If geometry shapes the physical world, and if resonance shapes consciousness, then it shouldn’t be surprising that our ethical lives show patterns too. Moral experience doesn’t feel random. It has direction. It has shape. Choices feel like movements—not just decisions on a menu, but shifts in orientation: up or down, open or closed, toward or away. Long before I ever tried to formalize anything, I felt that moral life had a geometry.
Some people understand the world through narrative. Others through logic. Others through image, or sensation, or purposeful action. Over the years I’ve noticed another style of mind—rarer, harder to describe, but instantly recognizable when you encounter it. I’ve come to think of it as the Tuner Mind: a cognitive architecture oriented less toward storytelling or argument and more toward resonance.
In the last post I sketched the basic geometric “alphabet” that seems to recur across physics, cognition, and meaning. But geometry alone isn’t enough. Something has to move in that geometry—vibrate, resonate, oscillate. And so we turn to frequency & spectra as a model/notation to use for what I’ve come to think of as the lavender boundary, a physical and phenomenological threshold where human perception breaks open into something stranger.
A critical definitional feature of the mystical experience is a sense of unity, or the experience of becoming one with all that exists. The boundary approaches this experience, and afterglow is its residue.
Over time I’ve found myself returning to four polygons that seem to function like an alphabet for both the physical world and the phenomenological one: the circle, the hexagon, the square, and the triangle. Each shape expresses a different way reality organizes itself. Together they form a cycle.
This isn’t a mathematical derivation. It’s a recognition that geometry has always been the language of both science and subjective experience. These four shapes show up everywhere—from molecules to myths, from symmetry groups to moral tension, from neural patterns to theological metaphors. I will use these shapes as an alphabet to build models with.
As I’ve moved through physics, philosophy, teaching, and a lifetime of reflection, I’ve come to believe that all human knowledge—regardless of era or culture—falls into three basic modes of understanding. Not three subjects, but three axes of one manifold: Phenomena, Structure, and Ground. Every worldview emphasizes one of these, but a complete picture of reality needs all three.
Over the past few decades I’ve carried on three parallel conversations—one with science, one with philosophy, and one with the quiet, persistent experiences of my own mind. For years these stayed in separate compartments. Science belonged to the lab bench and the classroom. Philosophy lived in the books I read and wandering thoughts. And whatever I felt or glimpsed during moments of trauma, awe, grief, or deep focus—those belonged to no category at all.
Lately, those compartments have been collapsing. And what I hope to do is develop a new way of describing why those compartments are illusory. My descriptions rely upon my own experiences as a scientist, teacher, reader of philosophy, and seeker of truth.
I've been working on a project to unify disparate areas of physics, consciousness, philosophy & theology. This is a first post toward developing models that bring together human knowledge and experience.