If geometry helps explain moral orientation and theological tension, it also helps explain something closer to home: the shape of consciousness itself. Over time I’ve found that a surprisingly good analogy for the layers of mind comes from chemistry—specifically the way carbon arranges itself in three different structures: cyclohexane, benzene, and graphene. These molecules aren’t metaphors I’m forcing onto psychology; they carry real geometric insights about stability, resonance, and identity that map cleanly onto lived experience.
Just as with my moral geometry, I am searching for models that clarify and bring light. These three representations of carbon are a good model for how consciousness could be "layered" with emergent properties.
Start with cyclohexane. In chemistry, cyclohexane doesn’t sit flat; it puckers into “chair” and “boat” conformations. Thermal motion makes its atoms oscillate constantly above and below the plane. It’s flexible, dynamic, never quite still. Consciousness in its most everyday form behaves similarly. Our attention rises and falls. Emotions oscillate. Thoughts never settle into a single configuration. The mind in its “embodied” state feels curved, reactive, a little unstable—shaped by pressure, fatigue, hunger, mood, environment. This is the level where stress bends us out of shape and where our sense of self feels more like a moving equilibrium than a fixed identity.
Cyclohexane is like the real, 3D lived experience of the ideal 2D virtues (hexagon).
Benzene is different. When carbon atoms rearrange into a perfect hexagon, something remarkable happens: electrons stop belonging to individual bonds and instead form a delocalized ring above and below the plane. The system stabilizes not by locking down but by sharing. This is what I think of as the second layer of consciousness—the layer where the self becomes coherent, emotionally regulated, capable of holding multiple internal states in harmony. Meditation, therapy, artistic “flow,” and moments of integration often correspond to this benzene-like state. It’s not rigid; it’s resonant. It’s the mind discovering that stability comes from openness, not contraction. And when those electrons are resonant, guess what wavelength we approach? The lavender light, the boundary wavelength of around 246 nm from the triplet.
Then there is graphene, an entire sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a repeating hexagonal pattern. Two things stand out about graphene: it is astonishingly strong, and it is almost perfectly conductive. Identity in this mode is not just coherent within itself; it connects outward. Think of profound empathy, deep intellectual insight, collaborative creativity, or the sense of being part of something larger without losing yourself. This is consciousness as a field rather than an object—a network, not a node. Many contemplative traditions describe something like this: the delocalized mind, the expansive self, the sense that one’s awareness has widened enough to include others without erasing individuality. Some of its emergent properties deserve more discussion as metaphors and parallels to consciousness (band theory) but I will save that for later.
These three layers—curved, resonant, and networked—aren’t stages we progress through once. They’re states we move between constantly. Stress pushes us back into cyclohexane: reactive, bent out of shape. Integration brings us into benzene: stable through resonance. Connection, love, collaboration, and insight move us toward graphene: coherent but expansive.
Why bother with any of this chemistry? Because it gives us a concrete framework for thinking about the mind that avoids the usual binaries of rational vs emotional, material vs spiritual. Cyclohexane captures the embodied mind, benzene the integrated mind, graphene the interconnected mind. Three geometries, one substance. Useful comparisons & emergent properties at each layer/level.
And importantly: each of these layers responds differently to ethical pressure, to beauty, to suffering, to crisis, and to the lavender boundary I wrote about last time. In the next post, I’ll turn toward the historical and mythic dimension: why human stories of enlightenment, resurrection, and transcendence so often mirror these same geometries, right down to the shapes we see in the sky and the shapes we carry in ourselves.
