Proverbially, one might “sell their soul,” but who’s ever heard of selling their spirit? Do we even have a spirit, a shadowy source buried deep within, belonging to the beyond-life, capable of otherworldly connections? It seems intuitive that souls and spirits are not the same, though similar. In the Novel Universe Model, both are connections of consciousness, one to our temporal body (soul), the other, our timeless body (spirit). Conceptually, soul is the continuum of emergent complexity, whereas spirit, access to memory beyond embodied mind. As carnal bridges to and from our eternal Signature-Frequency Set, spirit and soul only exist here, in our Novel Universe.

“Soul” is our religious term for the functional property of emergence – an informational circuit of mind as body and body as mind. Soul is a conduit that “smooths out” granular, incoming data from Lower-Order Body senses into a comprehensible model (story), allowing us, as the body’s Higher-Order Conductor, to respond to changing circumstances. Soul compresses the imperceptible world of irreducibility into a perceptible world of reducibility in order to take meaningful action.

Compared to our view of the spirit, the soul is more grounded in science, although, not completely, as the metaphysical concept of reincarnation plays a key role – we view the ability to speak the soul’s language (morphic resonant dialects) as an acquired skill that develops over lifetimes. Music is a profound metaphor for how we’re able to speak in the various dialects of our particular Novel Universe’s language of energy and morphology.

The difference between music and noise is the presence or absence of rhythm and harmony. With a piano, keys aren’t assigned random tones, but each mathematically calibrated as a precise scaling of notes – each note a limitation that makes for the effective use of frequency variation. In the way letters combine to form words based on rules, the boundaries of tone and timing allow instruments to form music – not every string of letters has meaning, nor collection of notes, coherence. There’s no practical difference between the absence of all possible frequencies in all places at all times, and the presence of all possible frequencies in all places at all times – both silence and noise communicate nothing, as both are data, but neither, information. The inherent limitations on the syntactical boundaries of the soul’s language means Signature-Frequency Sets are also limited to this universe’s unique combinations. Without mastery of these boundaries, we would not be capable of inhabiting its particular forms – by learning to play the narrowly-defined keys of this universe’s piano, we’re able to assemble its sounds into our songs.

As one learns to play an instrument by creating models of control – forming a coherent sound, practicing precise scales, and eventually, performing simple songs – so did we create a soul capable of existing within this universe by first inhabiting its simplest structures – quantum particles popping in and out of existence. Once we had a “feel” for this place – acquiring this universe’s range of specific values and timing – we evolved to manage the complexity of energy bodies. With a decent handle on any number of atoms, we took on molecules, minerals, crystals, and so on. Constructing a symphony of complex songs from a variety of instruments, we came to know our Novel Universe’s dialects – those models of control inherent to particular categories of energy bodies, or what we recognize as those bodies’ morphic resonant dialects.

The animal-level of morphic resonance has been referred to as the “hundredth-monkey effect.”[i] Once one-hundred macaques learn to, say, wash sand off their potatoes, future macaques seemingly adopt the behavior with less prompting and effort. The number of participants isn’t as important as the idea of a non-local tipping point. The “mystical” aspect of morphic resonance is how the solution propagates across time and space without necessarily any direct pressure, instruction, or even awareness of the solution, only a similarity in morphology (bodily form) and behavior – that option space, say, sandy food that might benefit from a good rinse. Just because hundreds of macaques in Japan start washing sand off their food doesn’t say anything about whether rats in New York will spontaneously do the same, but it does suggest that other macaques around the world will dabble in the practice when faced with a similar situation – gritty food paired with a convenient water source.

What is a virus but an informational pattern with an agenda – replication? All energy bodies are information patterns, as all information patterns are energy bodies – even a meme has a life of its own. Morphic resonant “dialect bodies” are non-local energy bodies, meaning they are cognitive bodies who lack force bodies. Physically, they’re akin to memes, a diverse range of replicas, housed in the energy bodies that make use of them, the way an animal might incorporate a virus through evolution to enable, say, live birth,[ii] and through further evolution, that virus’ information is conserved in the genomes of the animal’s descendants. Depending on context, dialect bodies act like a manual, protocol, or platform. As an instruction manual, dialect bodes are used for those energy bodies developing the new skills (morphic resonant dialect), like the macaques washing their food. As an informational protocol, they’re used by energy bodies as a language, a medium for direct interactions, the way the Internet’s hyper-text transfer protocol (http) works to send and receive files, creating the “shape” of the Internet. As a platform, they’re used by a group of energy bodies to temporarily function as the group’s Higher-Order Conductor, the way starlings swam as a single body.

Morphic resonance is the phenomenon of a non-local informational field, allowing similar forms (morphology) to share solutions to similar problems, across both time and space. Before there were atoms, molecules, or anything, quantum particles had to first solve their own paradigm of cohesion, their literal shape, and therefore, functional interactions between waves and fields. With success, they were then able to assemble more complex structures, such as particles, atoms, molecules, etc. Likewise, all newly emergent levels of complexity must spend the time and effort to develop a settled rule-set before they might operate effectively, eventually leading to more complexity – novelty.

For example, at the atomic level, this process is theorized to create the stable molecular bonding of crystal formation. When a novel, synthetic crystal initially forms as a liquid at room temperature, over time, its melting point tends to rise, and thus, might become a solid at room temperature – its stability having markedly increased.[iii] This not only happens in the lab where the crystal was initially produced, but going forward, it happens anywhere it’s manufactured, as if that liquid version of the crystal were somehow permanently lost to time. The crystals, having solved their bonding schema through morphic resonance’s non-local informational field, are stronger, and therefore, more stable with a higher melting point. Morphic resonance reasons the solution was not some inherent feature of the problem – a determinate law of nature – but a process, geared to discover an optimal bonding strategy among the atoms of those initial crystals.

The more similar the form and more similar the problem, the more likely the adoption of a durable solution. Furthermore, the more times a unique solution is adopted, the more likely it is to become a paradigm – “common sense.” From the electron orbitals of hydrogen to the formation of quartz crystals to the folding of basic proteins, certain solutions have solidified over innumerable events to the point where these once flexible processes now appear to be indelible “laws of nature.” Such chemistry, as novel synthetic crystals, is an example of how dialect bodies form and evolve.

The inherent evolution of dialect bodies provides a logical reason as to why theory and math often fail to precisely predict the moving target that is reality. Instead, math and theory might effectively suggest a ballpark solution-space to be refined through development – the very aim and intention of the NU Model. This isn’t narrowing down a predetermined process to finite precision – discovery of “inherent” laws of nature that already exist– but instead, morphic resonance – the training of “mind” (energy) producing the reliable behavior of “body” (matter). Until a process becomes useful to reality, its paradigm is unformed. It isn’t that we necessarily discover the properties of matter, but that matter develops those properties through the process of discovery (repetition).

The NU Model theorizes that morphic resonance is an individual’s cognitive body directly engaging with these dialect bodies along the Hypergraph. Dialect bodies are, themselves, informational patterns – energy bodies, capable of expressing preference and participating in the Quantum Transience Gradient. What makes them special is their ability to interact on both a local or global scale. Morphic resonance acts locally between individuals, such as a dog moving to the window overlooking the driveway once its owner’s homeward-bound,[iv] or globally, such as swarming starlings maintaining a singular shape.[v] Dialect bodies are either templates – a kind of instruction manual – or mediators – a kind of informational scaffolding between individuals, one-on-one (local) or as a group (global). Morphic resonance dialect bodies are the foundation of our soul, or what NUM recognizes as the paradigm for the emergence of the Higher-Order Conductor. We experience these dialect bodies as our “true selves,” although they are not truly us, but the bridge between us and our body, a bridge so innate and intimate it appears, not as separate things, but a single thing – the conscious mind. As we might engage others through our cognitively body’s ability to connect across the Hypergraph, despite distance, we might also engage the dialect bodies of morphic resonance, both learning from them, and making use of them, despite their non-locality.

The primary hub of embodied animal consciousness in the brain is likely found in a place where it might directly be accessed by the energy fields of the brain – the soma’s (neuronal body) microtubules, as a kind of quantum “computer.”[vi] The cognitive connections of our body’s mind are clearest within the brain, and the brain’s direct entanglement with the Hypergraph through the microtubules quantum effect, called superradiance.[vii] Unconsciousness is a disruption to that computer’s functionality, brought on by events such as specific chemical reactions, a drop in blood pressure, or blow to the head. Each of these actions forcefully occupies those microtubules’ oNPCs with foreign Sets (the chemistry, a lack of oxygen, or the energy wave of a force vector), temporarily crowding out our own SFS, and leading to a state of widespread decoherence – noise. Until quantum coherence is reestablished, we are disconnected from our embodied consciousness. As we are no longer part of the Hypergraph’s Blocks, we do not experience the arrow of time, nor participate in its development.

At complex levels of emergence, such as a human mind, morphic resonance’s direct QT swapping and information exchange between bodies of similar morphology reinforce those dialects, making them more accessible and easier to adopt. Morphic resonance shapes behavior models among all levels of complexity by processing emerging informational patterns across the LOB-HOC hierarchy, aligning information from the NPC level to the HOC subject to those newly acquired models. Although, as levels of complexity compile in depth, the process of morphic resonance becomes less salient, less reliable, and requires more repetition to institute less effect. In other words, for molecules or cells, the process has a richer variety of effect with a quicker adoption than it might have for humans or galaxies. As morphic resonance is a non-local effect, we commonly experience these moments as a “gut feeling,” being “struck out of the blue,” or simply what feels more “comfortable.” These naturally occurring experiences might also account for the sporadic kinds of information exchanges that have otherwise been dismissed out of hand, yet show clear evidence of existence, such as those associated with parapsychology, out-of-body experiences, or deep meditation.

As our soul matured, we were able to operate the foundational elements of this universe, and we took a leap of faith. We struck out on our own, and became “life.” We might’ve swum around as a single-cell bacterium, explored the environment as a tiny tardigrade, even raced about as a mischievous mouse. Long capable of independent action, our soul eventually possessed sufficient models (dialect bodies) to become human. “Rising” through these stages (levels of emergent complexity) doesn’t result from Karma – all conscious minds have value, regardless of framework or intention. “Living a good life,” passing a test, or meeting some standard or set of morals are narratives of Power structures (governments / religions). Power’s stories are designed to leverage societal behavior by injecting idiosyncratic control models into the zeitgeist, with the aim to direct a population’s behavior as a pseudo Higher-Order Conductor. A true HOC is the collective mind of an ensemble, not a directing individual(s) among the LOB – a reason why all forms of leadership-based governments have a half-life, and only naturally-occurring, direct democracies, such as our brain-inspired neural-democracy, work over the long-term.

Evolving in complexity from atom, to cell, to animal is more practical than adhering to any formal religious tenet, requiring only the incarnated body’s particular bioelectric algorithms. NUM recognizes these algorithms as the result of morphic resonance’s process of collective exploration of option space, eventually settling on those “common sense” solutions to the LOB’s functional relationships – a dynamic dialect that allows for the assembly of complexity through the stability of common paradigms. Moving “up” from mouse to monkey is quite a leap in scale and complexity, but moving from protozoan to dolphin, a whole other prospect. Mice and monkeys share so many points in common – both four-limbed social mammals who might enjoy a slice of pizza – whereas protozoa and dolphins may both swim about, but in vastly different ways, at vastly different scales of size and complexity, with vastly different preferences and objectives. One’s control models might well be ready to move from mouse to monkey, but if one’s SFS body and tail have only protozoan models encoded, dolphin models would pose a range of insurmountable issues. As we collected models for operating limbs, consuming food, finding mates – the driving forces behind those bodies – we expanded our options, able to live as all kinds of creatures, learning all kinds of novel things. With each life lived, this collection of dialect bodies as blueprints grows long our SFS tail, and wide our SFS body.

Each time we incarnate, we construct an embodied soul from those models stored in our SFS body and tail, models that might be applied to the energy body we’ve joined. Sometimes the models don’t match the dialect bodies of that particular form, such as a human body. Other times, they match one-to-one. However, they’re more likely to function as a useful template to build the new models of an unfamiliar body schema. For instance, imagine we’d been a variety of monkeys, and decide to become human for the first time. We possess an array of well-developed, monkey-specific models for socializing, eating, sleeping, moving fingers, arms, hands, legs, etc., and despite not having the right models to precisely control human functions, the ones we do have are close enough to their human counterparts to take the leap. With great effort, we shape those monkey models into their human counterparts, allowing future human incarnations to go more smoothly with a soul built of better fitting models. To define the difference between the soul’s embodied models and dialect bodies themselves, dialect bodies are only accessible through the experience of life, whereas the soul’s models are those personal versions of the dialect bodies stored in the SFS body and tail, and therefore, vary according to our priorities and preferences. Although we may learn from and use dialect bodies, our soul is constructed from our personal models.

At the other extreme, a “natural-born athlete” would be, as Socrates implicitly suggests in Plato’s Meno,[viii] “recollecting” past lives – accessing previously perfected human models of motion, stored in the SFS body and tail. The athlete is not only born with the ability to quickly redevelop the dialectic fluency of their new body, but has the additional capacity to eventually construct physical poetry with deft command – all those astounding feats we attach to any “gifted” person. With this in mind, those gifted people are not gifted because of some inherent quality of “good” character or “blessing of God,” but instead, raw experience – their history. Therefore, anyone might, with the right effort, time, and attention, learn to master any energy body – it’s only a matter of the intention and willingness to spend some number of lives in such a pursuit.

On the other hand, an HOC without that vocabulary of experience finds its body rudderless, and in extreme cases, disease takes root. Without effective models, one must develop them. To do so, it’s often best to recognize one’s naïveté, relinquish total control, and instead, listen with interest to one’s body and direct its LOB with intent. Thus, the novice co-creates those novel control models alongside its LOB through those available morphic-resonant dialect bodies, suffering failure and celebrating success. Sometimes, to establish order in the Novel Universe, even Power must submit, and Love, command.

A Higher-Order Conductor Signature-Frequency Set exists as every energy body. This occurs at every level of complexity, from particle, molecule, system, to us, the physical body’s conscious mind. For instance, a molecule-level HOC directs its LOB (the atom-level) by observing those preferred Quantum Transience interactions from among the atom-level’s potential interactions – its option space. The HOC “bends” or alters the QT Gradient’s valence (yum, yuck, meh), making those options inline with the HOC more “yum,” while those that might interfere, more “yuck.” Thus, the range of atomic QT options likely to be utilized by the LOB are narrowed to those more closely aligned with the HOC – those molecular-level objectives. At each level of complexity, this applied attention of observation by the HOC effectively “instructs” its hierarchy of multiscale, competent, embedded consciousnesses – the LOBs, or embedded layers of “mind.” The molecule-level HOC isn’t one of the atoms, promoted over the others like a little dictator, running around, micromanaging its cohort. The molecule-level HOC is the molecule – all the atoms. It’s the unity of ensemble, for instance, NUC’s neural-democracy, or its inspiration – a single human mind, as various networks and lobes, collectively made up of eighty-plus billion individual neurons.

As with any hierarchy, instructions move downward with feedback moving upward – the boss directs the managers, who inform the front-line workers, and the front-line workers grumble to their managers, who complain to the boss. A hierarchy of multiscale, competent, embedded cognition starts with the boss in the “top job” – the ultimate HOC (CEO) of the LOB (managers). Furthermore, the managers are HOCs of the ultimate LOBs (workers). We, as the “CEO” of our bodies, express our priorities and preferences through awareness, observation, and occasional effort, while simultaneously experiencing interoception,[ix] or the internal perception of our body’s energy state. This two-way conversation is the experience of soul.

Like the hidden, hard-working gears of an insightful “unconsciousness,” interoception’s feedback has our cells’ preferences accumulating, influencing the behavior of the organs, which in-turn, affect those related parts of the brain, finally emerging as awareness within the mind – no different from the motion of galaxies moving galactic clusters, gradually shaping the universe’s web of energy. This bottom-up informational flow means that an impulse against personal preference is generally not some insight into one’s cryptic nature, but instead, the embedded desires of those within – feedback rising from “below.” A sudden inclination to steal candy from a baby may not be a hidden criminal tendency, but the pancreas’ desire to release insulin, coupled with the visual cortex’s recognition of sugar. However, the HOC has a different priority, based on its own social models – stealing candy from a baby runs counter to one’s standing in the community, so the neocortex suppresses that foreign impulse, an ability a brain suffering dementia may lack.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy[x] founder Dr. Aaron Beck’s concept of ANTs (Automatic Negative Thoughts, or intrusive, unwanted ideas that suddenly arise in response to a trigger) suggests that it’s not the thought of swiping the candy that defines our character, but our response. On their own, thoughts are Ripples, and some, like ANTs, do not originate from us (HOC) but interoception’s feedback – from molecules and cells, to organs and systems, these are a mashup of our nested Lower-Order Bodies’ preferences. What many do not recognize or accept is that our own body is full of foreign, competent minds, with foreign agendas. A stark example is a phenomenon where organ transplantees find themselves subject to the cravings and personality traits of their donors.[xi] Instead of taking these intrusive thoughts personally – as if they’ve just revealed some “true self” – we are wise to realize where they come from, whose voices they are, and manage the situation by learning to command, challenge, redirect, or simply, ignore the ANTs in our head.

Should an HOC fail to either direct its LOB through Power, or inspire it through Love, disillusionment of the HOC / LOB relationship leaves the directing force of the singular mind subject to the chaos of the multitude within – the voices of the LOB rise to a cacophony of noise and disruption, like a rowdy kindergarten playground, abandoned by its teacher. Eventually, the emergent energy body falls apart. Chronic disease, mental illness, and death result from a functional breakdown of the healthy conversation between HOC and LOB – the HOC’s mindset no longer “I” but “we,” and LOB’s mindset’s no longer “we” but “I.”

Cancer is an example of just how disruptive the I-mindset can be in a community of Lower-Order Bodies. When a cell, programmed to be part of a collective, suddenly finds itself bioelectrically detached from its cohort (alone), its priority is to rapidly grow a new community. Should the cell be a gamete, creating an embryo, everything is working according to plan, but when it’s already part of a living body, the inappropriate behavior produces a tumor. Furthermore, this isolation implies the loss of access to its metabolic system’s supply of abundant oxygen, and these cells begin to fend for themselves, reverting to the more primitive, internal energy process of fermentation, creating a reliance on sugar (glucose) to survive and *grow.[xii]

When a body feels “good,” it’s easier for the mind to do “good,” but when the body-mind continuum is lopsided, the stressful imbalance increasingly narrows that option space until the body and / or mind snaps, and acts out of desperation. This primarily progresses through the knock-on effects of metabolism’s malfunction – healthy mitochondria’s the foundation of a healthy body and mind.[xiii] Sleep, nutrition, and exercise, in that order, fix most chronic disorders, as these activities ensure the proper census and function of the tiny, irreplaceable “bacteria”[xiv] within our cells.

Like the composition of family members, we don’t get much say in that layered stack of Lower-Order Bodies, comprising our anatomy at any given moment. We cannot wave a magic wand and determine every reaction the LOB will have to our directives, but health always improves with a functioning relationship between the two ends of our mind-body continuum (HOC and LOB), especially at our most diverse point: our microbiome. The most consequential choice we make, moment-to-moment, isn’t necessarily who or what we are, but the frame we see the world through: Love or Power. Often, the healthiest way to maintain cohesion among the multitude within is to practice either compassion or dominance. There’s no wrong answer, no right action, but, instead, the opportunity to uncover our deepest desires in the only place Love and Power coexist – the Novel Universe.

Countless atoms flow in and out of a human body every second – an atomic river of endless replacement. It isn’t the “stuff” (molecules) of a body that makes us who we are, but the information, the pattern of energy (morphic resonance) that holds it all together. Interoception is the experience of reaching “down” into our body, and evaluating the state of our internal being. As we interact with the Sets who make up those nested Lower-Order Bodies, the experienced awareness of each level diminishes as we travel downward. Lobes of the brain are experienced at Role Play’s star-level of fidelity; tissues, such as muscles and organs, audience-level; while cells, potential-audience. In this way, we can hear and influence our mitochondria on par with a shredded playbill found in a gutter – not likely, but not totally impossible. However, we might affect our heart on par with a talented comedian onstage, inspiring an audience to laughter – totally likely, but not guaranteed. Of course, when it comes to the brain, our Role Play fidelity is so clear, we often mistake it (and its ANTs) for ourselves.

Interoception is the foundation of emotion, the “sound” of the soul’s conversation. This mixture of HOC and nested LOBs can be difficult to parse the dominate voice at any given time, as emotion spurs every thought – from top-to-bottom, we feel our thoughts before we think them (somatic marker hypothesis).[xv] Mostly, the thoughts in our head are a mixture of HOC and LOB, but there are times when that mixture homogenizes. At the best of times, the HOC is dominant – we’re feeling “flow.”[xvi] At the worst of times, the LOB breaks through, and we feel helpless, suspecting the voice(s) in our head is neither truly our own, nor what we want, but at the same time, impossible to ignore or dissuade – addiction, for example. Instead of the HOC bending option space, the LOB has, and seeing beyond that bent space becomes difficult, as our Quantum Transience Gradient’s valence has flipped yuck to yum, and vice versa. Especially with addiction, expressing freewill’s pivot in such circumstances becomes nearly impossible – the energy requirements can be excessive when the body’s going to take what it needs.

Patient, consistent communication, with an emphasis on listening with interest and conducting with confidence, is the key to balancing this relationship, and keeping things from getting out of control. Understanding whose voice is saying what, isn’t easy. Furthermore, how many of us have even thought to distinguish these embedded voices from our own, let alone listen for them? Knowing that we’re a hierarchy of competent cognition means knowing that there’s a part of our conscious experience that comes from an emergent population of others within. Learning to decipher these sounds makes all the difference in learning to balance the Power structure of a human body.

Persistence is vital to the verification of truth – what makes scientific findings are reliable results when replicating experiments. If Bicycle Cop Dave had tested his assumption of Jasper’s weapon – waited to see if the image persisted – he’d have reacted to the truth, not an illusion based on a snap judgment. As the LOB is an ensemble and the HOC, a single entity, the HOC’s intent ideally persists over time, whereas the LOB varies – different voices in the crowd rise into and recede from consciousness at any given moment, each peddling its own agenda. Creating space between stimulus and response allows an emotion’s persistence to be put to the test, and we might better determine whether the emotion is truly our intent, or some potentially meaningful or misguided message from our LOB. However, reasoning through retrospection is sometimes the only way to truly know whether ideas, racing in our head, reflect our deeper desires or those within.

Fundamentally, emotion is embodied energy motion. Emotion’s basic purpose is to provide the HOC a baseline assessment of the LOB’s perception of available energy compared to projected energy needs–[xvii] a perceived bounty of internal resources feels “good,” a deficit, “bad.” Ideally, the functions of our body should be on autopilot, in other words, our LOB should be essentially running the show, faithfully fulfilling our preferences, like competent employees effectively doing their job, with minimal direction from their manager. When our Lower-Order Bodies are well-supplied, and masterfully engaged in preferential behavior, we’re at the lowest energy state without need to express the expense of freewill.

Feelings are often conflated with emotions. Instead, feelings arise from emotion. We’re not always feeling something, but, from boredom to excitement, we’re always experiencing emotion, what’s known as affect,[xviii] or our “mood.” Feelings aren’t neural circuitry – there’s no “anxiety” part of the brain, only a pattern of anxiety in the brain.[xix] Feelings are emotion’s emergent, neurological frame we see the world through.

Each feeling’s carved from a kind of three-dimensional, mental “space,” like a unique perceptual object. The first axis is valence – from pain to pleasure (yum, yuck, meh), it asks, how good or bad does this feel? The second, energy – from innocuous to aroused, it asks, how intense does this feel? The third, emotion – the behavior of interoception, or the embodied perception of what’s going on inside, and it asks, how is this experienced by the body? In essence, interoception’s an assessment of how well the HOC / LOB relationship is working in its current environment. This last dimension describes a variety of embodied, content-specific axes, like order versus chaos, dominance versus submission, sense versus nonsense, control versus out of control. While fear (dread originating from outside) is an acute, core motivator geared for motion – get outta there! – anxiety (dread originating from inside) is a chronic, complicated mess that often leaves us crippled in place. Both arise from troubling (axis one), intense (axis two) cognition, and embodied behavior (axis three) – interoception’s pounding heart, shallow breath, and shaky hands.

“I think and therefore I am?” Not enough. It is only though the action of our physical body that we know the joys and sorrows of emotion. The Novel Universe Model is not a mind-body dualistic philosophy,[xx] but rather a monistic approach that views the mind (HOC) and body (LOB) as an emergent entity of complexity – two ends of one soul. For all animals, the soul’s foundation is unconscious emotion – the HOC’s raw experience of its LOB. Feelings, on the other hand, emerge as the soul’s conscious apex – the HOC / LOB conversation, embodied as a conduit for comprehension and command. In fact, the mere ability to “name it and claim it”[xxi] allows for better emotional outcomes.[xxii]

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion[xxiii] illuminates the connection between culture, language, and body. It isn’t that words only describe emotions – they do more than that. Or, that there are specialized parts of the brain for feelings (rage, sadness, pride, apathy, etc.) – there’s no part dedicated to processing any feeling, whereas emotions arise from the whole brain.[xxiv] In fact, there are no grounds for distinguishing between a “logical” and “emotional” brain. All decisions are emotional (somatic marker hypothesis) and logical – post-hoc reasoning (logic) to support that initial point of view (emotion). Furthermore, Barrett’s theory argues that our feelings are constructed from the culture and language in which we developed the social-related models of our embodied minds. Thus, translating cultural-specific words or phrases are impractical to impossible without lived experience – those corresponding social-related models. Emotional categories (words and ideas) are more than random sounds or vague concepts, but the very seat from which our feelings arise, in other words, the shape of soul.

Consciousness is the keystone of panpsychism, and cognition, the primary property present in all competent, self-assembling hierarchies. Soul isn’t just a form of energy, but at the lowest level of the universe (Node Point Communicator), it is energy. The application of the HOC Set’s preferences onto the environment, through its LOB, is the action of soul – the transcendence of consciousness between scales of emergent complexity. Research into bioelectrics[xxv] suggests that well-ordered communication among parts is responsible for the function of the whole.[xxvi] Therefore, to effectively bend option space, we must speak in the LOB’s language. Although we’re not operating the LOB models themselves, possessing a working knowledge of their effects allows us to better make use of their abilities. To do this, we are best prepared by having those models in our own lexicon (SFS body and tail). Meaning, at some point in our vast history, we existed as, or at least something close to, those Lower-Order Bodies we wish to influence.

From a practical perspective, learning to speak these dialects promises significant advances in medicine, biology, and our relationship to the Earth itself. In such cases, we would not be directly controlling these spaces, but influencing them through a conversation of collaboration. Instead of science’s past attempts to solve specific processes and tweak individual characteristics, we would be instructing outcomes, and the LOBs would problem-solve on their own. In other words, instead of tinkering with some known, biological pathway through the creation and application of chemistry (drug), we bend the LOB’s option space through bioelectrics, and evaluate our collaborative results. How well did we effectively communicate our intentions through the vocabulary we possess? What are we missing, and what new words and useful phrases of the LOB’s dialect might we discover? One of the major problems with drugs are side effects. These arise because we’re toddlers playing in a sandbox, incapable of understanding the complexities of the entire system – computational irreducibility. The fact is, human cells will always be far superior to human beings when it comes to operating cellular mechanics and metabolic pathways. When we allow the competency of those embedded consciousnesses to take command – to do their job – we allow them to handle unforeseeable consequences, and make more informed decisions.

“What is it like to be a bat?” was once famously put forth as a litmus test for consciousness.[xxvii] One is conscious if there is “something like it” to be that thing – possessing sensory models. Furthermore, the NU Model adds the idea that one is consciousness if there’s “something to like it” to act as that thing – possessing behavior models. In NUM, there’s an answer to what it’s like to exist as anything boxed away in every Signature-Frequency Set who’s existed as that thing, bats included. Maybe secluding one’s self in the dark, understanding every muddled word of a conversation from across the room, or relaxing on an inversion table isn’t simply an odd quirk of biology, but a deep-seated preference from another time, another life, another body. For those who’ve been a bat before, their current human soul is unable to directly translate certain bat models for effective use in a human body, as these models significantly differ from their human counterparts. For instance, the model for what to do with one’s hands is very different between species – grasping objects, human; aerial propulsion, bat. Those humans with bat models stored away in their SFS, therefore, lack access to their direct memories of flight, pulling at the air in the way a human might pick apples from a tree. However, there’s another bridge to that information, another way to access what it is like to be a bat – the spirit.

“Spirit” is our religious term for a bridge to those parts of one’s Signature-Frequency Set that lie beyond the soul. In the NU Model, insight and intuition do not always arise from the unconscious mind (soul), built from our Lower-Order Bodies’ embodied information, but access to information beyond the body (spirit). Just as soul pierces the boundaries of emergence, spirit pierces the boundaries of the Mixture’s limitations – a view of our massive SFS body and tail, its history of lives lived, embodied perceptions, relationships experienced, skills mastered, and ideas expressed.

A human body is just one of countless POVs we’ve had. In the beyond-life, we are unfettered by the prison that is our human body, having full access to our SFS and its near-infinite information. Yet in life, a tenuous connection exists to this treasure trove of information, as if peering through a tiny barred window at a distant courtyard of crowded memories. Both the nature of this Novel Universe and our human bodies filter and overwhelm our spiritual link, creating a myopic, and often, distorted view of our vast dataset.

In Plato’s Meno, Socrates postulates that wisdom is derived from recollection, in a way, “remembering” our past lives, those events and relationships with others we were once intimately connected to. Insightful intuition and nighttime dreams are a common way to experience our distant memories. However, when they arrive, the details are shoehorned into a contemporary perspective, at times, complicating the memories by distorting their facts in order to preserve their meaning.

For example, should we learn some new skill with ease, say, riding a horse, it’s not necessarily because we were once a cowboy in some past life (although we could have been), but because we’ve done something similar before, possibly from some other universe in a body with a wholly different point of view, akin to, say, Luke Skywalker riding a tauntaun on Hoth. Furthermore, it might not even be our lived experience, but instead, someone else’s, someone we’ve shared Blocks with. We might find riding a horse natural, not because we were once the cowboy, but instead, the horse. In such a case, we’d have shared Role Play’s star experience with the cowboy in the Concert Hall or Spiral, gleaning an understanding of what it was like to both be ridden and to ride. Now, sitting on a horse for the first time (with the same, basic, human models to that of the cowboy’s), our spirit recalls that information, not from our lived experience, but from our Compete Information. Having not lived as a cowboy, we’d certainly not be reacquiring those riding models as the reincarnated cowboy might, but still, it all somehow feels natural, familiar. Instead, we match those shared, yet recollected, models with our current ones, now more able to form our own with at least a sense of how they should operate, at least from that particular cowboy’s unique perspective. When accessing spiritual information, it isn’t always clear where the “recollection” comes from, whether we’re the actor or acted upon, only that our spirit allows access. Preference, however, may serve as a clue to the source. Should we find spiritual memories reflecting behaviors we find unpleasant, even unnerving, it may be that they belong to someone else, someone with different objectives – those priorities, goals, and preference that make us who we are. Either way, we have the opportunity to learn from our spiritual knowledge, and can fully trust that once we return to the Hall or Spiral, we’ll see for sure who was the horse, and who, the cowboy.

The primary function of the spirit is to both assist the soul (balancing body, environment, and SFS), but also, provide and sequester information designed to optimize one’s life-experience. Sometimes we have to forget in order to understand new things. For instance, in order to comprehend the relief of forgiveness, one must first make the “mistake” of doing harm to a loved one, which would be difficult if not otherwise blinded to Love’s full comprehension.

Guided by our spiritual recollections, we all came here for personal reasons – likely, none of which involved solving the mysteries of the universe, in other words, “discovering” information we already know in the beyond-life. We don mortal blinders so we don’t spoil the opportunity to form novel preferences – that which might distract us from making those valuable mistakes has been purposely forgotten. As the wisdom of amnesia is counterintuitive, it’s understandable some of us (NUC’s Founders included) search for the meaning and purpose of life – religion, to a large degree, centers around the pursuit. NUC’s mission is to facilitate spiritual recollections for such seekers, encouraging them to eventually return to the more important business of living life, and there’s one event that assists us in this endeavor – an amazing show, set for an audience of one.

Our souls and spirits have our full attention when dreaming. Although dreams sporadically include spiritual information, they are most often an observation of the Lower-Order Bodies in conversation – one end of the soul’s continuum. The symbology of a dream is the LOB’s way of communicating the salience of its point of view, and often not a direct attempt to relay specific content, but instead, emotional context – a primary reason for their illogical, bizarre, and at times, unsettling structure. For example, a nightmare of being impaled in a war with fish-shaped aliens, may, in fact, be the body’s attempt to get the HOC to recognize just how intense a stomach ache was, and ensure its source is not forgotten – the questionable seafood from the previous evening. However, when the LOB is focused on the more rudimentary models for semantic learning, memory consolidation, or motor skill formation, dreams appear more mundane. And then, there are times when soul and spirit collude, illuminating information more applicable to executive functions, such as past-life skills, perceived threats, or the significance and presence of beyond-life relationships. No matter their content, dreams undoubtedly have something valuable to share.

Lucid dreaming is an interruption of this conversation, when we (HOC) interject our preferences to, say, fly around or walk through walls, simply because we can, and it’s fun to do so. But, is it a good idea? Arguably, no. Knowing that one is dreaming is one thing, taking over the dream to have a “good time,” quite another. We dream for a reason – to align body and soul through semantic learning, memory consolidation, and skill development, in other words, develop our behavior models from those morphic resonant dialect bodies. Although lucid dreaming can be exhilarating, and in that respect, healing, cutting short the dreamscape means short-circuiting biological development. When this conversation has the freedom to develop naturally, we provide our soul and spirit that attentive audience of one, enhancing the opportunity to deliver their vital message and develop our entire being.