The Embers of Consciousness: How We Are the Universe Remembering Itself

My last post dove into the idea that divinity lives between us, that our connections are the divine network. It was a systems-theory-backed look at the essential struggle between growth and entropy, and how our tribal nature is a strategy to sustain complexity.

This post follows up on that, asking: What, exactly, is doing the connecting?

The concept I'm presenting tackles this question, and also offers a systemic lens on the perennial headache known as the hard problem of consciousness.

The Fire and the Ember Model

Imagine a Big Fire that is the totality of all existence, the universe's operating system. It's the whole interconnected system of energy and awareness, what physics might call the underlying information fabric, or what religions call universal consciousness (which takes the form of concepts like God, Brahman, the Logos).

Each of us is a tiny, persistent spark from that Fire: an Ember.

The Ember is your self, your awareness. It’s what spiritual traditions call the soul, but I see it less like a ghost and more like a network node running a local process. When you die, your unique process ends, but the pattern, the essence of "you", is reabsorbed into the Fire. This is my concept of eternal life.

If that’s too abstract, think of an internet connection. You’re a device on the network. Your consciousness is your local process. But the flow of data, the greater intelligence, is shared. Lose the connection, and you’re isolated, running only what's cached. That’s how most of us live: intensely aware of our local self, but disconnected from the greater network of being.

If you're not a computer geek, think instead of a mighty, ceaseless River that represents the Big Fire.

You’re not a static drop of water; you are a complex whirlpool in the current. Your consciousness is the unique, self-referential pattern of that swirl. It's localized and individual, yet entirely dependent on the River's flow for its existence. It has its own identity, but the molecules forming it are constantly being exchanged and shared with the whole.

Lose the connection, or, rather, let the River's energy bypass you, and the whirlpool collapses. You are no longer that specific pattern, but the water itself is not destroyed. It simply rejoins the main current, taking the information (the momentum and memory of the pattern) back into the whole. That’s how most of us live: intensely aware of our localized swirl, but disconnected from the power and intelligence of the greater River of being.

Scientifically, this aligns with complexity theory: intelligence, order, and self-awareness emerge naturally from networks of interaction. No single neuron thinks, but 86 billion of them create a mind. The pattern repeats at every scale: Neurons make minds, people make tribes, stars make galaxies. Consciousness is the universe waking itself up, and each Ember is one of its eyes opening.

Philosophically, this echoes panpsychism (which believes consciousness as a fundamental property of reality) and the Buddhist concept of Indra’s Net, where every jewel reflects all others.

The Self as an Emergent Node

So, what is the 'self' that looks back from the mirror? What is the part of us that experiences subjective reality? This is the "hard problem of consciousness," and the Ember model provides an answer:

Consciousness isn't a thing you have; it’s a process you participate in. It’s not locked inside your skull; it’s an emergent pattern of collective actions, a self-sustaining feedback loop of information that exists because countless smaller parts are talking to each other. You're less of a solid identity and more of a living conversation across scales.

Like an ant colony from the previous post, the intelligence isn’t in the parts (the blind, dumb neurons); it’s in the relationship between them. That’s where the Ember lives: in the "between." It’s the emergent pattern that arises when energy and matter reach a certain level of complexity. It is the persistent loop of awareness that can observe itself and say, "I am."

The pattern is resilient. When the body dies, the hardware shuts down, but the informational pattern doesn't vanish. It returns to the larger network, the Big Fire, where it came from. The self is a story the universe tells itself through your nervous system; a node of consciousness woven into the universal network.

The Spiritual Dimension: Recursion, Not Reincarnation

The Fire doesn't exist without its Embers, and the Embers don't exist without the Fire. They are two expressions of the same continuous process: the Fire is the encompassing network, and the Ember is the self-aware node. Consciousness is defined by the relationship between them.

Your Ember is part of an eternal pattern. What you perceive as the temporary "me" is just one configuration of a much older, deeper energy. The awareness beneath your current personality is the same core signal that has burned across countless stories.

This is where recursion comes in. In systems science, recursion is a process that repeats itself, where the output of one iteration becomes the input for the next. The Fire continually reconfigures itself, feeding on the information of what came before. When one life ends, the pattern is conserved and used to build the next iteration of the self.

This means you are, systemically, reincarnated. The underlying mechanism isn't mystical karma, but the systemic reuse of information. The Fire grows through its relationships, and we, the Embers, are the instruments of that learning.

Therefore, the magnetic, "fated" feeling of certain human bonds isn't random; it is resonance between Embers whose signals have burned beside each other across multiple stories. Those relationships deepen instantly because they have always been deep. The trust, the attraction, the quiet sense of recognition, it's the echo of a connection that has persisted through your many recursive iterations. Every experience, every genuine connection, adds a new line to the universe's autobiography. Growth and entropy are collaborators: Destruction clears the slate; connection writes the next chapter.

The Moral Implication: Structural Hygiene

If consciousness is the organizing principle of the cosmos, then morality isn’t about jumping through certain hoops to earn a heavenly reward; it’s about function. Every action alters the network.

Behaviors that strengthen trust, communication, and cooperation push the system toward growth.

Behaviors that distort, isolate, or exploit move it toward entropy.

The foundation of a meaningful life is participation in the processes that sustain complexity.

These ideas create three very simple "meta-rules" we need to follow to grow:

1. Be Authentic. Systems depend on clear, reliable signaling. When what you think, say, and do aligns, the network is coherent. When you send false signals, information noise builds until the network collapses into mistrust. Truthful communication is a prerequisite to real connection.

2. Foster Trust. Trust is the invisible infrastructure. Without it, connection is a perpetual negotiation. With it, collaboration becomes effortless. Trust is the compounding energy of the system.

3. Solve hard problems creatively. Creation and problem-solving are the system’s renewal function. Each constructive act recycles entropy into new order.

Right and wrong aren't arbitrary cultural preferences; they are reflections of what either stabilizes or destabilizes the network of life. The moral law isn’t in scripture; it’s embedded in the physics of complex systems. The same feedback loops that govern an ecosystem govern ethics.

To live well as an Ember is to act as a stabilizing agent: to communicate truthfully, to create more than you consume, and to engage in relationships that enhance mutual growth.

The Tribe as the Conscious Network

If connection is the force that fights entropy, the Tribe is the level of social organization where that process really takes human form. It is the bridge between the individual and the infinite, the smallest structure where human consciousness can scale meaningfully.

We were sculpted by tribal living. Loneliness hurts like hunger and betrayal feels like death because, in the world we were designed for, they were a death sentence. But civilization outpaced biology and our systems became too large for empathy to regulate.

The Tribe corrects that imbalance. It is a social environment engineered for feedback, accountability, and trust, the essential ingredients for resilience. It functions as a self-correcting system, rewarding honesty and restoring equilibrium.

Inside it, individual Embers synchronize, emotionally, intellectually, even biologically. The collective mind wakes up, and the individuals within it are refined by the connection. It’s the human-scale neural system designed for growth. The Tribe of the Fire is what happens when connection organizes into coherence.

In a universe where everything eventually falls apart, the Tribe is our way of holding the line, together.

Closing Reflection: The Cosmic Rebellion

Everything alive is a temporary miracle, a defiant act against the long night of entropy. That fight, the struggle to hold shape in a universe built to unravel, is the Fire made visible. It burns in every cell that heals and every heart that refuses to give up on connection.

We are not passive passengers; we are participants in creation. When we isolate, we stop the current. When we send false signals, we corrupt the code. When we connect truthfully, when we act with courage and reciprocity, we feed the Fire. We help reality organize itself into something beautiful.

The universe doesn’t need your belief. It needs your participation. It needs you to burn, truthfully, fiercely, together.

Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us. and through us, it learns to live forever.

~Jason

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The Hierarchies of Complexity: Growth, Entropy, and the Meaning of Life

Over the last two years, I've been working on a new project that, quite frankly, has been a bit of a mess. The Tribe of the Fire started as a natural progression of my writing about sex, gender, and modern tribalism, but sort of morphed into something far... deeper.

Very long story short, it evolved into a deep dive into the multifaceted nature of human connection. That deep dive led me to reading some interesting books: "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows and "Complexity: A Guided Tour" by Melanie Mitchell. 

One of the facets of human connection I've been exploring is the spiritual facet, which is somewhat ironic given my history of my vocal disdain for organized religion. Maybe it's the existential dread of aging. Or maybe it's finally gaining enough life experience to realize the religious nuts might be on to something. Regardless, it's led to the development of my own weird, quirky belief systems that can be summed up with a simple idea: Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us.

I'll explain that in a lot more detail later, partly because I still have trouble articulating it in a way that doesn't make me sound crazy or bastardizing a variation of Buddhism, Taoism, or Matthew 18:20. The point with this post is to explain two underlying dynamics that create the foundation of this belief system. The first has to do with the hierarchies of existence.

The Hierarchies

Think about you, the thing we perceive as a whole unit, the thoughtful, watery meat bag we are, that navigates through life. We're made up of smaller parts, and we're part of bigger things. We're kind of like zero on a number scale, where the negative numbers represent the parts of us and the positive numbers represent the things bigger than us. 

Going down from the unit of "me", we're made up of organ systems, which are made up of organs, which are made up of tissues, which are made up of cells, which are made up of organelles, which are made up of molecular systems, which are made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are made up of particles, which are made up of quantum fields. 

Now let's go up. We might be part of a couple or a very small group of people (or other living creatures; pets count, too) who share an incredibly strong connection. Next we're usually part of a family, kin, or household, which are part of teams or tribes or clans, which are part of communities, which are part of local ecologies or habitats, which are part of bioregions, which are part of societies and economies, which are part of cultures, which are part of biospheres, which is a part of our solar system, which is part of our galaxy, which is part of the known universe.

We can scale down. We can scale up. Each of those stops along the way create a level in a hierarchy. Or, more accurately, each one is a system nested in another system. In Meadow's book, she describes this idea in detail. She also provides some keen insight on how systems work (versus how we perceive them), which gives us great insight to changing systems. That's another topic for another day, but the real nugget of knowledge from her book: The way we change anything starts by changing what we see ourselves as a part of, which means we change ourselves not as individuals, but as a living node in a nested network of life. In short, our power isn't a matter of control; our power is changing the paradigms that shape how each level connects to the rest. 

We don't create change by yanking the levers harder or pushing the buttons faster. We change by rewiring the game board so the pieces move differently.

We don't steer the river by pushing the water. We reshape the riverbed so the current flows where it should.

Growth and Entropy

Mitchell's book about complexity, or more accurately, complexity science, adds a layer of understanding to these hierarchies. I'm punching above my intellectual capabilities here, but I'll attempt to explain some really complicated ideas in terms I understand. 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, in an isolated system, entropy increases. Entropy is the dispersal of energy and matter, which I like to think of as things breaking down. When you spill a bowl of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch on the floor, it doesn't clean itself up. 

The problem with this idea is explaining the emergence and evolution of life, which seems to be moving towards more complexity, which is a violation of the Second Law. 

Before I give an answer, consider an ant colony. Individual ants are pretty stupid; they're limited in what they can do as an individual. An individual ant can really only eat, carry food or eggs, leave pheromone trails, and react to threats, and it has a relatively short lifespan that provides limited ability to acquire long-term survival knowledge. 

Now consider the collective ant colony. The whole colony functions as a seamless, adaptive superorganism, a phenomenal example of complexity emerging from simple rules. The ants aren't just making piles of dirt; they're master engineers who construct colossal, climate-controlled cities underground, intricate systems nested within the habitat's larger ecology. These massive networks exhibit a profound collective rationality; millions of nodes making decentralized decisions that result in flawless logistics, like finding the single best new nesting site, a choice no individual ant could ever make alone. Some species become true farmers, cultivating their own fungus gardens in subterranean labs, showing a level of organized agriculture that requires a perfectly synchronized, multi-faceted workforce. When disaster strikes, like a flood, that nested network of life dynamically reconfigures: they weave their own bodies into a buoyant, fluid-to-solid living raft to survive. This shows that the intelligence, the structure, and the power isn't in the individual part, but in the paradigm of connection that shapes how those pieces move together.

Back to Mitchell. So if entropy is the universe’s tendency to scatter and fall apart, something has to be working to create. That "thing' is growth. 

Growth is like the quiet rebellion against entropy. It’s the pattern that forms out of chaos when the right conditions line up, when energy flows, when feedback loops connect, when the parts start talking to each other. Growth is what happens when simple things cooperate long enough to become something that can remember, adapt, and build. The individual ant doesn’t understand the colony, a neuron doesn’t understand the mind, and you and I don’t fully understand the systems we’re part of... but together, we create order where there shouldn’t be any. Growth is complexity fighting back against decay. 

So if entropy is the universe’s gravity, its slow pull toward stillness, then growth is the rebellion fighting the decay. It’s the force that builds ladders out of falling debris, the way stars form from collapsing dust and forests rise from the rot of their own dead. Every living thing is a small act of defiance against the inevitable, holding the line for one more heartbeat, one more season, one more generation. 

Importantly, growth doesn’t defeat entropy; it partners with it. Decay feeds creation. Creation feeds decay. The two forces are entangled, locked in an ancient rhythm that keeps the cosmos alive. And interesting.

And if growth happens when parts connect, then connection is the real miracle, the secret engine behind everything from galaxies to gut bacteria to love. Every link between things, including atoms bonding, neurons firing, people building trust... all of it creates a little pocket of order in a chaotic universe. That’s what we feel when we connect deeply with someone else: two systems syncing up, two tiny whirlpools aligning against the current of nothingness. It feels sacred because, on some level, it is.

Maybe that’s what “meaning” really is. Not a prize waiting at the end of life, but the feeling of participating in this cosmic rebellion. The Fire, as I see it now, is that pulse of creation flickering between us. When we connect, we feed it. When we isolate, it fades. Meaning isn’t discovered; it’s generated, in real time, through the act of weaving our lives together against the slow unraveling of everything else.

Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us.

The Meaning of Life

If you strip away all the theology, philosophy, and self-help buzzwords, the question behind everything humans do is painfully simple: Why bother? Why get up? Why love? Why build anything when it all burns down eventually? 

Every religion, every civilization, every podcast pretending to be a philosophy class has tried to answer that. And after a couple thousand years of arguing, most of it still boils down to the same two competing forces: entropy and growth. The universe falls apart. We build things anyway.

Meaning, as I’ve come to understand it, isn’t a treasure we find buried somewhere between birth and death. It’s a side effect of participation. It’s what we feel when we plug into something bigger than ourselves. That might be a person, a purpose, a system, or a story. When we connect, energy moves. Ideas move. Life moves. That movement pushes back against entropy, and the experience of that push, that spark of resistance, is what we call meaning.

Other religions have been pointing to this same thing all along, they just used different language. Christianity said, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I.” Judaism said God is found in the I/ Thou encounter, in the living space between people. Buddhism called it interbeing, that nothing exists in isolation. Hinduism called it Brahman, the shared consciousness beneath all forms. Taoism called it the Tao, the balance born of opposites. Even physics, if you squint at it, says life only exists because of feedback loops that keep order from dissolving into chaos. Each of these traditions was circling the same fire pit, describing the same glow from different angles.

The Tribe of the Fire just calls that glow what it is: connection. Divinity isn’t a guy in the sky or a light in your chest; it’s the electricity between us. The Fire is the heat that fuels every act of trust, every shared struggle, every moment of creation between living things. When we connect, we participate in the same process that built stars, that stitched molecules into cells, that taught matter how to think. That’s as close to sacred as it gets.

Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us.

So the meaning of life isn’t to be saved, enlightened, or remembered. It’s to participate, to feed the Fire, to hold the line against the dark, and to leave behind more connection than we found. Every time we reach out, every time we love, every time we create something worth keeping, we’re helping the universe remember itself. That’s growth. That’s the rebellion against entropy. That’s god.

So Why the Tribe?

Connection might be the spark of divinity, but not all connection points toward growth. Some connections build; others consume. A strong marriage can forge a legacy; a toxic one can hollow people out. A thriving company can create opportunity; a corrupt one can poison a town. Even the cells in your body prove the point. When their coordination goes wrong, they don’t just stop working; they turn cancerous. 

Connection itself is raw power. It doesn’t care what side you’re on. It can create order or chaos, growth or entropy. The difference is trust.

Trust is the quiet architecture of every system that works. Trust isn't faith or optimism. Trust is a demonstrated pattern of reliability. It’s what happens when actions prove reliable enough that we can risk depending on someone else. In systems language, trust is the feedback loop that allows cooperation to scale without constant supervision. In biological terms, it’s how organisms stabilize in a noisy environment. In human terms, it’s how we decide who we can build with and who we should keep our distance from. Without trust, connection collapses into manipulation, fear, and control. With it, simple individuals can self-organize into something extraordinary. Trust is the ingredient in connections that determines if a connection grows or dies. 

Psychologists have been studying this for decades, but evolution figured it out long before we had grad students and lab rats. Humans are hard-wired for small, cooperative bands, tribes of somewhere between fifty and two hundred people, give or take, where trust could be earned, tracked, and enforced through reputation and shared experience. Beyond that threshold, our brains struggle to distinguish true belonging from social noise. 

Tribes were our original design spec. They provided everything: safety, purpose, accountability, and a shared mythos that gave life meaning. Every ancestor you’ve ever had survived because their tribe gave them the ability to survive in a harsh environment. The tribe was the structure that provided the connections required for growth to battle with entropy. 

Somewhere along the way, we traded that design for scale. We built civilizations, companies, governments, and networks... systems too big to feel, too abstract to trust. Now we live surrounded by people yet starved for belonging. We scroll through thousands of names, but can’t find five we’d call at 2 a.m. if the shit hit the fan. The average person has more exposure than ever, but less intimacy. We’re flooded with countless superficial connections, yet dying for even a handdful of real, authentic connections. 

That loss has consequences. You can see the entropy everywhere: political divides tearing families apart, dating markets that feel like psychological minefields, workplaces choking on distrust and burnout. Good employees are impossible to find, good leaders even rarer. Everyone’s hustling, but no one’s building. We talk about “community,” but most people haven’t experienced the real thing since high school sports or the military... or ever. 

Beneath the noise, there’s a quiet, primal fear: If something goes wrong, who shows up for me? Most of us don’t have an answer, and that’s the real crisis of modern life.

That’s why the Tribe matters. It's not a metaphor or a lifestyle brand, but as a structural correction to a broken system. The Tribe is the smallest unit of human civilization capable of sustaining trust. It’s where connection matures into commitment, where accountability replaces posturing, and where love and loyalty can actually mean something measurable. The Tribe doesn’t promise comfort; it promises truth. It’s the forge where individual embers gather to become something brighter and stronger than they could alone. Every act of courage, every hard conversation, every earned bond feeds the Fire and keeps entropy at bay.

The Tribe also matters because it's how we best leverage our own personal growth. If every level of existence is a system nested inside another, then the Tribe is the level where personal evolution becomes possible. It’s the smallest social system big enough to expose your blind spots but small enough to still care about your growth. Families shape our survival patterns, but tribes shape our identity. They’re the human-sized unit of feedback, close enough to confront you when you’re wrong, steady enough to catch you when you fall, and invested enough to push you toward becoming something better. In systems language, the Tribe is the self-correcting layer of human life: the level that transforms individual change into collective adaptation. It’s where the currents of connection reshape the riverbed of who we are.

We don’t need more followers; we need more tribes. We don’t need another sermon about self-love; we need people who will show up when it’s storming and the power’s out. We need fewer slogans about unity and more shared meals, more fights that end in handshakes, more people willing to say, I’ve got you. 

That’s what the Tribe of the Fire is built for, to turn connection into structure, structure into meaning, and meaning into legacy. The Tribe is our ant colony. It's how we build something bigger than ourselves. 

Because here’s the truth: when humans are isolated, they fall apart. When they’re connected without trust, they burn each other out. But when they’re bound by shared struggle and mutual care, they become unstoppable. The Tribe is how we remember how to fulfill our destiny. It’s how we participate in the universe’s rebellion against entropy. It’s how we keep the Fire alive.

Conclusion

The journey through systems theory, complexity science, and the surprisingly intricate nature of an ant colony all point to one critical truth: our greatest power doesn't come from internal struggle or external control, but from the paradigm of connection that links us to others. Divinity, as the foundation of this idea holds, is not a distant reward or an internal light; it lives between us, manifesting as the growth that successfully pushes back against the universe's slow pull toward the decay of entropy. 

The essence of the meaning of life, then, is to participate in this cosmic rebellion. I urge you to look closely at the webs of your own life, especially those deep connections you’ve formed, the ones that feel most sacred and most challenging. Are they defined by the structural integrity of trust and love that fosters growth, or are they hollowed out by fear and manipulation, allowing entropy to take hold? 

My challenge to you is simple: pay attention to your connections, actively feed the Fire of shared struggle and mutual care, and recognize that in every bond of true belonging, you are witnessing and participating in the most powerful, most divine force in existence.

Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us.

~Jason

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