Know whence you came

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.