The universe is connected. Reality is connected. They are one. Roughly fourteen billion years ago, they were literally one. All of everything - every atom, every force, all the time, all the particles, were all just one “thing”. One concept. One existence. No abstractions.

This one thing existed in some space or field which also had its own existence. And the interaction between this one universe thing and this field, led to an interaction which created the universe as we know it. It’s possible that there are other fields... other “things”. We don’t know. We can’t know.

That interaction - that alpha causation is the beginning of everything we could possibly understand. There is no human concept or understanding of “before” this.

It’s important to understand that this alpha event included not one, but two key elements. The initial “thing” that is the universe as we understand it. And the field with which the thing interacted. This field is what defines quantum concepts. It’s more or less the grid on which reality exists. It establishes the boundaries and restrictions which ultimately define our waking life.

From a mathematical perspective, you might be tempted to say that the numbers zero, one, and two all existed in this context. But that’s not correct. Really, the number one is the only to exist. Zero doesn’t exist, because there isn’t nothing, but something. And two doesn’t exist because there’s no external entity to contemplate the abstraction of each “thing” or existence. I’ve described it above as “two key elements” because that’s the only way a human mind could understand it. But if you could contemplate it as existing without two, as only one, it would be more accurate. Maybe think of a wave, which is one thing, but which has two distinct phases? Or maybe consider that each “thing” can only perceive the other, and can only perceive “one”. A third “thing” could possibly start to perceive more than one. But each of the key elements is really just fluctuations of the one “thing”, and its one existence, and cannot perceive anything except the one thing.

Or maybe I should preface all of this by saying that the above is our way of understanding... it is our concept. It is the way we interpret the various perceptions and experiences we have. The important thing is to understand that the universe is not one thing, but is really two things. It is the universe itself, and it is the field within which the universe exists. And they are conceptually like two things, but really they are the one, the universe.

It doesn’t matter if the universe is infinite or finite. It doesn’t matter if it is analog or digital. It does matter that it exists in coordination with the field; or, rather, that the universe is the phenomenon of the field and reality. The field defines many of the rules for how the universe behaves.

The simplest way to think of it is that the field is like a grid. Imagine a checkerboard, or chess board. The very simplest rule is that any piece can only exist in one square, and only one piece can exist in any particular square. There is no opportunity for a piece to exist in multiple squares, or for squares to overlap, and so on. You cannot move your checker to a corner where four squares meet.

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Another metaphor might be video. In the old days of film, it was easy to see that video was just a sequence of still frames being shown to you one at a time in rapid succession. There is no such thing as “continuous” video. When the frame rate approaches 30 frames per second, your brain perceives it as continuous motion, even though it is just 30 individual snapshots being shown in rapid succession.

These are both examples of quanta. Quantum fields are ideological constructs that allow information and “things” to only exist in specific states. A chess board only allows white bishops to be on white squares. They cannot be on black squares, they cannot move horizontal or vertical, only diagonal, and they cannot be in between squares. The movie cannot exist between frames, it only exists when the frames are experienced one after another in a precise configuration and speed. The movie only emerges as a concept in our mind as it tries to process the successive visual and audio sensory inputs.

The universe and its constituent components also exist on something like a chess board, called a quantum field. This field, however, is different in a few key respects. First, it is not two dimensional... it is at least three dimensional, possibly four dimensional, and some think there may be more. The best way to think of three dimensions is a cube, maybe like a Rubik’s cube. To conceive of four dimensions, imagine the cube rotating over time. This quantum field also has fixed “locations”, but they exist in the four-dimensional space, and they are also very very small. And, lastly, this field has unique properties which allow it to interact with the constituent component (or components) of the universe. One simple way to try to understand this might be to imagine a chess game. And as a pawn moves forward, perhaps it gains new characteristics as a result of moving to a particular space, or within range of a particular piece. Perhaps the pawn can become more like a rook if it is next to an opponent’s rook, or if it is on a black square. In this way, both the constituent components and the quantum field affect or have a causality on the pawn. But simply moving a pawn or rook on the board does not make a game, any more than viewing a single frame from a movie. Just as the movie emerges from subsequent frames and audio sensory events, a game of chess emerges over a series of moves. And so, our universe, and our reality emerges because of the oneness of stuff that makes up the universe, and the fundamental field which defines the rules of causality for the one universe.

But these concepts, this syntax, this language and description, is inadequate to properly describe the reality of it. While there are two things – sort of, conceptually – there really is only the one thing – the one universe. The pawns are not separate from the chess board. They exist because of the chess board, and vice-versa. They exist “with” the chess board. As humans, we can conceive some separate definition, some separate language to describe the pawns, and the board. But that’s because our conceptual framework is too poor to properly represent this reality. It would be better to say something like: a description of the pawn is a description of the chess board. But this makes no sense to human conception. We, as humans, want abstractions, we want distinctions. We want there to be a pawn and also a chess board. It is nonsensical to a human mind to describe the pawn as the chess board or vice versa. Yet, that’s as close as we can come to a proper linguistic expression that represents what we mean as reality. It is only when you apply dimensions of time, or rather – snapshot change along the dimensions of reality – that you can start to distinguish one item from another, one moment from another, one location from another. When you combine them into a single “thing”, the locations become one, the moments become one, and the items become one. It is only the peculiar way we perceive and traverse these dimensions that defines the human phenomenology of existence.