In the last two posts I outlined a moral geometry with two apexes: one that represents collapse into domination (the “black-hole” orientation) and one that represents expansion into generativity (the “white-hole” orientation). Most of our ethical and spiritual life unfolds somewhere between these two pull forces. But every once in a while, people describe an experience that sits at the boundary—a liminal state where the two orientations seem to overlap before diverging. I’ve come to call this threshold lavender resonance.
When I began writing a book project, a cool idea kept returning to my mind: lavender light as a special, spiritual experience. Lavender the true color comes from a mixture of red and violet wavelengths, kind of a mix of the most energetic light we can see & the least energetic light we can see. At the limits of perception is this curious "mix" I call lavender ... Again, as a phenomenological experience, this fits nicely: boundary, collapse, afterglow.
The term “lavender” comes partly from physics. Human vision tops out around 400 nanometers, just before ultraviolet begins. There’s a spectral tension there—a zone where the last visible violet thins into almost-nothing, where the brain must stitch together a perceptual experience out of signals that barely reach consciousness. That edge feels strangely charged. Many people describe lavender, both visually and metaphorically, as a color of thresholds: the last hue before the world becomes invisible.
But more importantly, “lavender resonance” describes a certain state of mind: a moment when one’s moral, psychological, or existential trajectory feels suspended between collapse and emergence. It’s the instant when you’re not yet falling inward or rising outward, not yet contracting or expanding. You’re simply there, at the hinge.
These states usually arise under pressure—grief, trauma, awe, love, responsibility, loss of control, birth, death, or profound beauty. They appear in religious literature as the dark night of the soul or the mountaintop vision. They show up in psychology as the moment before breakthrough or breakdown. They show up in philosophy as the existential “limit experience,” where one’s framework no longer functions and the self must reorganize.
What fascinates me is that people often disagree about what is happening in those moments. Some describe them as the purest example of free will—a moment of radical agency where a person chooses who they are. Others describe them as inevitable—the culmination of years of formation, habit, trauma, character, and circumstance collapsing into a single inflection point. In one version, the lavender boundary is the apex of autonomy. In the other, it is the exposure of destiny.
Both interpretations are plausible because both are true from different angles. From inside the experience, the moment feels like freedom. From outside—viewed over a long arc of character formation—it looks like resonance collapsing along the strongest vector. A lifetime of small orientations suddenly reveals its trajectory.
In physics, this duality is familiar. A system in superposition looks indeterminate until observed, but the probabilities were already structured by the system’s history and constraints. In moral and psychological life, the lavender moment is a kind of lived superposition: two apexes equally present, two futures equally near, the self poised between collapse and emergence.
When people talk about moments that “changed everything,” this is often what they’re describing. Not a new fact or a new doctrine, but a reorientation in the manifold of experience—a tipping from one apex to the other.
Lavender resonance is the experiential hinge between the physics of thresholds, the phenomenology of crisis, and the geometry of moral orientation. It’s where the personal and the structural meet. In the next post, I’ll turn to a more concrete metaphor drawn from chemistry—cyclohexane, benzene, and graphene—and why these three layers offer such a powerful analogy for consciousness itself.
