Consciousness and the Universe

The small-body exploration Tianwen-2 is part of China’s interplanetary missions, called the Tianwen series 天问系列. It was preceded by China’s first Mars exploration mission and will be followed by a Mars sample-return mission and a Jupiter system exploration mission. Originally named after the Chinese explorer of the early XV century, ZhengHe 郑和, it was officially renamed Tianwen-2 天问二号 and launched from the Xichang 西昌 space center in Sichuan 四川 on the 29th of May 2025.

The title of the series is a direct reference to a long poem Tianwen 天问, widely translated as Heavenly Questions. It is a lengthy set of open questions attributed to the Chinese poet and political figure Qu Yuan 屈原 of the Warring States period who was slandered and banished for having spoken truth to power over two thousand years ago. Every year, on Duanwujie 端午节,  the 5th day of the 5th lunar year, his death is commemorated. This year, it will fall on the 19th of June, 2026.

The first lines of the poem describe the state of being and not being before the being apprehends itself separately as being. Beyond the hows today’s scientists are tackling, the poem questions why it is the way it is and addresses the order in which things came to be (For a strict interpretation of the text, see Nicholas Morrow Williams, Dialogues in the dark): 

In the first instances of ‘that which feels’, at the origin of origins — the so-called Great Ultimate, who’s there to tell what happened if not through the experience of the state of being and not being? 

When all above and below were not yet formed, how was it built upon and from what vantage point was it observed, felt and investigated? While no direction has yet been chosen, a feeling of being in multiple states coincided with a feeling of not being in any. 

When darkness and light were indistinctly muddled, who could fathom such blurriness and see through it? The random emergence of events set the stage for superposed states of being and not being and, by the same token, the consciousness of being and not being. 

Such an immaterial ethereality, merely a speck of imagination, who was conscious of it? The overflowing chaos was a string of conscious moments in which things moved and communicated. A ripple outward shook the very foundations of such a center of consciousness.

How then did night and day come to be, each owing their own time and space? Time moved forward along with the expansion of space and stretching of distances. Within the boundaries of the universe,  time involved consciousness of time direction.

The exploration of the cosmos fulfills the human mind’s deep-rooted yearning to find its way back home, the cradle that gave birth to star stuff of which humans are made. Tianwen-2 exemplifies the physical outreach of human wanderings, a ripple outward. It is a two-phase mission. Kamo’oalewa is its first target. Its second is an active comet among asteroids of the main belt, 311P/PANSTARRS. The seven year-gap between the time Tianwen-2 will leave Kamo’oalewa to its arrival at 311P/PANSTARRS might provide the opportunity of a fly-by of another asteroid, yet to be determined. 

Initially named 2016 HO3, the asteroid was officially renamed Kamo’oalewa, meaning it is an offspring of unknown origin that travels on its own, a small object that broke off of a larger one, a remnant of something that is not there but of which it was once part. Like Ho’oleilana, the name Kamo’oalewa came from the Kumulipo, referenced in the fourteenth era. It alludes to a celestial object that is oscillating and reflecting the asteroid’s path in the sky when viewed from Earth. 
 

In a state of being or not being, all events are transitory. Even small-body populations, like cosmic superstructures, are transient configurations. Time conceptualizes this transitory process experienced on the human level in the shift from night to day, winter to spring, birth to death, and youth to old age. too. In the mind’s eye, those configurations are like rain bands, each passing on their own schedule, flocks of birds flying in ephemeral murmuration before individual elements escape. 

In small-body populations, asteroids have their physical appearance and life path altered over time. They are celestial bodies made airless by solar winds and cosmic rays. Kamo’oalewa may be a fragment of an unknown parent object — a remnant of a close encounter with Earth-Moon — or an object originated from the main belt. In the swarm of debris and particles escaping from collisions, it survived and settled into an equilibrium state, on the edge of chaos. 

Among near-Earth asteroids, quasi-satellites have laws of motion of their own. A quasi-satellite appears to orbit around the Earth in a rotating reference frame in which the position of the Earth is fixed. In reality, Kamo’oalewa goes around the Sun in almost exactly one year, the time it takes for the Earth to complete its orbital period. Discovered by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS1) at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii on April 27, 2016, it is one of eight quasi-satellites confirmed as of November 2025. 

Periodically switching between a quasi-satellite configuration and a horseshoe configuration, Kamo’oalewa stays outside of the Hill sphere, pulled away on its heliocentric path while still hugging from a distance the Earth and the Moon. Kamo’oalewa’s current quasi-satellite state occurred nearly a century ago. It will transition back to the horseshoe orbit in roughly 300 years at which point the gravitational effect of the Earth–Moon system reaches the weakest point. Jupiter, too, appears to play a major role in the operation of the dynamical mechanism responsible for these transitions. 

Subject to the dynamics of debris transport, Kamo’oalewa wasn’t pulverized nor rapidly accreted by the Earth nor the Moon. Like stars and humans, it too bears the great force of history. It will hang there in its quasi-satellite position for a total of 400 years, considerably longer than the time co-orbital objects usually hold that position on average. Considering the influence of the Earth-Moon system, and the Sun, particularly the impact of space weathering and solar radiation, its very existence and location constitute the epitome of a chance occurrence. 

Notwithstanding the uncertainties around its precise size, shape and density, Kamo’oalewa appears to be a solid, monolithic asteroid, possibly covered by a thin layer of regolith. It has an elongated shape with an estimated size of 69 × 58 × 51 m and a weak surface gravity. While it is a fast rotator — about 28 min, the solar terminator orbit is found to have the best robustness and is suited for global mapping and measurements. The polar region is expected to be the best place for sampling. 

Tianwen-2 will be approaching, and maneuvering carefully, using hovering, touch-and-go and anchoring techniques to collect about one kilo of samples and return the sample capsule to Earth via a flyby in late 2027 before moving on to the second phase of the mission. Kamo’oalewa’s surface morphology, chemical composition, and internal structure will provide more clues as to the evolution of the Earth, Moon and the solar system.  Its formation pathway and dynamical evolution will address — in a more narrowly manner — the broader context of heavenly questions.

The possibility that asteroids with Earth-like orbits have a lunar origin has been raised before. If Kamo’oalewa is a lunar ejecta, soil samples might pinpoint a particular area on the Moon such as the crater Giordano Bruno given the timeline of the formation for, both, the crater and the quasi-satellite. The crater-riddled Moon offers other candidates as well, such as the Tycho crater. Once the exact source is confirmed, it likely will lead to the identification of other objects with the same signature.

The returned soil samples, probably a silicate-based composition, specifically a mixture of olivine and/or pyroxene, will be compared with samples collected in the past by previous missions, including Luna 24 drilling core extracted by a soviet spacecraft that landed on the southeast edge of the Moon’s Mare Crisium in the seventies and Chang’e-5 嫦娥五号 as well as with meteorites, such as those found at the Yamato Mountains in Antartica in the eighties. 

In closing, Qu Yuan’s demise reminds us that, when facing turbulent times, we feel as if we are walking through a spiritual desert. In search of the awakening of the human spirit, we struggle to divert and extract ourselves from the constraints of reality. And so we undertake wanderings into the world of images and ideas. Our spiritual odyssey still bears the burden of our corporeal self. 

While some embrace idols of power and wealth, others turn inwards. Yet, the inner nature can never be detached from worldly matters. Why, the spiritual yearners ask in dismay, the absurd claim that problems and differences among humans can only be resolved through war and violence?

Williams, N. M. (2025). Dialogues in the Dark: Interpreting Heavenly Questions Across Two Millennia. United States: Harvard University, Asia Center.

Demiéville, P. (1973). Choix d'études sinologiques (1921-1970), énigmes taoïstes. Belgium: Brill.

Donald Sturgeon, Chinese Text Project: a dynamic digital library of premodern Chinese, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 2019, https://ctext.org/chu-ci/tian-wen

Like a freediver who speaks of her out of body experience being the default setting, the Questioner falls back on the Acrobat to go the distance and lift the veil off the starry dome. Its rolling parts had drifted towards the three circles of dance. On their return, they recount their passage through the zone of avoidance beyond the line of sight where the Norma supercluster and a distant continent of matter named the great attractor wall stand. Farther away from the Earth hides a broader hierarchy of flows — Quipu, Vela and Shapley. 

The zone of avoidance indicates that the human view is obscured by the absence of light and the presence of dust in very low galactic latitudes near the plane of the Milky Way, blurring the line between the field of existence and Nothingness. The map below illustrates the distribution of the main superstructures on the galactic plane, with the grey, open circle marking the location of the Vela supercluster buried in the zone of avoidance.

Motion is, in principle, enabled by attractors, massive objects or collections of objects which dominate the gravitational field. It is looked at through the lens of basins of attraction like the Shapley concentration and more than twice its size, the Sloan Great Wall. On the largest scale, gravitational sources drive the accretion of gas, dust and matter causing them to coalesce. The singular tiny red dot on the map below marks the Earth’s spot. 

Basins of attraction appear closely stacked upon each other, interconnected like the Acrobat’s bubbles and overlapping their spheres of influence. Among those intersected bubbles, the basin of attraction centered in proximity to the highly obscured Ophiuchus cluster behind the center of the Milky Way Galaxy includes the Great Attractor region, itself being embedded within a larger-scale flow pattern extending to greater depths as seen below:

 In an all-encompassing theory of everything, entities and objects seemingly tend to combine with each other, assemble and gather in a long-drawn-out process from stars and planets’ formation, tectonic plates’ collision, cities and countries’ foundation to consolidation efforts in human affairs. The process, however, involves a piece of the puzzle hard to factor in — a threshold of complexity at which all things reach the edge of chaos. Even cosmic superstructures are bound to break up into collapsing units. They, too, are transient configurations. As if in a collective mass, they slide on an invisible mantle to reach the abyss of not knowing into which they will ultimately fall, shredded into pieces.

Less than 100 years ago, the human hand was praised as being the equal and rival of the human mind. One was said to be nothing without the other.  Today the digital mind bypasses its primary tool of creation. Still, it relies on visual aids to express its line of thought. In red dots on the celestial map below is the largest clustered state ever observed, the superstructure Quipu, even more colossal than the Shapley concentration in blue dots. Looking at the cosmic landscape in colorful dots, the Questioner ponders over the Earth’s whereabouts as the Milky Way in Laniakea’s embrace inches closer to the blue dots in the southern celestial sky.

If it’s not the movement toward being that is transcendence,  but the movement toward nothingness, the logical step towards Nothingness would be to operate a shift in the human perspective and look at all things from a state of absence, hence taking into account an improvisational dance involving poles of great attraction and those of repulsion such as the Dipole repeller, a massive underdense region associated with a supervoid. The next map shows voids, not matter, with the Sculptor Void in yellow, the Local Void in black, the Hercules Void in blue and all the other voids colored green.

The universe, therefore, consists of a disparate collection of matter structures and cosmic voids. It shows the characteristics of a sound screen with resonance chambers occupying in present time empty chairs of phantom objects and spectral entities among which the Earth today finds itself. They are essential parts of the supporting framework.

A deep resonance spread through voids and matter structures, in particular in the form of acoustic oscillations that propagated through the baryonic matter.  These pressure waves, generated in the hot plasma about 390,000 years after the hot Big Bang, have produced density structure in the atomic gas and dark matter, suggesting a dynamic interaction between quantum fields and spacetime itself. To determine their scale, density fluctuations in neutral hydrogen mass are measured across vast distances. Those frozen relics, imprinted in the fabric of spacetime, serve as a cosmological ruler for measuring the expansion of the universe and probing the nature of dark energy. 

Words and concepts transpose themselves from one field to the next. To the questioner, those sound waves are broadly speaking variational invariants, invisible yet present as they communicate in an acoustic and geometric language. Whether dispersion of matter or its contraction follows established patterns or creates the appearance of one, something remains and has lingered  — faint spherical contours. Within their bounds, clustering properties and matter densities vary.

One of those relics of the early universe was detected out of the morphological and dynamical properties of voids, walls, filaments and galaxies. It imprinted a shell-like structure named Ho’oleilana, a primary cocoon of energy. Within its confines, a layering of later states of existence establish themselves.

Spanning roughly one billion light-years in diameter, it marks a new milestone in the distance revolution unless, indeed, it is simply the result of a chance alignment. At the intersection of the three arrows below, the Earth is facing Ho’oleilana which includes part of the basin of attraction centered around the Sloan Great Wall. Near its center is the Boötes supercluster presumed to be the manifestation of the matter concentration that gave it birth. 

In the inquiry into the nature of feeling, the name of this ghost-like bubble derives from The Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation account.The line 124, Ho'oleilei ka lana a ka Pouliuli, in particular, is rendered as follows in two translations:

Born is a child to Po-wehiwehi 

Cradled in the arms of Po-uliuli[?]

and

The first child born of Powehiwehi (dusky night)

Tossed up land for Pouliuli (darkest night)

The second translation above by Queen Liliuokalani, the last sovereign monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, provides a window into the nature of  Ho’oleilana as a tossed up land for darkest night. As with the tossing of dice, chance fulfills its own idea by affirming or denying itself. Whether it is a chance alignment or a form of reality, Ho’oleilana is the place of pre-existence. 

Inside its limits, the ripple effects of earlier events are felt in the present time. The idea of a tossed up land brings back another discussion on the original interpretation of the Chinese pictogram 或 in an earlier post, Crossover, as a battle over a primordial domain, and, in more general terms, as ’field’, ’space’ and even sphere. Dark energy, one of the foundational parties engaged in the ‘battle’, governs its own expansion. While it pushes back the walls of the universe, acting like a counter-gravity, the gravitational pull to which spinning structures and spherical entities are subject prioritizes form over content. 

“Whether dark energy pulls large-scale structures apart faster than gravity brings matter together, did gravity and dark energy both wiggle their way into this universe?” The Acrobat whispers into the questioner’s ear.

On the icehouse Earth around which the full moon orbits in late winter, the human soul is burdened by the inquiry of the mind into the nature of feeling. Ho’oleilana is in itself an expression in action, an entity carrying the memory of past experiences, residual traces that encode and extend ‘that which feels’. Far from being a perfect sphere, Ho’oleilana has taken a very common form of reality, that of a bubble. 

The blue planet, along with the Milky Way and the Local Group, inhabits its own much smaller and unrelated bubble with a younger history on the edge of Ho’oleilana. Still, both bubbles appear hollow. While Ho’oleilana is a galaxy-packed shell revealed through the combining effects of luminosities, velocities and speed variations, nearly all the star-forming complexes in the solar vicinity lie on the surface of the Local Bubble, a shell of cold, neutral gas and dust.

If there is no consciousness without gravity, then gravity fosters a place of pre-existence whose self-sustaining shape vows, on the surface, to assert itself as the ancient geometrical figure of harmony whose central point may be a space of deep consciousness that undergoes a timeless and transcending process of awareness. Within the framework of a general theory of everything, nothingness, a fundamental component of reality, is defined as invariance moving in harmony while the movement toward nothingness is called transcendence. Ho’oleilana is the outward form of an underdense ‘biome’ — a nothingness-driven entity. 

“I get it” The Acrobat says, “We all live in bubbles waiting to be popped. Even my own bubbles of concepts, while interconnected, keep each other at bay.”

Notes & References:

1. “… the collective name Great Attractor affixed to a region containing several superclusters of galaxies with their own identifications” ruffled a few feathers “as if it were superfluous to name a mountain range if each of the peaks had its own name.” Dressler, A. M. (1995). Voyage to the Great Attractor: Exploring Intergalactic Space. United States: Vintage Books.

2. Edwin P. Hubble ,The Distribution of Extra-Galactic Nebulae.Science75,24-25(1932).DOI:10.1126/science.75.1931.24

3. Valade, Aurelien, et al. "Identification of basins of attraction in the local Universe." Nature Astronomy 8.12 (2024): 1610-1616.

4. Quotation from Paul Valéry, inscribed on the facade of the Palais de Chaillot in 1937 (Paris)

5. Tully, R. Brent, Cullan Howlett, and Daniel Pomarède. "Ho’oleilana: an individual baryon acoustic oscillation?." The Astrophysical Journal 954.2 (2023): 169.

6. Chang, Tzu-Ching, et al. "Baryon acoustic oscillation intensity mapping of dark energy." Physical Review Letters 100.9 (2008): 091303.

7. Aubourg, Éric, et al. "Cosmological implications of baryon acoustic oscillation measurements." Physical Review D 92.12 (2015): 123516.

8. Bault, Abby, et al. "Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from the C iv Forest with DESI DR2." arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08103 (2026).

9. Crocce, Martín, and Román Scoccimarro. "Nonlinear evolution of baryon acoustic oscillations." Physical Review D—Particles, Fields, Gravitation, and Cosmology 77.2 (2008): 023533.

10. The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant. (1951). United Kingdom: University of Chicago Pres

11. Sacred Texts. The Kumulipo was translated by Queen Liliuokalani and published in 1897

12. Wittgenstein, L. (1921). Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus

13. 或 showed originally a circle and a spear or lance on the right (radical halberd) with one or more borders sometimes drawn around the circle.

14. Science & Vie, No. 1301, Fevrier 2026, p.68

15. Zucker, Catherine, et al. "Star formation near the Sun is driven by expansion of the Local Bubble."  Nature 601.7893 (2022): 334-337.

16. Fabre d'Olivet, A., Redfield, N. L. (1917). The Golden Verses of Pythagoras. United Kingdom: G. P. Putnam's sons.

    Paoletti, Patrizio, and T. Dotan Ben Soussan. "The sphere model of consciousness: from geometrical to neuro-psycho-educational perspectives." Logica Universalis 13.3 (2019): 395-415.

The Dialogue between Consciousness and the Universe takes an unexpected turn as it is reframed within the context of a multiverse. Should the Dialogue be grounded in facts or in truth? In truth, this search will never end. It may progress, stall, regress, persist. It carries its own transcendence in the form of a theory that faces great contradictions. In its attempt to predict how things are and why, it holds onto patterns of invariance with the goal to reveal something from within dominates or something from without supersedes. What sort of a thing these Universe’s shores are comes down to a mere suggestion. 

Just that words like absence and nothingness have a ring to them. They signify that something lies beneath the surface of things that poets, painters, and composers alike allude to with verses, brushes, and musical notes and to which they give tangibility in a moment of inspiration. 

Scattered on a blank page like stars in the sky, words not only bear witness to the evolution of consciousness, they play their part in the process of actualization. If a poet could speak the language of geometry, she would describe nothingness as unity in darkness, a plunging circle into eternity, a well falling into infinity. Words fall like snowflakes onto the Earth’s surface. What remains is the same intent dressed up into a system aimed at framing a theory of everything. 

Buried under piles of words, nothingness is shaped like intervals forever removed from what is, has passed, and will be. The feeling left by its disappearing act lingers as forms bear the enduring absence. Yet, nothingness is a perpetually felt presence within and out of every entity. It coexists as a fundamental element of evolution in the process of the formless and the accidental, hides in plain sight in the splits and folds of spacetime, and in the molecular geometry, the expansion of distances, the fundamental interactions as superposition states disentangle and disseminate.

As the story goes, the Questioner threads seven beads onto a string. The beads create a necklace that transforms into a chain of nine rings. Their free expression carry them like waves on water. Pieced together from ontological fragments and woven connections, the figure stands upright, shaped like Burnham’s star queen. The Questioner gives it the freedom to exist. The evolving character turns into a dancer twirling around an axis of loops that nurture the genesis of things and preserve, in a fragile balance, matter and energy. 

Circles, loops, and bubbles channel information, shrinking and growing, dispersing and reforming. The figure has entered the scene in the Woods of the Universe. The Questioner calls it the Acrobat. They, both, believe to be the shadow of the other. The distance between them is zero, yet the Acrobat that takes the form of a presence rifts apart from the Questioner whose own consciousness struggles to establish itself in itself.

Formed from concept-bubbles, the Acrobat bears on its shoulders the weight of these shores and juggles existential balls and ontic clubs, hoping to give meaning to its parts. The thoracic bubble of freedom, essence, and existence envelops its heart. Those of beauty and melody, and of sensation of space and emotion of time, hang from its hips and knees. The silent tinkling of nothingness occupies its head, while the universal melody translates into frequencies down to its feet. Beauty is what gives sound waves freedom to be in harmony. 

 Words, like birds chirping and ground crackling, build the resonant walls of the house of everything where the Acrobat is setting up its home. Through the windows, it throws ropes around a balloon of dark energy, pulling and releasing it at will. In the submerging sea of words, energy applies to diverse processes. 

Most of the internal energy of ordinary objects— the rest mass —is stored in the labyrinth of proton and neutron particles. The vacuum energy is the information with no name that spreads through the Acrobat’s bubbles. Placed in its chest, it may be the hidden essence that, along with existence, is preceded by freedom rising from Nothingness. Yet, space that fills its belly already suggests the implicit existence of a dark energy of remarkably low density. 

In practical terms, the next logical step is to situate nothingness in relation to dark energy. Informational dark energy is pictured, in the mind’s eye, both as a standalone balloon that balances out the odd arrangement of the Acrobat’s bubbles and as a chameleon-like entity that spreads through its body. It is a necessary element of existence within the multiverse. Is one equal to the other? Fearing the collapse of its parts, the Acrobat scratches its head which resonates in a silent ringing and relays to the Questioner that Nothingness is invariance moving in harmony like a chorus, a repeated hum. 

It climbs into the rafters of the house of everything from which swirling plumes of time, nothingness, and quanta rise to recombine within the multiverse. There, on a roof beam, the code of a pre-existing order is carved in the language of absence, that says : “there is no agency without space, no sentience without time, no consciousness without gravity.” 

The Questioner dwells on the wider meaning of time domain. Nothingness is the negative state, a bit like what sculptors call 'negative space', in the absence of the four temporal components of time (what is, has passed, will be, and is always in the state of becoming). The hypothesis that it is a mode of temporality beyond spacetime leads to its definition as the temporal strata of the multiverse. Are those temporal strata scissionned by dark energy? 

“Time is a subjective experience.” The Acrobat whispers to the Questioner’s ear. A thread of open communication connects them to each other. “It differs, fragments, recedes, and accelerates. It drips, slips away and disappears into intervals that fold into layers of the multiverse. Its arrows, like spokes of a wheel, spring randomly from  the rhizomatic Nothingness. Nothing is what it appears to be. Even the profile view of this universal plane is but an imperfect rhizomatic line between the field of existence and Nothingness.” 

Nowadays, though, time gives the Questioner the unsettling impression that it moves backward. From the Abbey of Beaugency to the Hospices of Beaune, from Cluny to Cîteaux, she finds herself in the young monk’s place before the rows of empty chairs on which phantom objects and spectral entities are seated. She tells them what she has understood sofar: “It is not the movement toward being that is transcendence,  but the movement toward nothingness.” Her mind pushes open the door of her cell. 

Between water, pond, and forest, she engages in an internal Dialogue with the Acrobat. Its ethereal nature is intrinsically linked to the nothingness that haunts the Questioner. It is a co-creation of all the phantom objects and spectral entities that transmit keys of communication to posterity. It is an esoteric code, a transient entity, the voice of a theory as light as a cirrus cloud. 

Like a drunken boat, the Questioner wanders around lakes, along rivers and canals, on the bay shore and ocean coast. Among migratory birds, the great egret stands, solitary, in the muddy stream while other egrets find refuge on an island in the riverbed. Bald eagles yelp and soar above the waters flowing into the ocean where sea lions blow bubbles, dolphins whistle, and rays fly underwater. From the cosmic sky to the bottom of the oceans, surely time feels different, except for the graveyard of fallen trees. 

The Questioner no longer perceives a difference between shapes of nebulae and supernova remnants and those of jellyfish and translucent squids, nor does she distinguishes the deep fissures of the Grand Canyon from those of the Zambezi River. From the beaches of Nantucket to the hills of Sancerre, the state of being conscious is a feeling, an intimate sense of belonging that transcends objects and entities by incorporating elements drawn randomly from one event to the next so that they can be inner parts of  those objects and entities as outlined in the following: 

While Nothingness and the Quantum Universe occupy the Acrobat’s head, three red dots invite themselves unexpectedly. They are manifestations of time itself, that is LBCA (the Last Bacterial Common Ancestor), LACA (the Last Archean Common Ancestor), and LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor). LUCA, for whom time undoubtedly flows differently, is a 4.2-billion-year-old thermophilic anaerobe. It has passed the word to LBCA and LACA, its closest relatives. They arrive, delighted to find themselves on the Acrobat's head. A series of exchanges unfold between them and their host. With its new features as conduits of feeling, the Acrobat becomes increasingly aware of what it feels like to be others. It has become a community. With its newly acquired mouth, it declares proudly:

“There is no 'I' in 'I,' but 'we,' whether it be genetic, ancestral, spiritual, or based on proximity. The 'I,' how imposing its presence appears, will never erase all that was, is, and will be.”

The three life companions could not agree more and say: “We are reflections in the mirror of the early universe’s red dots with an eccentric V-shaped appearance like two lines joining eyes to the mouth. The problem with existence is that it is plagued with a fundamental fear. The evolution of consciousness can’t mask a deep sense of nobodyness — the existential experience of nothingness.”

The multitime properties of the multiverse allow for waves of resonance to cross over from end to end in such a way as to constitute the rhizome of Nothingness where there is no pre no post and where the mirroring dance has no starting point.

Why, then, would the Acrobat engage in the infinite game called Chaos and Nothingness with the Universe? Square one marks the Quantum realm. While no direction has yet been chosen, it allows for the release of an energy it doesn’t appear to have. There, a feeling of being in multiple quantum states coincides with a feeling of not being in any. 

From square one of the board game, a step back leads to pre-quantum pre-spacetime. A step forward,  primordial asymmetries and fundamental processes bring about chance existence and energy fluctuations. However, in the multiverse, a pre-quantum pre-spacetime domain should model after the pre-existing order as another universe defined by its own chance existence and energy fluctuations. 

Motion and communication set time directionality and causal relations, making dynamic histories dependent upon initial conditions. What, then, determines their historicity when, out of infinitely many ontologically indeterminate splittings, a few only persist and evolve on these universe’s shores? All arise from a deeper level as quantum chaotic systems decohere or fragmentate, and no longer exist in a superposition state. While evolution takes complex systems on, or in the ordered regime near the edge of chaos, quantum chaos entails that the interaction of particles may, in some cases, randomize rapidly and create patterns of unitary evolution. The two chaos are diametrically different, separated by their respective histories. Still they mirror each other.

In the multiverse that makes up the sum of all histories with echoing events, the conservation of ontology points to the retention of a geometric memory of a deep resonance, so deep that a black hole has its interior causally connected from its exterior and that events, grouped and regrouped, randomly wash ashore.

After a few rounds of the game, the universe draws closer to the edge of a transitional chaos that may decide whether consciousness grows new bonds of sympathy. By the rules of the game, winning conditions are triggered by achieving the highest level of consciousness, known as the togetherness of being. 

The Acrobat manages to flee from the Questioner to the point of its very own evanescence. Catapulted into a higher dimension, it journeys through the noosphere. Its disembodied self watches its parts drifting away along the path toward the three circles of dance. Its rolling head emerges from slumber and swears it dreamed of what sort of a thing the highest consciousness is. Words, though, freeze in its mouth. All what it is left with is an inexpressible feeling — a subtle resonance.

In the end, it regrets the scattering of its parts. Each has its own raison d’être, after all. So it regains its complete form, but not quite with the same arrangement and color. Its nine parts have moved around a bit as if they were the Earth's tectonic plates. The bubbles' escape and rearrangement have proved that motion isn’t just a question of distance and communication isn’t just a question of information.

The blue Acrobat, joyfully, wiggles its feet, one anchored in light, sound, and water, and the other ascending and descending the levels of consciousness. Nonetheless, it is utterly aware that the growth  of consciousness runs counter to the general tendency of all things to gravitate toward chaos as the stampede scene, currently taking place at its feet, shows. 

For the Questioner who once searched for a glimpse of consciousness in the force-carrying bosons, it remains an open question whether the emergence of consciousness is dependent upon the influx of photons into atoms. Light is absorbed photon by photon, likewise each event is experienced in a unidimensional manner. With light, consciousness expands. It is a network resonance that utilizes all what it is at its disposal from black holes from which trapped quantum information is ready to be released to waves, fields, and clouds.

With a blueprint in its hand, the Acrobat goes off to open fields and mirror lakes with the ease of a great egret. It is on a mission to build its authentic self. There is still a probability of change in its agency.

All things considered, it doesn't want to be human or any other living form than its own. It chooses to simply be what it is, an evolving figure assembled by chance in midst of a multiverse.

As the Questioner returns to the Dialogue, the Acrobat remains a spatial metaphor on the reader’s screen. To enact change, words and concepts transpose themselves from one field to the next.

References :

1. Barfield, O. (1926). History in English Words. United Kingdom: Methuen & Company Limited
2. “…what we call theory of everything was yesterday a theory of harmony whose goal was to combine mathematics, geometry, music, astronomy, and philosophy. The growing knowledge of our ever-expanding spatiotemporal surroundings has, continually, shifted the focus of our attention, but our intent remains the same.” Cosmic Harmony
3. Balzac, H. d. (1837). Illusions perdues. Belgium: Société Belge de Librairie.
4. Sartre, Being and Nothingness
5. “The introducing sentence 亙先無有 of the bamboo manuscript sets the stage for events prior to the formation of the Earth-Moon system and before the Sun came out of a nebula cloud of dust and gas. Some scholars chose to translate it two ways: “In the Constancy, there is first no existence” or constancy “preceded the absence of Being”. Others believe that the two characters 亙先 have to do with the ‘origin of origins’, the ‘absolute primordiality’, the ‘ultimate commencement’ as a reference to the Great Ultimate 大極. Perhaps both interpretations —constancy and an ultimate beginning — do not contradict each other and point to an ultimate state of invariance.” Crossover
6. “Un a produit deux; deux a produit trois; trois a produit les dix mille êtres. Les dix mille êtres se retournent de l’element Yin et embrassent l'élément Yang.  Le souffle vide en fait un mélange harmonieux 沖氣以為和.” Le Livre de la voie et de la vertu, JJL Duyvendak, 1981
7. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux
8. Vasily Kokorev et al 2024 ApJ 968 38. María Carranza-Escudero et al 2025 ApJL 989 L50
9. Martin Luther King, Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? (1968, Beacon Press)
10. Strasberg, Philipp, Teresa E. Reinhard, and Joseph Schindler. "First principles numerical demonstration of emergent decoherent histories." Physical Review X 14.4 (2024): 041027
11. Stephen L Adler 2012 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 361 012002
12. Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 90
13. Adler, Stephen L. "Trace dynamics and its implications for my work of the last two decades." arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.14524 (2023)

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.

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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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“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.

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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

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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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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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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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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.