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.
Phenomena is the beginning of everything. It’s the world as experienced: sensation, emotion, memory, intuition, the quality of a moment, the shock of grief, the flood of awe, the quiet clarity of insight. Even the most technical scientific discovery starts as an appearance inside a human mind. Phenomena includes the dramatic states people report during trauma or near-death events—moments where experience seems to stretch, dissolve, or reconfigure. This is the raw material of reality as we encounter it from the inside.
Structure is the attempt to understand why those appearances take the forms they do. It’s pattern, order, symmetry, lawful behavior. When I talk about geometry in physics—hexagonal lattices, resonance states, threshold frequencies—I’m talking about Structure. When we examine the psychology beneath moral decisions, or the developmental arcs that make certain choices more likely than others, we’re also talking about Structure. It’s what remains invariant when subjective experience is removed. The universe behaves according to patterns, and our minds—perhaps because they evolved in such a world—intuit and manipulate those patterns with surprising ease.
Ground is the most elusive of the three. It isn’t a being or a doctrine. It’s the question of ultimacy: what makes the laws, patterns, and appearances possible at all? Classical theology approached this through the idea of God or the absolute. Buddhism approached it through emptiness. Philosophy has called it Being, the real, the unconditioned. Physics touches Ground unintentionally whenever it hits a singularity, a boundary condition, or the vacuum state from which fluctuations arise. Ground isn’t “something in the universe.” It’s whatever underlies the universe’s capacity to manifest anything.
These three modes constantly shape one another. Experience pushes us toward models. Models push us toward questions of origin and ultimacy. And whatever we take as ultimate inevitably reshapes how we experience the world. The cycle runs P → S → G → P, over and over.
What interests me now is how these three axes—the experiential, the structural, and the ultimate—might share deeper connections than we usually assume. Geometry shows up in all three: circles of perception, triangles of conflict, hexagons of resonance, singularities of transcendence. Physics, consciousness, morality, and theology all seem to rhyme, as though they’re different dialects of the same underlying grammar.
In the next post, I’ll begin laying out the basic shapes in that grammar—the cycle of circle, hexagon, square, triangle—and why I think they form a kind of alphabet for both the physical world and the phenomenological one.
