When I look at the universe and see the infinite swirling soup of stars and galaxies, I don't see something that is external to me. Through analogy, I can visualize a direct correlation to each element in nature to something that is occurring internally. Depending upon which side of the brain your universe often relies upon, this will either strike you as useless dream-like drivel or a powerful meditation. For me, I have chosen not to make a judgment call upon what I see, and instead have a tendency to use the arguments generated by both halves of my brain in an attempt to rise above it all. In this sense, my visualization is a form of meditation in that the noise generated by both halves of my brain are used to cancel the other out. Writing articles in such a state is relatively difficult, because every word written onto the paper becomes hardcoded, where the universe is this dynamic process, and the act of trying to capture this process through a word is the equivalent of throwing a lasso around water--over time, it just loses form and you are left wondering if you really captured anything at all. But write of it I must, even though words feel to be a poor medium in which to relay this multidimensional message.

When we perceive the universe, when we look outside of ourselves, there is a tendency to discover the "prime mover" which started it all. Some of us who are more creative may take the mystical point of view and say this force is called God who calls the shots-some kind of whole that is greater than the sum of all parts. Others take the more scientific point of view and believe the parts are greater than the whole, so there is no God at all, and we pretty much started it ourselves. Yet both points of view are left rather wanting in that we wonder who in turn could have made God, and alternatively in the absence of a god, we wonder how the universe could have jumpstarted itself.

Since we can apparently move our arms without prompting, in a certain way, we are prime movers, so subjectively we have at least one example of a prime mover in the universe. Nothing is causing us to move our arms or legs other than our own consciousness. We can do what we please, watch what we please, hurt others when we please, help others when we please, pick a career path that we please, and on and on. We don't require any external force to move us. We have interests, friends, opinions, philosophies, etc. We are not rocks. And if we are to obey the same laws of physics that the universe obeys, we must find something in the universe that does as we do. A prime mover. And there is: quasars.

What is a quasar? It is believed by some to be the "white hole" on the other end of a black hole. Black holes apparently rip holes in the fabric of space time where things from this universe might flood into another. You may never be sure what will come out of a quasar because you can never be sure how the universe on the other end may function. Conceptually, then, black holes in one universe are white holes in the next, and white holes in one universe are black holes in the next. Or, in some cases, it is conceivable that the tear in one spot of the universe that forms a black hole merely opens up a portal to another location in the same universe. You never know. It just makes them all the more unpredictable. In addition, if you were stationed outside of a quasar, you would have no idea when it is going to spew out something. From your perspective, what the quasar brings into the universe is random, but who's to say if it is really random? From your perspective stationed outside of a quasar, you would say it is manufacturing everything spewing forth, and so it would pretty much have the same definition of being a prime mover, forming a galaxy of matter around itself. But is it conscious?

Well, here's where it gets interesting. We have this depiction in our religions of what it means to be conscious, and the most often used pictorial representation is a man with a red devil on one shoulder, whispering sweet nothings in one ear, and an angel on the other shoulder pretty much doing the same thing. Devils and Satan are very often associated with the color black, just as angelic godly depictions are associated with the color white. The color black is also associated with people who are relatively "draining" on our energy, and the color white is associated with people who "radiate" energy. This dichotomy is quite similar both in color and meaning to the black hole/quasar depiction, is it not?

We try to break the world up into this type of structure, dividing everything in two, believing that we must choose one or the other, and it is a contradiction to choose both. Are you a democrat or republican? Do you believe in logic or faith? Are you scientific or spiritual? Are you artistically inclined or mathematically inclined? Are you an environmentalist or a capitalist? Are you right brained or left brained? People spend a lifetime trying to define themselves in this way to see where they fit in, torn because they cannot decide. They see reasons to be both, and they notice they can twitter between one definition of themselves and the next, wondering if perhaps they are "stupid" or haven't thought about something enough to make the proper decision.

But let's pretend for a moment that you are both the core of a black hole and the core of its constituent quasar. You are both...sucking in matter and energy from one universe and spewing it out elsewhere in a new form. Within the universe that contains your black hole, you are a drain to everyone around you, you are selfish, you hurt people, you want it all for yourself. Within the universe that contains your quasar, however, you just want to give it all back, modified, better than before, bringing life where there was only void. In every instance, you are doing both, and all those conflicting emotions and feelings and thoughts and perceptions that are twirling around your head, interfering with clarity and purpose are there because you have both properties, and the choices you make at any given moment are opening and closing a valve positioned between the two. You might say to yourself that the black hole is evil for what it does, and the quasar is good. But to be a quasar, you have to also be a black hole, and to be a black hole, you must also be a quasar.

Questions have been asked: What happens when all the energy is used up around a quasar? Answer: It becomes a black hole! What happens to a black hole when it sucks up too much matter? It becomes a quasar! The quasar/black hole doesn't die. Instead, there is this oscillation that occurs that you can pretty much graph out on a piece of paper. So in that sense, what we once believed was "evil" becomes "good" in a different context, and the universe not only allows us to accept this contradiction but forces us to, and gives us several examples such as black holes / quasars to help us come to terms with this.

Again, I'd like to reiterate that there are two ways to look at analogies, and you may believe I am drawing faces in the clouds, but from the moment we are born, humans learn about the world around them through analogy. They do not have to be a physicist, nor do they have to be a moralizing priest to make sense of the world around them. And like a two year old, I choose not to make judgment calls on any analogies I see: instead, I let my mind coat energy in matter, like a stream of caramel on an apple that I can offer to others when the time is right. If you have the time, let me know if you enjoyed the taste, and Merry Christmas.