Musings from the Meta-Verse: Tip-of-the-Iceberg Cosmologies
Note: If you're in a hurry, save this for later. If you're curious about the edge where structure, awe and meaning touch—welcome.
Before you begin: please take a moment, settle in, enjoy the image above—of me holding my baby daughter as a first-time dad, tune into the frequency of restful wonder. Now allow your mind to wander outward from the edges of that image: to the room, to the street outside, to the vast sky beyond the vast sky. Further—past the solar system, past the galaxy’s edge, past everything known—to the edge of the cosmos. And then…
I won’t be making arguments in this post. Instead, my thinking comes from a quieter place—just noticing the movements inside myself, how they interact with all the thoughts before. It’s a place where—by sitting long enough with something—that something acquires a presence. Sometimes, without intending to, these movements trundle down the path of child-like questions touched by wonder—like: why there is?
Perhaps it’s from starting meditation and Buddhist practice decades ago, so that Yogācāra and Madhyamaka gave shape to my feelings about things. First, the cosmos as projection from karmic seeds stored in the alaya-vijñāna. Then even that framework dissolving, gently, into the emptiness of all phenomena. Something from childhood, too. Did I encounter it before, reading Kant with the mind but not yet embodied? Home-coming to the liminal space between noumenal and phenomenal. What remains is not an answer, but a quickening—like standing near something that does not speak, but is unmistakably there. These cosmological musings are not attempts to answer the unanswerable. They are where a mind attuned to the edge alights and rests.
My thought didn’t begin with λCDM (lambda cold dark matter—the standard model of the universe and everything). It began with a question about how reality is framed—how models arise, and what they reveal about the structure of knowing. Wandering through Wheeler’s participatory universe to decoherence, from Many-Worlds to QBism, I kept circling the same insight: each model carries the shape of the observer embedded within it. What drew me in wasn’t the desire to find their flaws. It was the tense dance between what these models claim to describe and what they seem to leave untouched. Something about scale. About the edge of observation. About the kinds of questions that are inevitably asked from within the system doing the asking—to a gentle awe beyond these questions, beyond questions.
Such an elegant model, λCDM—elegant in its internal consistency, its predictive power, how well it accounts for the data. Not sloppy or half-baked. But in a sense, so clean and conclusive that it invites—not suspicion, exactly—but a kind of restless momentum. Like seeing dominoes fall in slow motion. Because coherence at this level tells us something is being well-described, but not necessarily well-understood. It explains how the universe behaves within its own structure, but not why such a structure exists to begin with. And what it calls anomalies—early structure formation, unexpected galactic rotation, asymmetries too persistent to be coincidence—I register as fractures, places where light leaks through. The feeling nags that we’ve come so far, but we have to stop—because λCDM can only illuminate part of the structure, not the whole. The standard model is as deep as we can travel with our observational tools.
And then, suddenly—some ideas don't just challenge a model. They shake and loosen the frame itself, so that the brain stretches and becomes limber again. This happened when I encountered black hole cosmology recently (Schwarzschild cosmology). Plausibly, our universe might originate from the collapse of a black hole in some parent universe, that there are universe-s, plural, all artifacts of space-time inside black holes. Not "inside" a black hole in a spatial sense. Think of it as the causal interior of what becomes its own self-contained spacetime. Strangely coherent. Reality masked in absurdity is my thing—the resonance between the Avataṃsaka Sūtra (Flower Garland Sutra) and Alice Through the Looking Glass—quantum mechanics has long forced us to abandon the obviousness of intuitions. And this cosmology, at least, offers structure without singularity—not everything inside a nothing. It upends the very search for an origin story.
What this is, instead, is a transfer of structure. Again. And again, and again, and ... ... ... One configuration folds in on itself, and what emerges isn’t an echo—it’s a new beginning, causally sealed. Compelling. Inspiring. Maybe not testable let alone true. Yet, there are tantalizing phenomena that JWST and other instruments have revealed from deep time that beg for a simple solution like this—like the non-randomness of galactic rotation in our universe. Is this the expression of genes from the parent black hole? I can’t help but linger longer next to its conceptual warmth, because the alternative—a nothing–Bang! followed by forever-expansion into the heat death of perpetual dilution—feels cold, literally and figuratively.
What makes black hole cosmology more than speculation is Popławski’s 2012 model, which gave the idea new theoretical footing. It reframes the Big Bang not as an origin but as a rebound—an emergence from collapse. The proposition is that under extreme conditions the fabric of spacetime behaves differently: torsion, normally negligible, exerts a repulsive force that overcomes gravity. Rather than collapsing into a singularity, spacetime bounces. What we experience as expansion may be the continuation of a process that began with the gravitational collapse of a black hole in a parent universe. Not mystical, but it resonates like myth: a collapse that becomes a rebirth, not by metaphor but by structure. A change in the rules when density passes a threshold. A way for the system to preserve coherence, not erase it. And what’s neat about this is that our universe, in turn, may be spawning others—each black hole a seed.
And when I follow that thought (these thoughts) to its edge—which must be: why does anything exist at all—I don’t arrive at an answer. I arrive at something like inevitability. If you go deep enough, you’re not asking about origins anymore—you’re asking about what makes structure possible at all. Not how something began, but why anything holds. Why there is persistence instead of nothing. Why I felt that I was touching some basis when I touched my baby daughter’s hand right after her birth—and the awe and quiet recognition of generativity as the constant.
Why there is are-ness. Not in time. Not in space. Not as an event or a state, not as the physical universe, but as the condition beneath all of it. A substrate that didn’t come into being, doesn’t develop, doesn’t resolve—because it doesn’t participate in the categories it gives rise to. Categories limited by our experience, so that linguistically we are left only with is, was, will be; here, there, above, below. The substrate is not any of these. It can’t be observed, only intuited. It doesn’t live in measurement—it lives in the imagination, where structural coherence exceeds language, even the abstract language of mathematics. “Something from nothing” isn’t a theory. It’s a refusal to stay with the question. And if there’s any truth here, it’s not a mechanism for emergence—it’s the impossibility of vanishing.
In the end, I’m not looking for origins. I’m watching for structural resonance—what feels coherent beneath the surface of explanation. Models rise and recede. Theories sharpen, then fragment. But something persists, not as a thing, not even as a truth, but as the refusal to disappear. I don’t need it to be named. I only need to remain near it, awake. Not knowing becomes its own kind of alignment. What begins as cosmology ends as practice. And what remains—whatever remains—is already here, needing nothing from me.
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