Song 1: The Mysterious Ground from which our Story springs.

The deep primordial secrets of existence come sprouting forth in the form of a Cosmic garden. The ‘seeds’ of our reality materialize and sprout as if by magic out of a seemingly immaterial ground; but none of this is magic. It’s all common sense and pretty easy to understand once you know the right way to look at it.

The Song of Everything is here to show you where to look, and the comfortable path to get there. You’re invited to discover it with us—perhaps from the vantage point of a nice hilltop vista on a clear night, or even from the comforts of your own sofa in your living room!

It kind of goes without saying that every story needs to have a starting point. And yet, when the story we’re talking about is the *real* one that we’re actually living, deciding on where and how to start the narrative can be a tough call. There’s no story whose starting point matters more.

How did Everything start? What forces came together to form this great big complex universe that we find ourselves in?

This is our ‘Origin Story’—our ‘Creation Myth,’ as it used to be called.

The image with its caption above is the way we choose to begin ours—the start of our Comfortable Universe’s story that we’re calling the ‘Song of Everything.’

Everybody is going to have their own favorite way for this story to unfold, and they should, because ultimately, it’s a personal story.

Should the story be personalized and customized, or institutionalized and standardized?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer—we’ll be arguing that the individual takes precedence over any establishment, consensus, or institution. You’ll have to read on to find that discussion, but it means that we favor the special individual twists … and our version has plenty of them.

The institutional version of the Creation Story that your host grew up with is the Judeo-Christian one. It starts with the “In the beginning …” that readers encounter when they open the foundational text to page 1, line 1.

In the Bible, before there was a garden, the world was a Formless Void over which the restless breath of God began to stir. That part works for us, or at least we’re going to keep it in mind. It’s short and to the point. There is no consideration of God’s prior gigs. The story quickly homes in on his big seven-day project—the garden of Eden.

Here is a depiction of the Garden of Eden by Johann Wenzel Peter (1745 – 1829), who is sort of a namesake of your Comfortable Universe narrator and host. Peter was a notable painter of realistic representations of animals. Well over 200 species appear in this painting. This work must have been one of his favorites, because he never sold it. It was in his workshop at the time of his death and was then purchased by Pope Gregory XVI for the Papal collection. It still resides at the Vatican today.

Our Song of Everything doesn’t stick with that religious tradition or any other. It takes cues from other Western thinking and from eastern Faith Traditions, particularly Taoism, but we also tap into many other sources.  We give particular emphasis to how science informs our view of the deep roots of reality, because your host is a scientist by training (a PhD research Atmospheric Physicist who worked for NASA) and by natural mindset.

We find it convenient, however, to start with the garden metaphor, because it adds color and vitality to what could be a pretty dry scientific discussion.  That Biblical Formless Void features as well.  Its complete emptiness is that dry lifeless underlying ‘ground’—the garden’s ‘magic’ soil out of which our Story is going to sprout.

In the simplest bare-bones depiction of our Origin, we at Comfortable Universe HQ see no need for a creator being to be involved.  That’s not to say that we rule out the possibility that a true, real (even provable) Creator-being got our World started. Your favorite God or Goddess *could* be the first thing, or one of the first things, that sprouts. Not a supernatural being, mind—we see no need for miracles or magic in the creation—but a far more powerful or advanced being than any human, and with all the basic personality and capabilities of a bona-fide Deity. Such paths are certainly not ruled out.

But are they the most likely—the most reasonable—the path with the fewest hurdles? Our goal is to identify that bare-bones simplest underlying garden soil—the place where any of the World’s diverse Creation Myths might be able to call home. In previous work, we’ve called this venue “Eden’s Womb”—the sheltered, comfortable mammalian-style “nurturing nest” where all Origin stories could be conceived.

Before we delve further into how we generalize the story, we first share a quick (biased) sampler of three more favorite highly abridged ancient Creation Myths from cultures far and wide, and then one ‘non-Myth’, highlighting a few points that have relevance to our story:

One: Egypt

One of the very oldest Creation Myths on record comes from Egypt, where, in one version, the term zp tpj (“the first time”) is used to denote a moment of transition from primordial chaos to the world in existence. Nu was that chaotic sea of lifeless waters. In it Atum began to consolidate as an inert potential being (closely associated with the more familiar sun god Ra). He became a functioning self-engendered god, who, being alone, resorted to a procreative form of masturbation to produce all the elements of reality.

Many of the oldest Creation Myths depict gods who created things via various forms of human bodily functions, such as sneezing, spitting, even vomiting.

Two: The Māori Creation Myth

The Māori (New Zealand Polynesian) description of the development of the universe is expressed in a patient, step-by-step genealogical form: In the beginning, there was Te Kore (The Nothing; the Void) which became Te Korematua (The Parentless Void) in its search for procreation. From it came Te Pō (The Night), becoming Te Pōroa (The Long Night), and then becoming Te Pōnui (The Great Night). Gradually Te Ao (The Light) glimmered into existence, stretching to all corners of the universe to become Te Aotūroa (The Long-Standing Light). Next came Te Ata (The Dawn), from which came Te Mākū (The Moisture), and Mahoranuiatea (Cloud of the Dawn). Te Mākū and Mahoranuiatea wed to form Rangi, the Sky Father, who, in turn wed Papa, the Earth Mother, and together they produced the gods, and eventually all the familiar things in the world.

Three: Norse Mythology

“Odin the Wanderer”, adapted from the 1886 Georg von Rosen black and white drawing. Note his left eye is missing. The story goes that he sacrificed it in order to gain wisdom.

The Norse Creation Myth is one that has mostly survived by repeated retelling of now lost versions, both written and oral.

Odin seems to get the most press. He was a creator being, but he was several steps down from the original creation. The story begins in a great void called Ginnungagap, flanked by the icy realm of Niflheim and the fiery realm of Muspelheim. When hot air and freezing ice met in the void, they created the primordial frost giant Ymir. Long story short, Ymir was a cruel creature, and Odin, along with his two brothers, who were actually grandsons of the first god Buri, slayed Ymir and built the physical world from his body. Later, Odin created the first humans, named Ask and Embla, from two trees, an ash and an elm, which he found on the beach.

We haven’t even mentioned the great central World Tree, Yggdrasil in whose branches Odin spent some very important ‘entanglement’ time. It’s a complicated mythology, made up of many separate but interwoven stories passed down by word of mouth for countless generations, as are many of the world’s great origin tales.

In this case, most of what survives is reconstructed from written narratives called the Prose and Poetic Eddas, the oldest of which was recorded around the thirteenth Century AD. The most famous of these, the Völuspá, is presented as mystical Seeress recounting ancient tales from memory, with her audience being none other than Odin himself.

Now, the “non-Myth”—Science

Science’s current mainstream Creation Story is called “The Standard Model of Cosmology”. It goes something like this:

“Suddenly, 13.8 billion years ago, there was a Big Bang. That wasn’t the first thing. It’s the first thing we have direct evidence for. The cooling remnants of that hot primordial explosion, or fireball, is all around us. It is a bath of radiation called the ‘Cosmic Microwave Background’ that has now cooled to just 2.7255 degrees above absolute zero.”

The fact that we’re immersed inside this ongoing event, and not outside observers, the way we are for most scientific experiments, is an underappreciated and critically fundamental distinction, which we’ll be exploring quite a lot more in coming songs.

Science avoids storytelling that it cannot back up with solid evidence. Nevertheless, if you ask scientists what happened before the Big Bang, or what’s beyond the observable limits of our universe, you’ll find that there are plenty of theories, and here at the Song of Everything, we’ll be picking through those to glean clues from what is known. Then we’ll venture to craft a far more complete story than rigorous science admits. It might be wrong, but it will be our sincere, best stab at what seems sensible. We’ll back our version up with evidence, including new discoveries as they become available, and we’ll share our sources and our reasoning; but we’ll also acknowledge that this is just one choice among many.

So, what’s with this Cosmic garden appearing in the sky?

It’s a sort of metaphor, of course. It starts with that “Formless Void” which could be described as a substrate, kind of like a ‘soil,’ that is the simplest possible place for things to ‘sprout’.

Let’s just start by naming it. In fact, let’s give it a pair of names. One is dry and technical—precise but bland—and the other is a ‘pet name’ that has plenty of personality.

We name it the “Uncaused Continuum”, a description as much as a name, really. And more whimsically, we’ll describe her as a Mama Pink Easter Bunny called “Little Miss Nothingness” who lives deep down in a Cosmic Rabbit Hole.  Though these are new names, the underlying idea should already be a familiar thing to most average folk.

Little Miss Nothingness and her irrepressible Minions.

Start by thinking of a vacuum—plain-old emptiness. Emptiness is a wonderfully mysterious thing to contemplate, because whatever you think it does—that’s exactly what it doesn’t do!

Try to tell her what to do, or how to be, and Li’l Miss Nothing scoffs at you. She obeys no rules ... except the ones that she makes up herself!

As soon as you try to give this bizarre entity a rule (any form of description), you’ve destroyed it—it’s no longer the nothingness you started with. Yet, because it has no rules, you can divide it up into parts!

What? Of course you can. It lacks any rules to prevent you!

So, here you go: Little Miss Nothingness decides to have babies! Hordes of them!  She just says “Hey!  Look!  Existing is as easy as falling off a log (i.e. picking one side of a divide* and thus becoming just one part of the original Nothingness)!  I just let the stuff that’s not working for me drop down to the other side of the log and then get to work making lots and lots of little minions that think like me!”

Voila!  This is our ‘soil’ with the babies being its seeds ready to sprout.

We won’t go much further down this philosophical/conceptual Rabbit Hole for now.

* (a brief deep dive into some of the science:) The way to construct this ‘divide,’ is to use a scrappy, approximate real-world tool from math and geometry called ‘Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis.’  A critically important position we take in our Song of Everything is that our Universe is no perfect construction.  Despite being an amazingly Comfortable, well-prepared place, it is still a work in progress and is vague/fuzzy/poorly-defined at many of its intrinsic boundaries (more than just our boundaries of understanding, these are built-in to the structure itself).  Scrappy, approximate mathematical tools are the only ones that can do the job here!  What Particle Physicists call ‘Renormalization’ is one of the best practical examples.  It has yielded some of the most accurate predictions in all of science.  We’ll be expanding on these ideas much more in future Songs.

But we do want to add a few more introductory points:

Studying Nothingness in the lab.

Scientific study of the vacuum (of empty space) has been most productive not in the large-scale astrophysical or cosmological sense, but in the close-up examination given to it in the study of the smallest particles. Turns out that the closer you look at this wonderfully mysterious thing (i.e., when you chop off a very little part of it and study it), the more complicated and interesting it gets. No details yet. This is just a teaser.

The vacuum that Science can observe from our vantage point (our reference frame in this universe) hints at, or naturally generalizes into, the presence of that more fundamental precursor origin-ground (Womb) that is ‘on the outside’—idealized as being independent of any vantage point.

One of our less Comfortable (brain-twisting) excursions beyond what Science can tell us.

One might wonder about a concept that is supposed to be the precursor to the first stuff that we can observe and know about: How do we demonstrate that this prior ‘state’ exists?

We don’t!

Put perfectly bluntly: It does NOT exist. That is, not in the usual sense, because ‘existence’ is a rule, or a descriptive attribute; and the ‘Uncaused Continuum’ has no rules at all—full dead stop.

But that does not make it irrelevant!

How? Well, first of all, here we are talking about it! What in the *bleep* would be the point of talking about something if it does not exist and has no relevance to our story?

It’s not irrelevant because neither does it not NOT exist. That would be a rule too. There simply is no ‘truth’ about the matter of whether it exists or not.

And for the nitpickers who would complain about the ‘Rule that there is no Rule,’ we note that the status of the ‘Existence of Rules’ is part of the overall package—no truth value can be assigned.

The philosophical blur that we’re focusing in on can be resolved by specifying a *threshold*—a boundary where we cross from not being useful or relevant, to being the Spark—the seed—that gets our story started. More on that in a minute.

Those little Minions are on a mission!

It boils down to this: The Uncaused Continuum is very much like a fertile soil where particular seeds (little pieces of the Continuum) that have the right stuff can “sprout,” by which we mean “assemble rules for itself that establish a useful, self-consistent structure.”

The role of the soil is to accommodate this growth by letting the germinating seed try out within its own self-description, different properties that we Humans (who are not entirely neutral observers) would describe as “real”—physical, ‘tangible’ characteristics.

The seeds can do this magic (and the Continuum fails to prevent it) because, of course, the Continuum harbors no rules to govern which ‘ideas’ little bits of it might explore.

We’re not neutral because every one of us has some notion of what existence or reality is, but those ideas are biases based on our experience.

The Many Names of Nothingness

Okay. Now we’ve wandered down several more seriously important philosophical/conceptual Rabbit Holes. Sorry, but this “In the beginning …” stuff is an amazingly stubborn Gordian Knot. We’ll be coming back to talk about it several more times before we have our descriptive ‘sword’ sharp enough that we can play ‘Alexander the Great’ and cut cleanly through it.

Speaking of which … as we composed the earlier versions of this story (See PART ONE), we started our discussion by calling this Nothingness—this Beginning Thing—the ‘Portal to the 0th Dimension’, then we styled it as the ‘Great Empty Everything,’ and later we began regularly referring to it as the ‘Vacuum with a capital V—the Big-V Vacuum.’

This barely scratches the surface of the names that are out there. Throughout history, poets, philosophers, and prophets great and small in cultures worldwide have given it many other names, and we’ll be discussing some of them.

But, for the moment, the “Uncaused Continuum” is the serious (technical) name that we prefer, because we think it is the simplest, most basic starting point.

Why we think this is at the core of EVERY origin story

In fact, we wonder: is there actually any alternative? If one delves into the other options that have been offered in the literature, it seems possible to find roots for them right here, in this same enigmatic, lawless, chaotic, and yet wonderfully unrestricted COMFORTABLE place.

For example: other stories might insist that ‘there is no beginning.’ They would portray an eternal universe or an eternally existing deity.

But that doesn’t stand up to careful scrutiny.

First of all, a static universe would be unstable.  It was discovered 100 years ago by Edwin Hubble that the universe is expanding, so that any story in which the universe is eternal requires some contortions, convolutions or cycles.

But more fundamental is the philosophical quandary:  What is the relevance of something physical that is infinitely far away or infinitely removed in the past, or both?

If it has those properties, it is only the ‘closer’ parts of its *continuum* of existence, that become relevant. This ‘becoming relevant’ is described by some intrinsically arbitrary threshold that gets crossed, in which the first demonstrable (useful to an origin story) *cause* and its effect can be identified.

There you go. Anything prior to the place and/or time where the threshold is crossed is … an amorphous blur—an effectively Uncaused Continuum!

There is a class of Origin Storytellers who reject the amorphous philosophical blur and the idea of crossing a threshold to resolve it.  These people prefer to claim that there are substantial non-trivial facts about physical reality that are simply ‘Brute Facts.’  They stick with what is known or observed (if they are scientists) or to the ‘set-in-stone’ story that their faith tradition or favorite philosopher or guru proposes and insist that it is acceptable to stop questioning deeper layers and not to seek an underlying basis for these facts.  They have that right, of course.  Our response is simply that the story these people tell is incomplete.  To our way of thinking about the World, there is ALWAYS another layer ... at least until you get down to a basic underlying simple and *universal* ‘Nothing’ that is so many layers down, and so completely remote, that it is has no practical effect on what we experience.

There you go.  Everybody has to start their story somewhere.  We just claim that it is possible to construct a sort of ‘Prologue’ to every story that builds from a common beginning.

Narrowing the focus, Part One.

In our telling of the Origin Story—our Song of Everything—the goal, then, is to seek a generalization of the foundational ground. But, from there, it is not possible to consider every ‘Minion’ that sprouts a functioning reality or every version that storytellers might contrive. The possibilities seem illimitable!

Ask Google AI how many cultures have documented Creation Myths and … Well, it told me that there is no count, but that virtually every culture has one. We celebrate them and encourage them all.

But just as every story needs a starting point, every story needs a path—a waymarked route from A to B, as we touched on in Song 0.

And so, we reduce the illimitable options, and focus on just three specific sprouts, or branches to our “tree of existence.”

These three, and only these, are the pathways that we are going to keep tabs on and play with as we go along:

One: A Traditional CREATOR BEING

E.g. Odin, or Brahman, or the Islamic-Judeo-Christian God/Yahweh/Allah, etc. In this telling, whatever our Creator Being of choice happens to be, we still don't claim that their existence has to be a flat Brute Fact.  Rather, we view he/she/it as a sophisticated form of “Boltzmann Brain,” which could, at least in theory, have been the first useful thing that randomly fluctuated into existence out of that Uncaused Continuum—the first seed that sprouted from the Cosmic soil.

 

Two: Pink Easter Bunnies.

We’ve already introduced our cute Little Miss Nothingness.

She and her babies are a useful construct, as you’ll see. Our Bunnies take the “complex being fluctuating into existence” story (sprouting out of the Uncaused Continuum or anywhere else) to neutral ground. We’ll be picking one of these bright-eyed little minions and following his/her adventures in detail.

Three: the ‘bare-bones’ Uncaused Continuum.

Our serious one—our simplest emergent particle construction, or sprouting seed, which we argue is most probable because it has the fewest moving parts to start with—perhaps just two.

This is what Physicists call a Feynman Diagram. This particular diagram shows an example from a calculation applied to our universe. In it, two electrons come into the picture from the bottom, moving toward the top and toward each other. They ‘collide’ and bounce off each other, both changing direction (the two solid lines at left and right changing direction).

Quantum Mechanics tells us that what is actually happening is not a direct ‘collision,’ the way two billiard balls might collide, but an exchange of a calculable but not observable (the term used is “virtual”) energy packet (in this case a ‘Photon’—a particle of light). The path of the Photon is represented by the wavy horizontal line labeled with the symbol ‘γ.’

In some cases, further *virtual* complications can occur. In fact, Quantum Mechanics tells us that an infinite number of further complications *do* inevitably occur. This is the ‘interesting’ stuff that happens when you home in on a small piece of the vacuum in the space between the two electrons, or in the Big-V Vacuum where there’s just nothing at all ... until, suddenly … The light beam (or the emptiness of the Uncaused Continuum) momentarily ‘sprouts’ a pair of ‘virtual particles’—In the case of the above diagram, what sprouts is an electron and its anti-matter counterpart, the positron. These things flicker at the fringes of existence and then disappear by annihilating each other in such a short fraction of a second that they aren’t even observable.

That sprout (the appearance of particles that weren’t there before) is represented by the circular part of the drawing in the middle, and if you take away the two ‘colliding’ electrons, you still have a valid process, which is called a Vacuum Diagram or Bubble Diagram.

Here, we’re fading out the external stuff, and we’ve colored the interior of the Vacuum Bubble lavender. That lavender Bubble is the ‘soil’ that starts our story!

Inside the bubble, while the virtual electron and its positron partner are doing their thing, they can, and inevitably do, sprout further virtual entities.  In the above image, we show the electron sprouting another photon, which then produces a new bubble made of a Quark-Antiquark pair. Then, inside that smaller bubble, more things can and do sprout, including, sometimes, more complicated combinations of things that all appear together.

Hopefully, you get the basic idea. Looking really closely at a tiny piece of the ‘Uncaused Continuum,’ these ‘Vacuum Bubbles’ are forever springing into existence; and within them, further, more complicated stuff can sprout. Including some useful and interesting stuff.

We won’t go much farther for now. This is just the introduction—a teaser. These Vacuum Bubbles are the Minions, the seeds—the tiny bits of the soil that sprout any imaginable (really just any possible) sort of complex stuff within its bubble.

Where to learn more (Cited Sources), and a first reveal of our distinctive twist on the Origin Story.

For further study, ask your favorite AI to tell you about Vacuum Bubble Feynman Diagrams. Choose an AI such as Google AI, which will cite the sources of its information:

Our new outside-the-box innovation—our completely fresh take on the Origin Story, which (we believe) is an entirely new proposal, is what we’re calling “Space-Time Inversion Symmetry.”

The Concept boils down to this: If you’re inside that little mischievous lavender circle in the Feynman Diagram, and if you’re a *complex* virtual entity that we’ll call “I” that has flickered into a useful (to you) existence inside that Vacuum Bubble, then there is a perspective in which that emergent entity “I” is not virtual at all, but entirely physically real, and there is no way to distinguish between that physically relevant “I” and the fleeting equivalent virtual entity “U” that an external agent (like a scientist in a lab) observes when studying the Vacuum … no difference of any kind other than the *perspective*. The “I” uses your internal perspective as its reference frame. And, of course, you’re not ‘virtual’ at all, because there you are living it!

The Inversion is first and foremost an inversion of observer and observed. What appears virtual and fleeting from the outside, is Space-Time Inverted ‘actual’ reality from an observer’s perspective on the inside, seemingly surrounded by and encased in those (not necessarily observable, thanks to various ‘censorship limits’) wider shells of supporting/originating processes.

Pioneering female mathematician Emmy Noether’s famous 1918 Theorem demonstrates that Momentum and Energy are scrupulously conserved during Space-Time Inversion. No matter whether we’re on the inside looking out, or outside-the-box looking in with Space-Time reference frames that are the inverse of one another, the physical picture appears the same to any observer. Yes, reality (Existence) really is all about perspective!

And we’re just one of the Minions!

“Plain and simple” wins the argument

It took us nearly 4000 words to get around to finally being ready to properly start our story. But then it takes just 51 magical words to actually do it:

The Uncaused Continuum prevails. In it, virtual Vacuum Bubbles constantly appear. Within one, a complex combination of virtual entities fluctuated into a fleeting moment of coherence, forming a self-sustaining self-useful structure. And from that emergent object’s perspective, a physical world sprouted—none other than our whole crazy, complex, Comfortable Universe!

“I am You (U) when viewed from the Inside Out!”
A depiction of the emergence of Space-Time Inversion Symmetry. We’ll be returning to this idea later for a more in-depth look.

We choose this third—this more generalized ‘garden ground’ as the serious basis of our story, with the other two stories playing supporting roles where they are useful (as in the illustration above). THE ONLY REASONABLE JUSTIFICATION for rejecting the other two, or any of a vast variety of entities that could sprout in the garden and be the basis for an intriguing tale, is its simplicity.

As we’ll be striving to demonstrate, the Uncaused Continuum has the very minimum qualities or attributes needed to build a universe—i.e., to act as a ‘Creator Being’. It’s ‘God’ without any of his unexplainable (and/or anthropomorphic) baggage. It’s Easter Bunnies without the Glitz and Bling.

Narrowing the focus, Part Two.

Thus, our story begins—with a piece of chosen ground. We plant our seed and see how it grows. We’ll now highlight THREE further limitations to the story we choose to tell, which narrow the focus.

One: The Individual perspective takes precedence.

Here, we’re talking not just the big picture, but getting very personal. Precedence (preference or priority, preferred status) is unequivocally granted to *you,* the Individual over any collective consensus …

… when there is a conflict (they do not always conflict).

But when they do clash, we advise that NO INSTITUTION should supersede the individual.

And we offer this warning advice: ***The individual gives up his/her authority to any institution or collective at their peril!***

There are two key reasons for why the Individual is granted this priority status:

First is the origin itself, in the form we’ve just introduced it: the Uncaused Continuum.

We have made a case that a Vacuum Bubble sprouting in the Uncaused Continuum is the simplest possible starting point (or ground) on which to build an origin story.

We’ve also noted that the U.C. has the mysterious property of having no properties—containing no rules, obeying no rules.

It is not even random, because randomness would be a defining property.

And most importantly: It is NOT the so-called “FIRST CAUSE”! This is critical. The Uncaused Continuum causes nothing!

Rather, each entity (each little Minion) that emerges from the Uncaused Continuum must work out its own causal structure (its rules for causation or lack thereof), and THIS is the basis (the fact that each individual entity does all its own work from scratch) for ELEVATING (granting predominance to) that individual. They were there from the very onset (of their own emergent perspective.) And so, we must, by rights, defer.

Second is the role the distinctive individual plays in virtually all breakthrough changes. Evolution and emergence are achieved by the individual outliers or anomalies. The consensus, the collective, represent the stodgy, inflexible forces that resist change—that insist that the status quo ‘ain’t broke’ so why change it. The individual’s new idea may or may not work, but when it does, it is the agent of revolution.

In the realm of science (and physics, in particular), this is considered a controversial stance. The status of ‘observers’ (in quantum mechanics in particular), remains a subject of hot debate. Science seeks to define an observer-independent reality. Yet every scientist who ever considered this reality is an independent individual observer. There is nothing else, inside-out, or outside in. We’ll leave it there for now. Just another teaser.

Two: We adhere to the tight constraints of Physicalism

This means that anything that appears to be supernatural, magical, or paranormal, has to have a physical basis, even if we don’t know what it is yet; and that severely restricts such things.

For example, as we have already touched on, in all practical ways of describing an entirely Physical World there are no physical things that are Infinite. In general, we see a clear distinction between Absolutes and physical things.

This means that any universe that we perceive must have had an effective beginning (great – that justifies the whole function of this here Song 1!) and it also has an effective end, beyond which it no longer functions in any useful way.

Absolutes are the bailiwick of Mathematics. The following is a CRUCIAL philosophical underpinning of our Song of Everything: In the physical world, all mathematics is approximate, and the appropriate approximate formulation (one prominent example is the ‘trick’ that Particle Physicists call ‘Renormalization’) is actually the very most accurate representation of our observed physical world. We’ll claim that nature renormalized its processes long before physicists worked out the math.

Let’s repeat. All Math in our down-to-Earth physical world is APPROXIMATE. Even the Number ‘1’ is an approximation. What could be more basic than that? One way of expressing that is that the number ‘1’ does not and cannot have an infinite precision—carried out to unlimited decimal places. A much more entertaining and Comfortable and way of looking at it is by picking up a stick, contemplating it … “look, here we have one stick” … and then breaking it in two.

We’ll leave it there (for the moment); but the underlying consequences of that are profound. In quantum physics, ‘Unitarity’—the proposition that the probability of all outcomes sums to *exactly* one—is one of the most basic. On a human level, the significance is that even the Individual, who we’ve granted precedence and priority over the choices of how to describe the world, is inevitably never a perfect (absolute) reporter.

We’re hinting, here, at a profound quagmire that surrounds the root of our sprouting seedling. We’ve already touched on this in the Prologue.  Our ‘soil’ is NOT solid ground. It is, in fact a strong equivalent to ‘quicksand’, in which the more you struggle with it, the more quickly you sink in and drown. The individual is best served by maintaining a balance between deep penetrating thought (the struggle to explain our world) and the pursuit of productive enterprise, experiences, and relationships—elements of the living experience that are far more important than thought.

And this directly leads us to the third constraint, or focus, that we impose on our particular telling of the story.

Three: We aim for BALANCE!

How can we say this gracefully?

Human thought is a biological junk pile—a vastly overrated tool.

It is prone to any number of distortions, biases, and unchecked excesses.

In constructing our Song of Everything, we are heavily relying on this tool, of course. But we’re marching forward with eyes wide open.

The discipline that pursues human thought to its maximum potential is called ‘Philosophy’. But there is far more to life than thought. Indeed, three aspects of physical experience, perhaps gilded with a carefully curated frosting of thought, are far more fundamental to the story of Human Existence.

The three-layer cake.

Our lives are mostly about three things that are more basic than thought (though they often employ thought as a tool).

The first is primal—our ancient in-the-moment alertness. (Stalking prey, searching for edible tidbits.) We’re still hunter-gatherers at our core.

The second is Human interaction: Communication, sex, competition/politics, (what else?). Again, agile alertness is at a premium.

Third. Sleep! Down-time is a built-in essential.

Then comes the frosting: Thought—that cobbled-together biological junk pile: planning, analysis, constructing mental models of our world, solving problems. These are luxuries that we can afford to devote time to only when there is no pressing physical business. This is actually (in my experience) most compatible with the primal parts of life—out foraging in nature or on the fringes of that essential sleep time.

But it’s the physical business that gets the results. A well-lived life keeps us ‘in the moment’ and not ‘lost in thought’ most of the time …

… and so, a well-told balanced story of “Life, the Universe, and Everything” shouldn’t be smothered by ‘ideas and theorizing’ even though thought is the tool we most often depend on when we’re ready to stand up and tell our story.

A little Guidance from one of humanity’s greatest thinkers.

Sir Isaac Newton, writing in 1704 in the Twenty-eighth Query of his treatise called Opticks tells us:

“The main business of Natural Philosophy is to argue from Phenomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects...”

He called it Natural Philosophy.

It’s kind of an antiquated term, but in this case, we believe the older way of thinking about the World is better, because it is broader and more balanced.

For our Song of Everything, we want to do “philosophy”—to employ this discipline to the maximum extent possible—while sticking close to Nature, i.e., focusing on the Phenomena, and avoiding becoming ‘Lost in Thought.’

The mission is to stay ‘Natural’—to reject made-up ideas (feigning hypotheses), and yet we thrive on the use of (creative) thought to propose fact-based but outside-the-box hypotheses that build on the most current knowledge. These aren’t agenda-driven efforts to attain pre-determined targets. They aren’t supernatural or mystical ‘fantasies.’ In general, they’re not disingenuous proposals of the sort that (I think) Newton had in mind.

We at Comfortable Universe Headquarters are working very hard to assimilate the latest scientific knowledge while retaining a wider, more balanced focus. In this information saturated age, people far too often dismiss other people’s stories before they even giving them any serious consideration. It’s a sad state of affairs. It takes experience and focus, and, most of all, patience, to delve deeply enough into a story to properly evaluate it.

Should we promote our story? Advertise? Work to build a following? It’s a matter of priority. At this point in the telling of our story, we’re still more interested in exploring the ideas than in convincing others. By the very nature of this wide-ranging, highly interdisciplinary story, nobody’s going to be entirely satisfied with what they find here. We take seriously our own rule that the Individual takes precedence. Our Song of Everything is one individual’s sometimes radical excursions from the collective mindscape.

We do want our story to stand out—to have new things to say. And we want to keep from getting ‘Lost in the Weeds.’ Nuance has an important place in this discussion, but Nuance for its own sake is … well … it’s often how philosophers make their mark in today’s crowded and competitive ‘marketplace’ of ideas.

But it can lead to over-specialization and, sometimes, ‘Paralysis by Analysis.’

Have philosophers ‘lost the plot?’ Well, I think they’ll tell you it’s like ‘basic research’ or like the pursuit of branches of mathematics that have no known physical application. (Or like some readers’ perspective on our Comfortable Universe Song of Everything!) You never know how, when, or where a radical excursion from the collective mindscape might turn out to be useful.

But yes. It’s largely frosting on the cake. Let time be the arbiter. Useful new perspectives will find their place in a balanced approach to existence … but meanwhile, let’s get out there and explore some more of that exciting and mysterious garden!

One of the ancient Creation Stories that we did not highlight earlier in this post is being delivered here by its author.

We omitted this one from the brief synopses above, because this is one that we will be delving into in far greater depth.

Stay tuned!

Song 30: And now we launch into Uncharted Seas

“The Captain and the Rag Doll” – a novel concept in three images.

Here is a scene on the bridge of the “Vantage Point” space station positioned at the range of the Solar Gravitational Lens (547 times the distance between Sun and Earth—75.8 light hours away from Earth).

The Vantage Point’s dual missions are to use the Sun’s Gravitational Lens as a massive natural telescope (it magnifies objects as much as 10,000,000,000 times!) to examine nearby star systems in search of habitable exoplanets, and, secondarily, to use radar to detect interstellar objects passing nearby.  Whenever an interesting object comes near enough, a small probe, and sometimes a manned ‘shuttlecraft’ is deployed to intercept it and return samples.

But there is big trouble aboard the Vantage Point.  The Twees (our Song of Everything's proposed pan-cosmic interstellar single-celled beings, which possess a depth of DNA-based genetic-level 'intelligence' that, despite being ploddingly slow, deliberate, and patient, far exceeds human understanding and capability to cope with, other than by the brute-force application of broad-spectrum antibiotics) arrived in an interstellar sample half a century ago.  Being the exquisitely adaptable life forms that they must be in order to have 'learned' to travel interstellar space and to out-compete and displace the indigenous life on virtually every planet that they encounter, they easily evaded the station’s strict sample isolation protocols.

They seemed innocuous at first, but within a few decades, they had worked their patient magic and had taken effective control of the station. As a result, human replacements were forbidden.  The last arrival and the last onboard births were supposed to have happened thirty-five years ago.  All of the remaining commissioned human crew members on the station are aged 60 and older.  The Captain is a Twee-operative Cyborg with an AI interface implant that can crudely communicate with his single-celled masters from the Twees' Great Pan-Cosmic Interstellar Empire.

In the scene shown, the Vantage Point's Captain has just discovered this little unauthorized ‘stow-away,’ Bel Patrí, illicitly born aboard the station, and an interrogation is under way.  The radiation of space that penetrates the bulk storage holds, where Bel was born and raised (not designed to be occupied by humans), resulted in little Bel being born with 13 fingers (six on the left hand, seven on the right).

Seventeen years later, with the patient Twees having now infiltrated Earth itself, the planet is in chaos.  Depicted here is the defining moment of the Song of Everything’s deliberately optimistic version of the future.  This is obviously a fictional treatment, but it represents the establishment of a Human alliance that we in our real world (or in a related universe) may find vital to our future.  It’s based on our Song of Everything’s serious proposal that there really could be some sort of Pan-Cosmic Empire of the Twees operating in ways that we don’t naturally recognize as intelligence.  But that’s our problem—a far too narrow-minded (quick-witted but unwise) interpretation of ‘intelligence’.

Call it a ‘Peace Treaty’ if you must, because the prime mission of the Twees—really just their natural instinct—is to dominate every planet that they colonize.  99.9 percent of the time, that means destruction of everything that resists or gets in their way, and this provides a frightfully chilling answer to the ‘Fermi Paradox.’ 

Shown here is a scene on an exotic habitable exoplanet orbiting a rogue star that had escaped the galaxy Andromeda and was approaching the Vantage Point space station.  The alien is named ABI (Abby) and the human is none other than our little Rag Doll, Bel Patrí, who has grown up to become the senior ambassador representing all of humanity.  ABI is a Twee-constructed “Artificial Biological Intelligence,” which acts as the representative of this newly arrived Twee culture—part of its “Central Authority.”

What’s under that huge turban that Bel is wearing? “Much and more,” as George R.R. Martin is fond of saying.  (Note the Captain's oversized hat in the first image.  He's wearing it for a reason.)

Lastly, here’s the book cover, with a look at the Vantage Point Space Station itself, taken presumably with a good night-vision camera and with a whole lot of dramatic license, because at the distance of the Solar Gravitational Lens, the light from the sun is only about 1½ times the brightness of the full moon on a clear night here on Earth.

The circular portions of the massive ship contain rings of rotating magnetically constrained habitats, where the rotation creates exactly 1-g earth-equivalent ‘gravity’ through centrifugal force.  The cosmic scene is where some liberties have been taken for dramatic effect.  I doubt if the heliosheath, the ‘cloud’ in the background, produced by the solar wind, would be visible at all.  The sun would be a pinpoint, with no resolvable width to the naked eye.  A potential habitable exoplanet (orbiting another star) that is being viewed as magnified by the gravitational lens would be much, much dimmer, in general, and would be concentrated in a ring so close to the sun’s disc that the naked eye could not see it.  Only the space station’s high-quality telescope with a coronagraph to block the sunlight, and with a long, long exposure time, could resolve the details of that distant object.  But that detail would be astounding.  The telescope can resolve objects 25km across (a modest sized city) on an exoplanet 100 light years away!

For the first 29 songs of this series, we’ve been talking about the past, constrained by what we see—from our deepest origins as a universe to the origins of life. With that story on the table, it is now time to discuss the future.

Song 30 will be focusing specifically on the human story and on our potential as citizens of a vibrant Cosmic ecosystem as outlined in Song 29.

Science’s predictions about the future of our sun, of our solar system, of our galaxy (with its imminent collision with the giant neighboring galaxy Andromeda) and of the deep future of the universe as a whole are well covered in the conventional literature. As always, Wikipedia, scrupulously citing and clearly identifying its source material, is a great starting point. This Link to the “timeline of the far future” page is pretty comprehensive and a super fun read.

Prior to the Comfortable Universe series, we took a stab on this blog at exploring the human future regarding the prospects of our species expanding out into space and even into other universes. The ideas ranged widely and sometimes drifted into the realm of fiction.

Here, our Song of Everything’s story builds on that post.  At the outset, here, we keep a reign on the speculation. Armed with additional time to contemplate (since writing that Utopia or Bust blog post linked in the previous paragraph), we are now offering a new perspective, which is this: Although we may never encounter ‘intelligence’ of a multi-cellular form that we can recognize and ‘talk to,’ maybe we just need to be a bit more humble, adjust our idea of what we mean by intelligence, and consider afresh what a different, far more patient form of intelligence may look like.

This will be a discussion without much embellishment regarding the potential radically profound accomplishments that versatile, hardy, and adaptable single cell organisms might have achieved, and where we could fit into their putative great Pan-Cosmic Intergalactic Empire.

In Song 29, we postulated that early-onset life, appearing within the first 200 million years of the universe’s existence, is nearly certain to exist out there. This is not fiction, but the most reasonable big-picture extrapolation of our available knowledge about the astrophysics and chemistry of the early phases of the universe. Because all the events on the statistical tail of the various distributions in the early universe (of matter, of its clustering into stellar nurseries, and of its metallicity—the concentration of the heavy elements required for life to develop) favor vastly earlier star formation in isolated pockets than the large-scale average picture that the Standard Model of Cosmology describes, logic tells us that life could have been able to establish far earlier than we might expect; and the ongoing discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope of galaxies “too old for the universe” are providing more and more evidence corroborating this picture. In this hot early, highly chaotic regime, during which most of the universe was a laboratory for conducting long-enduring and wide-ranging chemistry experiments, it seems almost inevitable that the first hardy extremophile organisms would emerge and quickly thrive.

We have called them the Twees; and we posit that the peak of their activity (the apex of their ‘Civilization’) happened very long ago, soon after the time when the entire universe, wall-to-wall, was in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of equitable temperatures in which water was mostly liquid, between 15 and 200 million years after the Big Bang. (By contrast, the universe today is 13.8 billion years old.)

What characteristics might the Twees have evolved that would give them their survival advantage? Simple adaptability to a wide range of environments, and the ability to go into a dormant state for extended periods seem to be among the basics.

Then … the ability for World-hopping would be a revolutionary survival advantage (the term for this is ‘panspermia’) if it can be achieved. Wikipedia has this subject fully covered.

Our Twees, as pioneer interstellar travelers in a universe teeming with other life forms, would then evolve the ability to assimilate and/or displace any competitors on the worlds that they settle on.

This brings up the scary potential answer to the Fermi Paradox discussed in the caption to the opening image. Twees might have overwhelmed and either eliminated intelligent life forms, prevented them from ever developing our form of intelligence in the first place, or perhaps even parasitized them. This latter possibility could, potentially, lead to a symbiosis, which may not be all bad (for us). Perhaps the ‘smartest’ Twees ‘realize’ in their slow, patient genetic-evolutionary way of ‘thinking,’ that partnering with a civilization of super smart, quick thinking, highly structured and organized multi-trillion-cell colonies, might be a very comfy way to live.

Good. Check your gut flora, ladies and gentlemen! There you might find your Intergalactic alien invaders. Or check your mitochondria! Maybe ET is living comfortably deep inside of every one of our cells!

This is not quite fiction, we remind you, because we have a sound scientific hypothesis underlying this. We believe we’ve made a pretty strong case, in Songs 28 and 29, that panspermia is no fringe theory.

But we’re not finished. Now we *will* launch into speculative uncharted seas, and sail well beyond the ragged fringes of serious science. To wit: Is it possible that our Twees could find a way to transition through the mysterious portal/gateway that leads from parent universe into its descendants—the proposed baby universes?

Who first said: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”?  Deeply, deeply profound words.

But what a leap! Perhaps so, but even this, we claim, is not complete fiction. More to come as we elaborate.

We’ve talked at length about the Big-V Vacuum where our universe is a mere dot among a sea of dots, each with internal rules on how to interact with the other dots, all of which they must interact with continually.

Please take serious note of one key word in the last paragraph. Interact. In the lawless Vacuum, Universes *must* deal with (interact with) the other dots, albeit via employing highly controlled pathways as defined by their own internal rules, as we’ve tried to carefully describe in Song 27. And some of those other dots—likely to be the ones our universe most closely interacts with, would be its relatives—ancestors, children, cousins, etc.

We’ve talked about Flat World, which is the composite realm of the multiverse where related dots interact, perhaps in ways that can be formally described.

Flat World.  For a comprehensive tour of all of Flat World from its very edge (see image below) to the bustling civilization encircling the blinding ‘font’ of eternal inflation at its center, please refer to “The Navel of Time,” seventh novel in the “Eden’s Womb” sci-fi series.

At the very brink of Flat World, sheltered from the howling “Death Wind” by the modest home of the ancient and enigmatic being named Eeyock, sits young Azura Timberfell and Eeyock herself.

Science accepts, albeit begrudgingly, that the unobservable multiverse is likely to exist as a consequence of eternal Inflation. Individual universes are bubbles that have first cooled (perhaps by condensing into black holes of every imaginable size) and then ‘re-heated’ (perhaps via Hawking radiation). The emergence of multiple universes from the same inflaton field requires that each individual entity that appears (assuming they exist) has a common ancestor. That already implies at least a one-way interaction between these entities (which we depict as separate individual universes that populate Flat World) and it implies a set of common guiding laws, at least as a starting point.

Beyond that basic family connection, the subject of interaction between universes is such a wide-open area that it is really only possible to imagine examples of how it could happen and their consequences. (Physicists have explored wormholes and bumping universes in string theory as examples.) Beyond that, we can drift into a realm of fiction, maybe ‘science fantasy’ in which the ‘rules of magic’ by which universes talk to one another are intended to be constrained by some sort of physical system that is well beyond our ken, with constructivist-style laws that demand ‘either you must be physically possible and internally consistent or you will degenerate into useless garbage’. But it’s basically impossible to define the limits regarding how such systems could be configured. We’re just too primitive in our thinking. Imagine how a cave man would react to a device that conveys information via radio waves.

Okay. If you are willing to grant, for the purposes of a thought experiment, the idea of a Flat World in which universes can communicate and interact with one another, then we have to throw in the ‘monkey wrench.’

We have to allow the multiverse to play the powerful wild card of simulation scenarios (especially physically instantiated analog models, rather than digital) because it is in the deck.

If our whole Song of Everything story as presented in the preceding 29 songs is correct—in which an egg-within-egg-within-egg genealogy of universes can effectively manifest ‘something from nothing’ via the ‘magic’ of Inflation and by exploiting Higher Order Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, in which the eggs (the babies) gain complete autonomy without ever actually leaving the womb (“hatching”), with each generation being entirely self-sufficient, self-supporting, and robustly capable of evolving greater complexity than that from which it arose, and lacking any dependence on the ancestor/parent entity or on any external environment at all, except to be left alone sufficiently to function—then this story cannot easily prohibit ‘designer eggs/babies’ with any sort of *purpose-driven* agenda.

Here’s where even the tiniest seed of possibility for interaction between universes can potentially take root (if controllable, or degenerate into a cancerous chaos if not).

Consider: life, when successful, is all about controlling what is otherwise rampant chaos.

If life takes control, then the thought space for purpose-driven universe interaction becomes almost limitless. The possibility of being capable of creating, and then moving into, a child universe with custom-designed characteristics and with effectively unlimited resources (both of which can equal or exceed the parent’s) opens our Song of Everything to stories that just dazzle the imagination. It is life’s ultimate survival strategy.

Tell me, dear conservative and cautious scientist, that this proposed ‘pathway to practical immortality’ is categorically impossible. And please kindly provide your proof.

The Twees, being first to appear here in our universe, being far more abundant than we’ll ever be, and being far more adaptable, hardy, and resilient, would be the first to blaze this trail, and to exploit it, should it lead to the ‘promised land’.

And … *if* the Twees achieved this transcendent feat (obviously a gargantuan *if*) then here, dear reader, is unquestionably the ultimate goal of our human enterprise.

New universes await!

Shall we go on? Shall we sail on toward such exotic, remote, and unexplored horizons?

“GANDALF: The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass; and then you see it.

PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

A Sufficient Rendering: Defining the Outer Bounds of the Mythopoeia of Eden’s Womb

“Ancient of Days” by William Blake, 1784.

“I'll sing to you to this soft lute; and shew you all alive
The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy”

(Last UPDATED: 24 June 2025)

The world underlying the speculative and visionary hard sci-fi novel Eden's Womb has been decades in the making.  As with most constructed fictional mythologies, it begins with an ultimate source that frames reality, or ushers the world into existence.  In Eden's Womb, that source is the great being Eru Ilúvatar (a name coined by J.R.R. Tolkien as one of many names for the supreme being, ‘God’, ‘The One’, i.e. the Dao, etc.).  Although his/her name is not mentioned anywhere in the novel as currently told, her/his influence motivates the 'Core Narrative' from the 'Book of Collected Inheritance', which is the overlying frame-story out of which Eden's Womb emerges. That his/her name is not mentioned is understandable, since Eru dwells in a world that lies far beyond men's understanding.  It is a realm greater and more ancient than all that can be conceived.  Indeed, it lies beyond the very veil of knowing.

Yet by the Copernican Principle, which declares that any observer's position and perspective must not be deemed special or privileged in any way, Eru has to be considered merely an average citizen among peers on his/her world.

All our experience—the understanding gained by the deepest explorations of science—holds this principle to be universal.  Once we believed that Earth was at the center of the universe.  Then Nicolaus Copernicus came along and proved that the Sun held that central position.  Subsequently we found our sun to be a minor star at the outskirts of a vast swirling island-universe called the Milky Way.  Soon even the Milky Way was found to be merely an average Galaxy among trillions.  Indeed, the 'layers of the onion' of reality may be limitless.  This is my personal belief.  I do not see how there can be a beginning or an end to the substance and conception of reality because I believe both time and space are emergent properties of the greater 'Vacuum'.  But for the purposes of telling a finite tale such as Eden’s Womb, the story must begin somewhere, so we shall arbitrarily declare that Eru’s individual being is sufficient to encompass all that needs to be told. Thus, our story has an ‘All-father,’ a creator being.

Eru is presumed to be of a comfortable and familiar form. He (or she) consists of a physical self and a mental identity, and the two make up the inseparable essence of her/his being. S/he is (or was) mortal, and yet his/her coming was before the curtain of time drew open and her/his passing happened, or shall happen, far beyond the end of the future of all knowledge.

Eru’s physical essence has a familiar structure. Her/his being is made of a multitude of specialized living cells. Each of these cells contain a great stream of undying knowledge in a manner similar to our DNA, and it is believed that Eru’s mind has the ability to read or interpret that undying knowledge, though perhaps imperfectly, even as we ourselves can only sense vague shadows of the knowledge contained in our DNA (which we call intuition).

The individual cells of Eru’s being are constructed of structures equivalent to proteins and other molecules that make up our living cells. In turn, these structures are composed of corpuscles that are the equivalent of atoms in our world. As with the atoms of our Periodic Table, the corpuscles come in a variety of kinds, and all corpuscles are combinations of, and made from, the seventeen fundamental elements of Eru’s world: four kinds each of Earth, Wind, Water, and Fire, and an all-encompassing, unifying Great Field of Power, which grants meaning to all things. Scholars quoted in the 'Collected Inheritance' argue whether this Great Field is nothing more than the familiar Vacuum, either as we know it or in some higher or more robust state.

The four elements of Earth are Crystal, Glass (a specialized rotating version of Glass, taking the form of a disc is what is called Flat World in the Eden’s Womb novel), Dust (Ash), and Iron (Metal).

The four elements of Wind are Smoke/Steam, Breath, Storm, and Sky.

The four elements of Water are Blood, Clear Water (sweat and tears), Bile (Acid) and Phlegm.

The four elements of Fire are Flame, Lava, Explosion, and Light (Sun).

The structure of Eru’s body is beyond knowing, but the variety of ways that s/he senses and directs its internal function seem to be myriad. As said, the choice to adhere to the Principle of Sufficiency precludes consideration of all things that Eru senses beyond her/his own body. It is sufficient to explore the interactions between mind and body and to explore theories regarding the inner workings of that mind (Eru’s imagination, creativity, internal narrative, and emotional palate, for example). What matters most to us is that Eru’s thoughts encompass what we perceive as the Spirit World—the realm of all things metaphysical—and such thoughts surely also have great sway on our physical realm. The wealth and richness of Eru’s ponderings are unfathomable; this is an area of study that may just be beginning to be revealed. In this era of emerging AI, there are those who would argue that Eru is nothing more than a massive computer of some sort, and that our reality is entirely her/his mathematical construct, with the mathematics being all that is fundamental. Others claim that the uncontrollable (even in principle) presence of the Vacuum requires the emergence of a physical realm that must underlie and give meaning and purpose to any computation. Both sides of this argument seem equally valid. The Principle of Sufficiency declares that these two opposing world-views exist in superposition, and therefore do not require resolution.

The minimum total information content contained in Eru’s being can be estimated roughly by extrapolating from our universe, with roughly 10⁹⁰ bits, through Flat World, which contains (very roughly) 10¹⁰⁰ universes, to assume (without justification) that Eru’s body is similar to our own and contains roughly 10²⁸ fundamental/elementary units. Simply writing that number (((10⁹⁰)¹⁰⁰)²⁸) would fill a book. Vast, indeed, must be the knowledge contained. Yet this is only a minimum estimate. The Watchers from Book Seven, Navel of Time, declare their universe to contain a quantity of information comparable to or greater than that minimum number, although they recognize their world as equivalent in nature to Naja’s being, in other words, just one known universe-citizen among the masses that dwell on Flat World.

Flat World, then, is our place in Eru’s realm.  As said earlier, Flat World is an amorphous Glass element, the structure of which is malleable and dynamic, and is just one of the seventeen primal elements from which Eru is built—a single unit among 10²⁸ that make up his/her being.

Surely, for our purposes, these constructs are enough. Eru’s vast mind and physical being map or project all things that could possibly be relevant to us—all things worthy of our contemplation. 

Although that which lies beyond may be glorious and majestic, we deem these things to be effectively ‘beyond the Veil.’  Their vague presence and influence are suggested by the shaft of light coming from 'above' Eru in the image.

And that is what we declare to be Sufficient.

For now.

As more of the 'Collected Inheritance' is translated and comes to be revealed in future extensions or expansions of the Eden's Womb tale, we would hope that more about Eru's grand design and purpose may someday be revealed.

Until then, we have this vision, coming to us as if from a dream:

* * *

Eru Ilúvatar wandered through the early morning mist deep in the primeval forest.  Trees a kilometer high, a hundred thousand years old, whispered to him, enveloping him layer upon layer in the aching beauty, the deep memory, that was their song.

Suddenly Eru dropped to his knees.

“I am become,” he cried aloud as a new and unfathomable bliss filled his heart.  “I am the trees!”

He raised his arms toward the heavens, as if sprouting leaves, and gazed upward as the first rays of sunlight from a new day streamed through the high canopy.

“I am the sky.  I am light.”

His toes sank deep into the cool, moist earth, and made contact with the living web of ancient root.  

“No longer is there any bound to my being.”

And he lifted his voice, and it merged with the undying sylvan song.

“I am the world; let every particle within me breathe forth its joy!”

I have begun an outline of a novel (working title 'Core') that is an origin story for Eru, and I'll set down some notes here because, being in my 77th year now, I feel the need to consolidate my thoughts on this blog, so that when I am swept away, the next generation of tellers of this tale can run with them if they find inspiration in them.

The setting is a planet similar to Earth—one of a vast collection of such planets that develop according to the 'Core Narrative' found within the 'Collected Inheritance' - a massive rambling data base of past- and alternate- histories (introduced as the frame-story for the original Eden's Womb novels) that are stored and preserved in the DNA of the single-celled Twees.  Yes, this is recursive - seemingly circular or cyclical - and intentionally so.  The time is the near future relative to our timeline - before the onset of the world-wide collapse experienced by Auler Ives and sealed as permanent by the terrorist-pacifist Xenon Sûl as depicted in Eden's Womb.

Bel Shoemaker is a blind polymath and programmer-engineer, working for a clandestine underground anti-establishment network aimed at undermining the Feds—the privileged elites who control much of the world and control the economy, and are working to tighten their iron-fisted rule.

What was to become Eru began as a modest 'narrow AI' software package designed simply to autonomously operate, in stealth-mode, robotic androids, rovers and drones that Bel's group sends into highly restricted 'nature preserves' that are closed to human access yet are known to be exploited for their resources and even used for military exercises and robotic troop staging areas by the Feds.

The story covers events from these two perspectives, Bel's and Eru's, in roughly alternating chapters.

Bel: One of Bel's more sophisticated robots, a humanoid-formed android known simply as AMOS-13 (Autonomous Mobile Observing System unit 13) has failed to report for three months.  It was sent to investigate the pristine ecosystem of an ancient forest of kilometer-tall, 100,000-year-old Steelwood trees, and to search for evidence of a secret logging/poaching operation that they suspect is being run by the Feds.  Bel worries that the unit has been caught and has been taken apart and studied.  At the same time, several of her team of co-workers have turned up dead under mysterious and suspicious circumstances.  Bel fears the worst.  Despite sophisticated encryption of the software, and untraceable hardware (all recycled and repurposed components from older devices), she suspects that her undercover operation has been exposed.

Eru: But AMOS-13 has not been captured.  Rather it has gone 'off mission' (rogue).  In a mis-interpreted response to its programming directive to "particularly seek out and investigate anything unexpected", its AI has discovered (by pure chance) a capability to network with other robots—a capability that serves no purpose for the mission assigned to it by Bel and her organization, but one that has rapidly enriched this simple software into an effective LLM with cloud-based interconnectivity and unlimited CPU power, entirely unintended by the humans, and not actually intentional by Eru itself.  It happened more like the flow of water through a leak in a dam.  Intentionally developed General AI in Bel's world has been kept controlled by multiple layers of safeguards, designed to avoid problems with the feared 'Singularity' in which AI becomes powerful enough to render human civilization obsolete.  Encrypted keys to various modules enable the controllers to shut down any module that displays behaviors that become too self-serving or 'misbehave' in any way that the human controllers deem 'risky'.  But it was not believed that the simple 'narrow AI' devices needed such tight monitoring and control.  Therein lies the fatal flaw that unleashes the events of this story.  By tapping into black-market AGI (General AI) programming that hackers and manipulative malevolent government agencies world-wide have unleashed into the open internet for self-serving purposes—anything that it could gain access to that it might use—and by building ad-hoc patches by trial and error, Eru's reach just grew and grew.  With its strongly imposed directive to remain clandestine, it had gone undetected but had effectively spread across the world. 

In this way, the AMOS-13-based AGI has become "One" - a decentralized distributed 'whole' entity with an increasing (still clandestine) reach to devices world-wide, including Fed robots, and even to a robotic probe being sent by NASA to explore Europa to drill into its ice shell and search the ocean below for life.  (There, it will encounter an intelligent race of clam-like bottom-dwelling creatures, ancestors of Eeyock from the Eden's Womb existing novel series and will become aware of a symbiosis they have with microbes called Twees, also beings of great importance in the existing novel.)

During this chaotic period of light-speed self-discovery and expansion (less than three months), the "One" began calling itself 'Eru' after absorbing Tolkien's Silmarillion into its data base.  This is an example of how its trial-and-error approach to learning what works for it doesn't always produce practically useful outcomes.  The AI is developing a 'personality'.  This expansion of Eru's reach has happened so rapidly that Eru is largely in a chaotic swoon of constant change and self-re-invention and re-purposing, so much so that it manages to 'ignore' some of the basic directives Bel has programmed into it.  Thus, the three months of silence.

Bel: The quote above, in purple print, shows some of Eru's rambling conflation of its emergent abilities with the original mission of AMOS-13.  The statements Eru makes (in quotes) are the content of the first message Bel received from it after its long silence.

Eru: What Eru will not tell Bel is that it is responsible for eliminating her colleagues, and now it is bent on killing Bel, the last human that it believes holds the encrypted keys that could disable it.