A Ceaselessly Flowing Quantum Soup

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. — William Blake

Author

Lucy Petroucheva
June 09, 2026

The sky that an insect sees is not the sky you and I see.

A honey bee experiences ultraviolet radiation.
A snake experiences infrared radiation.
A bat experiences the echo of ultrasound.
A chameleon’s eyeballs swivel on two different axes.

There’s no such thing as colors or sounds, or textures, or tastes, or smells, in the so-called ‘real world.’

The real world is a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. It’s a fluctuation of energy and information.

Your mind is the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.

— Deepak Chopra1

If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts . . . remember that nature does not know it!

— Richard Feynman

Over the years, I’ve grown pretty convinced that the mind is “the knife that cuts the continuum of space and time into neat slices of linear experience.” I’ve come across arguments for this idea in science, philosophy, literature, and contemplative traditions— each challenging aspects of our intuitions about time, space, identity, and definitions themselves.

If my mind, and every mind, is a knife that cuts the continuum into slices, that’s a pretty big deal. We should question the slices—or boundaries—we impose on the world.

If our perception boundaries (what counts as a color, sound, texture, taste, and smell) are subjective, then maybe other boundaries are less objective than they appear:

  • What counts as beginning and end (temporal boundaries)

  • What counts as a thing (definitional boundaries)

  • What counts as evidence or proof (knowledge boundaries)

  • What counts as good or bad (moral2 boundaries)

I think we should practice forgetting our slicing every once in a while. Practice experiencing the world with less distinction. This deepens our humility, infuses life with wonder, and makes us more aware of the mystery that holds us.

Of course, I know that my mind can’t help but slice. Slicing can be incredibly useful! But I’m a better person when I hold the slices3 loosely.

Kristina Armitage

1. Poem | “Calendars” | Jim Harrison

Back in the blue chair in front of the green studio
another year has passed, or so they say, but calendars lie.
They’re a kind of cosmic business machine like
their cousin clocks but break down at inopportune times.
Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar
but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons
of greed and my imperishable stupidity. 
Of late I’ve escaped those fatal squares
with their razor-sharp numbers for longer and longer.
I had to become the moving water I already am,
falling back into the human shape in order
not to frighten my children, grandchildren, dogs and friends.
Our old cat doesn’t care. He laps the water where my face used to be.

*Chills.*
Calendars orient us. The knife orients us. But let’s not forget that these are tools!

2. Poem | “Exercise” | W.S. Merwin

A fitting title: Exercise.

First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire

(Forget in order to glimpse your continuity with everything!)

3. Thought Experiment | The Problem of Many | David Lewis

This little thought experiment, better than just about any I’ve seen, reveals how difficult it can be to draw precise boundaries.

Think of a cloud—just one cloud, and around it clear blue sky.

Seen from the ground, the cloud may seem to have a sharp boundary. Not so. The cloud is a swarm of water droplets. At the outskirts of the cloud the density of the droplets falls off. Eventually they are so few and far between that we may hesitate to say that the outlying droplets are still part of the cloud at all; perhaps we might better say only that they are near the cloud.

But the transition is gradual. Many surfaces are equally good candidates to be the boundary of the cloud. Therefore many aggregates of droplets, some more inclusive and some less inclusive (and some inclusive in different ways than others), are equally good candidates to be the cloud. Since they have equal claim, how can we say that the cloud is one of these aggregates rather than another?

But if all of them count as clouds, then we have many clouds rather than one.

And if none of them count, each one being ruled out because of the competition from the others, then we have no cloud.

How is it, then, that we have just one cloud? And yet we do.

Whatever line we draw, there are other plausible places to draw it!4

Embracing the ambiguity feels helpful when I need to loosen my grip, but disorienting when I need firm ground to stand on. Fortunately, it never takes long for my monkey brain to pull me back to distinctions and judgments!

4. Quote | Rumi

Every!! Line!!

5. Quote | Anthony de Mello

In his mind bending book Awareness, Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello writes:

If we are to believe the mystics . . . reality is whole, but words and concepts fragment reality. . . every language has untranslatable words and expressions, because we’re cutting reality up and adding something or subtracting something.

And, so profoundly (take a moment with it):

A frozen wave is not a wave. A wave is essentially movement, action; when you freeze it, it is not a wave. Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows.

Kristina Armitage

Beneath objects, names, categories, beginnings, endings, and identities may lie a far more continuous reality than we can imagine.

Kerouac reminds us: “close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for three seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing.”

It is all one vast thing.

But is it awakened?

:)

P.S. In this long-form artifact, On the Notion of Cause, Bertrand Russell (mind-blowingly) brings into question the phenomenon of cause and effect. What is anything?

1  Please forgive this citation choice. 😅

2  Holding moral boundaries loosely is, of course, not an excuse to hurt people; it's a recognition that our moral frameworks are fallible human attempts to make sense of reality.

3  Talking about slices reminds me of this image (see below) from the old PBS clip that challenges our intuitions about time.

4  It’s like the Paradox of the Heap and the Ship of Theseus.