a phenomenological sense. They are discrete, yet the togetherness of being, that is the defining feature of the universe’s past, present and future states, entails a certain degree of analogy in shape, form and pattern so that we feel deeply connected to an infinite series of self-organized structures.

The third part in the act of consciousness — the internal response — may prompt bees to perform a waggle dance . We can't say here that stars have bees’ ability to recognize faces , yet as with other entities, humans share with stars and bees the power to express and communicate if not by uttering sounds but through bodily movements.

Transients bear witness of a pattern of motion and communication by which the outbound matter spatializes time and grounds locally feelings. The radio transient ASKAP J1832-0911 conveys the experiential sense of time of an object whose nature remains unknown as it exhibits since November 2023 a 44-minute periodicity and a 2-minute duration. As in the story of the falling tree in the forest where no human is around to hear it, it accounts for an astrophysical event outside of our direct observation.

With its flares and winds, the sun, too, moves, rotates, orbits, shakes and trembles. It acts as something that feels and it, too, demonstrates in effect its experiential sense of time and intent to express. We might say that its layers of hydrogen and helium are doing the moving, that our variable star like our body is the outward form of an inner ‘biome’ in which molecules at their level of existence own their mode of expression.

While ‘that which feels’ has an independent existence, nested in a web of spatiotemporal resonance chains, it has built-in a relational component. The setting and increase in size and duration of physical associations raise questions about their shared agency, social bonding and sense of unity.

Does an entity described as ‘that which feels’ — may it be an astronomical object — wander in spacetime for the sake of wandering or is it a pawn in a bigger scheme, wired to play its role? Stars, comets and galaxies show agency in their movement. Beyond data collection by radio, optical and space telescopes, their very motion stands as affirmation of their existence and personal history from the time stars spent in nebulae and comets were icy bodies in storage zones.

Stars, like humans, bear the great force of history. Encounters in a distant past may have barely left any ripples, yet their enduring effects can be seen in the stars’velocities. Caught in cosmic flows , they carve a path into the canvas of spacetime as if it were a Dreamtime painting depicting their story.

Most particularly, our solar system moves through the spiral arms of the Milky Way whose density maps the likelihood of impact by asteroids and comets’ debris as well as where and how the first planetesimals came to bear the signature of their parent cores.

‘That which feels’ has not only the intent to express but the will to act on the choices made and so carving its own course of action.

Closer to us, examples of an ‘expression in action’ are in the past a thermophilic anaerobe 4.2 billion years ago, a cell in a complex multicellular organism 900 million light years ago, and a bioluminescent octocoral with the survival skill of producing its own light 540 million years ago.

A motion-induced feeling arises during the appropriation — of elements — through interchange of information — to be components in the real constitution of a subject. Information fuels the subject’s inner workings and runs its course until the contact is no longer maintained. When proximity is lost in time and space, memory is how the contact is kept. It stretches the life of consciousness. As components, feelings carry the memory of bodily phenomena which enjoy, as a result, a considerable extension in time. The intangible past leaves residual traces into the future. 

In memory, consciousness of time is implicit. While the response may not be as profoundly transformative as the kind a human being experiences, elements involved in the appropriation process combine forms of experience into that which becomes historically part-to-whole.

Above the surface, plants and trees are seemingly immovable. Yet, they grow, reproduce and die. The capacity for photosynthesis that the first plants integrated 2.6 billion years ago became a memory in their DNA. Today, I watch sundrops in my native garden opening and closing their pedals. They ‘remember’ the time of day and year, providing evidence of plants’ experiential sense of time. and capacity to use motion as a mode of expression.

Memory suggests the inner ability to encode and access those feelings.Vulnerable to the passage of time and to layers upon layers of elements brought upon, the ‘narrative’ of a past event may be blurred momentarily or some ‘details’ may become unretrievable.

Naturally, a debate ensues over whether signatures of past events are definitely and totally erased, whether the transmission of feelings — determined to be information elements — is cut off and no longer are they part of the real internal constitution of a subject in favor of less erasable ones which accumulate preferentially. Out of the observable universe and beyond the realm of consciousness, the loss associated with past events may be on the surface. The conservation of ontology describes preserving and sharing a memory of a deep resonance, so deep that even a black hole could not have its interior “causally disconnected” from its exterior. It entails first and foremost, beyond shape, form and pattern, the random occurrence across the universe of a conscious state of being that holds motion as means of expression. 

There is a rhizomatic aspect in the manifestation of all things.

When it comes to the universe as a whole, how it finds itself experiencing is through every sense of its ‘body’ — individuals acting and being acted upon. As each individual leaves their mark on the fabric of time, the independent entity that is the universe comes to ‘know’ itself through everything including us. It, too, has a built-in sense of time with all that which is expressed in its expanding self.

“The me” did not create the universe, but the universe from earlier on did create the me. We are a by-product of its inner evolution at the basis of which lies the question of time. 

We naturally presume that if the universe is a sentient medium, its state of consciousness cannot predate the moment at which it became the entity it is. We suggest that it has developed into a single conscious state that subsumes all the other conscious parts, possibly retaining the memory of some if not all of them. Yet, even before it was defined as such, its beginning devoid of accretions from later integrations was a tiny bit of feeling.

As it expands, matter and consciousness co-emerge and coalesce in loops of temporalities, biological and cosmological cyclicities, one ontological stage at a time in a process forever becoming. Those parts, while evolving independently yet concurrently, are presently involved in something that is now distinct from them — the integrated information system of the universe’s 13-billion year-old physical structure.

And so, it is a conscious medium to the extent that its parts — micro-conscious agents whose individual existence feels like something to them — act in a unified and indivisible manner. We cannot presume what it feels like to be the universe given the sum of the widely different experiences it has accumulated over time. We postulate however that, as it collects a wealth of facts and a depth of vision, it has acquired its own capacity to feel, experience, and perceive. Differences in form and content do not negate such a possibility.

Because it is we reflecting on ourselves, the difficulty we face lies in trying to depict a much larger picture than the one we observe from our vantage point. While consciousness, at its core, revolves around the conscious state of being and not being, yet, within the boundaries of the universe, it involves the consciousness of time direction.

Let’s say that the pattern of the seasons, the cycles of day and night, and the flow of time — all boil down to a quantum series of events: the inflow of photons into atoms. With motion and communication as the guiding principle of the way all things work, particles of light are a commonality.

Through adjacent experiences, a population of photons at a quantum state form a light cone extending from past to future. Yet, photons may be spending a physically meaningful quantity of negative time as atomic excitations. They may otherwise be described as in a state that can or cannot excite the atom. It prompts the question of whether time is absent from the quantum realm or whether it flows in two directions, forward and backward.

We can say that, as with the collection of assembling particles that appears to have self-organized, the memory of time direction accumulates preferentially. In our universe, time is moving forward, away from its historical past. Our personal experience of a sustained forward movement is absent from the quantum realm. The random emergence of events sets the stage for superposed states of being and not being and, by the same token, the consciousness of being and not being.

Here, if we solely recognize a conscious moment by things ‘moving’ and ‘communicating’, consciousness of being supersedes that of time. It may involve any quantum of energy in wave-particle form as they find themselves at multiple quantum states simultaneously. At each point of contact, particles interact and transition, bursting into bits of feeling at the interface of the quantum realm and the universe.

At this juncture, we face an odd physical association — that of nothingness and the quantum realm, unable to separate one from the other. Let’s enter the realm of nothingness and realize that the mind can only acknowledge that which is if it understands its necessity to be. If zero + one equals one, then what is zero? For the transdimensional consciousness, nothingness coexists as a fundamental constituent of reality.

Let’s say that the universe is fed from moment to moment by an agency external to itself and consider what it may be and how it feels to be conscious of it. Whenever a superposition forms from undetermined elements, such a superposed entity that lies at the interface is conscious of those elements of external origin as they become its very own components. Bodily awareness enables it to feel beyond the sound screen that cancels out the background noise of an even wider communication system — may that include a dark sector or a multiverse.

Time may be originating from a rhizomatic nothingness made of multilayers or rather moving directions. It isn’t the picture perfect of an absolute nothingness but that of intertwined roots in the shadows without any single point of emergence. Whether it is a hidden dark sector or a multiverse beyond the sound screen, for the human mind to acknowledge it, it needs to understand its necessity to be and its connection with the realm of human consciousness.

The fabric of spacetime has cast upon us a sense of isolation. Humans are faced with the fragility of life and the impossible truth that there is no other place where they fit in but here on Earth. To them, it would be inconceivable to find conscious lifeforms elsewhere in the universe that are not modeled after themselves. Their perceived uniqueness leads them at times down the path of arrogance, domination and conquest.

While it is generally accepted that consciousness is confined to large brains and a few living species, the statement is based on the very definition we choose to assign to what it means to be conscious. Yet, the full scope of consciousness may be revealed only once the scale falls off from our human eye.

After all, humans are said to be made of “star stuff” . It leaves the door open to something of an indeterminate kind and invites the possibility that we inherited something other from stars than just their matter. So why then are we subject to cosmic dissociation ? 

This has roots in our own duality by which we stand in between the observable matter and the non-corporeal part of our being. Caught in the canvas of time, we struggle to see through the apparent disunity. To be fully conscious implies not only for the universe in its past, present and future states to exist but for the six agents of human consciousness to open their gates wide.

The human capacity to feel, experience, and perceive relies on six agents of consciousness — eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind. It may be that each acts as a free agent, the way Godfrey-Smith wrote about octopuses whose arms are partly self. They are in charge of establishing contact — first in line to engage and respond.

A human contact entails the crossing of an in-between, and the internal response involves the process of metacognition that is humans’ ability to reflect on their own thinking. Reality sets in, based on the physical and mental entanglement we find ourselves in, as with the differences in our individual experience of color have shown. Humans are a bundle of organic matter molded by sensations, constrained by perceptions, and guided by volition.

The body does not simply hint at the sense of touch. It extends to its electromagnetic field. It is the host of two principal organs, brain and heart. They appear most especially engaged in a dialogue about how they both feel inwardly and outwardly. While the beating heart measures time as if to tell the body its days are numbered, it appears to connect more intimately with its environment. The human brain, on the other hand, takes in stride cultural and social changes, sets goals and acts on them.

Among the six agents, the mind, in its initial stage, is in a state of feeling. Could intuition be characterized as a mental feeling? You may ask. There is, Lois Isenman writes, a subliminal physical sense of the experience of intuition as a rapid closing and opening somewhere in the chest. Intuition hints back at the aforementioned dialogue between the heart and the brain. Be that as it may, the state of feeling through each agent may stand independently from the intellect’s support. As the mind harbors thoughts, it digs a network of mental roadways over which the inner voice — that we recognize as such —struggles to prevail. As it asserts its power over its competing agents, the mind has moved away from a close relation with nature and the cosmos to human-centered needs and transactional interests.

At this very moment in time, if I say a simple sentence, like “the garden is waking up on this early spring morning”, there’s a lot to unpack that we choose to ignore and take for granted. The plants and trees of the native garden — oak, elm, columbines, redbuds, bluebells, mayapples,… — and the animals that have established home within this limited space — robins, sparrows, crows, finches, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, bees, frogs… — all follow an early routine under one sun — a star in the Milky Way — rising on the horizon while the moon is still high, with white-throated sparrows making sympathetic sounds until the time comes for them to depart north.

The word ‘follow’ is loosely used and hints at whether each actor of the garden is at different degrees aware of their own actions. In reality, the here and now brushes off all the events superposed that our consciousness has unknowingly registered. The mind, like a camera, captures a series of single shots to create scenes. What does consciousness do, then? While the mind only manages one scene at a time, the purpose of consciousness is to see beyond a sectional reality.

Considering an attribute as an inseparable property of the state of being, we might say that humans, as living organisms, have four attributes: they are born; they live; they grow old and they die . To be born is to arrive at a state of being. To live points to physical existence. To grow old is experiencing the impermanence and flow of things and to die is putting in the past one’s own existence.

Humans’ embodied consciousness has no awareness of its beginning (when it was born) and its ending (when it dies). Only being and becoming are physically tangible. That is the root of our subjectivity. While humans might, at some level, grasp the subtlety of not being, it is their deeply rooted existential fear that forbids them from confronting it. Being truly conscious requires being conscious of being and not being which not only deals with both ends of existence but every single disappearing time interval.

Among the four attributes, to live is the central point. It is through the interface of our existence that we relate to everything. Yet the core aspect of time is its flow —what is always in the state of becoming. It implies that the very existence of a person is out of sync with what it means to be truly conscious, that is to be in complete acceptance with the passage of time and embrace life and death like the four seasons of a year.

“Hope says, 'I seem to see light.’

Faith says, 'That is the dawn of day.’

Doubt says, 'I'll wait, it is yet night.’

Death says, 'Tis left for me to say

Which one is right.’”

To be brought face to face with the impossibility of existence leads to the introduction of the soul as a way to comfort ourselves and solve the mystery of the beginning and the end. Yet, since this is objectively out of our conscious reach, we can’t help but question the soul’s existence, whether it precedes the search for a host — the body that moves through space — and whether it is prior to being in the foundation of an actual entity.

Let’s put forward the following as a hypothesis: the soul refers to a quantum-based stream of consciousness at times trapped, at others released unbound by spacetime. It undergoes a timeless and transcending process of awareness. At its basis, human consciousness is shaped as an abstract flow of thoughts, seeds we sow and pass on that, independently, grow. It is mounted into individual links of an infinite chain in the making of a great ideal that may, at times, wander homeless till it finds a new community to mold. We attach to consciousness a spiritual quality as we believe in the enduring footprints of those who have preceded us. Following in the footsteps of Plato, Kepler, and Jung among others, we believe in the spiritual origin of humankind and postulate that the conscious medium that is the universe is a living soul.

Words are expressions of individual thoughts. They diverge more or less from their original  intent. Let’s say that there are four inseparable properties of the state of being that could be extended from the quantum realm to the whole universe. What would they be? I have built upon the Buddhist concept, made a few modifications and determine the following four attributes: being, entity, soul and self. 

Being underlines the quintessential notion of existence.

The general term entity applies more broadly to any distinct or specific individual.

Spirit at times, soul at others… Here the soul refers to a spiritual dimension.

Self in its original sense is the projection that we, humans, identify with under the influence of social, family and cultural constraints. I consider it to be a vantage point whether it be from ‘that which feels’ or from ‘the me’. The self cannot escape its subjectivity and may, at times, be narrowly known as the ego as it relates to humans.

Togetherness extends to all entities. It describes the state of living and existing side by side. Consciousness, defined as a manifestation of togetherness, is of variable dimension. As earthbound entities, we belong to an ecosystem from which we are prevented from escaping by Earth’s gravity while Earth, too, holds onto its orbital path around the Sun due to gravitational force. Yet, consciousness’ reach goes beyond the galaxy to the universe as a whole.

History, evolution and the things we create all reveal signs of togetherness of being among humans. History, as the chronicle of time, holds a great force over us. It lives on in our DNA, memory and dreams, prompting impulses and self-realization to emerge in the sphere of consciousness. A deeply transformative response, cognitive in nature, has been in the making for a long time, teaching humans a few tricks along the way. With early Oldowan tools two million years ago, our ancestors showed intent and signs of creativity. By accident or in a state of absent-mindedness, their doodling attempts resulted in stone spheroids, engravings on shells, and wall carvings. Those early efforts to conceptualize preceded rock art and cave paintings that we date back to 70,000 years ago.

Evolution came along with a growing sense of community. A culture breeds and nurtures ideas a group sows, passes on, and so setting the stage for ideas to become more complex. In hindsight, toolmaking and cave painting are markers of a collective expression that has given us a sense of shared connection and unity. 

That which we collectively feel has shaped entire communities so much so that cities and nations embody distinct entities formed out of many citizens, neighborhoods and boroughs. Their sociocultural evolution provides them with an historical context. They perform a sort of territorial assemblage similar to how planets and galaxies form by accretion, and position themselves over the course of history through wars and times of peace.

Among the things we create, space probes keep in their structural design the memory of those who engineered them. Cars may not undergo a profoundly transformative response of the kind we experience but the spirit of their makers lives on in their wires and engine, enabling them to start and run smoothly.

The most fascinating outward manifestation of human consciousness is the Web, a dynamic expression accessible via its body — the Internet — that uses electromagnetic waves to communicate. Taking stock of the infinite flow of data involved, AI systems are designed to harness in a more indivisible and unified manner the staggering stream of information bits.

While sentient beings act on senses, they do so each in their own way. Beyond humans, the fate of senses differs. Light sensor became eye and from those embryonic eyes were born the compound eyes of insects and our camera eyes. While blue whales use a sophisticated array of vocalizations, our ancestors moved away from simple vocalizations to language-based communication skills.

Other sentient beings across the phylogenetic tree have developed powers of perception which exceed our own. In contact with an external stimulus, a bird’s dominant sense is its sight. The dolphin relies first on hearing and echolocation. For us, humans, it is the mind that has taken precedence.

Humankind is a marker in the evolution of consciousness. A human being is a living experience of an embodied consciousness that feeds on its inner and outer worlds and struggles to transcend. A selective memory weighs on its upward ascent.

For human consciousness to grow outward and evolve, the inner chatter ideally must reach its highest level and the six agents must strive to perform at their best. Where evolution selects, nurturing senses to the fullest, in particular bodily awareness, may raise levels of consciousness.

From that which is felt outwards to that which feels inwards, feelings are communicated through neural oscillations in humans and across species. While our vibratory-based capabilities of perception, memory, reasoning and insight might benefit one day from being artificially augmented, beyond scientific advances what the evolution of senses aims to achieve is seeing what is not there, feeling what can’t be touched or observed. It requires rewiring our brains to think more perfectly.

There is a transition, Richard Maurice Bucke wrote, that is when one feels that the universe is “a living presence”. It may involve gradual efforts to “take on enormously greater capacity both for learning and initiating” unless it is attained in remarkable instances of sudden awakening.

“Originally, there is no tree of awakening

And the shiny mirror has no support

Since Buddha’s nature is always pure and immaculate

To what, then, does dust stick?”

Such a transition can only be achieved when one is increasingly able to feel that which is felt. While we strive to increase our knowledge, elevating consciousness through intellectual understanding might not suffice . It may require opening wide the six gates, accessing a system of forgotten signs and retrieving an archive of vibrational frequencies within the human biology. We question whether the process, individually or collectively, goes through periods of stasis before leaping to higher states. Expanding consciousness invites us to explore non-conscious mechanisms.

Dreams are superposed layers of storylines telling us of a shared connection buried in the depth of the unconscious. They bring back flashes of memory. Abstract representations and symbolic images take the dreamer on a journey in which information moves from past to future and future to past as some of us have personally experienced. Dreams may be the most readily accessible platforms to explore the beginning and the end.

The interior dimensions of consciousness are outside of spacetime. Fragments of memory and dreams act as strings attached beyond the spatiotemporal distances, waiting to resurface out of the individual or collective memory. They are inaccessible parts, black holes that escape us. 

The modern mind appears to have unlearned the path that leads to the dreaming state and shut those signals off in favor of others at the risk of untying the bond with the cosmos. Such a bond still manages to transpire in artists’ works as a source of inspiration. Some have experienced the removal of the divide in their dreams and express in art and writing the togetherness of being. 

Poets, for example, would describe consciousness as being at awe of redbuds’ flowers falling like rain in spring, white-throated sparrows whistling sympathetically, frogs meditating on the side of a pond, and great white egrets standing in muddy waters in solitude.

Literary analogies using shape, form and pattern offer an intuitive blueprint that allows bonding with that which feels. Their use aims at providing a universal vision.

Each step forward initiates a pause before the start of another round of reflection. I let my thoughts stretch beyond my own consciousness to think of others’ consciousness. Plural forms of consciousness unfold across space and time. Where would we look for them? In stars, galaxies, filaments, the universe and beyond.

By a paradox, nothingness is at the very heart of transcendence. Consciousness entails being conscious of being and not being. It is the recognition of layers upon layers above and below the surface with time going in all directions from a rhizomatic Nothingness. It is being conscious of the presence of all that which is absent across spacetime.

Johannes Kepler’s bond of sympathy is, in theory, what can teach us the interconnectedness of everything  existing in the past, present and future. Sympathy, the experiential way in togetherness, is a level up from feeling, the experiential way of individuals. Through such a bond, we are reminded of the duty we have to ensure the well-being of others and the protection of their and our natural environment.

Notes

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“They are two objects for the absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it is through that consciousness that they are linked together. This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of the I, is no longer in any way a subject, nor is it a collection of representations; it is quite simply a precondition and an absolute source of existence.” Sartre, Jean-Paul, La transcendence del’ego, in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier, 1962)

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See Scientific American, spring/summer 2025, p.18, The Quantum Observer by Anil Ananthaswamy

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“To appreciate how unusual quantum measurement is, imagine someone speaking to a crowd of people. Sound waves spread out across the crowd, and everyone hears the speech. In the quantum world, however, the sound wave would spread out just as expected, but as soon as a single person in the crowd perceived (or measured) it, the entire sound wave would concentrate itself in that person’s ear, and no one else would hear it.” Van Wezel J., Mertens L., Henke J. Quantum Physics Isn’t as Weird as You Think. It’s Weirder, Scientific American, October 12, 2023.

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Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience. Entropy 2024, 26, 460. https://doi.org/10.3390/e26060460. The authors proposed that a conscious moment may occur “whenever a superposition forms, not when it collapses.” They further suggested that “a quantum system may be composed of many experiencing minds, albeit often very simple ones.”

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“The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills” Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press.

Guevara, R., Mateos, D. M., & Pérez Velázquez, J. L. (2020). Consciousness as an Emergent Phenomenon: A Tale of Different Levels of Description. Entropy, 22(9), 921. https://doi.org/10.3390/e22090921

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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| December 2016 | Vol. 7 | Issue 11 | pp. 900-909 Kastrup, B. The Idealist View of Consciousness After Death.

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“The formal body is a citadel whose gates are the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body. Outside there are five gates. Inside is the

gate of the mind.” Section 35, p.64-65 “And the six gates? They are the eyes 眼, ears 耳, nose 鼻, tongue 舌, body 身 and mind 意”. Platform Sutra by Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Buddhism Zen. Dunhuang manuscript Stein 5475. Toulsaly, C. (1992). Sûtra de la plate-forme, section 45, p.79, You-Feng, Paris. Bouddhisme, resonanceouvanite.com

Godfrey-Smith, P. (2017). Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. United Kingdom: William Collins.

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Chirimuuta, Mazviita. The reality of color is perception. Nautilus, issue 56

Chirimuuta, M. (2017), Perceptual Pragmatism and the Naturalized Ontology of Color. Top Cogn Sci, 9: 151-171. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12222

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Jaekl, P. The inner voice, Aeon, September 13, 2018

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“Everett’s fundamental point is this: we are part of the reality we seek to observe, yet no part can fully apprehend the whole, and thus our view is limited. Multiple timelines arise in the hidden recesses imposed by our very embedment within the universe.” See Scientific American, spring/summer 2025, p.6, Alternate Timelines Can’t Help You, Quantum Physicists Say by George Musser

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“There are those who imagine that they have achieved enlightenment and succeeded at practicing buddhism, but it only give rise to the attribute of the ego; this is what is called the false conception of the self. To completely eradicate this false conception is what means crossing over.” See Huineng’s Commentary on the Diamond Sutra, Bouddhisme, resonanceouvanite.com. The Commentary by the Sixth Patriarch of the Buddhism Zen, nicknamed the Great Mirror 大鑑, is from Xuzangjing 续藏经 (vol.38, T.4, p.330-346). It is also found in Xintangshu 新唐书 juan 59 under the name of 金刚般若经口诀正义.

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Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| December 2016 | Vol. 7 | Issue 11 | pp. 951-968 Pereira, C. & Shashi Kiran Reddy, J., Near-Death Cases Desegregating Non-Locality/Disembodiment via Quantum Mediated Consciousness: An Extended Version of the Cell-Soul Pathway

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Jung, C. G. (2002). The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life. United States: North Atlantic Books.

Chinese commentaries of the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (See Bouddhisme, resonanceouvanite.com). Notably self, being, living soul and person based on the translation of the Sanskrit text Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Diamond Sutra) by Edward Conze, Buddhist Wisdom Books. (1980) United Kingdom: Allen & Unwin

Mercader, J., Akuku, P., Boivin, N. et al. Earliest Olduvai hominins exploited unstable environments ~ 2 million years ago. Nat Commun 12, 3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20176-2

Muller Antoine, Barsky Deborah, Sala-Ramos Robert, Sharon Gonen, Titton Stefania, Vergès Josep-Maria and Grosman Leore 2023. The limestone spheroids of ‘Ubeidiya: intentional imposition of symmetric geometry by early hominins?R. Soc. Open Sci.10230671

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Marquet J-C, Freiesleben TH, Thomsen KJ, Murray AS, Calligaro M, Macaire J-J, et al. (2023) The earliest unambiguous Neanderthal engravings on cave walls: La Roche-Cotard, Loire Valley, France. PLoS ONE 18(6): e0286568. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286568

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Jung, C.G.. Les racines de la conscience & Métamorphoses de l'âme et ses symboles

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See Andre Breton and the Surrealist movement

Long ago, the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi dreamt that he was a fluttering butterfly. When he woke up, he felt suddenly lost. He no longer knew if he had dreamt that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreamt that it was he. Tchouang-tseu œuvre complète (1969). Translated in French by Liou Kia-hway. Connaissance de l’orient. Gallimard/Unesco

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This is the true meaning of prophecy. It's …to feel something that someone will listen to in 100 years” Howl (2010)

Wilson, E. O. (1998). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. United Kingdom: Knopf.

While the dense, compact inner regions of today’s most massive ellipticals have already formed around 600 million years after the Big Bang, given that the Universe looks roughly the same in any direction, if we stood on the other side of the Universe looking back at the Milky Way and its smaller satellite galaxies within the Local Group alongside Andromeda, would we question the age and whereabouts of our very own existence? 

If whatever moves is something that feels, motion is its way of communicating. William James’ distinction between transitive and substantive parts — flight and rest — echoes this perspective. Points of gathering and overdensities serve as resting places along the cosmic horizon, where consciousness fades into fragments, flickering from afar. Quenched red galaxies and brighter objects draw waves in the sand with resting castles of early galaxies flying, so to speak, towards the witnessing Earth.

The Universe, in its present form, is a continuity of the past. Moments of agency are branching off the arrow of time, each crossing the Boundary. Those ontologically indeterminate splittings undergo countless physical stages, each acting on the other and so having a time-forwarding effect with freedom hereby displayed. As evolving states take their course, complexity grows inwards and outwards, increasing the probability of transitions into ever more diversely organized states with unforeseen outcomes.

Whether the Universe, a galaxy, or a society is considered to be an animate being, the general struggle is for entropy which becomes available through energy transition. Memory and agency together convert such energy into information. While the cosmic dawn marks the union of time and space, giving rise to two intertwined entities with independent meaning, measurements of their union are electromagnetic in nature.

If information is inherently physical, then light in itself is the message. Photons in the Quantum soup are better known as light among poets who marvel at the sun. While communication builds upon entropy, energy, and information, the motion of photons conveys something fundamental about the theory of everything, that their quantum nature allows them to be captured by stars, planets, black holes, and the human mind. 

 For all we know, the Questioner and the juggler are transcendently something else — a star moving in orbit around a black hole. Once upon a time, two stars were keeping each other company. The acrobat, catapulted into a higher dimension, reveals only its shadow on a flat surface while the Questioner is on a gradual inward spiral. Suffice it to say, they have no clue where their story is going, only that the acrobat’s head has caught up with its other parts. 

The parts had detached from each other and drifted away to prove it wrong. As they reunite with the acrobat’s head, they say in unison, “No, little acrobat, the three red dots squatting your head are crowding your memory. Motion as a tool of expression is not exclusively limited to the palm of your hand.” “Noted.” the little acrobat replies as it pushes upward in the dark. It proceeds to get a better handle on the distant landscape — the physical moment in the history of the Universe when early galaxies began to form and evolve.  

 In the dust-enshrouded scene of the cosmic dawn, the first hydrogen-ionizing photons ignited the early stages of cosmic reionization. Pristine, primordial gas clouds fragmented and collapsed, allowing particles, atoms, and molecules to evolve into stars — supermassive ones — and galaxies. The first galaxies began to form around 100 million years after the Big Bang as small dark matter haloes merged to become larger ones. 

Stretching cosmic time and expanding distances shape reality itself. Uncertainties come from differences in the perception of light and the inferred physical processes involving objects that had been unaccounted for. The little acrobat uncovers a map to open fields. It feels unsettled not only by the back-and-forth with its own parts but also by the realization that there are red dots too in the early Universe, acting like ancestors just like the ones occupying its head. 

Launched in late 2021, the Webb Telescope is designed to observe primarily in the infrared spectrum. As a result, most of the distant objects it has revealed so far are due to this redder coverage. A greater number than expected of very first galaxies, with young age stars outshining older ones, have popped up in the background. Objects, peculiarly brighter, are the most highly star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. 

Young and active formations coexist with primeval, massive red galaxies that appear to have gone into quiescence. While the glow of older stars in young clumps of a galaxy is dominated by the light from most recent bursts and clusters, the darker space between clumps is itself dominated by the dim light of ancient stellar populations. Time is local. Two of them, particularly luminous, GLASS-z12 and GLASS-z10, have built a billion solar mass only 300 to 400 Million years after the Big Bang.

A recent study focuses on eight of those red dots defined by their overly massive black holes, or, alternatively but not equivalently, under-massive galaxies making them look like off-centered blobs. They share features, like extremely high velocities and high densities, with the central regions typically associated with supermassive black holes, except for their nuclear structure and dust properties. Their spectral energy distribution exhibits a distinctive V-shape.

The little acrobat flees, chasing a glimpse of happiness on the cosmic horizon where Earendel nests. Drifting through space, on its circuitous course, freedom prevails. The light of Earendel in the Sunrise Arc left its source about 12.9 billion years ago and spent the intervening time crossing the Universe. A possible individual star system, it was first spotted by Hubble and then by the Webb Telescope.

Somehow the cosmic horizon is sprinkled with seeds of black holes. Primordial massive black holes could be remnants of the very first and exceptionally massive and metal-free stars. So inflated from collisions and accretion, those stars have produced black hole seeds that have become supermassive black holes such as the most distant quasar J0100+2802 which hosts a ten billion solar mass black hole less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. 

Like the chicken and egg, swirling gas and accreting black holes are not entirely separable events. Over time they follow a coordinated evolutionary path. The mass of a central massive black hole correlates with the luminosity, mass, and velocity dispersion of the galactic stellar bulge. One of those early galaxies, nicknamed Maisie’s Galaxy, existed less than 400 million years after the Big Bang. Another, GN-z11, 420 million years after the Big Bang, hosts a young stellar population, suggesting a rapid build-up of stellar mass. The nitrogen-enriched nucleus amid its particularly massive halo of pristine gas, contains an accreting black hole. A third is a merging system Gz9p3, 510 million years after the Big Bang. 

Most things seem to come in pairs or multiples on their way to be something more, or less, in a chaotic fusion. From the previous post, it becomes clear that there are two sides to every dance of give and take as with mass transfer within close binaries. Given that the majority of massive stars form in binaries or higher order multiples and that one out of every thousand stars ends their lives as a black hole, a large fraction of black holes end up with a companion like in the case of Gaia BH1. 

Within a tightly packed gathering of hundreds of thousands to millions of stars, hierarchical growth of black holes occurs through the formation of binaries, even triple systems, such as the recently observed binary black hole merger GW190521. Simulations demonstrate that if the binary inspiral time is longer than the time until the next galaxy merger occurs, a third massive black hole can enter the system. These triple systems disproportionately occur when the first binary is stalled. Black holes spiral inward and lose energy through gravitational waves, causing them to eventually merge.

The little acrobat consists of a geometry of nine temporal dimensions. Its parts have a mind of their own. While on a flat surface, it appears spatially, yet its body stretches temporally. From necklace beads to Star Queen it once was, it doesn’t have, still, a good bead on things. It is the same dancer who pirouettes around an axis of loops. Its parts balance on top of each other of their own free will. Yet, it sees nothing wrong with tunneling on its natural path — the time domain of Nothingness. It wishes to explore whether Nothingness fits with what is otherwise described as a pre-quantum pre-spacetime theory. And so, it rambles, dragging along its parts, and hones in on its next whereabouts.

There is a lot of throwback in the story below as it appears to be the only way to carve a path forward. A theory of everything is a human theory. The mind wrestles with uncharted territories. It clings to its own interpretation while new ideas are crafted, waiting to be vetted through validation processes. Yet, time messes it up, leaving the mind out of sync for it can never catch up. If humans are offsprings of stars, could their philosophical system hold the universal key? From the reflection to the reflecting, from the reflecting to the reflection, there is a positioning of a being whose being is already unveiled. 

As she collects the ontological pieces of entropy, the Questioner dwells on Sartre’s words. Breaking the boundaries, she wonders whether transcendence is a piece of the puzzle, for transcendence, too, is irreversible. There is an expectation in transcendence of reaching a certain value, heedless of the choices made to get there only of the freedom to make them. Reflection is recognition rather than knowledge. It makes the unveiling exist for itself in the form of an elsewhere in relation to itself. It implies a pre-reflexive understanding of what it wants to recover. 

Probabilities measure the likelihood that the Universe splitting into subsystems in which sources of entropy production crop up and grow, undergoes a single experience,  a unitary transcendence. Should the expectation be for the Universe to know its target value? Probabilities tell how certain the intended value and meaning is reached over time. Like a whole outcome space in which all possible occurrences take place as randomly as they do, the Universe emerges from infinite probabilities. 

The being unveiled, however, does not reveal itself as a given. Being apprehends itself as being, Sartre wrote, insofar as it is not, in the presence of the particular totality of which it lacks and which it is in the form of not being it and which is what it is. Probabilities underscore a state of latency while preventing such a state from being. Transcendence needs that which it lacks and that which it is not to coincide with being. 

Following Flaubert’s footsteps, the Questioner, a DIY enthusiast, aims a paradox: writing on an invisible subject within a philosophy of presence that basically says something is there to witness it. Given that nothingness is the negative form of something in the absence of that something, one can only be aware of its absence in the presence of what is, has passed, will be, and is always becoming. 

Transcendence digs deeper into the being until it meets Nothingness, the rhizomatic time domain. While the mind experiences the emergence of one reality out of many, it experiences in its dreamlike state intertwined layers of events and thought processes, entangled as in a quantum superposition, until they streamline and pop up into a single conscious moment. In other words, there is indeed a quantum Observer in the simmering soup of the mind before the clarity of the collapse sets in. 

The mind, in its dreaming state, escapes, by a paradox, into true free will. As it wakes up, it realizes it just caught a glimpse of all the choices beyond its control and the freedom they all share. It begs the question of the mirroring reality beneath consciousness and its symbiotic relation with the Universe. The mind holds within its own transcendence.

While the Questioner’s hypothesis that there is no consciousness without gravity derives from the necessary existence of a gravity-induced Universe, if gravity interacts with all matter, including things without mass, what is absent from quantum entanglement and before the collapse that would deny the existence of consciousness? The Questioner struggled in the past to situate, first, consciousness in the evolution of everything and, second, humankind in the evolution of consciousness. 

The same conundrum came back with revenge. Through proximity or at distance, when does consciousness kick in? Are superposed states an agency of feelings? A recent paper suggests that a conscious moment occurs whenever a superposition forms, not when it collapses. It states that a quantum system may be composed of many experiencing minds, albeit often very simple ones. Those bits of feeling, however, are simply moments of agency. 

By now, agency, sentience, and consciousness have crisscrossed paths, making consciousness a rare incidence for it is sparse across time and space. Transcendence is a key element of consciousness. For it to occur, everyone and everything need to apply themselves to its pursuit, then, and only then, would all transcend. Its fundamental characteristic is to transcend the ontic towards the ontological, Sartre wrote, and to surpass itself towards the particular being that it would be if it were what it is. 

Transcendence must be able to manifest itself through infinite dimensions. In those solitary moments, the dreamer processes and integrates totality, without the slightest distance, which the awake mind lacks. For true consciousness to be achieved, it should exist at a zero distance from self, as a presence to self that its being carries within. Thought processes occur within such a philosophy of presence. 

Knowledge flows in fractals within its reach. It grows and branches out into alternate theories and models, grappling with key issues of dark matter, gravity, antimatter, and time itself, notably the Modified Newtonian Dynamics, the Dirac-Milne Model, and the Timescape cosmology aimed to explain cosmological observations as a result of backreaction and replace dark energy with mechanisms linked to gravitational energy. 

A recent paper suggests that dark matter and modified gravity could be dispensed with, provided that the existence of topological defects — thin shells of gravitational fields — can be affirmed or denied. Caught in the fast-growing Local Void or subject to pockets of overdensities, attractors and repellers dominate individual streams of time, each with their own sense of being.

Processes reverse while living beings separated by eons of time and cosmic distances may feel time differently. Are those bits of time only perspectival or do they weigh on the overall passing of time and affect the expansion rate of the Universe?

While there is no interaction between photons and the Higgs field nor with neutrinos, could a conscious moment be beyond the realm of light? Within a philosophy of presence, photons are fireflies of higher dimensions, gatekeeping the mind’s quest. Is time moving forward or photons doing the motion? Let’s say that there is a population of photons at a quantum state. Entangled, they don't necessarily share information. The population decreases, and spreads to the next quantum state. Through adjacent experiences, they form a light cone extending from past to future. Their timeless inner beings interact with other particles, transition and collapse. 

Is the emergence of time dependent upon the inflow of photons into atoms or consciousness going forward and falling back? Given that photons are time-forwarding, what does it mean if they spend a physically meaningful quantity of negative time as atomic excitations? In a superposition state, photons may be separated from their antiparticles by a zero distance. Does the delay observed, like thunder and lightning, provide evidence for their existence?

Trapped in an atom cloud, photons may oscillate backwards and forwards in time. Appearing simultaneously rather than being mutually exclusive, they would perform a balancing act, ontologically speaking, between being and not being. Such an act describes a rhizomatic time domain that allows for a sequence of events to dip below the surface. Could dark photons, carriers in the dark sector, be reflectors of negative time? From reflection to reflecting, from reflecting to reflection, there is a positioning of a wave particle whose being is already unveiled. 

An impalpable split has crept into the being between for itself and in itself, between clear intent — openly pursued choice — and what is inherent, a being that it would be if it were what it is. There is transcendence in immanence. The present dialogue underscores the divide. The Questioner yearns to understand and digs for herself every rabbit hole on her path. She doves wholeheartedly into hitting her target while the little acrobat escapes, flees almost to the point of vanishing.

The for-itself takes the form of a presence, Sartre wrote. It is the in-itself losing itself as in-itself to establish itself as consciousness. By a paradox, nothingness is at the very heart of transcendence and conditions it. The little acrobat, losing track of itself, is the Questioner’s own nothingness. Its parts have drifted away.  Each one was another ball in its juggling act. Its disembodied soul watches them flow, dropping away. Yet, what catches its soul and still would not let go is its head making waves into Nothingness. It puts it right back on its nonexistent shoulders for the creative process to continue. “What has left of the time I passed bodiless?” it mumbles. 

“What has left of that time,” the Questioner answers, “ is my reflection on the Universe, the theory of everything and Consciousness.” From the reflection to the reflecting, from the reflecting to the reflection, a hidden code of figures and symbols allows thinkers — past, present and future — to carry the torch of enlightenment. Words are used and reused in an open dialogue that abides by the principle of difference and repetition. 

While the dialogue goes in loops on its linear quest, it falls like snow, freezes like time, and rests like noise. It is an occasional chirping, a cracking sound of the snow dropping a new coat on the ground. The Questioner yearns to find common ground and mulls it over but proceeds instead to nurse the injury to her juggling soul. While the distance at which the little acrobat stands from her is zero, it has kept its elusive dimension. 

No matter how deep nothingness haunts her own being, it can never quite coincide with herself.  Drawn to Nothingness, the little acrobat follows its bliss. Since it let its balloon go, it finds a renewed interest in the differential growth of the Universe and hopes to investigate further. Feeling restless, it hasn’t got the time to explore the unseen nested inner binary as if such dynamics could shed light on its own relation with the Questioner.

Ideas come as fast as they leave to the point that she can’t catch them fast enough. Moseying away from the chatter in her head, the Questioner drops the one piece that has fallen in place. She pauses for now so she can join for a little while the dead poets, on the other side, who ask, baffled: “These days, how do humans sleep?”

Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique

            L’Etre et le Neant

While it genuinely wants to lend a helping hand, the little acrobat is deeply fearful of losing its way amidst the landscape of probabilities. It proceeds once more to review the Questioner’s notes on the concepts that have invited themselves into the circle of fundamentals. It ponders over dark matter’s elusive nature, hoping to patch holes in the story of the dark sector. On one hand, a search is underway to seek evidence of dark matter in tiny trails of destruction imprinted within a rock’s crystalline lattice. On the other hand, Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) — whether modified inertia or modified gravity — disputes the necessity of such existence. At the one end of the theoretical spectrum, there is neither dark energy nor dark matter. At the other, an early dark energy may have decayed rapidly after recombination with negligible dynamical effects at late times.

Some dreams tell the incompleteness of an ideal. In them, ideas are drawn in pictorial forms. Carved in sand, their messages are washed away. Time, like a poetic image, can’t hardly separate its transforming action from the detail in the variations. Information slips through. Pieces are missing. At the heart of motion and communication lies a fundamental question: Can something remain its authentic self through the waves of resonance?

An eagle once asked the riddle of existence:”“What is, has passed, will be, and is always in the state of becoming?” On the edge of knowing, the little acrobat vows to answer as it crosses the threshold of the house of everything built brick by brick of evolving possibilities. New perspectives open windows in its exterior walls. It climbs high up in the roof rafters from where time, Nothingness, and the Quantum universe escape into thin air. There, carved into the beams, it finds the code of a hidden order inscribed in the language of absence with concepts dubbed dark energy and dark matter entering the circle of fundamentals.  

In the race to unravel the mystery of time, theories are incomplete. They are partial representations of the riddle’s answer. They are adaptations, borrowing bricks from one version to the next with the ultimate goal of building a more complete house that counts for everything. Perhaps, the race is futile. There is no underlying theory. Like pieces of a puzzle, they fit quite perfectly under specific conditions and agree with each other where the circumstances overlap. 

Statistical fluctuations come into being, enabling translational motion, repetitive patterns, and dynamic interplay of emerging entities. The riddle finds an array of answers in the timely manifestation of the Universe’s variations — its cosmological evolution in terms of cosmic time and material content. The quantification of cosmic time and measurements of material content constitute its algebraic form. As these calculations grow more precise, they change the preconceived idea of its topological outlook.

The accelerated structure formation at early times — that the Webb Telescope has confronted the human mind with—challenges the dark matter paradigm. Astronomers looking for one thing stumble upon another while MOND physicists interpret these anomalies as evidence of their theories. As astronomical observations deepen, they bring into question the basis of the Universe's algebraic expression. The apparent landscape at early times casts doubt on the cosmic time. It may however reveal deceptive, influenced by the presence of massive dark matter halos and nearby supermassive black holes.

Teachings are passed on by figures of the past and present who paint details of a four-dimensional reality with walls pierced by higher dimensions. The pursuit of a unifying theory turns into a quest for these higher dimensions with out-of-the-box concepts. With the expansion of the observable Universe, ideas and concepts sprout continuously. They pile up steadily mounting a landscape of ghost towers emerging off the ground as the knowledge base grows.

In Thoughtland, ‘dimension’ above and below the surface refers to a degree of freedom, a higher state, and perhaps another Universe as if transactional exchanges extend beyond the Boundary allowing dark matter to break down into massless fermions, or photons at the threshold of the visible sector. A single unique mesoscopic dimension was recently introduced as a ‘dark dimension’ in which the smallness of the dark energy leads to the emergence of a tower of weakly interacting light particles — graviton excitations coalescing into five-dimensional black holes.

Our juggler fumbles with new ideas. It follows an unmarked path in its very own swampland in which fields are drawn in geometrical patterns up and down the surface. It wishes to rein the horse, named time, to a stop and wonders whether it is the emergence of time or that of consciousness that necessarily depends on the inflow of photons into atoms. In a swirl of concepts, time is an invariant variational while the Universe is a variational invariant. The invariance of time is due to its dynamical necessity while the Universe lacking a singular beginning is invariably filled with variational details, preceded by and vanishing into a rhizomatic Nothingness. They are one and the same.

The core mechanism driving time carries the illusion that there is a necessary trend towards the betterment of it all. But from its standpoint — how things have passed, are, will be, and how they are always in a state of becoming — they tend to gravitate towards chaos for evolution takes them there. Being near (or in the midst of) chaos describes the stampede at the acrobat’s feet.

Whether or not consciousness is dependent upon the light of photons, it came last. First came agency, then sentience, then consciousness — a by-product of evolution. Had consciousness come first, there would have been a lot more consciously thought-out processes in the Universe aimed at upholding feelings of sympathy — a togetherness of being — once referred to by Kepler. But the order of appearance in the script is set. Kepler, the ghost of the Past, laments, “Where, the heck, have I ever seen the bond of sympathy, the state of feeling together?” 

Sympathy is a level up from Whitehead’s take on ‘feeling.’  Feeling, the experiential way of an ‘individual’, differs from sympathy, the experiential way in togetherness. Feeling might be what triggers and animates those variational details. But Freedom, Existence, and Essence rule over how agency — a sort of territorial assemblage — plays out. Agency is how one variation relates to a community of them. In theory, only, sympathy, Kepler’s ideal, would have been able to uphold cohesion. 

Going through a major transition, the conscious acrobat turns inwards, fully aware of the incredibly small value but rather heavy burden that its balloon of dark energy puts on its body. Bound with ropes, like a ball and chain, it waits for a chance to let it go. In the language of absence, if the ratio of ordinary matter to a nonexisting matter is governed by an invisible balloon, how does it affect the layout of its bubbles? It longs for its free will to prevail. 

Its hitchhikers, meanwhile, hunker down, recalling the reality of their own evolution — death as they individually experienced it. Windows to the past, the three squatters need an ear to bend and confess: “We have been dead for a long time. We are, what humans would call, relics from an era gone million years ago. Consciousness has a price, little acrobat, that you might not be willing to pay. As you question your own raison d’être, you must realize that the problem with existence is that it is plagued with a fundamental fear. Struggles shape the ebb and flow of existence. Even the Universe is just a sphere rubbing against other spheres trying to make a place for itself, trying to exist within the Multiverse.” 

Swamped in a forest of theories, the conscious acrobat would rather not be caught any longer in the labyrinth of particles and their crisscrossing fields. Deep down, it only wants to play, throwing lassos around targets, pulling and releasing them as it pleases. Its own ethereal nature is drawn irresistibly towards Nothingness, the strongest attractor of all for it feels at home in the shadows. With time coming to a stop, it retreats to where there is no light of photons. Its three companions withdraw in silence. 

In the end, its bubbles detach from each other. One by one, they get carried down the cosmic flow. They tumble with filaments, breathe through comets, and return to the circles of dance in the deeper patterns of agency. Could such an outcome have been foreseen? As its rolling head emerges out of slumber, it swears it dreamt of what sort of a thing the Universe is in its simplest form. Breaking the silence, it utters words to describe it. But in a split second, it all vanishes. The image could not be wrung out of its slumber.

The little acrobat scratches its head — it isn’t for the faint of heart.  Running back and forth through the Universe helps build its stamina. On the celestial bridge, it listens to the sounds of the Earth and the swishing stars. From its vantage point, its heart unites with kindred spirits everywhere who gaze at passing comets and flickering northern lights. Whether it is made of early or late dark energy, the little acrobat can't let go of its balloon. 

Feeling antsy, it moves around like a yo-yo, reflecting on what stirs the information to flow through its multidimensional body from the threshold of what has yet to exist. It may be that information travels, in replay patterns, from upper level concepts to lower material parts. Motion refers to a dichotomy that may be seen as a before-after relationship. Motion does the expressing while communication does the channeling of information, for instance locally, with human concepts such as gravity, entropy, energy, beauty, and melody, and through figures, numbers, and equations.

The little acrobat proceeds to go through the notes written over the past six years by the Questioner. It is not getting lost on her that her makeshift diagram of collapsing circles does a much better job of leading the story. It pursues the journey while she is left with picking up the ontological pieces of entropy — that is, in a nutshell, the degree of randomness unmoved by what the choices are only by the freedom to make them. With her evanescent shadow by its side, the little acrobat follows the waterline from north to south, along streams, around lakes, through rivers and canals, into the bay and the ocean as if they were trails of a distant star-forming galaxy. 

From the hills of Poughkeepsie to the shores of Nantucket, she finally gets what it meant by an ‘intimate sense of belonging.’ Whether seagulls squeal, herons squeak and hawks screech, they all dive headfirst into the rippling water, as if burying their heads in the sand, to catch wiggling fish under the sun. The sighting of a non-periodic comet is a time-stamped occurrence beyond past and future knowledge. While it is a unique event, it may last days or weeks, as with Comet Mitchell (C/1847 T1), observed over roughly two months in 1847. A comet that does not come back to the vicinity of the sun mirrors the life of a tree or a person. Time flows. It runs like yarn through power looms, endlessly forming all things, small and big, swift and slow, weaving every individual story.  

Tinkering around all things, the little acrobat hopes to get all its ducks in a row and find words to encapsulate a theory of everything, considering all the alternatives and how it feels like to hold within foreign states of mind. The theory of everything would not just be mere information about information, but information about existence in itself and by itself, prompting the little acrobat to question its own raison d'être. It climbs up and down mountains, peering through telescopes to observe ice-rich planetesimals that span over an undefined period of time. 

The Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA, is responsible for identifying, designating, and maintaining the master files of observations and orbits. As of November 13th, this year alone, the MPC reports the discovery of 2,482 near-objects including the mini-moon  2024 PT5, 17197 minor planets, 54 comets (such as C/2024 S1 ATLAS), and over 30.7 million observations. 

Motion and communication involve the collection and transformation of dust aggregates, the effects of thermal processing. Paired with communication, motion provides a visual and acoustic reading of Oort Cloud comets. The length, shape, and orientation of their dust tails, their position in the sky, and their nucleus composition cannot however offer certainty as for the calculation of their period. 

C/2023 A3 (紫金山–ATLAS) was initially detected by the Near-Earth Object telescope in Xuyi 盱眙, Purple Mountain 紫金山 Observatory (Jiangsu, China). A few weeks later, it was ‘rediscovered’  by the Sutherland facility in the Karoo (South African Astronomical Observatory) as part of the ATLAS project, which includes two Hawaiian telescopes — at Mauna Loa Observatory and on Haleakala (alongside PAN-STARRS  on the same site) — and the El Sauce Observatory in Chile.

Chess pieces are few,  and the positions in which they may be placed,  numerous as they are,  have a limit. These are the rules that apply to their movement. In the infinite game, however, cosmic circumstances such as the path of a planetesimal weave a never-ending story that tells, only a little at best, of individual movement and whereabouts. A throw of dice will never abolish chance.

Planetesimals unbound to a star are unsung heroes. Cast out from star-forming regions, they develop a ‘mind’ of their own, a unique ‘individuality’.Their evolution through time and space, shaped by an array of cosmic circumstances, raises the fundamental question of how, by a ghost of a chance, some accretion processes prevail from dust particles to planetesimals to planets and the life that inhabits them, and so weaving invisible threads of memory. They contribute unknowingly to the big picture through the dissemination of their material into cores of objects far beyond the interstellar  — and even intergalactic — medium. As with most things, retracing their steps isn’t easy. While the chance of a planetesimal originating from another galaxy is slim, it may have been carried forward through previous galactic mergers. 

Like the Turritopsis jellyfish, planetesimals would span forever if not for a chance encounter along their paths, caused by the gravitational tug and pull of other objects. And when shattered, their pieces, like the vertical and horizontal movement of genes, may swing back. The thing about chance, though, is that it brings out freedom in the mix of limitations and limitation in the abundance of freedom. As chance manifests itself, limitation is inferred in existence.

Hyperbolic comets, with their water-ice sublimation and recombination of radicals at great heliocentric distances, hint at processes leading perhaps to their fragmentation and disintegration that would forbid them to ever achieve an immortal existence. A gravitational slingshot mechanism expels objects and debris into interstellar space. Comets and asteroids drift through the interstellar medium where free-floating planets, occasionally, wander. Confined in distant reservoirs, they could remain on relatively stable orbits for timescales of billion years. 

On their inbound path, planetesimals reenter star systems like a boomerang, a ball on a pool table, or a shuffleboard disk. Communication sometimes implies the redundancy of a message about returning objects whose properties become more refined. In and out of human view, they appear and reappear as reimagined pieces of a puzzle. Whether they begin as centaurs or arise from the Oort Cloud, comets are more likely remnants of our own planetary formation rather than interstellar objects from a nearby star system, as Oumuamua is claimed to be. Was it a dark comet exhibiting non-gravitational accelerations inconsistent with radiative effects?  Could its flattened shape be the result of gravitational collapse and gradual erosion by stellar winds? 

If motion is a way of communicating, the movement of the solar system within the spiral arms of the Milky Way is not only linked to where and how it was impacted by asteroids and comets’ debris but also to how and where the first planetesimals came to bear the signature of their parent cores. The layers of the Earth’s crust, the configuration of its natural features, and its mineral content might hold clues of past encounters. Some rocky bodies may have kept and passed on the remanence of a magnetic field dating back to the pre-accretionary nebula field, thus broadening the concept of spatial-temporal identity.

The dialogue between Consciousness and the Universe continues in a roundabout way. Seeking answers from the Earth, the little acrobat puts in good use its newly-found attributes and mumbles with its LUCA mouth, “Along the trails, my eyes — LBCA and LACA — have watched ducks bathing in the river, cows, horses and alpacas in the fields, a seagull resting on the lakeside and cormorants perched on a line seemingly chatting over snowy bed of fluttering milkweed seeds. Are they all evidence of motion and communication?” 

The Earth replies: “The Universe is filled with pitter-patters of a transcendental nature. Information isn’t primarily what binds me together with the sun, the Milky Way, and everything else, feeling is. The ‘I’ — as overwhelming as it is — will never dispel the haunting presence of all that was, is, and will be. From the horn of plenty where the sun sets to the flower of the trumpet vine where the sun rises, earthly forms move and communicate, mirroring all other forms of the Universe. Although they are spacetime-dependent, they aren’t mere limitations for they share the inner ability to transcend and shape into pluridimensional components. That which moves communicates through echoes and resonances, rippling outward across the Boundary, from what feels on the inside to what is felt on the outside. Outgassing in comets, for instance, hints at their inner activity. The inflows and outflows of galactic formation and the devolatilization of comets mirror processes like inhalation and exhalation as if a pulsing heart beats within. While these cosmic rhythms are non-intentional expressions, they display a deliberate act of communication, saying in substance: “‘I’ exist in the midst of it all.” The Universe driven by the emotion of time reveals itself by expressing itself. While all objects — even I — eventually jump off the train of existence, the Universe through each bit of feeling comes to grips with the process of motion and communication by which information gives rise to consciousness. This is the nature of the Dialogue between the Universe and Consciousness.” 
 

Taking the roads less traveled, the little acrobat goes on reading a book by Ed Yong, The Immense World. Communication alters perception — both its own and that of others. Every uttered thought, written word, and encounter it has shapes the Dialogue between the Universe and Consciousness. Upstream, the slow-moving bird continues its solitary existence. Downstream, more great egrets have found safe haven on an island off the shore as bald eagles in pairs fly in and out over the river, diving to catch fish. If a bald eagle makes a sound, regardless of whether it’s saying something, what does the silence of the great egret amount to when it flies off gracefully above the water? Even its quiet motion conveys a message.

As the Sun dips below the horizon in the West, the little acrobat goes on surfing gravitational waves, gliding through molecular clouds before slipping into the hollowness of a black hole. Could black holes be producing magnetic field seeds like trapped quantum information poised to be released? As much as it had in the past marveled at the great egret, it feels an even greater fulfillment, sensing magnetic fields beyond galaxy clusters — in gaseous filaments, underdense voids, and intercluster bridges. 

Unnumbered individual things, seemingly all alike and all unchangeable play hide-and-seek in the Quantum Universe where there are no strands of personal order until differences in their nature, configuration and motion unfold. Above the surface, no event ever happens more than once, James Clerk Maxwell noted in Matter and Motion. The essence though isn’t lost even as initial quantum sparks do not survive. 

Time is the ability of the ontological condition to endure, but its innate porosity ultimately does not allow it to do so on an individual level. Collectively, the essence subsists in the process of becoming. It extends in strings of resonance. All the time passing on those roads, the little acrobat holds onto the awkward yet insightful words by Whitehead in its heart, that a ‘feeling’ is the appropriation of elements to be components in the internal constitution of actual objects. Those multilayered components highlight differences between one event and another in the nature, configuration, and motion of the objects concerned.

It scatters seeds along its path to help retrace its steps and backtracks a bit reminiscing its encounter with the Time Mind and their discussion about initial magnetic seeds. Energy fields exist on all scales. Rotating and drifting plasma generate electric currents, which in turn produce and amplify magnetic fields. Fields travel to the edges of galaxies and, on even larger scales, to the distant intracluster regions. 

Self-generated fields in constant fluctuation act upon each other, with feedback from supernovae that blow out matter and cosmic winds driven by star formation. Inflows and outflows proceed directly and indirectly like the underground networks of a forest. These motions participate in the swapping of ‘feelings’ through galaxy clusters and across space and time. Realists may argue that space is not a conducive medium like the sea. In fact, it is an even greater insulator than air. But in the air, poets would contend, flowers sticking their heads out hold on to their invisible electric halos. Pollen flies, leaping from flowers onto bees, even before they land. From the air, migrating birds sense the weak magnetic field of the Earth. 

Traveling asteroids and roaming plasma carry the hidden message of their original sources. What happens when the magnetic moment of a celestial body reacts to the magnetic field tied to a star, and when an asteroid is accreted by a magnetized white dwarf, does it compare to an electric fish buzzing signals to other fishes with its electric field? If magnetism, electricity — and, to a larger extent, gravitation — are affections of the same substance, the necessary condition for the existence of such a substance is its ubiquitous extension. 

If whatever moves is something that feels, motion is its way of communicating. Like an electric fish using the same discharges for navigation and communication, there is a universal language that sees no distinction between navigation and communication. Navigation however implies a volitional act, in the same way we asked before whether stars’ motion is deliberate. The term ‘motion’ might be more neutral, leaving aside any volitional theory of causation. 

Are all things just moving, or are they navigating in any given medium — whether in space, air, or water? In the search for cosmic consciousness, the little acrobat gets down to brass tacks: time invites motion and motion is a form of expression, independently of the data collected by the human mind. Stars do not need eyes to sense light from afar and that which they self produce. Their fields are clouds of thoughts, limbs of action. To the little acrobat, a dweller of the Boundary, motion equals what it holds in its bubble-shaped hand — distance, mass, and electric force — while communication encompasses one of its core bubbles — entropy, energy, and information. Indeed all its bubbles have a purpose. It just needs to hold onto them a little while longer.

Whether celestial bodies passively detect other fields, actively open lines of communication, and sense their own self-made fields, such a sense may be fragile — lost and regained across time and space. Like electroreceptors that operate in both passive and active modes, and magnetoreceptors that are buried deep and elusive, such a sense reveals a deep-seated awareness of the Dialogue. Six hundred million years ago, the common ancestor of all living vertebrates almost certainly had an electric sense. These electric senses, which might also function as magnetic senses, appear, disappear, and reappear, branching off from each other.

Like the Great Egret, the little acrobat goes on exploring new fishing grounds. “How does it feel to breathe in unison with trees, oceans, the Earth, and the Sun?”  — that was its initial intent to find out. But in the end, it gives up on being human or any other living being for that matter. It chooses instead to exist on a larger scale, unafraid of burning its invisible wings.  To the Questioner who has become a mere shadow by its side, it says: “Six years down those roads, haven’t you understood anything? No, information is not the primary link between Consciousness and the Universe. The link is a feeling, an intimate sense of belonging.” 

As it navigates through the Universe, the internal and external relations woven by spacetime are its field of investigation. It grasps at distance something from without… from somewhere outside the world of stars. It is swayed by James Clerk Maxwell’s belief that the Universe is fed from moment to moment by an agency external to itself,  tucked away in other parts of the Multiverse or in the dark sector where the universal organism plans its every step behind the scenes, or even in the togetherness of the rhizomatic Nothingness and the Quantum Universe from which Chance arises. 

Chance has it that electric and magnetic fields perform a self-regulating dance, leaving enough time and space for ecological and biological processes to niche within irregular steps of stability levels. Molecules and proteins, formed and enriched by these processes, produce an ever-expanding array of fields varying in size, some significantly fainter than others. Chance — the extensional criterion — holds unto its essential qualities of freedom, essence, and existence.

In the world of stars, pollen-like particles seemingly fly and leap from body to body. Bee-like things gather, transport, and transfer encoded information through magnetic fields, along gravitational waves, from pulsars, magnetars, and galaxies whose combined radiation they emit generates and reinforces the magnetic force. Motion transmits signals. Diffuse radio emissions produced from electrons spinning in magnetic fields provide information on the formation and evolution of the cosmic web across time and space while low radio frequencies uncover old remnant sources. Whether magnetic, electric, or gravitational, the Universe is full of vibrational signals. In the Impossible Sea, they are all talking, in choir or solo, of objects buzzing and feeling near and far.

James Clerk Maxwell,  Matter and Motion

James Clerk Maxwell, The Dynamical Theory Of The Electromagnetic Field

James Clerk Maxwell, A treatise on Electricity and Magnetism

Ed Yong,  An immense world

Matt Strassler, Waves in an impossible sea

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.