Consciousness and the Universe

“Midway in the journey of our life,” Dante wrote, “I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was….” Each step affects the mind and unravels strands of thoughts wrapping around themselves, prompting the need to frequently pause in moments filled with sparks flickering over sensemaking and the Universe. Like Ivy-leaved toadflax in the tiniest chins and cracks, drilling into walls, the mind wanders. Ideas germinate.

Through Muir Woods, I reached Aotearoa and came back with a concept ringing louder than the memories of korimakos (bellbirds) at the foot of the Pinnacles and piwakawakas (fantails ) along Rotoroa Lake. It tells the human story of neurodiversity. The Maori word created for autism is takiwatanga. It means ‘in his/her/their own time and space.’ While ‘neurodiversity’ suggests a cognitive aspect, the concept brings up images of bundles of thought processes and feelings that occur simultaneously, superposed in stacks, all being relevant, all being real. 

I felt the white clouds’ touch, the mist’s wetness, and the sky’s closeness as I did ten years ago... On the forbidden trail along Rotoroa Lake, I reflected on the nature of other minds and states of consciousness, the diversity of feelings, and the plurality of existence. Freedom of being unites amid fragmentation. When we say ‘diversity’, we mean freedom to be in one’s own time and space. “What is it like to be a bat?” is used to ask: “how it feels to live in its own time and space?” It implies that its outer reality is intrinsically connected to its inner world. 

The walk in the woods mirrors how I lose my footing in the Quantum Forest. I imagined a set of values and coordinates that measure the body of a bird, its location on the branch along the forbidden path, and its field of view. It might have been a particle, a star, or even the twinkling of an eye. Wary of the warning sounds made by piwakawakas, my body was alert, and my eyes focused. Still, I slipped and fell in the mud.

While it remains inconceivable how far in time and space the Universe’s boundaries reach and how many dimensions spread in and out of those confined limits, Sean Carroll describes a kind of stratified reality. “If we imagine describing nature in terms of multiple levels of reality,” he writes, “one such level appears to be a particular kind of quantum field theory, with other levels above and possibly other levels below” and the Core at the Quantum field level where entities, known and unknown, share time and space.

In the togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe, ‘compact’ dimensions extend the realm of existence into the field of potentialities, for they are neither observed nor perceived objectively. Since existence precedes the essence of information, we wonder whether something is not observed or belongs to another dimension. Extra dimensions draw routes in and out of the existential field. They are embedded in the grid of spacetime, closely intertwined with each other, making it a hard nut to crack. 

The Universe is an interacting organism comparable to a network of plants and animals, trees and fungi, birds and bats-like entities dying in a split second or over billions of years, feeding and pollinating. Some shapes and forms wither, fading away not before producing seeds, while others continue to thrive. It may be why, as John Muir foretold, "When we try to pick out something by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." 

Even more so, we fail to observe a single quark, for "quarks don't exist as individual particles" in the Quantum Universe. The expectation value of energy cannot be measured for a single quantum system, comments further Shan Gao. Particles are carried away by invisible quantum rivers with winds and currents above and below riverbeds, above sea waters and on the sea floor, above grounds and under the soil, bringing seeds lightyears away, microscopic threads connecting filaments and galaxies. Gravitational signals are sent along these paths like nutrients.

In the end, there exists a distinction between Nothingness and the Quantum Universe when there is a perceived interaction. Dreams, too, only very weakly influence and interact, competing for our attention beneath the surface. "Newton himself, "wrote Frank Wilczek in The Lightness of Being, "usually used the phrase quantity of matter for what we now call mass. His wording implies that you can't have matter without mass" If we acknowledge its existence, we assume it has a mass even if we can't measure it like a force carrier at the threshold of higher dimensions. 

Wilczek wrote in A Beautiful Question that energy conservation is "a useful but approximate result that applies in limited circumstances." One possibility may still be that the conserved energy of the system lies within hidden variables, or we simply "can't know what it is," concedes Carroll. If a dimension is a physical quantity that can be measured, a force carrier may be a relative unit meant to encapsulate it. 

Massless photons and gluons are bits of information, "embodied ideas." Whether sub-particles are the product of the mind or the outcome of observation brings up the mental image of a tree falling when no one is there. Given such uncertainty, what we virtually cannot see becomes a matter of probability. On the one hand, the problem with probability, De Finetti explained, is that, instead of considering it and studying it as such, trying to perfect our understanding of it and its use, we often externalize it as if we believe we can conceive of it only by representing, if not as a real object, at least as something which exists outside ourselves, something which acts on the outside world according to its own laws which are supposed to govern the facts which do not follow the laws with, in addition, laws which are not laws. 

And so it is with particles we say exist as distinct entities, in addition to the wavefunction, which, itself, becomes an entity. The wavefunction — a link between entities — "guides the particles," Carroll writes, "but the particles exert no influence on the wavefunction whatsoever." On the other hand,  if, as Sartre wrote, there is a being of the thing perceived, then a thing thought of, even as a probability, is like a plant beneath the surface of the river or a fungus underground.

A set number of evolutive stages separates zero (point particle) to oneness — a time-subjective state. Each entity, large and small, regroups itself into a one-dimensional experience that adds up to create the multidimensional Universe we know. The togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe refers to an above and a below — the ultralight fields of the dark matter that open up to extra dimensions as if in a dream where translucent weightless butterflies slowly escape through the gates of darkness. 

A month ago, I came home. A house sparrow rested on a twig of a fledgling oak. Its state of being offered a last glimpse of the neuro and bio diversity surrounding us. On the edge of the in-betweens, I set on to imagine all the things that exist in Heaven and Earth. There are voices in my head — haunting ghosts pressing me to explore — for there are so many dreams, so little time… 

Only one letter sets the artist apart from the autist. The double empathy problem speaks of a lack of connection and miscommunications between 'differently disposed social actors'. The call to mourn for what never was seeks to lift the veil of our limitations and remove our blinders. In the midst of it all, all levels become visible, for we carry within the bird's eye view, the butterfly's flapping wings, the bat's echo-sensing abilities, the chipmunk's instinct, and the elephant's gentle soul.

I lost the Moon the other night behind a blanket of clouds. She was confused about how exactly the universal organism was planning its every step behind the scene. The togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe infers the difficult predicament of having to dissociate one from the other as if the primordial structure was the meeting of above and below, the drawing of a smudged line with ‘no strands of personal order.’ 

The mind enters the Quantum Forest. It barely scratches the surface and already feels disoriented, climbing over hills of learning and knowledge, wondering whether it could ever find the nature of reality and, if not, what it is all for anyway. From mountain tops, it overlooks foams of particles with hidden and open charm, beauty, color, and flavor. It gazes down fields of elusive neutrinos, trillions of them, passing through, whose natural sources include the Earth’s core, fusion reactions in the Sun, the atmosphere, supernovae, and other neutrino-emitting sources such as, perhaps, the bright and long gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A reported last fall.

 An inverted figure comes out to play. The upside down juggler rests on its head. It takes one step back into the phenomenological investigation and brings up the concept of an emergent period, whether it be a singular structure or a quantum Big Bounce. Is the Universe a tree whose roots reach the depth of the dark sector, or is it more like a loop with one end in the dark? A mirror image involves an awareness of what goes in and out at the threshold of time. It refers to an implicit give-and-take in decay processes from and to a hidden sector of what is concealed and what is revealed. On a chameleon-like field, scenes of exchange become visible.

The more nature is analyzed in little bits, the more we uncover extra dimensions bound into a higher dimensional continuum. Extra dimensions appear mostly spatial, but the cessation and succession of physical and biological cyclicities tell us about something else: intervals between what is, what has passed, and what will be — all hanging onto the same continuous line of time. As I see it, nothingness stands for a split between all actual entities, whether they be up and down sector quarks or entire galaxies. Nothingness disappears under the remnants of what has passed, underpins what will be, haunts what is, and represents the absence within timelessness.

Every discovery and subsequent observation becomes another fundamental constituent of the observable matter and creates small cracks in the dark sector. Has there always been something? The conservation of energy in dark corners may guarantee the homogeneity and viability of the whole universal system beyond horizons. The quintessential question is whether each break contains the quantum-gravitational seeds — whether any given quantum spacetime reproduces what happened with the very early quantum universe. 

The early Universe followed a timeline of its own. There is an order of appearance: After a primordial epoch of cosmological inflation and the Big Bang, quarks and gluons roamed in infinite degrees of freedom for a split second, surprisingly shorter than a blink of an eye. A mechanism of inflation driven by the hypothetical inflaton preceded the Big Bang and the quark-gluon plasma. Did inflatons decay into gravitons or other hidden particles? The gravitational force appears to hide its quantum origin in the shadows. 

In the quantum Universe, waves of energy wash up on our shores. Subatomic structures decay while others form, through a cycle of life and death, as if there was a conscious attempt to move forward. If there is no strand of personal order in a quantum gravitational foam, how could it be a ground for absorption and emission of discrete amounts of energy? The togetherness of waves and particles offers a paradox: discrete forms and continuous fields. Crawling out of shadows, the Quantum Universe may have begun with point-like particles and a field named Higgs. Could the Higgs field generate mass and be altogether the carrier of gravity through interaction with other particles?

Beyond the Higgs boson, how to imagine discrete amounts of energy without mass? What appears to be the closest to it are neutrinos. The smallness of their mass would suggest that they carry with them the feeling of absence. Neutrinos travel long distances and through large densities because of weak interactions and via gravity. Even smaller than up and down quarks and electrons, they are electrically neutral and the lightest leptons. As the plasma started to cool, primordial neutrinos propagated in the hot gas of baryons and photons under only one second after the Big Bang and during the subsequent expansion phase.

And, among the force carriers, there are the massless photons and gluons. The gluons’ strong force, the photons’ electromagnetic force, the W and Z bosons’ weak force, and the gravitational force allow connections to take place and bonds to form among particles and matter, as if their energy carriers were channeling bits of ‘life’ and ‘consciousness.’ Could force-carrying bosons be what makes the Universe an organism?

We wonder whether time truly exists during the Universe’s fleeting moments and whether short-lived particles contemplate the prospect of a future. Was there a time flow for axions, tachyons, Higgs, or other unknown primordial particles? At the gates of Nothingness, the most common construction materials — up and down quarks and electrons — make up all the carriages in the Universe. Do quarks see hadronization as their life mission? How do protons feel about time? A proton in its everlasting box may be clueless about how a human feels. 

Like Ruth Renkel, Lee Wilson Dodd (1879-1933) was a prolific writer. His poems and writings are now buried in the archives of newspapers and magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Nation. He is credited for the following quote: “Much that I sought, I could not find.” In the infinitely small, do the four attributes matter? Could the concept of the four-time components make its way into Nothingness and the Quantum Universe?

The horse with no name jumped out of the Eagle Nebula.  “Who am I?” it asked as it pulled forward an invisible carriage whose 30-spoke wheels turn on themselves at the Universe’s cardinal points. The Eagle with dark wings glanced at the horse and wrote a riddle in its trail: “What is, has passed, will be, and is always in the state of becoming?” The horse slid through the  Earth’s clouds hung from the sky dome and came to a halt with no answer. With its keen eyes overlooking from afar the four-dimensional spacetime filled with elements of fire, water, earth, and wind, the Eagle sounded a peal and whispered: “Time.” Through seasons, the horse's hoofs went on printing rings of stars into the wood of trees.

Shapeless Universe means the four-sided reality is embedded in one. Since there is no shape, to begin with, there is no divided entity from the start. Sensitive souls have pondered over their relationship with the Universe since the beginning of time. Ideas are seeds from an antecedent philosophical thought planted into the ground of new lands adapted to their growth. We are seed sowers in the quest for answers, picking up where others left off in a participatory approach to fundamentals and principles through time and space.

There is a double screen of perceptions and conceptions. We may split them apart and observe the projection of their shadows, the interplay between them. In my mind, there is a correspondence between the four time perspectives and the four attributes* of a self, a soul, a being, and an entity — whether actual or enduring. Whitehead writes that the common element of form is simply a complex enduring object. In his mind, ‘enduring’ does not preclude that they enjoy adventures of change through time and space. Enduring entities point to longer cycles and interlocked processes. How every entity processes reality depends on balancing the four time components.

What is a soul anyway? The breath of consciousness. A floating memory expanding freely like gas.  A quantum spark in a magnetic field. Even words have a soul. What I know is that how can a poet not raise the question of the soul? By soul, I mean an ethereal essence that grows and transcends. It is indivisible from cosmic consciousness. We may question the soul’s spiritual journey, whether it precedes the search for a host, and whether the four attributes form a hierarchical chain. Should the soul be prior to being, it may come from an antecedent whereabouts to take part in the foundation of an actual entity. Does the soul find its home where the light touches? And once it finds its niche in the human body, does it lodge in the heart or the mind? Whatever passes in the mind is born out of a feeling. 

The difference lies in the layers of time. Each provides a different perspective. Timelessness is what is always in the state of becoming.  It is the place of the soul. What has passed remains with the self, rigid like a rock, which clings onto past events, stages, and states. What is defines the innocence of action and the freedom of the being. What will be carries in the shadows the quintessential aspect of what it is yet to become. It is what an actual entity — a person or an organism — chases after, planning the next steps behind the scenes to serve the purpose of actualization. Whitehead asserts that even the Universe in any stage of its expansion is the first meaning of ‘organism’. I ask then: In the end, can the universal organism reveal itself by expressing itself and know itself through every bit of experience and still be planning its next steps below the surface?

The four attributes break apart and merge like dark spots on the Sun’s surface. They come together, mix and split. They take on characteristics of awareness, subjectivity, intentionality, and agency. Awareness is the process undertaken by the soul. Subjectivity is what the self cannot escape. Intentionality is what defines the existence of the being. System-wide, Whitehead’s ontological principle refers to the concept of ‘existence.’ It means that any ‘puff of existence’ or ‘drop of experience’ is, by itself, the only reason; to search for a reason, he wrote, is to search for anything that is ‘positively somewhere in actuality, and in potency everywhere.’ Nothingness becomes a nonentity beyond the realms of form and formlessness.

Agency is how an actual entity relates to a group or a society. ‘Society’ is a geometry of social order. It may apply to a group of stars, a category of galaxies, or even a clump of passing clouds. Any togetherness among actual entities underscores ties among living souls and relationships among objects, entities, and individuals. Although there may be a ‘genetic’ relatedness between members, distinct elements become over time impossible to determine. We see the wholeness of a body but are oblivious of its parts, not fully aware of the holobiont-like system within ourselves.

The universal organism is an intricate lacework of geometry and matter. In its ultimate and simplest form, it is shaped by a geometry of ontologically prior entities. Our Sun is a circle; our bodies are vertical lines with feet on the ground and heads in the clouds. We are strings, short and tall, capable of emitting sounds. And within such a geometry is a shapeless Universe laying bare its simplicity.

Reality displays a landscape of boxes in boxes. Within the boundary of each box is a mindscape that only catches a partial view through pierced holes that let sun rays shine in. From a higher vantage point, drops of feeling are everywhere at different degrees of agency, sentience, and consciousness, thus denying insentience.  A modern take on Buddhism would argue that if entities had been insensitive and devoid of seeds, the structured reality at every level, whether physical or spiritual, would not have produced anything. And so if the soul of the Universe — the source of consciousness — is indivisible from every entity, it is all at the same time individualized into every entity, scattered into echoes and mirror souls.

In contact with their environment, entities are malleable. Metaphorically speaking, they curve, flow, or freeze like water. They may be endowed with corporeality, sensations, perceptions, and the volitional act within their consciousness, as do systems and ‘societies’ that are organically constructed from actual entities. Their raison d’être is the outcome they pursue. Sentience is determined by how they relate to their surroundings through prehensions or inner feelings of perceptions by the self. 

The question of sentience brings back to the forefront the fragile figure of the juggler. It, too, evolves into a more random state. It stretches and shrinks, moves away and closer from the collapsing of its parts. It, too, is a geometrical figure that spins on its axis. The more it spins, the more the collapsing circles of concepts become unsteady, distancing from each other at times and deepening the spatiotemporal divide from the one integrated structure. Positively speaking, the primordial integrated structure is the togetherness of Nothingness and the Quantum Universe.

 Like the juggler, the Universe loses its grip on its parts to the benefit of their independence. Something within takes over. Divides and intervals make it harder.  Every bit of experience becomes wrapped up in themselves. But if they are part-to-whole, shouldn’t they intuitively know deep down how the Universe and all its parts feel? It is neither about an outside view nor an inside experience. It is that everything — through the self, the being, the soul, and the entity — is a manifestation of time.

* The term ‘living soul’ on the top of the page to the right comes from a translation by Edward Conze. It was meant to describe the living beings, the mistaken belief in the permanence of life. The emphasis was originally on ‘life,’ not on ‘soul.’ I have revised it to focus on the ‘soul’ and extend its reach to every manifestation of time. Like Conze, I use the word ‘being’ instead of ‘creature’ to emphasize the idea of existence. I also use the general term ‘entity’ instead of ‘person’ or ‘human being’ to widen the philosophical view. 

Randolph Kloetzli, Buddhist Cosmology

Whitehead, Process and Reality

Did Edward and Annie Maunder read Mallarmé’s poem when they took it upon themselves to tell the story of the heavens? Did they take note of the way his writing dances on the sheets of paper and how each word and group of words spread like sunspots on the Sun’s surface? Observers held down by gravity to the Earth’s crust see the reality, that is there for them to see, on the uppermost layer of things: stars twinkling on the velvet sky, sunspot groups whose ascent to the surface remains invisible. 

They see patterns, signs of a hidden process, and clues that storms are brewing. They observe outbreaks of spots beginning in the regions farthest in latitude and migrating in both hemispheres closer to the Sun’s equator. The distribution zone of those outbreaks within a solar cycle draws a butterfly-like time stamp. They notice the fluctuations in the symmetry of the wings. During the grand solar maximum of the last century, there was a clear north-south asymmetry, with a significantly greater number of outbreaks in the northern hemisphere. The trend was reversed with sunspots almost exclusively in the southern hemisphere during the last grand minimum and the Maunder minimum (1645–1710).

Sunspots live and die, at least on the surface. Quieter areas, between stronger magnetic clusters, act as transition regions as if they were linked to a network down below. Darker-looking spots are large and small, growing and shrinking,  breaking up and coalescing, round and elongated, short and long-lived, in pairs and in groups. There are dark clouds with haloes passing in the plasma sky. And just as clouds, they change form and disappear.

I thought about writing a post on how the Sun remains a constant in our lives. From the Eagle Nebula, I came back to the timeless presence of the Sun. Born from nebula clouds and contracted into a ball of gas, his internal dynamics transpire through spots, plages, pores, jet-like prominences, and rising flares. Below the surface, his granular texture hides a mechanism that secretly triggers sudden conflagrations as if underground volcanoes were spewing excess plasma. Pressure waves up and down along tunnels and bridges create a changing morphology.

But in the end, I wrote about cycles of time, how apparent cycles stretch, break under the heavy weight of internal and external drivers and disruptors. Intervals in between lengthen. Cycles are lost amid variables. They are an approximation of reality that involves a bundle of coarse-grained events whose fine details start to take shape. Any system — whether it be the Sun or the Universe — evolves into a more random state as time progresses.

And so, the Sun goes through cycles of change. Cyclicity is a property easier to comprehend on shorter time scales, less when it comes to a time span of thousands to billions of years whose beginning and end are hard to fathom. Chance, through the appearance of repeating patterns, like sunspots, rises to the surface. In the Sun’s polar field reversal and magnetic activity, we find indicators and set up parameters to confirm predictions of a cyclic, if not periodic, pattern. While solar cycles last, on average, for 11 years, a cycle around 1601 lasted five years, and the one that followed, 16. In the 18th century, there were 7 or 8 years cycles while others lasted for 15. The hypothesis is that the lengthening of plural neighboring solar cycles, among which at least one cycle is several years longer than 11, could be a prerequisite for long-lasting sunspot disappearance. Yet, while cycle 23 was 12.7 years, 24 returned to a regular length of 11 years.

Solar minima, which last a few cycles, are also characterized by a greater number of spotless days. Cycle 24 was the 4th on record with the least sunspots. There were  274 spotless days in 2019 (SILSO). However, a recent increase in solar activity has occurred during the rising phase of solar cycle 25. It has seen a reversal, with the number of spotless days dropping in 2020 and 2021, respectively 192 and 50 (SILSO). After a quiet solar winter, the Sun came out of his slumber to resume his fiery activity.

Whether we are coming out of a brief minimum period will be determined by whether 25 is as weak as or weaker than 24. Its maximum is expected between February and March 2024, and if there is a secular minimum, it may last through cycle 26. But even so, it would not be sufficient to counteract the warming trend caused by greenhouse gas emissions, which is six times greater than the possible decades-long cooling from a prolonged grand solar minimum. 

Twelve hundred years ago, a large sunspot was observed with the naked eye on March 16, 807, at the time of Charlemagne. As it was reported in the Annales Royales, it lasted eight days. Was it of the size or even exceeding that of the great north group of solar spots spotted by Richard Carrington in 1859? During the great geomagnetic storm of August 28 through September 3, 1859, Carrington witnessed the extremely powerful sequence of two patches of intensely bright and white light, stronger possibly than the most powerful X-ray flare recorded on the 4th of November 2003. Large flares may impact Earth directly depending on where eruptions occur on the Sun’s surface. Magnetic reconnection, in which energy stored in magnetic fields is converted to energy in charged particles, is at the base of the formation of geomagnetic storms, potentially damaging to satellites, space travel, ground communication systems, and power grids. Charlemagne’s biography described the fire of a wooden structure and a dazzling torch descending from the serene sky. Do those details relate to a coronal mass ejection reaching Earth? It is estimated that G dwarf stars like the Sun could produce superflares every few hundred to few thousand years. 

In the mind’s eye, everything is connected through loops of adjustment and feedback, from cosmic events to the growth of tree rings. We feel the timeless presence of what is, what has passed, what will be, and what is always becoming. Tree ring researchers attempt to confirm whether radiocarbon enrichment events of cosmogenic origin can leave consistent fingerprints. One study discovered a possible correlation with three potential solar particle events in 994, 1052, and 1279. Another identified two radiocarbon events in 774 and 993. A third suggested that the solar system navigates through interstellar clouds thick enough to shrink by a factor of one-fourth the heliospheric magnetic field, already diminished after the past few weak cycles. When solar activity declines, galactic cosmic rays may reach Earth and cause a rapid increase in carbon-14 at every other minima of solar cycles.

While we contemplate the possibility of longer cycles of an astronomical origin, we ask ultimately to what extent they are intertwined with those of the whole biosphere and human life.  We understand time through the spatiotemporal complexities of interlocked cycles (sunspots, precession, rotation, seasonal, hydrological, carbon, nitrogen,…). Yet, we still struggle to grasp how the relationship between living souls and the Universe fits in all of this. 

Within a system of stacked cycles, there appears hidden in the human brain and body the hard question of consciousness. We can’t confirm the system-wide cyclicality of historically rare events, only that there, on Earth in this Universe, are born living souls. Concretely, on the surface, the Universe reveals itself step by step and knows itself little by little. Below the surface, there are intricate connections between beings and mechanisms, all equipped with the power of agency. We feel that the birth of a human soul is a fractal occurrence like the branches of an invisible tree and that, beyond the Earth’s geophysical and biochemical response to solar activity, there are resonance signals overshadowed along the paths of UV flux, energetic particles, and plasmatic matter. Let’s imagine that the Sun has volition and the power to communicate through light particles. And so the noise-like character of the solar radiation and the sound of waves on his stormy surface are received loud and clear at radio frequencies over great distances in neighboring galaxies to the other side of the Universe. But even the Sun is subject to universal time structures.

In January 2023, the Earth shook significantly on 12 occasions, with two events on January 20th — and again this month with a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Turkey — while two dozen volcanoes threw thermal signals, emitted ash, and blew steam. The Sun, too, put out a clear message that it was quiet no more with three X-flares (small though) and 13 medium-sized bursts. When dealing with concomitant events, we wonder whether the Earth trembles when the Sun unleashes dust clouds, whether she responds with tears of lava when solar winds unwind.

In the end, the Universe is a metaphor meant to describe shapes and visual forms. Metaphors reveal that within a circle, there is a Sun, and within a theory, there is a shapeless Universe. When the Sun went down behind the Freedom Tower, I thought of newborn stars forming in the heads of gas pillars.  Drawn to the edge of the abyss, the gates of the heliosphere, the mind sees the Universe as a fractal fluid of free particles. Scales are relative. And when I hear the word invariance, it is still the word convergence that resonates in my head. On the visual trail from the city skyline to nebulae and back, pillars rising from the surface of the Sun shoot arrows of plasma in the direction of the Earth. 

A bird in the shadow flew over the neighbor’s locust tree across from the rising Sun. The breeze carried its wings. There was no cloud in the sky as it flew back a while later. A house sparrow sat on the top branch of the oak sapling outside my window. Its chirping sound pulled me out of the fog in my head. The night before, I dreamt of an elephant charging and a colossal bear sleeping on rooftops. At night, dreaming is like watching a drama unfold from the mind’s dark places to brighter horizons. In the daytime, song sparrows guided my footsteps through the enchanted forest of the Universe toward the long lateral branches of a massive white-bark tree shining in the sunlight.

Earth's Climate response to a changing Sun, Thierry Dudok de Wit,  (editor)

Cycles of time, Roger Penrose

Living with the Stars, Carolus J. Schrijver and Iris Schrijver

The heavens and their stories, Annie S. D. Maunder and Edward Walter Maunder

A visual trail opens up. It passes through light, sound, and water, goes up skyscrapers, and makes its way through clouds into the Sun. It is the same old path that starts off with concepts and reaches into the physical world. A theory of harmony spans over an invisible abyss. A bridge connects an array of correspondence principles, first thought of conceptually, then in the most concrete ways. Ideas, too, are conveyed by colors of light, wavelength, and sounds. They, too, spring from a host and need a medium to reach receptors whose spatiotemporal location is intrinsically linked to an inner self of past images and ancestral memories. Do reason and logic have anything to say, or does freedom lead the way beneath the surface of things?

The Pillars of creation have been studied over the years, providing us with new insights. Snapshots taken since the very first time the structures were captured with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 are fragments of a moving scenery. They are located in M16, one of the nebulae “with stars” listed by Charles Messier in his original catalog of 1771, which Jean-Philippe Loys de Cheseaux first observed based on a list he compiled in 1746. Messier wrote that in the night of June 3 to 4, 1764, he (re)discovered a cluster of small stars, which appeared in the form of a nebula.

The Universe is made of views of events which unfold as each piece of information is passed on from one event to the next. As with the formation of stars and planets by accretion, when events go through stages, they add newly integrated features to living mechanisms. Whether nebulae move away, asteroids face the Earth, or galaxies are seen face-on or edge-on, image processing attempts to produce a unified picture that converts a set of composite data into assigned colors. 

Pillars are common in star-forming regions, notably the Mystic Mountain in the Carina Nebula. Like light and shadow on a face,  their curly plumes in infrared light reveal a complex morphology, outflows of translucent gas, embedded stars, and stratified structure. It is speculated that their transitory existence is contingent upon the explosion of supernovas and that their shape is subject to change until they break off and tumble down. 

Pillars of creation may be as wide as the distance separating the Sun from Barnard’s Star, and the tallest could stretch from us to Proxima Centauri. Their life span may be a few million years in the grand scheme of things. Their heads are ionized and photoevaporated by the nearby cluster NGC6611 making the clouds look like mare’s tails in the sky. The first pillar to the left consists of two separate entities. The upper part flows behind the ionizing stars with tails of evaporating cometary globules pointing away from us. The lower part stands in front of them with tails pointing toward us. The pillars are divided into three principal components, with the third shape being unspecified, like a horse with no name.

Pillars of creation rise in the midst of the Eagle Nebula, like stalagmites on a cave floor. The eagle with dark wings hovers over a secluded cove, the nest of ascending cloud chains. Its bird’s eye view catches the physical and spiritual sides of things. Pillars are ethereally anchored on a ridge, drawing mass and energy. The limpid folds of gas and dust are stripped of their substance by hungry stars.

On the visual trail, fundamentals co-arise as trains of thought rapidly succeed. Poets rise early to catch the Sun’s eyes. They listen to the inner voices of the past, present, and future until they float back down in the light of the setting Sun. They tell stories of their encounters with shapes and forms of the Universe. A journey through space resembles a stroll into the woods. The play of shine and shade on the trees feeds their inspiration. 

Into the dark Woods of the Universe, there are trees whose roots grow beneath the surface of things. Pillars are gigantic tendrils of cosmic dust reminding poets of tree limbs. Once scale falls from their inner eye, pillars become winter trees wrapped with naked vines, filiform bodies reflecting light in the nebula’s den, sculptural figures. The subtlety of all things lies within the collapse of spacetime, the riddance of scale.

Misty-topped columns bursting with activity are spiritual beings whose subtle presence earth-bound receptors feel. Niched within hollow cavities of nebulae, they stand tall like slender buildings of the New York skyline as if they, too, were part of a laboratory for architecture, a nursery for creation. Gas pillars and concrete skyscrapers become one, merging into a shapeless Universe. 

Pillars of Creation are castles built of sand echoes repeating an unuttered feeling endlessly that there is no agency without space, no sentience without time, no consciousness without gravity. They reveal the outline of a hermit who stands face to face with three bodies sitting upon each other shoulders, all asking the same thing: “Why, on Earth, would we live and die if not to achieve a higher purpose?”

Robert Burnham Jr. saw the silhouette of the Star Queen in the outline of the middle pillar (from the right). In my mind’s eye, I see an alchemist in her workshop working on the agency of physical and spiritual processes, transforming chaos and forming stars. She weaves a network of intricate connexions within the ever-changing architectural structures, funneling a timeless essence through spacetime. She feeds the genesis of things and keeps a fragile balance shuffling matter with energy. 

The star queen I draw below is made with beads from my old necklace, strung on a thread. They create a subtle chain of rings precariously balanced together on top of each other like a house of cards, the house of everything. They form a dancer who, I imagine,  pirouettes around an axis of loops. Information cuts across lines. Circles intersect. I only have an intuition. I only feel a little nudge in that direction.

There was a wall of clouds on the horizon at daybreak. The dead poets had gathered all night around the simmering pot of concepts, debating over what could have plucked the humming strings in the silence of the night. Their minds were flying high above the glittery surface of the Earth, playing catch with fading echoes of all the chirping, croaking, booming, rattling, whirring sounds of Nature, forming a choir down below. 

There was a buzzing sound in their ears of voices from beyond the grave. Bertrand Russell whispered that strings of events are connected according to the laws of motion. One such string is called one piece of matter; another is called a person, and the transition from one event in the string to the next is called “a motion,” like a motion picture of multiple flows into one flow, strings of the Universe. 

Johannes Kepler joined in the philosophical ramble. By string, he meant the length of any motion or any other length capable of emitting a sound. He clearly associated distance to sound. A string is a distance traveled by any motion, even that of a gravitational wave or a radio emission. On the one hand, there is distance, mass, and electric force. On the other, there is entropy, beauty, and melody. Beauty refers to the visual; melody refers to the sequence of sounds. Where, then, does gravity fall? Since gravity isn’t an entropic force, it seems fitting to place it along distance, mass, and electric force. 

The fool on the hill who tagged along recounted the story of her profound experience with light, sound, and water, prompting the symposium to shout to Joseph Mallord William Turner whether he could add sounds to his paintings of the Unveiled from beyond the grave. In a conceptual reality where distances are humming strings,  there exists a table of correspondences between colors of light, wavelength, and related sound frequencies. 

In the first light of the Sun, they composed poetry using metaphors like meteors of the sea, birds of the cosmos, and flowers of the sky. They formed rhymes about the Earth being a soundscape of ringing rocks responding to echoes of singing stars and balancing planets. They swore there is a connection between light-givers — optical transients with fleeting lights — and light-bearers — anglerfishes whose lure inhabits a bacteria called photobacterium.

Wishing to co-create a poetic code for the house of everything, they disappeared over the horizon, chasing communication keys and following trails of vanishing stars falling off an invisible tree like autumn leaves. Humming strings waved, making faces in the clouds.  Light beings came along, playing peekaboo by the silvery light of the Moon which hung below Jupiter. The Earth, deafened by the sound of temperature rising, cast her shadow over the Moon. 

On my way to New York City, trees swung fall leaves, bowing down to the rapid translation of commuters. Gravity pinned down the heavy stream while dead leaves freely rose, blown by the wind. Dancing branches sang to the tune of the trumpet and the harp whose strings were strained beyond limit by the lyrical Lady so that they snapped free. The gradual collection of strings of events resembles a gathering of kindred spirits. Beyond human perception, a string in harmony with another will always vibrate sympathetically.

At the tropical garden of Valombreuse, red-tailed hawks hovering over bare trees and white-tailed deers on the side of the highway are replaced by hummingbirds hopping on porcelain roses. In the lost paradise surrounded by water, ego is a skin-shedding reptile crushed by the passing of time, a frog-poet grappling with illusionary rhymes. As I listened to the sound of the ocean waves crashing on the long sandy beach, the cacophony of the falling waters came back into my mind. 

Since sounds travel slower than light, beauty and melody are split. They are a two-step experience. What we sense through sight and hearing occurs unevenly as a result of the infinite number of strings that separate us from every droplet bouncing on the ground in a single extended event. At the rate at which waves roll down the beach, a compound sound emits a number of harmonically related vibrations. As sound travels through air, water, and matter, it causes vibrations along a greater number of dimensions than the linear form of a single string. Wave frequencies superimpose on each other. 

Transformed sounds and waves travel across spacetime and through matter.  Steadiness implies that even gravitational waves are part of a conversion chain. In the Universe occurs the limitless transmission of multiform waves. For them to travel, they require a source (host), space in-between, and a receptor. While sounds can’t move through empty space, gravitational ripples travel at the speed of light and distort the fabric of spacetime. Humming strings connect points of the spacetime manifold.

If being came out of something, that something which came out of the shadows has a sound for property. Is a sound incidental or fundamental? Humming strings whose shape and size bring about the lowest frequency grow to become moving sounds and waves of the ensouled Universe. Strings cross each other and vibrate like a string orchestra performing a movement. The Universe, in its plurality, is a resonance chamber, a music studio. Resonance in and out of matter carries waves of a discreet melody played on the keyboard of time.

Russell and Kepler seem miles apart. Can a length be anything else but a motion across spacetime? How can the transition from one event in the string to the next be a motion, and the length of any motion be a string? And how can a motion not make noise or give an impulse that causes a vibration? Those questions feed into the debate on how we perceive the Universe, whether we view it as a patchwork of events or an ever-changing geometrical figure. 

A string carries the meaning of all orders of events. That which plucks the humming strings in the silence of the night relates to the ontology of a string that carries the unspoken intent of a linkage. From the sounds of moving objects, we feel that stars, galaxies, and other bodies might also produce noise friction through the intergalactic and interstellar medium. Stars rustling radiate radio waves covering the muffled sound of Nothingness whose grip loosens to let strings break free. Strings become random motion, seesawing events separated by segments of silence. 

Is light withdrawing or darkness covering the light with its cloak? Do sentient beings and inanimate objects reflect light, or do they have an intrinsic light within them whose brightness varies according to spatial and temporal circumstances? Brightness or reflection? We speak of relativity in luminous intensity and observe the brilliance of each inanimate object and sensitive being according to the luminous intensity of each other. Nothingness within bears the intrinsic light.

The Universe communicates with waves going back and forth along strings in time-like intervals. Sounds are what we hear. Vibrations are what we feel. The representational content of a human experience feeds on a steady flow of energy, which manifests light-years away into cosmic scenes of random beats, X-ray flares, and radio bursts. We’re told that bright radio bursts release as much energy as the Sun does in days or even years. They are ephemeral-like events, usually lasting for about one-thousandth of a second. However, a three-second radio burst was reported to have at least nine overlapping components. Somehow my mind made the connection with birds’ songs. There are high-pitched calls of long duration, like the gentle and clear whistle of white-throated sparrows, and repeated series of notes, such as the distress call of Carolina Wrens. 

Red and orange sunset extended over the clouds. Under the starry dome, I flew back home from New York City. There were pockets of lights along the Eastern Seaboard, which looked like snaps of fireworks. In the native garden, birds chirping came in and out of bushes as if they wanted to say hello. Bikes’ wheels squeaked as they rolled over red and yellow coating left by trees on the Custis trail a while ago. Time goes on.

Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres

To lift your mind up:  there are breathtaking online magazines such as Emergence, well-written articles by Lee Billings in the Special Collector’s edition of the Scientific American (Summer 2022), and flows of ideas in Aeon so much so that my head is spinning, overrun with disheveled thoughts I can’t straighten up. I don’t know why some linger longer than others. I only know that they need to be rearranged together. I hope that by spelling them out one by one, those ghostly imprints will either enter a more straightforward line of reasoning or simply vanish.

The Universe is a breeding sphere, a breathing field strewn with islands of consciousness. From massive stars to strains of cyanobacteria, an immanent thing rests upon its quantum nature of freedom, essence, and existence. To us, reality wears a coat of light and water. It is a screen of molecules woven into the electromagnetic field. To us, life and consciousness intertwine. We are unable to conceive one outside of the realm of the other. In our eyes, consciousness is glued to the ground, prevented from escaping into space the way Earth’s gravity keeps oxygen down.

Given that we are carbon-based living beings breathing in oxygen in a hydrogen-dominant Universe, should we expect that any form of life and consciousness derives from those same physicochemical parameters, modeled after our own experience of biological building blocks on Earth? As hard it is to imagine life beyond what is conventionally accepted, it is even less intelligible the extent to which consciousness — in the most general terms — occurs. 

More than our inability to imagine a greater diversity for niches of life and consciousness, our attempt at classifying them beyond Earth and the Solar system, beyond spatiotemporal boundaries, takes the risk of downplaying all the possibilities. Intuitively, though, we feel the heaviness of an invisible map drawn not only through physical places and distances we travel. Threads weave the present into a monster blueprint that is slowly expanding. Such an invisible web is full of dynamics pulling and repelling, splitting apart our bodies and souls. It extends across time, keeping tight invisible cords while mounting scaffolds of consciousness breaking up beneath the surface of things. 

There’s the image in my head of a fracture that almost completely surrounds Artemis corona, the mouse-shaped feature on Venus.  It cuts through the same way as with the deep-sea Aleutian Trench to the south of the Bering Sea, whose maximum depth is 78 times that of the fault line at the Mosi-oa-Tunya Falls. Physical fractures merge with disappearing time intervals. Time is gravity written in geometrical patterns. In trench-like areas with weak gravity, time feels different. Climbing out of the shadows, extremophiles move away from the quantum realm to set up biological niches on their own timescale. Inside the crust and in the depths of celestial objects, there are microorganisms from which more complex lifeforms will, in time, emerge.

In a Universe crisscrossed by invisible time-dependent spatial relationships, past, present, and future poets are mind travelers looking through the lens of telescopes at stars and planets. Planets depending on their position, are on their own timescale, and as time goes by, stars increase in size, pushing further away the habitable zone. Those much closer to the galactic center may have an even slower timescale than the Sun. Far from city lights, poets watch the night sky gradually changing with the continuous launch of human-made satellites since the sixties. Could one of them get out of orbit and reach a nearby planetary system? Could it drift for millions of years and return to an Earth that was once its home? Could Oumuamua be a drifting satellite launched aeons ago by an alien civilization?

It may be that the goal set by Emergence to underline timeless connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality inspires me to say the following: In a perfect world, the Outer Space Treaty would have meant right from the start for States Parties to conduct exploration so as to avoid “harmful contamination.” Are we harming, even if unknowingly, undiscovered lifeforms? Are we subjecting them to our system of values, convinced anyway that if there are life forms out there, they’re probably microorganisms deemed inferior to human life? In our current effort to remove space debris, we acknowledge the potential risk of leaving behind waste and shards of metal in Outer Space and on extraterrestrial objects the same way we have recognized it to be environmentally harmful to our oceans.

Territories and uncharted lands have been seized by right of conquest throughout human history. Such a principle left permanent scars and became institutionalized in our human psyche. Seventy years after the  Supreme Court upheld it in 1823, one of the wealthiest people in the US, John Jacob Astor, described in his scientific romance Outer worlds “that would have satisfied a poet” while inciting others to “mine the hills for copper and drain the swamps.” One hundred twenty years later, are we still more eager to follow in the footstep of Christopher Columbus than to fill the role of custodians of Outer Space?

Historical knowledge is a window into human nature. Outside the traditional ways of conducting business as usual, let’s ask fundamental questions about what life is and what consciousness entails before proceeding with the next Gold Rush and the race to drill the ground of planetary bodies. There are interdependent variable quantities and extremely long range correlations sprung from underlying microscopic degrees of freedom. An evolutionary approach to consciousness should be part of our ongoing discussion on space exploration. From planet-changing species to the responsibilities that come with the awareness of our role and duty within the Universe, we ought to grow and consciously feel those invisible ties in order to address the failures of the past and cross the threshold of complexity. 

Settlements come and go. They share the same habitat through loops of temporalities, cosmological and biological events moving in cycles and synchronicity. In a recent article, Caleb Scharf made a reference to the human colonization of the Pacific Ocean, to the length of time that separates the arrival of seafarers from the mythic Hawaiki to that of Europeans. “If typical planetary civilizations can last for a million years and if only 3 percent of star systems are actually settleable”, he writes, “there is roughly 10 percent probability that a planet like Earth is not been visited in at least the past million years”. If time is written in geometrical patterns, then numbers set the rhythm at which those patterns and relationships are formed in space. Will we become the Maori explorers of the future visiting star systems in the next million years?

Four years have passed since I started researching the relationship between the Universe and Consciousness. I feel I have momentarily lost the axis around which I revolve: the fundamental idea that the Universe reveals itself by expressing itself and knows itself through every bit of experience. I have lost the whimsical nature of a poet frog, run over by the wave of History. Living with the Unknown means we are bound to make mistakes, face uncertainties, and show humility.

The white-throated sparrows have returned to the native garden. In the depths of my soul vibrates the crystal clear sound of their whistle. Solitude is a fantasy, a veil cast over our collective demise. Clouded by the haze of doubts, the mind sinks under waves of cosmic symmetries and rides above rivers of terrestrial analogies, catching a glimpse across spatiotemporal lines of the extent to which consciousness can grow. There are communication keys on sheets of gravitational waves that poets catch in their dreams and feel in the earthly signs of light, sound, and water. 

I woke up from a deep slumber to Thoreau’s words to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. If reality is the process of time and evolution, why did my journey to Zambia and the African savanna feel more real to me? We’re told that it is all a matter of perspective, that even the sight of a rainbow is an individually experienced optical phenomenon. There is no single designated lookout point from where to watch reality unfold.

A 300-mile drive from Lusaka, the transboundary Mosi-oa-Tunya Falls (Victoria Falls) more than a mile-long slide down the vertical walls of basalt rock in a free fall. Like a curtain of falling water, the Zambezi River drops abruptly under the force of gravity from a towering height. The resounding waters rush down as if, the legend says, it were the spirit of Nyami Nyami, still angry at how the population was resettled and its stream was forcibly regulated by the construction upstream in 1950 of the Kariba Dam. The planned binational hydroelectric project (BHES) downstream — led by Power Construction Corporation of China and General Electric — may repeat history with its foreseeable impact on the environment and the livelihoods of the local population in the face of climate change.

From an image taken on board the International Space Station showing the deep fissures on the surface of the Earth, the Zambezi River plunges straight down within the spatiotemporal boundary of a fault line from which the misty vapor spills over like white scum. Is a fraction zone the same as a fault line? Do the turbulences the plane experienced over the Charlie Gibbs fracture resemble the tremors I felt on the opposite side of the Falls?

The tightly packed water molecules fight their way down the stream. Thereafter,  the riverbed divides into a stretch of steep-sided gorges zigzagging. The column of vapor rising and the roaring Falls contrast with the seemingly smooth and tranquil river which swells before the Falls into a plateau of islands from where hippos bellow when — I could just imagine — a crocodile swims by. Along the bank extends upstream a National Park much smaller than the one in South Luangwa. It manages however to keep out of harm’s way ten white rhinoceros.

Across from the Falls, a pedestrian overpass dominates a riverine strip which one crosses to reach the very last piece of land on the Zambian side. I felt dizzy when I walked across the bridge 350 feet above the ground. As far as my eyes could see, the horizon was blocked by the misty cloud. I could not distinguish the other end of the fault line three-quarter mile away.

Where reality lies is the Place of the Rainbow, an ancient name cited by David Livingstone for the Mosi-oa-Tunya Falls. The Sun came down on my left while I faced the end of the rainbow. The multicolored arc circled at my feet while the other end stretched away from the Sun on the Zambian side. At one point, there was a double rainbow, barely perceptible. Do rainbows arise and circle on both edges of the curtain? Hoping to find order in what we observe, I wonder whether our perspective is the same or whether it freely varies. 

Could I have seen a rainbow touching the Earth at my feet had I crossed the border with Zimbabwe and reached the right bank of the vanishing river? And if observers stand every 20 inches from each other on the opposite side of the Falls, with their back turned to the Sun, will they all see light striking water droplets and the refraction of three-dimensional air bubbles repeatedly breaking and forming in the same way I did? I wonder whether, through complex processes, exquisitely orchestrated dancing waters unfold or whether we can assume their randomness.

The configuration of the fault line encloses a system of event occurrences causally dependent on each other. Within those topological boundary conditions — bathed in the evening light and battled by macroscopic quantities of water — rainbows are a window to the microscopic collision of droplets. They illustrate how a many-body system works. The smoke-sounding, rainbow-making waterfalls appear in local equilibrium, doing what they are supposed to do, what is expected from them on that ordinary evening of the dry season. 

The fluctuations of the waterfalls reflect the translation and rotation of masses of water continuously occurring. It may be the immeasurable number of water molecules moving all at once, locally and globally, which convey an image of symmetries in motion. Their distribution in staggered superpositions abides by the geometry of steep walls and narrow channels. Versatile droplets burst, spray, roll. They go in and out of existence, from a state of nothingness to a state of being. What is their degree of freedom?

As they fall off the elevated ground with gravity, are they following a non-deterministic path? The linear fault line,  as if it were a spatiotemporal chasm, acts as a control line for the flow of water, each droplet on a short-lived time path falling prey to gravity. As time went by, a choreography of water-made wormholes, vortex, and spirals rising and wriggling popped into my head.

Shortly after my return to Lusaka, I went on a quest through malls and markets for Nyami Nyami, hidden away at the bottom of a basket or the back of a display. It brought me to the Aylmer May Cemetery — an old graveyard from colonial times — next to which stand today the offices of two of the major foreign-owned mining companies. 

Truth be told, I see the human world through the prism of history. Along the roads, the centenary trees wailed, chained to the ground. The next day, in a matter of seconds, the wind blew, and the clouds gathered without a drop of rain. 

While the hope is to discover a true mirror of nature that exhibits the essence of reality, I have lost my footing through the mirroring surface of the Earth. After a two-leg flight and a 19-hour layover, I went home the same way I came. There are so many ways to describe where reality lies that they all contradict each other. If reality is what we think we know, it is also what we think we observe. There is undoubtedly a part of unknown in reality. Reality is singular. Reality is discrete.

I’ve lost my sense of continuity between the places I’ve been. Amid fragmented realities, my living essence seeps increasingly through the temporal, physical, and conceptual gaps which pull apart the reality that constitutes our human existence. Each place is an element of reality I can’t quite reassemble within my mind and body. 

Reality is anchored in our consciousness only through the increase of the length of time. Without physical and mental entanglement, we may be less aware of the reality of our surroundings. I feel as though I have unknowingly stumbled across the essence of reality: it is the misty cloud at the Falls that turns into fog over the Fall line on the trail to Rosslyn. It is the setting sun at the Falls that rises through the fog this morning. It is the wet drops of the Falls that become rain lightly falling on my skin. It is the rainbow I saw through the prism of history.

The observer of the human soul passes on the three rings of intuition, sensibility, and self-awareness. It may be that my words wish to relay to others the relentless flow of things, the moving set of situations and circumstances that engulf life and matter, myself including. Every once in a while we all need a change of scenery and forget for a brief moment that something deeply rooted inside us never really goes away regardless of the latitude of the place we live in. 

Thousands of miles away from home, we are held by the puppet strings of our emotional responses and homegrown biases. Like little probes swung by turbulence drifting 12 billion miles away from Earth hooked by a timeless connection with other space missions and observatories as if they coud listen to each other faint whispers, we swing back and forth in the web of social relationships between standing up for what we believe and the influence of others, hoping to strike the right balance. Interstellar objects under the gravitational pull from the Sun, Jupiter, and on jump into the interstellar medium, beyond the solar wind, where they will be slowly pulled away by the magnetic field from another neighboring star (1).

I departed from my beloved surroundings— the luxuriant native garden and the straight architectural lines and steel sculptures rising out of Glenstone landscape — to dive into the unknown. After a two-leg-flight and 21 hours later, I crossed the Gulf of Aden to reach Africa. From above I could already discern smoke rising from burning land and wildlife gathering in the water as the plane descended. I traded a murder of crows and a pair of vultures feasting on neighborhood trash for black and white pied crows — evocative of the smaller London magpies. One was perched on a wall along Leopards Hill Road; others were flying above Latitude 15, and a pair hopped on the front lawn of the Cathedral.

On the plane over the clouds at sunset, I was convinced that free will dominates the Universe. But when I reached the Mambwe District in Zambia’s Eastern Province, I felt the resurgence of a long-forgotten bond with my ancestral lineage the way I imagine space probes keep forever in their structural design the memory of those who engineered them, carrying the imprint of their souls and that of humanity. The great force of history, James Baldwin wrote, comes from the fact that each one of us carries it inside us and is unconsciously controlled by it. I still struggle with that idea, but felt on this journey into rural Zambia the weight of history, through intense dreams and emotional turmoil.

What stayed with me, though, is the unsolvable mystery of event symmetry, the mirror reflection of universal events. It is less about whether the throw of the dice could ever abolish chance than its occurrence while the ship sinks during a storm — the odd synchronicity in sceneries and landscapes, individual and collective actions. I jumped into the unknown, my hardwired brain resembling a gravity-assist interstellar probe on the edge of the heliosphere touching the far-flung corners of the galaxy, torn between the urge to resist and falling prey to the raging cosmic rays.

At Glenstone, a quotation by the late William Weiner tells the story of matter so shaken to its core that it leads to a change in inherent form to the extent of bringing about a change in the destiny of the material. Bits of matter form and grow, fragment, and reform the way I see physical bodies and human, if not cosmic, consciousness do. I have stalled where the intervals have disappeared, my living essence dripping into the shadows of Nothingness. Neutrinos, I feel, stand at its gateway.

The quantum state of the Universe, like a topology of breaking and reconstruction of boundaries in interparticle interactions brings images to my mind of spatiotemporal chasms, crests, and troughs of wave-particles the same way I see unfold social interactions when we clash and embrace each other time after time. Gap closing occurs with the popping up of surface states (2), leading to surface quantum criticality. If global and local symmetries emerge in the process, do they also apply to spatial divisions and disappearing time intervals? Do they rule over phase transitions? The changing topology across the quantum critical state may indicate that change itself is information encoded in the quantum field.

The observable manifestation of a particle is the result of an excited state of the quantum field. The question then I raise pertains to the behavior of particles. In their quantum walk as they propagate — going down multiple paths at once — do they ignore each other, stick to one another and try to get as far away as possible from each other all in the same breath? The Universe tingles at every point of contact and sinks back in disappearing intervals. 

If particles were words, the excited state would amount to the tingle we feel with the sense of closeness before the inspiration sinks back again. The Universe in its evolutive form bears a resemblance with a present thought, although not ignorant of the time-gap, which still regards itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past. Particles, likened to specks of metaphysical dust acting as a proto-will, trigger the awareness of information. While global symmetries may refer to the symmetry of charge conservation and time reversal, supersymmetry, if supported by evidence, may involve the emergent symmetry of fermions — particles that form matter — and bosons — which mediate the interactions between them (3). 

In the South Luangwa National Park strewn with ebony, apple-leaf, tamarind, and sausage trees, zebras, impalas, giraffes, waterbucks, monkeys, and others appear to live in peace side by side — except for the predatory lions, leopards, and wild dogs. We crossed the dry and sandy Luangwa riverbed in search of the iconic African baobab beyond the pristine mopane forest far from the reach of elephants. We dwelt upon the hidden life of trees and wondered if baobabs are falling prey to the changing climate the way white oaks back home seem to be. Symmetries in my head refer to those parallel events across spatiotemporal boundaries.

As if they perceived the presence of a threat, I watched animals within a 500-meter perimeter stand still, their head turned in the direction of a nearby field of tall grass, in a posture that incidentally reminded me of museum-goers gazing with perplexity at Serra’s latest installation. On other occasions, there appears to be, in a herd or a smaller group, the most curious one, the explorer ceaselessly staring while others carry on. 

The observing giraffe keeps an inquisitive eye on me. She feels the bond that ties her to the whole Universe. She has no doubt that any life form would know the coldness of the breeze, the brightness of the full moon over the Luangwa River and the thickness of the dust haze the way she experiences it. She has no doubt that the one whom she observes knows, too well, how it feels to walk, run and fall. 

Living beings feel the touch of gravity, the mounting tingling during intervals before collapse, the heart murmur of the Universe. The jointing and separateness among parts of the stream of consciousness may reflect a time-gap. Such a gap is intensely active, bringing every point of contact and every surface state toward a specific direction. A game of hide-and-seek plays out in the vast expansiveness of the Universe. The other end of the Janus point hides in gaps, spatiotemporal chasms, and disappearing intervals, which sculptors hopelessly want to transpose in their work as the negative space. 

William James spoke of the resting places of the 'substantive parts,' and the places of flight of the 'transitive parts'.  Do a pair of pigeons or pied crows signal to each other when it is time to fly? Upon their landing on the ground, I observed their resting places — the cement fences around houses and compounds, the squeaky sound of the left-hand drive cars, the pool players, the young students walking and the flowering trees along Leopards Hill Road. 

(1) Scientific American, July 2022, p.40

(2) Topological Quantum Critical Points in Strong Coupling limits: Global Symmetries and Strongly Interacting Majorana Fermions

(3) Absence of emergent supersymmetry at superconducting quantum critical points in Dirac and Weyl semimetals

Words like beads on a necklace create a series of images. They are the voices in my head. When one speaks of Nature, it is the Earth-bound nature I see, not the Universe as a whole. I imagine that one encompasses the other, that the Universe is a reservoir of Nature, and that Nature is a separative stage of the Universe, a kind of outgrowth. We, humans, are neither at the center of the Universe nor even at the center of Nature.

The difference between the two words may be that one was more commonly used in the past. Words carry memories. Pascal urged us to contemplate the whole of Nature in Her full and grand majesty. The whole visible world, he added, is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of Nature (1). One meaning however has endured: Nature and the Universe both provide a sense of unity. They imply the existence of one single entity across time and scale. What was a theory of Nature has become a theory of everything. And to scientists, such a theory poses a mathematical riddle rather than an epistemological one. Rules that have been tested and verified most stringently are elevated to the status of Laws of Nature (2). Those Laws of Nature support each other like building blocks in a game of reciprocal causality. They come together, Matthew Bothwell writes, to produce a Universe filled with these ridiculously vast –- and incomparably beautiful –- structures. 

Nature though isn’t a passive player, a mere landscape. “Being” I recall, “came out of something, nature came out of Being”.  Nature is the genesis of growing things. It is a process of creation and refers to the life of the Universe. Indeed, the most surprising in cosmology is that the nature of the Universe requires continuous creation—the perpetual bringing into being of new background material (3). 

Somehow by the power of creation, Nature does something that seems impossible, making more energy available. Nature shapes the Universe. Its overpowering effects bring the Universe out of Nothingness, moving it forward. Not only Nature does not allow anything to perish, Lucretius wrote, till it has encountered a force that shatters it with a blow or creeps into chinks and unknits it, but Nature also repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another’s death (4). It is as if we could follow the tracks of Nature within the Universe.

In Nature we see fractals, and patterns, constantly and regularly occurring along a set of well-defined categories. Are Laws of Nature ineluctable and their number finite? And why is it that Nature often seems to make sense on the assumption that it has a purpose? (5) Nature becomes a fateful thing to which the Universe obeys, that which subdues the Universe. I wonder why it all comes down to the existence of governing laws from which the Universe can’t escape and where the urge to make sense and find order in all things comes from.

Nature versus Nurture is preceded by the ontological debate over steadiness versus evolution. Within the boundaries of physics, we look at Nature processes. As the nurturing conditions provide for evolution, the indecipherable process has complicated our understanding of the conservation of ontology. Nurturing conditions affect the geometry of the whole system. The evolved stage of Nature under the direction set by entropy bears waves of feeling and emotion across spacetime. Today what conservation of ontology means, in the most practical terms, is the conservation of Nature. 

Let’s say that the Janus point stands at the narrow neck of a sandglass. If the Universe were an expanding glass bulb and each grain of sand the size of Webb’s view of the Universe, what would constitute the steadiness of sand? To Fred Hoyle, no matter how far in time and space we, observers, view the cosmos, we will still be able to see about the same number of galaxies as we do now. At first sight, he explained, it might be thought that this could not go on indefinitely because the material forming the background would ultimately become exhausted. Following in the footsteps of Lucretius, he added that “the reason why this is not so is that new material appears to compensate for the background material that is constantly being condensed into galaxies”. Today, the advancement of new technology which allows us to peer deeper into the far reaches of the Universe seems to comfort us into such impression.

In the end, where the realm of Nature begins remains an open question. Should the natural boundaries of the physical Universe extend beyond? It seems far-reaching to start Nature at the quantum level since Nature appears less probabilistic on the surface than seemingly mechanical. For Bohr, I recall, neither particles nor waves are attributes of Nature. They are no more than ideas in our minds that we impose on the natural world. But some have argued that Nature clues in a fundamental truth — quantum mechanics is unique in enabling the assignment of a non-redundant, complete final boundary condition to every system. The ambition of quantum mechanics is to predict the behavior of Nature. And the more we introduce global symmetries into the quantum world, the more Nature claims its design.

Aristotle observed that Nature may also represent an immanent thing from which a growing thing begins to grow. So what constitutes the steadiness of sand? If the Universe is conceptual in nature, that which is preserved, carried across time and space may be its conceptual origination, an immutable and undifferentiated essence within the evolutive appearance of reality. The immanent thing which perdures, despite or owing to variation processes, is the quantum nature defined by Freedom, Essence, and Existence. The Universe goes through stages — the agency of physical and dynamic properties and the sum of all its features weaves a network of intricate connexions within the ever-changing architecture. 

“To a man laboring under calamity,” Emerson wrote,  “the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population” (6). Nature only wears the colors of the spirit. To me, the Universe from its initial state is free to explore what it means to be.

A deer in the park, 

Lilies in the pound, 

The reflecting Sun, 

Stars, rings, and galaxies.

Rabbit crossing

Music in my ears

Highway sounds piercing

People running and biking.

Sun burning

Light in my eyes 

The beat of the drum

Clouds gathering and time passing.

Woodpecker pecking 

Stand by watching

Dog walking 

A grain of sand catching a breeze.

(1)Blaise Pascal, Pensées

(2) James Trefil, Cassell’s laws of Nature 

(3) Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the universe

(4) Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

(5) Peter Dear, The intelligibility of Nature

(6) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature