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.
