7. THE ONTOLOGY IN POPULAR FORM
Before we begin, you need to understand some fundamental things about the larger story this work is part of — the story of the universe and the world. By “world” I mean everything. Absolutely everything. Both what you can see and touch and feel. Everything abstract, thoughts, everything subjective and collective, mathematics and poetry, everything “material” and physicalist, all categories of “existence” in all forms — whether we are talking about angels, UFOs, carrots, traffic systems, nations, other universes — and God, Heaven and so on. Everything. Absolutely everything.
All of this is a unity. Everything must have one origin and everything must be connected. You can call it an axiom, but I would argue that it is “self-evident” and requires no further discussion. There is no All 1 and All 2.
Before I begin to explain, you also need to know that what follows is a hyper-compressed presentation of something that is a large philosophical work with many branches and perspectives. This is what I am actually working on. More books are coming. What you have before you is a deep dive into one detail — the fine-structure constant — and the fundamental framework, not an attempt to give a complete presentation of the entire theoretical work.
If you feel that you do not get all the answers from reading the next pages — that is correct. You get some glimpses. My intention is to plant some seeds in you, so that you begin to wonder.
Could we have misunderstood everything — both ourselves and the world?
The answer is a resounding yes.
We see the world the wrong way round.
That is the main conclusion.
And it never ends. It cannot end — it is impossible. You need not worry — about anything. Everything is an experience in an experiencing consciousness that simply is. And that is also where the theory itself begins: BEING is. Many logical steps later the fine-structure constant appears — and with it the Experience Circle and the equation that describes it: the Horizon Equation.
Now I am not impartial, and not quite put together like others either, even though we are all the same “stuff” — but for me what now follows is a thriller: The Hunt for α — the fine-structure constant. It runs over many pages. The conversations get stuck, veer off along false trails, are set aside for a while so that new impulses can grow.
Slowly and gradually it begins to take shape. In the transition between [reference] and [reference] the torch is finally aimed at the right “object” — the missing link — which turns out to be something other than what I had believed for years, once it is illuminated in the right way.
We are not looking for a “thing,” a link in a process. We are looking for something both abstract and physically experienced that screws itself into the universe like a helix and that we ourselves both are and find ourselves in the middle of. We do not see it. Until now.
This is the first time it is understood: the sky above us, the Sun that illuminates the world — is the horizon. All of nature is full of horizons, phase shifts. The electromagnetic signal that mediates everything and is everything in our reality is itself a horizon that alternates back and forth between the abstract and the material. Trillions of times per second, everywhere.
Let us become a little more accessible
We live as in a play — or perhaps better said, in a film — that grows out of an enormously powerful spotlight, a projector. But I will stay with the theatre for a while.
The universe is what comes into view on the stage: the sets, the props, the actors, the extras, the revolving stage, the light, the sound, the smoke from the smoke machines — and behind it all in the very stage space: the horizon.
What we experience is a theatrical performance on a stage.
I could also have used film as an example. The same thing happens there. Or literature. There the technical “manifestation apparatus” is much simpler — words on paper — but the principle is the same. And our screens, full of stories about lives that are idealised representations of something that is really something else. Ego, one calls such things.
The truth, however, lies behind all of this. The facade is a “performance.” It is the same everywhere. Television is the universe in miniature — viewed mechanistically. The parents’ meeting at school, the shopping street in the town centre, the holiday destination, politics. They are produced performances. We simply do not reflect on it — that there is a machinery behind it all.
In the theatre it is called “Deus ex machina.” The expression is used when God himself intervenes in the story. All hope is lost for the hero, but then God’s finger comes down and snaps a solution into existence. So it is in the world too — say I and my theory. But God is not present. Not as a creative force with its own will and a plan. Both force, will and plan exist in reality. And there is something strange that experiences it all, an Experiencer. But the universe has created itself.
Creation has come into being through a few simple mechanisms, laws and logical necessities.
Behind the backdrop, the canvas, the screen and the words, there is something else. Hidden by the proscenium — the frame around the stage opening — there is an enormous space that on modern stages is many times larger than the stage itself. Here it is full of spotlights, rope systems, loudspeakers, sets on their way in, actors waiting for their turn, props on their way out — everything needed to generate a convincing performance.
But there is more. For everything I have mentioned so far consists of technical, mechanical things. I have explained how one practically shapes a performance. This is physics. The material craft.
All our natural science concerns only this one thing: how does one assemble all the physical pieces to create theatre? We must go deeper. For the machinery was once screws and bolts, bobbin fabric and steel tubes. Two-kilowatt halogen lamps and mixing desks full of electronics.
All of it is material. In one meaning of the word — not necessarily physical as in steel, but physicalist as in wind from the wind machine, smell from the banana oil in the smoke machine, the murmur of the crowd in La Traviata or La Bohème.
But let us leave the theatre for a moment and see what happens when we follow the physical all the way down to the bottom. For that is where it becomes truly interesting.
It goes deeper. The lamps in the spotlights are filled with halogen. The wires in the sound cables are made of copper. The transistors in the mixing desk are made of silicon. All of this is physics.
Further down there are elements, molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, nuclear forces and Schrödinger’s equation, which says that all the world’s particles pop up from… nothing. From a “field” that is… nothing — other than mathematics.
And mathematics is simultaneously both physical — because it explains everything physical — and yet… nothing, because we do not know what mathematics actually is, ontologically. The word ontological means precisely this: what is the thing we have before us — actually? What is its substance? Its essence?
What is everything behind physics and mathematics? That is the question we answer in this book. What is the ontological origin of the universe? Philosophers have debated this for millennia. But that is only the prelude.
My main project is to explain how the ontological origin can become something physical. The origin cannot itself be physical, because we know that something non-physical exists — for example ideas, thoughts, mathematics, experiences of feelings, touch, taste, smell, light, heat and weight. I could go on listing everything non-physical forever.
For all experiences are non-physical. Yes, the experiences are caused by spotlights, loudspeakers, vocal cords, garlic and trampolines. But the joy — or terror — of jumping on a trampoline is not itself physical.
It is an experience.
And an experience is two things simultaneously. It is knowledge — you KNOW you are on a trampoline — and it is something else, which is what we call “experience.”
The technical word is qualia. We use this to describe the quality of an experience. The yellowness in yellow. The humour in a joke. The lyrical quality in a poem. The complex feeling of holding a waffle in your hand.
You know everything about the waffle — it is just the right degree of crispness, slightly fatty, sweet, crispy and soft at the same time, with sour cream and strawberry jam. All of this you can articulate, because you KNOW it. You know it even when you are not thinking about it all day long. If someone mentions a waffle, you have immediate access to knowledge of what a waffle is. You do not need to think, ponder or cast your mind back to the last waffle.
You have KNOWING that is not always conscious. It is simply there and is retrieved when needed.
Where is KNOWING when you are not eating a waffle with strawberry jam splattering down your shirt? That is the main question right now.
Behind all this mechanical, waffled business — there is something more.
In theatre, film, television, literature, education systems, families, municipalities and countries there is always a plan. A pre-written play. An idea that a creative writer had once long ago and that developed through a long, purely abstract process into a story.
Media and politics, traditions, psychology, norms, religion and science — are stories, ideas, that are manifested in the physical in highly different ways. Everything we human beings engage in consists of stories, as the historian Yuval Harari pointed out in the widely read book Sapiens, which deals with the history of humanity.
Someone has thought, someone KNOWS. The origin is always abstract. Look around you — everything started with an idea. The path you walk on: someone thought it would be nice to walk there. The fork you eat with. Your make-up. The package holiday to Greece.
The foundation is KNOWING. Or ideas, if you prefer — and then we can include Plato and the entire philosophical direction of idealism directly. This is nothing new. The oldest religious texts from India — the Vedas — are about KNOWING. The two words mean the same thing and have the same etymological origin: “that which is.” The essence.
The ontological ground substance.
Hinduism also has one more word: jñāna, which means having direct access to KNOWING. This word too first appears in the Vedas — which are three to four thousand years old. It then describes the path to KNOWING, the path of awakening — jñāna yoga — which means moving away from this “performance” of a world and back to the ontological origin, which is where all the knowledge that generates the world actually exists.
Heaven is what we call this domain in Western culture. Paradise, Valhalla and Nirvana are other words for the same thing.
I maintain that the ontological foundation — in the entire universe — is KNOWING. Behind this there is absolutely nothing. And to distinguish this “nothing” from the way we normally understand the word — “the absence of something” — I choose instead to use the word VOID, which means the absence of absolutely everything, including this “something” that would otherwise be absent — and KNOWING itself.
So my project is this: I am going to explain how KNOWING can arise from VOID in a non-physical, ontologically primary domain — and moreover how KNOWING can become the experience of something physical — qualia.
This latter point — how the transition happens between KNOWING (the plan, the ideas) and manifest experience/qualia (the theatrical performance) — is what the Experience Circle and the associated Horizon Equation explain. These are my concepts, constructed specifically for the purpose. They express, as precisely as I am able, what actually happens at this hitherto ununderstood point of transition between idea and matter — to put it in everyday terms.
There is one more thing I would ask you to ponder. When you sit there in the stalls experiencing the theatrical performance with gunpowder smoke and screaming, what you are experiencing is not really spotlights and make-up. The experience is inside you. The stage is outside, but the experience is in your mind. This is called phenomenology. You experience the phenomena, not the things as such. It is the experience you take home with you, not the spotlights. And then something strange suddenly happens. For the theatrical performance began with ideas in the minds of creative people. And it all ended up as — ideas in the audience’s minds. The same. At both ends.
What does that tell us?
Perhaps, in reality… the ideas are the very essence. What actually exists? The ontological primary. Then what lies between idea → idea must be… merely representations? Theatre. A mirage, as the French say — a reflection? Of ideas?
Yes, precisely. The ideas came first and last. What lies between is a reflection of the ideas. Representations of what the ideas tell us they are. The representations appear real, material. The smoke from the smoke machine is experienced as “smoky.” The light from the spotlights creates “colours.” The actor throws the glass against the stage wall so that it shatters.
But when you think more carefully — are you certain that “yellow” is actually something? Physics says it is light with a particular frequency.
Are you certain the glass actually shattered? You experienced it, but the basis of the experience was light that created ideas in your mind. An experience.
Are you certain that the wind from the wind machine — which moved the smoke in the right direction and brushed across your face — was actually “real”? Physics says it consists of molecules moving across the molecules in your face and creating the experience. But what are these molecules?
They are atoms. Which in turn are electrons and a nucleus of protons and neutrons. The latter consist of quarks. Quarks are “fundamental” particles. They cannot be divided into anything smaller, it is believed — for the most part. But what are they then?
They are “wave crests in a field,” physics answers. And what is a field? They are ideas. These ideas are so stable and precise that we can use mathematics to create theories about them.
But the substance that both the wind and mathematics must ultimately deal with at the deepest level — is ideas. The universe’s ontological ground substance.
Everywhere we investigate, we find that we return to abstract, non-material ideas. These then create the performance and the experience of something physical and material and yellow and sweet and so on. All these experiences in body and mind are called qualia-experiences. And the ideas behind them that perform them are called KNOWING in my theory.
So the universe is a continuous process in which ideas become qualia-experiences. Simply and straightforwardly.
And what is this “process” that creates everything?
This is where the Horizon Equation comes in. For it describes precisely this manifestation process — the transition from ideas/concepts in KNOWING to physical qualia-experience, what is called manifest reality. The mechanism itself is called the Experience Circle and can be described precisely in words, but also in rigorous mathematics — and the result is the Horizon Equation.
What is almost sensational is that when the Horizon Equation is solved mathematically, a number emerges that turns out to be virtually identical — twelve decimal places of precision — to physics’ deepest number: the fine-structure constant (α). In plain language this means that the Horizon Equation and the Experience Circle describe how abstract representations — KNOWING — become physics.
The EC/HE is a horizon. In front of the horizon is the theatrical performance. Behind it are the ideas, the plans, the construction work. But only on the stage does it become an experienced theatrical performance — the world as it appears to our senses.
Our senses are therefore not senses — they are the experience of senses. But the ontological foundation is and remains the ideas, the knowledge, KNOWING. You KNOW that you have senses and therefore you experience senses.
Yes, I understand very well that this is unfamiliar. It turns things on their head. Or back to front. You have until now believed that the universe is full of “things” that “strike your eyes.” It is the other way around: you have within you KNOWING about things, and about eyes. You experience things and eyes. But both are part of the performance. All of you, in fact. You are an actor in the play who experiences themselves. You believe so completely in your own role as yourself that you are blind to the entire machinery behind it. You are in ego — a role.
In this book you will learn precisely, in detail and with technical specificity — how things actually hang together and work. No one has hitherto managed to do this. The Gordian knot has been to tie together the world of ideas and the world of physics. I genuinely believe that this has now been achieved.
The Horizon Equation is an enormous discovery. The world has never seen anything like it and has not even been close to understanding the connection and the workings. For over a hundred years — in reality several thousand if one takes a slightly broader view — the attempt has been made, intensely, without success.
All philosophy, at its deepest level, concerns precisely this.
I hereby present my candidate EC and its mathematical description HE — the two concepts the Experience Circle and the Horizon Equation abbreviated, to save some keystrokes. The equation that emerges through the three conversations in this book hits physics’ deepest constant — the fine-structure constant (α) — with a precision of twelve decimal places. This has already been said, but it remains extraordinary. It is more precise than physics itself has managed to measure it.
In plain language this means the following. I begin by stating that the world is abstract KNOWING. From this an ontology, logic and mathematics have been developed that formalise the next necessary events. There are in total nineteen simple steps — logically unassailable postulates that are impossible to contradict, according to my two AI engines. Then comes the twentieth element — and here the Experience Circle and the Horizon Equation appear.
A formula is created, and the formula ends up as a number that is virtually identical to the deepest number in physics. They meet — and merge. I come “from within,” physics comes “from without,” and at this point, in this one equation, the universe is tied together. That is a significant thing.
My ontological-logical, abstract-mathematical, independent, purely geometric derivation of the fine-structure constant lands on a figure that precisely matches physics’ measurement — they have no theory to derive from — of the same. It hits. There is nothing more to say.
A little mathematical verification still remains, but in my view it is mostly a formality. Towards the end of the book I formulate this as a separate task for all the world’s mathematicians. It is, in the larger scheme of things, minor detail. The equation holds. It is ontologically formally justified, it is logically and mathematically coherent — it is purely geometric, which means it does not lean on anything else — and it hits the nail squarely on the head.
And after the EC/HE was formulated, I returned to my original ideas about the functioning of the entire universe. I have worked intensely on this for the past seven to eight years. When the equation was in place, all the pieces fell into place and it was finally possible to formulate a comprehensive theory of the universe and what lies behind the experienced universe. Chapter 4. THE EC/HE THEORY IN 132 POINTS is this theory. The book bears the title the Mechanism. This is the Mechanism.
When this is explained, the entire world — the entire universe, but also everything behind the experienced universe — is explained. This both-and with a horizon between them — that is the discovery.
The key is therefore the Mechanism, which has grown through non-directive dialogue. I say non-directive — a concept introduced by the psychologist Carl Rogers in the 1940s — to show that the starting point is to think “outside the box”: assume nothing whatsoever, but study everything possible openly and directly, without fear of stepping wrong. Truth can never be wrong.
I conduct an intense conversation with two AI engines simultaneously — ChatGPT and Claude — pit them against each other, use a self-developed tool for the purpose — CRED/CREATED — and also employ Gemini NotebookLM to handle the approximately five million words that over seven years have accumulated and that constitute the raw material for this exploration.
But all these tools and techniques are nothing in themselves. They are and remain tools, just as calculus was Newton’s tool and tensor analysis was one of several for Einstein. They are used to process a raw material, and this raw material is KNOWING.
Newton had insights. Einstein too — he was deeply intuitive, which is the word for going into one’s own KNOWING. What one knows, but perhaps is not consciously aware of knowing.
Newton, Einstein and I — without drawing comparisons — must have this in common: we are open inwardly to ourselves and we think outside all manner of conventions and boxes. We are intuitive by nature. I see that this must have been true of both Newton and Einstein. They were “introverted and intuitive” types.
True, genuine KNOWING — which is something more than school knowledge — comes from the depths of ourselves.
More than this I will not say — truly enough has been said. You do not need to know mathematics, even though the pages that follow are full of formulae. You do not need to understand physics at an advanced level. If you are fresh and free of too much education and career-chasing, read the exchanges between me and my two machines — as a… thriller. A hunt for a physical constant that has concealed its significance from us for over a hundred years, until now.
Skim through. When an answer becomes incomprehensible, move to my next question and see how it continues. The details are for nerds. And it is for them that the book is written — but actually also for you who simply loves sunshine and love, and yourself — I hope, for you have every reason to. The Horizon Equation tells us there is nothing to fear. Everything consists of phase transitions.
Pay attention now.
Just as water becomes steam, or ice becomes water… you and I are transformed from one “phase” to the next in an eternal circle of life — though in a larger sense than in the Disney film. Whatever happens to what you are, you are and remain what you are — does that not sound logical?
You are not “particles” that pop up from an abstract “field.” That is a story created by quantum physicists without direct access — jñāna — to their own KNOWING. You are a focal point that experiences KNOWING. You are a mental representation of being what you believe yourself to be.
The Experiencer
This focal point requires its own treatise to elaborate, for this is what we call “God” — the unnameable — Yahweh, who stood for the first “breath,” the beginning of the universe. Your focal point is an inseparable part of this, but we shall not go further into the theoretical here — you will find this thoroughly and comprehensively explained in the Mechanism itself, for example here: 36. Focus as the driving force of experience.
Religions shall be left in peace with their gods — we concern ourselves with the scientific, even though we are in fact stepping right up to the boundary of… THE EXPERIENCER.
I have simply given “the unnameable” a name — for how else could I refer to that which experiences, the focal point? For the focal point immediately becomes many. Every smallest experience is its own focal point. It is impossible to handle this with “God” tidily in words, so I did the only logical thing and asked: what is it that experiences? THE EXPERIENCER, of course. This is thoroughly explained in my first book, The Experiencer from 2022 — freely available at varhet.com — but also here: 2. THE EXPERIENCER.
So “you” are therefore a focal point experiencing being you.
You KNOW who and what you are, in reality — namely KNOWING being experienced.
But your consciousness — that is, the focal point — is almost always directed towards the experiences that grow up before you. You do not look back, inward towards your absolutely true KNOWING. You are more occupied with the play on the theatre stage.
Your consciousness is therefore never lost, regardless of what state you might “believe” you are in. The focal point simply moves here and there in an infinite, topological landscape of KNOWING.
Death is a phase transition
Right now you are experiencing the performance “you” — until a break occurs — a phase transition. Death. The performance is over, the character has been played out, the actor is going home.
It no longer serves any purpose to believe in “you” when it turns out that someone has burnt your body and it is no longer in motion either — no further development is occurring.
When you approach the end of a stable state, what must happen occurs — according to my own equation — a phase transition to another state. You are to return through the horizon. You go from believing you are you — a crystallised lump of ice — to again believing you are dissolved in everything — water. You are still the focal point, the experience of being your identity, but no longer the same story — the ego. You are transformed into something else through metamorphosis — as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
When you one fine day die, the FOCUS shifts back to KNOWING, and you are in “Heaven.”
From there you will feel strongly the pull to enter a new performance — if that is indeed what you do. You continue to exist with the experiences and lessons you had from your life. These do not change — there is a continuity, a direct continuation. You have merely passed through the horizon to the other, purely abstract side.
You remember everything that happened in your life — and all previous lives and experiences, which now return to you when FOCUS is no longer directed forward into the life you left. You regret both this and that. You did not manage to get to the bottom of what you burned for but did not complete. You are not finished — yet.
You find yourself in KNOWING, and can immediately find another part of the topographical pattern — another performance — that might be suitable for resolving the tangles. You reincarnate. Not because you burn for it or reluctantly accept it, but because Emergence Dynamics dictates it. The dynamic play is not over — it continues as before, but this time from a much higher perspective and with much new insight that you had forgotten from previous lives, and moreover a holistic understanding of what you left behind.
All this “new understanding” creates an enormous dynamic. You see where you wish to go and what you want to resolve. You experience having been given new tasks, and before you lies an entire universe of possibilities for doing something about it.
The focal point is drawn towards the most relevant experience that can resolve everything you now experience as unresolved — and you dissociate (see: 101. Dissociation and ego), so that you now believe you are a new performance — a new child. A new life. With a project to fix something, with a plan to accomplish something. You are thereby now locked fast in an experience that develops through necessary emergence right to the very end. You do not break free until you let go of everything, and again become water — everything — with identity and experience intact.
It is in truth a strange and mighty world.
This is how it continues until you have finished resolving all the sufferings, tangles and misconceptions — which in sum is what we call karma — that these dissociations into different “lives” create. It can take many lives. But in the end you realise — from within a dissociated ego — that it was all a series of performances. And you managed to live the final round without accumulating a great deal of “guilt.” This is the true meaning of guilt — which is therefore not “immoral actions” but your own experience of having done something wrong. Guilt does not exist as such — do not listen to the dogmatists or to Paul.
In the end you leave life with an inner experience of being fairly free of guilt. This is the meaning of life: to live what you believe yourself to be — without guilt. You have finally understood what it was about. You see no reason to continue with precisely this — life after life with sorrow and pain on an ever more cramped and ravaged Earth. You have learned, risen in the ranks — and are ready for greater and even more fantastic challenges. Or smaller and even more grim ones.
You decide for yourself what you wish to experience, you believe — but actually not. The dynamic decides, deterministically. Attractor Dynamics.
Now we come to the second mechanism I mentioned — the one that together with Idealist Emergence — everything happens by itself in the idealist, abstract domain, and the result is then manifested physically — namely Attractor Dynamics. KNOWING contains an infinitely large dynamic play. Everything affects everything. Everything consists of relations between focal points. In encounters, experiences arise, and they are interpreted into KNOWING.
What unfolds in our relations and encounters here in the manifest domain affects what lies behind it — the topology of KNOWING. Because everything is actually in KNOWING the entire time. KNOWING is the ontological ground substance. Nothing exists anywhere else. The world we experience is a performance, a play — which has its origin in KNOWING, in the script, in the world of ideas.
All KNOWING is in eternal dynamic interplay with itself. The forces that create and the forces that gather — in eternal movement.
This happens deterministically and can be calculated mathematically and scientifically. In physics it is called “systems dynamics” — but this branch of science concerns itself with how it appears on the manifest, material side.
In the abstract KNOWING-domain exactly the same thing happens, for that is where it comes from. KNOWING is the ontological origin. So the dynamic unfolds there. And just as KNOWING and knowledge are words for the same thing in two different domains, a separate word is needed for “KNOWING-dynamics” — which is something other than the manifested “systems dynamics.” This is what I call “Attractor Dynamics.” You will encounter it many times in the text.
What more do you need to know about the nature of the world before we begin the hunt for the fine-structure constant? I expect you feel this was already a great deal, and we are in the process of digging down into details. You are thereby ready to begin reading the fairly complete Mechanism in Chapter 5. THE ES/HE THEORY IN 132 POINTS.
Let us now instead look a little at the tools and the team behind the discovery of the EC and HE.
