Universal Consciousness, Explained Badly (But Honestly)
Symbols don’t sit quietly in dictionaries. They float like waves until we look at them, collapsing into fear, healing, or divinity.
I was very good at physics till I studied it. In fact, my physics teacher once tried to convince me to do a Physics Honours degree. Physics was the only science that ever made sense to me. And here I am now, proving to him why my education was a good decision, not as a physicist, but as an engineer with a restless mind and a bad case of insomnia.
This essay is my revenge on two of my favourite people: Dr. Brian Greene and Dan Brown. It will probably piss them both off. It was born somewhere between their latest discussion on “when physics meets fiction” and my 3 a.m. insomnia. These days, the only thing that lulls me to sleep is the soothing voice of Dr. Greene letting everyone explain to him what he already teaches to pay his EMIs.
I know I’m playing with fire here, but watch me anyway.
And what’s better than starting an essay about physics with a bit of biology?
Mycorrhizal fungi: in simple terms, the “Wood Wide Web.” A network of fungal threads connecting trees across entire forests. Through it, one tree can warn another of a coming storm, or send nutrients to a seedling it will never live to see grow. Beneath the soil, trees whisper.
Wait, I am going somewhere here…
If forests can hum under our feet, what’s humming beneath our thoughts? Because sometimes, when I dream, or write, or even ache, I feel less like a person and more like a radio signal. Maybe we’re not solitary minds at all, but roots of the same tree, reaching back to a single point of awareness we’ve forgotten how to name.
Carl Jung believed that beneath your private memories and secret fears lies a shared reservoir of images, a dream library written before we were born. That’s why a woman in Delhi can dream of a serpent, and a man in Peru can too, never having met, yet both knowing it means danger. The collective unconscious is the proof that we are not strangers. We are echoes of the same story, told in different tongues.
A snake hisses in a dream and we wake in fear. The same snake coils on a doctor’s staff and we trust it to heal us. In India, the snake rests on a god’s shoulders, powerful and serene. In the West, it whispers temptation in a garden. How can one symbol wear so many masks?
You are free to pick stones and throw them at your screens now, but I have to say it: symbols are quantum.
They exist as waves of meaning until someone observes them. In one culture the snake collapses into danger, in another into medicine, in another into divine energy. If physics says particles behave this way “hovering as probabilities until observed” perhaps ideas do too.
I am still standing, and so are you, so let’s unwind this together.
If the snake is a wave of meanings, then the sun is a whole solar storm. In Egypt, it rose every morning as Ra, a god steering his golden boat across the sky. In India, it is Surya, the one who burns but also blesses. In Christianity, it becomes a halo, the circle of divine light crowning saints. But walk through a desert long enough and the same sun stops being god and starts being punishment.
So which is it? Life-giver, time-keeper, destroyer, grace? Symbols don’t choose sides. They just wait for us to look, and then they collapse into whatever our culture needs them to be.
Water is no better behaved. It is the womb of creation in Mesopotamia, the flood that drowns sinners in the Bible, the purifier in Hindu baths, the tears you cried last week on your pillow. Same archetype, same wave, different outcomes.
The mother herself is another paradox. She is Mary, gentle and immaculate, but also Kali, terrifying and blood-soaked. She feeds and she devours. She is Gaia birthing the world, and the devouring mother in fairy tales who swallows her children whole. Again: one symbol, infinite faces, waiting for an observer to decide which mask it wears today.
All these symbols snakes, suns, water, mothers are floating, drifting in a sea of waves. They don’t sit neatly in a dictionary waiting to be defined. They swim. They hum. They connect people to people, cultures to cultures, dreams to myths.
And here’s the catch: they only show their faces when you look at them. A snake only becomes temptation in a garden when a priest looks at it. The same snake becomes medicine when a doctor does. The same snake becomes divine when a yogi does. Until then, it is everything and nothing at once.
It sounds suspiciously like an electron to me. Physics says it hovers as a wave of possibilities, and only when observed does it collapse into a particle. Symbols, myths, even memories feel the same. They are quantum in spirit, if not in math. Reality waiting to be noticed.
Maybe that’s what universal consciousness really is. A sea of waves, all meanings and all stories, flowing through us. We are the observers, collapsing them into sense. And just as quickly, letting them float free again for the next beholder.
Maybe it’s not just beauty, but also meaning, that is in the eye of the beholder.
And if my old physics teacher is reading this don’t worry Sir, I finally made it to quantum. Just not the way you imagined.
