Brandon Heckman

The Universe is a Logoic Organism fully engaged in ongoing prismatic Self-awareness.

Now that the hell does that mean?

We have this sense that the Universe is a thing that is much bigger than us, much bigger than galaxies, and that is far outside of ourselves. We can conceive that it contains our galaxy, our planet, and we can maybe even conceive that we came from it. But we somehow fail to conceive that we are really in the Universe, that we are, at this moment, part of the Universe, a Happening that’s going on within it and participating with all the other Happenings immersed in it.

I think our bias is that of our mind, the goings-on of which we tie to a notion of spirituality that sets us apart from the physical world. And we also have a quieter bias: Our belief that the physical world itself possesses no spiritual dimensions. The presumption we make about the mind is that thought is an expression of soul, and the presumption we make about the material Universe and other lifeforms in it is that they do not have souls, and that no matter how enormous this Universe is and no matter how tied we are to it, that mind will escape this Universe in our souls’ forms when our bodies die. We will leave it and go someplace else. And we think that our minds are “us”―that everything else attached, like we believe of the rest of the Universe itself, to them are somehow spiritually void and not also “us.” So we are deeply biased in this regard to view our Selves as separate from and even above the Happenings of the Universe. And we are equally biased to conclude that the Universe and its Happenings, lacking no spiritual component, no awareness, are indifferent to our minds and therefore to us.

But our minds and their thoughts, also, exist in this Universe, exist as part of it. They emerge from it, just as this text emerges from my mind. As ephemeral and fleeting as they seem to us, as much as they seem to lack substance, location, and even a determinable presence, they have an actual presence in the actual physical object residing in our craniums―our brains―and they have an actual, measurable impact on our bodies and, through them, everything we interact with. Our minds and their thoughts exist in our bodies―and, we will see, outside of them as well―and, as a result, they are contained and Happen in this Universe. Perhaps mind and thought transcend this Universe at some point, and I will explore this a little later. But so long as thought and mind inhabit our bodies, our Selves, which themselves inhabit and are of the physical Universe, then our thoughts, too, inhabit and of the physical Universe.

But what is the Universe?

The Universe is all that exists that humanity will ever be able to observe, know, interact with, and imagine. It is the stars and the molecules, it is the planets and galaxies, it’s the trees and grasses and other living things we share this envelope of air and water with, it is even our cars and buildings, and it is most certainly us. There is also ample evidence to suggest that there is more in the Universe than we humans are able to perceive and conceive, not just in the forms of the particles and quanta physicists are able to detect and measure, but also in the spectrum of stimuli able to be detected by plants and animals equipped with other kinds of perceptors than humans are, and even also in the strange moments when humans themselves detect within themselves a shimmering of the undetectable, a whisper of the great and of the long shadow it casts over us.

The Universe is all-that-is, countless bodies and energy fields acting together in an overall harmony that allows for the separation of matter states and the emergence of Forms, establishes precedents governing and supporting energy exchanges, and propogates Syntaxes guiding the motions of all Happenings that occur within it. As an expression of Logos, it is infused with Awareness, and it is perfectly balanced to allow for Happenings occurring within it which satisfy that Awareness. As a single entity, it is cohesive and coherent, and evidence increasingly suggests that its internal components―galaxies, star, planets, organisms, molecules, quanta, us, and more, all the way down to what Laszlo’s Cosmic Plenum, all acting seemingly separately to us―are acting in concert, that they are responsive to one another, and that common rules govern and organize them from top to bottom. It is for these reasons of profound top-to-bottom/bottom-to-top coordinated cooperation that I consider the Universe to be a single organsim. Whether it is a “single-cell” or “multicellular” organism has yet to be determined. Cases for both will be made later in this work. That it is responsive to itself and that it organizes the goings-on it contains according to the same rules I will describe shortly is indicative, to me, that a fundamental Awareness resides in every Happening the Universe expresses. Therefore, the Universe is Aware, and, I believe, exists to facilitate that Awareness.

I also believe and will provide evidence to support that the Universe is a sonic hologram, a master Form that continually emerges from the original vibration we alternately call “the Big Bang,” “God’s First Speech,” and “the Divine Aum.” This sonic hologram is in constant emergence, ceaseless and ongoing creation, reverberating back onto itself in acoustically perfect space. As I believe the Universe to be sonic and vibratory–an emitted and listened to Form–I believe it is described best not in mechanic but linguistic terms, that while mechanical atomic models are useful, lyrical and linguistic models are more true.

Finally, I believe that the Universe is a spiritually emitted Form, and that it is emitted as a form of play for a divine entity I call the Logos, which Hindus and Buddhists call “Brahma” and “the Godhead,” alternately. Logos seeks to know itself through the expression of this Form (and likely others). As we are all, then, expressions of the Logos at play, and as we are all emitted sonic forms in a linguistic Universe, we must also all be imbued with Awareness so that Logos can observe and know itself through us. I will explore this, also, much later.

It may be hard for you to overcome your bias of human specialness and divinity-as-separate-from-the-physical to swallow this notion that Universe is Aware. I hope you keep reading my work, for I will make the case that the human being and the human civilization are truly remarkable and part of something beautiful and enormous that informs and enriches our lives moment by moment, and that something, if we properly harmonize ourselves with it, can bring us tremendous happiness, also.

Humans and the other expressions of biology that populate this planet also provide profound services to the Universe as we shall see later on. We are of the Universe, and also reflections of its fundamental structure and governing dynamics. We are containers of highly organized and harmonized actions of much smaller indepedent-seeming parts, and we give rise to things still greater than us as individuals, also. And we, like the Universe, and our component parts are also suffused with Awareness.

What is Awareness?

Awareness is the capacity of a distinct Happening to register an instance of Happening and its qualities. That Happening could be itself, or could be another Happening. Awareness is not the same thing as consciousness, intelligence, and knowing. Those are, as we shall see later in this section, hyperconcentrations and hypercomplexifications of Awareness. Awareness is simply the capacity to detect something. It exhibits no judgment, no feeling, and no response. I will theorize later that Awareness in matter is a function of an inner dimension present in all things I call Interiority, but for now it suffices to introduce the concept that all Happenings are imbued with the capacity to detect themselves and all other Happenings they might come across in their motions.

Now what does that mean?

As I observe it, the Universe is verbic. What I mean by that is that every thing and event―which I refer to as Happenings―that occur within it is involved in and defined by some kind of inherent change process. Nothing that exists in our Universe is truly static and unmoving. We can conceive that stars burn and planets orbit and revolve around those stars quite easily, and we can therefore judge that they are changing. But what of rocks―those seem not to change, correct? Not true: The changes rocks enjoy simply occur on subtler levels than we are able to perceive, and beyond human timelines. Individual rocks take millions of years to travel from beneath the Earth’s crust to it’s surface, and then take how many hundreds of years more to be eroded into sands and nothingness. What’s more, they’re also influenced by changes in temperature and forces such as wind, water, and upheaval that prompt them to swell or shrink, move. The buildings we construct, which are themselves hybridizations of plasticized rock, steel, and glass, are not eternal nor static: They, too, are weathered and will erode, and they shift, also, as the ground beneath them shifts. Given enough time and enough planetary change, they will fall. Given a little more time, they will have disintegrated.

Our Selves are no exception to this rule either; indeed, when we separate our egos from our observation of them, we discover that the physiological vessel we call our “body” which we deem the container for our “minds” and the conductor of our “spirits,” is a remarkable change engine―matter in a constant and harmonized state of countless overlapping dynamic processes, from our respirations feeding our blood flow to tissue construction to the electromagnetic pulses that travel our neurons to and from our brains and stimulate our muscles to act.

We know that the state of the Universe itself―from the smallest fleeting movements of waves and particles to the rapid expansion of space that it occupies and the Happenings that go on within it―has changed and is changing and will go on changing. Whether you go with the Big Bang as an explanation of origin or a religious genesis myth, it’s fairly well accepted that the Universe began as a fairly simple, uniform matter state and that, over time, it complexified and diversified in its physiological arrangement and change composition. By all accountings, scientific and religious, it will continue to do so until some unimaginable end point is reached, at which, if they’re right, the Universe will have exhausted its capacity to change.

In our language, a noun is an designation for something that is static in nature; a verb is a description of what has happened, is happening, or will happen―it is a description of how things change. At it’s core, the verb is always happening; only it’s tense assigns it in time. A Universe in which every expression of it contained within it is in a constant state of dynamic change is, therefore, verbic. We cannot say that anything in the Universe is static, but we can describe everything in it as dynamic and verbic in the moment. I will use the term Happening in this manuscript to generically describe the Universe’s components.

A Happening, therefore, is any isolatable, observable dynamic event in the Universe. Everything and every thing in the Universe is literally a Happening, including, as we shall see, space itself. No thing is the Universe is not-Happening; therefore, the Universe is devoid of non-Happenings.

Now, what is remarkable about our Universe is that these Happenings are not dumb. Viewed from our perspective, all of the dumb-seeming Happenings that go on at atomic and subatomic levels produce a result that can hardly be described as dumb at all: Us, and the dynamic biological engine we call our planet, which contains everything needed and more to sustain us; the Bios, which is the expression of biological life that supports the ongoing vitality of living things and their capacity to coax the material Universe into the formality of Being from the state of Quantum probability all things rest in when not observed by the Bios; and those Forms which are not of the Bios, from subatomic particles all the way up to the Universe itself. These things―us and the planet we reside on and benefit from, the Bios, and more―are also Happenings, and as far as Happenings go, we and the organisms we share this planet with can hardly be dumb. We conduct our movements to satisfy our basic biological needs, do we not? And the Happenings that shape and give rise to us are not dumb, either, as they maintain their cohesion and act in persistent concert to maintain our Forms as they change, grow, and mature.

It’s clear that the Happenings in this Universe are coordinated in their broader Happenings, and so, as a result, accomplish the organization and Actuality that we currently reside in. As we know, coordination between humans, coordination between animals, and even coordination that is spread between multiple species of plants and animals and humans, such as a farm―-coordination requires a fundamental Awareness of Self and Other in order to exist. We must be Aware of our Selves first, and we must be Aware of the actions of Other’s second, and we must be Aware of the relationships that arise between our Selves and the Others we are inter-acting with. This three-fold Awareness is fundamental to all forms of biological coordination. We know this is true of humans, but observe also the Happenings of plants, animals, single-cell organisms and viruses. These things all respond to Other in one fashion or another. Their response demonstrates a fundamental Awareness of Self, Other, and relationship.

Take a blade grass. It demonstrates its Awareness by turning toward the sun as the sun progresses through the sky each day. The grass is Aware of its Self and the actions it is capable of (changing tissue tensions that allow it to subtly change position), it is Aware of the presence and actions of an Other (the Sun and its steady emission of photons and heat energy), and it is Aware of the relationship between its Self and that Other. It demonstrates its awareness of those things by conducting the physicality of its Self to optimize its relatings with the Other.

Animals I think we can all agree demonstrate Awareness, but what of single-celled organisms, such as algae or amoeba? Well, consider: These exist in a massive and highly complex environment, full of trillions of tiny organisms, most of which are nothing like the algae or amoeba at all, not to mention other bigger and bigger organisms that are more and more complex and move through their environments with less and less awareness of the small organisms the bigger and bigger they get. It is a miraculous achievement, when you think about it, that these tiny, basic and therefore dumb-seeming hyper articulations of proteins are able to navigate their environments and sort out their sustenance from all of the other particles and organisms that inhabit their environment. This requires and demonstrates Awareness―of Self and the needs of Self, and of Others in their environment, and of specific relationships that crop up between different kinds of Others. The amoeba is Aware of the relationship between it and another organism that would eat the amoeba, and we can observe the amoeba’s Awareness of that relationship in its actions to avoid that predator rather than actions it might otherwise demonstrate―where it would attempt to confront and perhaps try to eat its predator.

If Awareness did not suffuse itself throughout every Happening in the Universe, it is likely that the Universe would simply be an inert cloud of motionless dead particles. Actually, as we’ll see in Quantum later on, there wouldn’t be particles at all, nor quanta, nor energy, nor even probability of any of those things. In order for these things to exist, they have to relate to one another, they have to work together, to exchange energy and to influence each other’s Happenings. The Universe exists in relationships, in relatings.

Existence is a condition of Awareness whereby a Happening validates that it is Happening and validates the Happening of Others. Existence cannot be singular and occurs only in the relations between Selves and Others. Put another way: Relationships are fundamental for existence.

A Relationship is simply a Happening in which one or more other Happenings become aware of itself or of each other. These dynamic connections are absolutely crucial not only to the philosophical matter of Existence, but to the very formation of complex, massive bodies of matter, from dust particles to human beings to planets, stars, and so on.

Can a thing be truly said to exist if it is wholly separate from all other things? If we approach the question logically, we simply cannot conceive of such a thing. Imagine there is a place, first, that is outside of our Universe, existing in another sphere altogether, and sphere that has no relationship to our Universe or to anything else, except one particle. We have placed this particle in this lonely space as an experiment to attempt to determine if that particle can exist if it is not in relation to any Other thing. The experiment is a failure: The particle exists in relation to the space, it is defined by its relation to that space.

We can’t put a particle somewhere that it is not a space, or any other place that isn’t a place or a where. We can’t put a particle no-where. And we can’t manufacture a no-where to put a particle in. And we also can’t put a particle anywhere and not know that we put it there―we’re aware of it because we acted upon it and remember acting upon it, and we maintain our awareness of it by conducting this experiment. What’s more, we know that part of Awareness is a function of Self―the particle relates to its Self―and therefore establishes, to a small degree, its own existence. This awareness of Self is an odd repositioning of Self and Other in which the Self is Aware of itself as it would be Other. The positionings of Self and Other in relativistic settings is a fascinating phenomenon that we will explore in-depth a little later. For now, it suffices to say: Space and place require one another in order to Exist, as do Self and Other.