The Baseless Fabric of This Vision

Framing the Question

Antecedently unimaginable, the most profound prediction to fall out of Einstein’s theory of gravity are his pearls of aether consuming onyx, less poetically known as black holes. These invisible, obsidian spheres are known to crush space and stop time, and if those properties weren’t astounding enough, their defining feature is that they also swallow light. As to what becomes of that light, we know not and probably never will.

In a rather poetic happenstance, the pupils of our eyes are also black-holes that consume light and despite knowing rather intimately what becomes of it, we are at a loss as to explain how it becomes the immediately lived experience of spatially extended vision.

Do you ever wonder what the true nature of reality is? What must it be like to allow for the evolution of consciousness? And why, after all this time, does existence remain a mystery? We stand on the shoulders of countless intellectual giants and benefit from the technological leaps made available by their efforts and discoveries. Yet, the fact remains that after all of this progress, all of this environmental dominance, and the incomprehensibly vast amount of accumulated knowledge — we still don’t know what the universe is, what consciousness is, or what our purpose, if anything, could be? That these ancient philosophical questions of old remain as relevant today as when we first formed them serves as a powerful reminder of the very mystery we live.

Although these questions may seem unanswerable, the state of our theories have come a long way and today are mathematically structured, physically accurate, and experimentally verified. The two that speak most deeply of the Nature of nature are quantum field theory and general relativity. At their cores they are relativistic, locally symmetric field theories but due to how each treats spacetime, remain disunited. Fields are fascinating objects and may even hold the conceptual key to understanding that subtle somewhat that science loves to forget; consciousness.

Quantum field theory is erroneously thought to be a theory of particles and the subatomic microcosm, but it is more accurately a theory of the universe’s very tapestry. A cosmic canvas whose objects aren’t even necessarily small as they are non-local perturbations of fields; waves that obey non-classical dynamics. Some might even say “spooky” dynamics. Quantum field theory places light and matter on the same footing as both are borne of fields. It reveals matter to be an emergent phenomenon that arises from structures that themselves lack mass while also affirming that what we perceive as empty space is in fact a spontaneous and effervescent medium. General relativity, on the other hand, usually explains gravity as the curvature of spacetime. But it can equally be modeled as a field theory, one that fills the whole cosmos with an ethereal metric fluid that grants spacetime rigidity and causes gravity. What both theories are telling us is that we are awash in an invisible sea of energy and despite their fluid-like dynamics, we need remember that fields and their ultimate carrier are born of immaterial waters.

Viewing reality through the lens of modern scientific understanding tells us that we live in a plenum; Democritus’ view of atoms in the void is denied. Aristotle had it right; nature really does abhor a vacuum. The void is not nothing, but a something, and it has many attributes.

We are like fish who know not that they swim in a cosmic aether. Awash in and expressions of a cosmic fluid that flows and knows. And not only does this quintessence possess the bare attributes that we call metric and quantum fields, but it is holographic, as every fragment of it is indistinguishable from every other fragment. The aether seethes with ephemeral activity and even weighs with a universal density.

The aether exists.

Not only this, and getting a little theo-philosophical, but I would argue it is also divine, eternal, and although not conscious, is consciousness itself. We, each of us in our way, in fact all things we encounter, are an emanation of this aether. Each a quantized unit, an expression of this universal whole.

But to understand the aether whole and holographic and to discover how we got here, we need go back and learn what we can of the history of light and matter and fill all of space with a celestial element.

[This has been just the prologue of a documentary I’m making on my youtube channel Sophia’s Ichor. If you enjoyed this article and would like to see where I’m going with it, please consider subscribing to my youtube channel or following me here. After I’ve completed the video portion, I will be uploading the un-cut versions of the video’s scripts here. Thanks for reading/watching!]