Life Is In and Out of the Middle

 

There is matter and there is awareness of matter. The smaller / larger mutual implication, discussed earlier, is fundamental to living awareness from the single-celled organism to conscious animals. Humans, in particular, are aware of an entire world, or a universe, that spans the smallest to the largest that can be imagined.

 

The physical world of matter described by human science can only be understood by human consciousness to the degree that the physical universe is compatible with human consciousness. Insofar as an organism is aware of a world in which it lives, it understands that world through its own in-out boundary. The in-out living boundary itself manifests objectively, i.e., with three dimensional externality, as the physical in-out permeable membrane that is the cell wall. The world that humans and all organisms live in is projected through the in-out living boundary that evolved from the cell wall of the one-celled organism. And that world is, itself, an in-out universe understood in terms of the smallest and largest scale.

In 3D + 1 spacetime, time is imagined as one whole universe expanding outward. But outward from what? Out (and in) is not a spatial dimension. As discussed in Chapter 3, we can walk around or imagine passing “through” the center of a solid object, but in three dimensions, there are just more sides from all directions. Length, width and height can describe a smaller or larger box, but not an “inside”. Interiority is a projection of living awareness from the in-out cellular unit of life. We cannot “see” interiority in the same way that we cannot “see” our awareness.

The comparison of small and large implies direction. For evolved human physicists, quantum has been discovered as the realm of the smallest and spacetime, the realm of the largest. Small in itself, however, is not a direction. Large by itself is not a direction. Direction arises when the universe of small and large is taken as a whole – that is as a nested series. Moving from smallest to largest describes an “outward” direction. Imagine going out of a box, not east, west, north or south, but out. Conversely, the direction from largest to smallest is “in.”

At the smallest, quantum particle / waves (left image) have only future possibilities actualized in spacetime. Life (middle image) is in the present actualizing the past. In the world of physics, black holes (right image) manifest the small / large mutual implication in the large spacetime.