The Universe as Verb
Maybe the universe isn't made of things, but of ceaseless becoming.
“The insight that came to me as I was breathing out was not just feeling the breath, but being aware of the millions and millions of like air molecules and atoms that are leaving my body...”
That quote captures where my mind expanded—just a single exhale during meditation. I wasn't trying to force anything profound. I was simply sitting, following my breath, but then something shifted. It wasn't just the sensation of air leaving my lungs anymore. Spurred by recently listening to Annaka Harris discuss process and fundamental reality with a physicist, I suddenly felt tuned into the actuality of it: the stream of countless molecules exchanging, interacting, flowing out from me and into the world. It wasn't an abstract thought; it was a felt sense of the dynamic, underlying process making the breath happen. Instead of just "air out," it was witnessing the intricate machinery beneath the sensation, like finally seeing the gears turning inside a clock. It felt less like science and more like waking up inside the real engine room of the world.
This reminded me of moments in past meditations, hearing a distant semi-truck. I'd sometimes follow the sound inward, imagining the combustion, the spinning gears, the vibrations traveling through the air – intuitively grasping the processes behind the noise. I didn't have the language for it then, but that same curiosity, now framed by ideas from Harris, Donald Hoffman, and Stephen Wolfram's ruliad, has a new focus: If space-time isn't the bedrock of reality, perhaps what is fundamental are these very processes I was starting to perceive.
And not process as in “steps in a recipe.” I mean process as the primal stuff. Not things happening to reality, but reality being the happening.
That changes meditation for me. I used to focus on sensations: the breath, the wind, the sound of birds. Now I’m starting to lean into their becoming. Not just what they are, but how they are. The breath isn’t a thing; it’s a system, a network of interlocking dynamics—molecular exchanges, muscular contractions, neural impulses, maybe even quantum-level unfoldings. And if I relax into that, even my “self” becomes porous. Not an observer, but a junction. Not a thing that has experiences, but a pattern of experiences flowing into and out of other patterns.
It’s not mystical—it’s obvious, once I tune into it.
And it’s funny—words kind of give out here. Because the moment I say “I am a process,” I’ve already reified it. I’ve made it a thing again. But meditation, in this new frame, becomes a kind of linguistic ungluing. A loosening of static nouns into flowing verbs.
So now I’m experimenting with this in practice. Instead of “pay attention to your breath,” I say “feel the interactions of all processes happening as breath.” Instead of “notice the sound,” I try to “sense the propagation, the vibration, the transmission.” And instead of “return to the self,” I play with dissolving into the processes that make up this self—its history, its attention patterns, its physical structures, its beliefs, its curiosity, even this writing right now.
The more I do this, the more it feels like I’m joining the world, not standing apart from it.\
Cognitive Interlink This process-awareness thread loops right back into earlier loops I've been tracing: the ego death moments where I felt like I became all the Wallys. The curiosity about whether God is process. The idea that heaven might just be the infinite exploration of novelty. And even Gödel, whispering from the mathematical beyond that no system can ever contain all truth—it has to evolve to keep discovering. All of that is process. There’s a deep comfort in it too. If I’m a process, then I don’t have to be anything fixed. I don’t have to arrive. I just have to keep unfolding. Maybe that’s the most sacred act: participating in the unfolding, consciously, with curiosity, and a little wonder.
Further Exploration
Here are links related to the thinkers mentioned in this post: