Listen: The Cosmos is Talking to You

The universe is not just out there. We are part of it. Learn to talk to the universe, and it will talk to you. 

Usually, we don't bother. We wake up in the morning, look out the window, and what we see simply tells us whether it is about to rain or it is going to be a hot day. We take these and other signs for granted. We treat the cosmos as if it were indifferent to our presence.

But when I was growing up in a remote village in India, there was a livelier conversation with the surroundings. I remember instances when I would see an uncle of mine setting out for the day, only to turn around and march quickly back into the house. "It is a bad day," he would announce with absolute certainty. He had seen a cow urinating outside the house, and that was simply not propitious. The universe had sent him a blunt, rather unglamorous message, and he was smart enough to heed it.

Yet, the universe doesn't only send stop signs. Nor are the signs so fixed that you can’t modify them. When my older sister got married, my mother deliberately took control of the dialogue. She arranged for a cow to be brought right to our front gate, ensuring its face was welcoming the newlyweds. To her, the cow was a sacred symbol of fertility and abundance, a joyful greeting from the cosmos for the newlywed woman. 

In Batang Berjuntai, a small town on the road to Kuala Selangor, businesses don’t start until a white cow with painted horns is brought to their doors.

In our world, a single cow could rewrite your entire day, depending entirely on which end of it you happened to encounter.

Years later, far from the familiar places of my childhood, I met a man from the rainforests of Sarawak who possessed this same cosmic literacy. He read the day’s bird calls and flights as effortlessly as a city-dweller reads the morning newspapers. He was listening to the Beburong, the traditional omen system of the Iban people. To him, the jungle wasn't just a wall of trees and noise; it was a daily gossip column from the gods. If the tiny Ketupong bird gave a sharp, single cry, it was a cosmic warning telling you to stop what you were doing. If the Beragai bird laughed brightly, the universe was giving you its blessing to move forward. Like my mother and my uncle, this man knew that nature was an alphabet, and the world was constantly typing out messages.

For generations, traditional fishermen in Kerala have faced the volatile Arabian Sea without satellite data, relying entirely on the universe to signal the arrival of the massive Southwest Monsoon. They read the subtext of the landscape long before the first raindrop falls. They watch columns of ants marching upward to deposit their eggs on higher ground, and observe low-swarming dragonflies blanket the coastline. To these seasoned mariners, the sea itself changes its scent, and the wind shifts its syntax. They are not just predicting the weather; they are listening to a vast ecosystem of living alarm clocks, coordinating their lives with a highly synchronised cosmic rhythm.

If we elevate our gaze from the sea to the night sky, we find the grandest version of this dialogue: astrology. Long before it was reduced to generalised newspaper horoscopes, true astrology was humanity's original method of decoding the sky. It was built on the understanding that the positions of stars and planets are not distant, meaningless rocks floating in a vacuum. Instead, the macrocosm above is intimately bound to the microcosm below. As above, so below. The cosmic alignment was read as a celestial map of active energy, broadcasting the emotional and physical tides of our collective reality.

If you explain all this to a modern, hyper-rational person, they will smile and call it whimsical superstition. If you explain it to a linguist, they will call it semiotics—the study of how we decode signs and symbols. They would say the cow, the bird, the ants, and the stars are merely "signifiers" onto which we paint our own meanings.

But if you ask Federico Faggin, the legendary physicist who invented the microprocessor, he might tell you that my village elders, the man from Sarawak, and the Kerala fishermen were actually practising advanced quantum mechanics.

For a long time, classical science told us the universe is a cold, dead machine made of separate pieces of matter bumping into each other. In that lonely view, an Iban bird, an Indian cow, or a planet millions of miles away has absolutely nothing to do with human destiny. But Faggin’s revolutionary work in quantum consciousness shatters that illusion. He proposes that consciousness isn't something confined inside our skulls; it is the very fabric of reality. The universe is a single, deeply interconnected whole, and physical matter—the trees, the birds, the cows, and our own bodies—is simply the "user interface" that consciousness uses to show us meaning.

At the deep, quantum level, we are completely entangled with everything around us. There is no "us" and an "external universe." We are parts of the same living organism.

When we realise this, the whimsy of my childhood village becomes a profound truth. My uncle turning back from the cow's posterior, my mother welcoming the bride, the Sarawak elder listening to the canopy, and the astrologers tracing the stars weren't engaging in silly folklore—they were experiencing the literal reality of quantum entanglement. Because we are connected to the whole, our internal paths, doubts, and fears are mirrored perfectly in the behaviour of the world around us.

The universe talks back to us because it is us, continuously writing its daily newspaper to help its parts remember how to stay in touch. So tomorrow morning, when you look out your window, don't just check the weather. Say hello. And pay attention to what clears your path. Or blocks it.