We are storytelling creatures. Since we first gathered around fires, humans have crafted narratives to make sense of existence. Today, many argue consumerism has become our de facto religion. But I find myself drawn to an older story — one written in the very fabric of reality itself.

Nature’s Genesis

Why settle for half-baked creation myths when nature’s own story is more magnificent? The Big Bang — 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution culminating in conscious beings capable of contemplating their own existence. We are literally made of stardust. The calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the oxygen we breathe — all forged in dying stars.

We don’t just observe the universe. We are the universe becoming conscious of itself.

Quantum Consciousness and the Observer

Physics gets genuinely mystical without losing scientific rigour. The quantum measurement problem suggests reality might be participatory. John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis proposes that information — observed, processed, integrated — might be as fundamental as matter and energy.

Consider quantum immortality. While highly theoretical, it emerges from the Many-Worlds Interpretation. What’s remarkable is how people respond when they encounter this concept. Almost 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” — as if they’d slipped from one timeline to another.

Whether these represent actual quantum branching or how our brains process improbable survival, the phenomenology is remarkably consistent. We always find ourselves in the timeline where we continue to exist.

The Universe Computing Itself

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 minimises travel time. The photon appears to solve an optimisation problem instantly.

Quantum mechanics suggests something stranger: the photon explores all possible paths simultaneously through superposition. In a sense, it experiences every route through parallel quantum realities and “chooses” the one with least action.

Information processing — a key feature of consciousness — might be fundamental to the universe rather than something that merely emerges from complex arrangements of matter.

The Universe Starts with U

There’s something poetically perfect about “Universe” starting with “U” — not just the letter, but you, the conscious observer without whom the universe would be unconscious matter following blind laws.

This perspective requires its own faith — not in ancient texts or consumer promises, but in the reliability of natural processes, the beauty of scientific discovery, and the profound mystery of consciousness arising from cosmic evolution. Faith grounded in wonder rather than certainty.

This isn’t cold materialism. It’s recognising that matter is far stranger and more wonderful than our ancestors imagined. We carry within ourselves the history of stars and the potential for wisdom.

The universe starts with U, and that makes all the difference.