Consciousness and the Universe

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 1850-1854

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Strassler, Waves in an impossible sea

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

Catherine Zucker, Mapping our galactic backyard

Zach Cano, Adventures of a Millisecond Magnetar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Herbert Matthews, The surrealist mind

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

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

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Rudolf Steiner, An outline to the Occult, 1922

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking the silence

Of an ancient pond

A frog jumped into water

A deep resonance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eugene Ionesco, Les Chaises, Farce tragique

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

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

Rabindranath Tagore, A Tagore reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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