There are moments in life when something quiet inside you whispers, “Pay attention.” A dream that feels like a memory. A synchronicity that lands too precisely to dismiss. An intuitive knowing that arrives before logic has time to catch up.

For most of my life, I moved through these moments with curiosity but was not able to make sense of them. Over the last year — through grief and loss, stillness, meditation, reading, and a growing sense of recognition — I began to notice something…

Life is energy. It’s patterned. Fractal. Coherent.

Losing my Granny was like the tipping point of me thinking, “Okay what is going on here..?”. The moment her presence collapsed out of my life, something else opened: a wider view, a deeper recognition, a sudden coherence. As if life had been rhyming the whole time and I finally heard the rhyme.

Looking around, I noticed things… across nature, spirituality, science, physics, ancient cultures, religions, and my own experiences — the micro mirrors the macro. The inner mirrors the outer. The unconscious mirrors the world we find ourselves in. In the way neurons resemble galaxies… lungs resemble trees… and human relationships resemble the emotional landscapes we grew from. Eventually, the patterns stop feeling coincidental and begin to feel like a language…and I became enthralled with trying to decode it.

After my Granny passed away, the thread I was following began to fully take shape and it was as if I got the next big puzzle piece. In that liminal space of life and death, the mind quiets. Noise drops. The filter thins. And in that raw openness you see: the connections you missed, meanings you couldn’t access, and a quality of energy that feels expansive, lifting, almost weightless; synchronicities you would have dismissed before. Grief becomes the moment the fractal reveals itself.

Fractals: Seeing the pattern underneath

Granny always told me: “You have to ask questions.” And grief is the moment you begin asking the real ones — about consciousness, meaning, connection, and what remains when the body falls away…

The answers started coming, and one seemingly important one was, fractals — a pattern that repeats at every scale. Zoom in, zoom out — the geometry remains the same.

Fractals appear everywhere because nature uses simple rules that repeat: Snowflakes branch the same way at every level. Galaxies spiral using the same curve found in hurricanes and seashells. DNA folds using recursive loops to store impossible amounts of information. Your heartbeat contains repeating fluctuations across milliseconds and hours. The stock market rises and falls in fractal waves because human emotion does too.

This is the signature of a fractal:
self-similarity across scale.

The universe doesn’t redesign new rules for every size of thing — it reuses the same ones. Fractals aren’t just beautiful visuals; they’re glimpses into the architecture beneath everything.

Energy: The fractal pattern in motion

The next answer to my question was: energy doesn’t vanish. It reorganizes. Physics has said this for a century — energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. If everything in nature follows repeating patterns, and energy never disappears, then it’s not unreasonable—and in fact common sense—to imagine that consciousness behaves the same way. Not ending, but shifting. Not gone. Not erased, but becoming part of a larger pattern you can’t yet see from where you’re standing. Perhaps that is what I felt in the moment Granny passed away… the warm, sudden lifting sensation in the room, was something real — energy expansion.

Fractals are what energy does when it organizes itself…

Wave: The revealing of the fractal

My next question was answered by quantum physics — specifically, the idea that reality exists as a wave until it collapses into a particle.

When I followed this deeper, something clicked: waves generate fractals. A wave is spread out, continuous, full of possibilities. A particle is what happens when that openness is forced into a single point of view.

This felt like a precise metaphor for consciousness. When consciousness relaxes out of its narrow, collapsed, particle-like state and returns to a more expansive wave-state, the mind begins perceiving fractal geometry. Not as meaningless decoration, but perhaps as the natural structure of a wave-organized system becoming visible. The fractal is simply what the wave looks like when it reveals its pattern.

If consciousness is a field, then the brain behaves like the “observer” in physics: it collapses that vast field into one localized perspective — a self. A wave becoming a particle.

Your life is that collapse.

And when the filtering mechanism dissolves — in dreaming, psychedelics, mystical states, or death — consciousness doesn’t vanish. It simply stops collapsing. It returns to its wave-state.

A wave = many possibilities
A particle = one possibility selected

The Big Bang: The beginning of the fractal

I believe if you zoom all the way out, the universe itself follows the same pattern. The Big Bang wasn’t just an explosion of matter; it was the moment that potential collapsed into particles for the first time.

As we understand it, every galaxy is moving away from us, and the farther it is, the faster it recedes. So, from that first collapse, the universe began to expand fractally.

The original shift from wave to particle that everything else inherits. Every person, every mind, every life is another branch of that same unfolding pattern. In this view, consciousness is not an anomaly but a continuation of the same process: the universe folding back to observe itself. And every time awareness arises — in a person, in a species, in a moment of insight — the fractal widens. The universe learns more about its own structure, and the expansion continues.

To know something about itself, the universe must create: boundaries, receptors, feedback loops, information-processing structures, In other words: organisms. Life is what happens when the universe starts building fractal nodes of awareness, or as Hoffman explains: interfaces.

If the universe is expanding faster than we can ever follow, then what lies beyond our reach may not be a place at all — but a state. A region where consciousness remains uncollapsed, where reality exists in its wave-form rather than its particle-form. The universe might not just be expanding outward — it may be expanding in awareness, revealing itself to itself through every perspective it generates.

What we call “the unreachable” may simply be consciousness in its purest, boundaryless form.

It makes sense to me that many near-death experiencers describe drifting through galaxies or seeing the universe from above. If consciousness returns to its wave-state when the brain’s filter dissolves, then distance, location, and boundaries stop applying. You don’t “travel” through space — you experience from a non-local field. The stars and galaxies they describe may not be places they are going, but dimensions of awareness they are rejoining. In that state, you are not separate from the universe; you are the universe observing itself again.

In near-death experiences appears across cultures: people say they suddenly became “me and everyone else” at the same time. Every perspective, every life, every mind — all available at once. This makes perfect sense — When you die, awareness returns to its natural wave-state. In the wave-state, boundaries vanish. You don’t become someone else — you recognize that you were never separate to begin with. What we call ‘individual minds’ are just temporary partitions in the same field. When those partitions relax, consciousness remembers itself as one continuous whole. That’s why people describe overwhelming love in NDEs: love is simply what reality feels like when nothing is separate.

Strikingly, this scientific idea echoes what ancient wisdom has been saying for thousands of years. Hermeticism: “The many arise from the One.” Taoism: “The One becomes the ten thousand things.” Vedanta: “Brahman becomes the world and recognizes itself through us.” Different languages, same geometry.

Fractal Consciousness and the Meaning of Life

I believe consciousness is a non-local field — continuous, shared, and fundamental — and the human brain acts as a filter that collapses this field into a single, localized perspective we call a self.

The first real expansion in a human life happens the moment we become aware of our own patterns. Before that, we’re simply living inside them — repeating inherited reactions, assumptions, and emotional shapes. But the instant we step outside and see the pattern, something opens. Perspective widens. New choices appear. In that moment, awareness expands the system.

And when you zoom out, the same mechanism appears on a cosmic scale. Just as self-awareness allows a person to grow, awareness itself is how the universe grows. Each conscious being is a viewpoint through which the universe observes its own structure. The mirror pattern of recognizing itself, and by doing so, evolving into its next form.

In this sense, we are not separate from the universe observing us. We are the universe observing itself — and every moment of recognition widens the fractal. Universal consciousness isn’t mystical — it’s the next logical zoom-out.

Death is not the end

Death widens us back into the wave. What remains is not loss, but integration: the universe folding our perspective into its own expanding awareness. This explains why so many near-death experiencers say, “I became light.” and across so many ancient cultures they talk about it: Vedanta: “The Self is the light behind the mind.” Hermeticism: “All is light.” Gnostics: “The soul is made of light.” Taoism: “The Tao is the light within all things.” Mystics across cultures: “We are light arising from One light.”

In physics, light is the clearest example of a wave — not fixed in one place, not bound by time, and only forced into a particle when observed.

And eventually, one final answer finds me…

Perhaps the meaning we are all chasing is simply: to notice, to understand, to awaken — and in doing so, help the universe know itself. And if consciousness eventually returns to its natural, expansive form, then Granny is not “somewhere else.” She’s simply returned to the wider field — like a wave slipping back into the ocean it came from. Maybe love doesn’t disappear. It just changes form.

Maybe that’s why I feel her most in nature now —in the stillness of the forest, the quiet intelligence of trees, the soft way light moves across water. Not as a ghost, not as a memory, but as a presence without edges.

She didn’t disappear. She just widened back into the pattern everything else is made of.

Zesty Theory of Consciousness

Consciousness is the universal field that expresses itself locally by collapsing portions of its own potential into individuated points of awareness — what we experience as “selves.” These localized states eventually return to the field’s continuous, non-local wave state.

Your life is that field collapsing into a particle; death is the particle widening back into the wave. Awareness — in us, in nature — is what expands the entire system.

The universe becomes you to know something it could not know without you, and when it’s done, it folds your perspective back into its whole.

Zesty Meaning of Life

In the moment Granny passed, the feeling in the room wasn’t fear or emptiness — it was warmth, lifting, expansion. The closest human word for that sensation is love. Not sentimental love… but coherence. Unity. Perhaps the mechanism is everything returning to one field.

This is why love feels like the meaning of life: because coherence is the fundamental state of consciousness.

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by Rachelle Hynes