The Time Mind

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.