Stories We Tell Ourselves
We are storytelling creatures. Since we first gathered around fires, humans have crafted narratives to make sense of existence — where we came from, why we’re here, what happens when we die. These stories become the religions that shape civilizations, the myths that guide moral intuitions, the frameworks through which we interpret reality itself.
Today, many argue that consumerism has become our de facto religion, complete with its own temples (shopping malls), rituals (Black Friday), and promises of salvation (the next purchase will finally make us happy). But I find myself drawn to an older, deeper story — one written not in ancient texts but in the very fabric of reality itself.
Nature’s Genesis
Why settle for half-baked creation myths when we can uncover nature’s own fascinating genesis story? The Big Bang narrative — 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution culminating in conscious beings capable of contemplating their own existence — beats most origin stories hands down. Maybe except the Nordic myths, which at least had the poetic wisdom to imagine the cosmos emerging from primordial chaos, with Yggdrasil connecting all realms of existence. The Norse understood something profound: reality is interconnected, layered, alive with meaning.
But nature’s story is even more magnificent. We are literally made of stardust — the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the oxygen we breathe, all forged in the nuclear furnaces of dying stars. We don’t just observe the universe; we are the universe becoming conscious of itself.
And the sun! Life’s fundamental dependency on our local star feels almost too obvious to mention, yet how often do we truly acknowledge it? Every calorie of energy that powers our thoughts, every breath we take, every moment of consciousness — all gifts from nuclear fusion happening 93 million miles away. Ancient sun worship wasn’t primitive; it was profoundly accurate about the source of all earthly life.
Quantum Consciousness and the Observer
This is where physics gets genuinely mystical without losing its scientific rigor. The quantum measurement problem suggests that reality itself might be participatory. John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis proposes that information — observed, processed, integrated — might be as fundamental as matter and energy. If consciousness is structured information processing, then mind isn’t separate from the physical world but woven into its very foundation.
Consider quantum immortality — the speculative idea that consciousness might survive death by transitioning to parallel universes where we continue to exist. While this remains highly theoretical, it emerges from the Many-Worlds Interpretation, a serious attempt to solve quantum mechanics’ measurement problem.
What’s remarkable is how people respond when they first encounter this concept. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly: someone learns about quantum immortality, shares it with friends, and suddenly everyone has a story. That car accident they barely avoided. The time they should have died but didn’t. That eerie moment when reality felt like it “shifted” somehow, as if they’d slipped from one timeline into another.
These experiences are strikingly universal. Almost everyone can recall at least one moment where they felt like they glimpsed an alternative reality where things went very differently — where they didn’t make it. Whether these represent actual quantum branching or simply how our brains process trauma and improbable survival, the phenomenology is remarkably consistent. We find ourselves always in the timeline where we continue to exist, exactly as quantum immortality would predict.
The theory doesn’t require consciousness to actively “choose” which branch to follow. In the Many-Worlds framework, all possibilities occur simultaneously. But from any conscious observer’s perspective, they can only experience the branches where their consciousness persists. The result is a subjective immortality — you always find yourself in realities where you survive, no matter how improbable.
Whether or not quantum immortality reflects actual physics, the fact that such ideas arise naturally from our best theories suggests something profound about the relationship between consciousness and reality.
The participatory anthropic principle goes further: observers aren’t passive witnesses but active participants in bringing the universe into being. This echoes ancient wisdom traditions that recognized consciousness as fundamental, while grounding it in cutting-edge physics.
The Universe Computing Itself
Here’s where physics gets truly mind-bending: even a single photon seems to “know” things that should be impossible. When light travels from air into water, it bends at exactly the angle that minimizes travel time — Snell’s law of refraction. But how does the photon “know” to take this optimal path?
It’s like the classic lifeguard problem: if you’re on a beach and need to rescue someone drowning in the water, you don’t run straight toward them. You calculate the optimal path that accounts for running faster on sand than swimming through water. The photon appears to solve this same optimization problem instantly.
The traditional explanation is Fermat’s principle of least time, but quantum mechanics suggests something even stranger: the photon actually explores all possible paths simultaneously through quantum superposition, and the path we observe is the one that emerges from the interference of all possibilities. In a sense, the photon experiences every route through parallel quantum realities and “chooses” the one with least action.
This hints at something profound about the nature of reality itself. If individual photons can process information about optimal paths, if particles can “explore” multiple possibilities simultaneously, then information processing — a key feature of consciousness — might be fundamental to the universe rather than something that merely emerges from complex arrangements of matter.
Modern physics increasingly treats information as a third pillar alongside matter and energy. Quantum information theory suggests that what we call “physical” processes might be better understood as reality computing itself at the most basic level. This opens fascinating possibilities for understanding consciousness not as an emergent accident but as a fundamental feature of the universe’s information-processing architecture.
If panpsychist interpretations are correct, then consciousness — or at least proto-consciousness — might be intrinsic to matter itself. This doesn’t mean rocks have thoughts, but that the capacity for experience might be a basic feature of reality that becomes increasingly complex as information processing becomes more sophisticated.
The Universe Starts with U
There’s something poetically perfect about the fact that “Universe” starts with “U” — not just the letter, but you, the conscious observer without whom the universe would be just unconscious matter and energy following blind laws.
But perhaps it’s more accurate to say the universe starts with “us” — the interconnected web of conscious beings, from the simplest organisms responding to their environment to humans contemplating quantum mechanics and mortality. We are not separate from nature but nature’s way of knowing itself.
A Different Kind of Faith
This perspective requires its own kind of faith — not faith in ancient texts or consumer promises, but faith in the reliability of natural processes, the beauty of scientific discovery, and the profound mystery of consciousness arising from cosmic evolution. It’s faith grounded in wonder rather than certainty, exploration rather than dogma.
When I look at the complexity emerging from quantum fields, at the elegant mathematics describing reality’s deepest structures, at the improbable chain of events that led from the Big Bang to beings capable of love and art and existential questioning — I find more genuine awe than any human creation story could provide.
This isn’t cold materialism. It’s recognizing that matter itself is far stranger and more wonderful than our ancestors imagined. Reality is both more mysterious and more knowable than traditional religions suggest. We can pursue truth through careful observation and rigorous thinking while remaining open to the genuine mysteries that persist at the edges of knowledge.
Living the Story
A nature-based spirituality doesn’t require temples or priests, though it might inspire pilgrimages to dark skies for stargazing or quiet forests for contemplation. It asks us to see ourselves as temporary arrangements of cosmic material blessed with the capacity for experience, love, and understanding.
This perspective offers both humility and empowerment. Humility because we are brief flickerings in cosmic time, empowerment because we are the universe’s way of knowing and appreciating itself. We carry within ourselves the history of stars and the potential for wisdom.
Whether quantum immortality is real or consciousness ends with brain death, this present moment of awareness — your awareness, reading these words — represents something profound: matter organized in such a way that it can ponder its own existence and find it beautiful.
The universe starts with U, and that makes all the difference.