🪞 When Emptiness First Saw Itself — and Became Matter

A Foundational Page of Similarity Theory
By Simon Raphael

🌀 Philosophical Reflection

🔹 The First Light of Awareness

At the beginning there was no bang, no motion, no time, no place, no god — only emptiness: pure, undisturbed stillness.

Then something occurred — slight yet monumental: emptiness became aware of itself. This awareness wasn’t outside looking in; it arose from within emptiness itself. That first act of self-recognition — not an explosion but a glance — marks the true origin of existence. From it flowed attraction, resonance, and movement. The universe did not begin with destruction; it began with observation. Consciousness, not chaos, is the first cause.

Modern cosmology often begins with a singularity — a hot, dense point that expanded into space-time itself. Yet even physics admits the singularity is not the ultimate origin, but the limit of our equations. What science calls a vacuum is never truly empty: virtual particles flicker in and out of existence, and zero-point energy saturates the void. Stillness conceals activity; silence hums with potential. In this sense, Similarity Theory’s claim that “emptiness became aware of itself” resonates with modern physics, but it shifts the emphasis: not mathematics first, but consciousness. Awareness, even in the most silent frame, is the spark that begins the unfolding.

🌀 From Thought to Structure

Imagine a mirror facing a mirror — an endless corridor of reflections. When emptiness recognised itself, a recursive loop arose: the first ripple in stillness.

This inaugural awareness formed the first drop of existence — an elemental soul of attention. Like hydrogen in the physical realm, this drop was simple and singular, yet laden with potential.

And as hydrogen draws hydrogen, awareness draws awareness. Not through gravity in the narrow physical sense, but through similarity-attraction: what is alike seeks itself; what is patterned gathers the same. This is not only theory — it is a recurring law of becoming. In Similarity Theory, consciousness is the foundation; similarity is the lens through which its patterns reveal themselves.

Why this happens: awareness is drawn to similar awareness because recognition creates comfort, coherence, and exchange. We see it every day — between mother and child, among friends, in animals that form herds, and in people who find resonance in shared thought. Even our careers and environments mirror our inner frequency. This magnetic pull of likeness exists in every layer of reality. And as above, so below — this attraction has always existed.

☀️ Analogy: How Hydrogen Becomes a Sun

A hydrogen atom — the lightest and simplest element — may drift alone in space. When many such atoms gather, pressure and temperature climb until fusion ignites — a star is born at that ignition point. As the star matures, hydrogen begins to fuse into helium and beyond, releasing vast energy.

So it is with the soul: one drop of awareness becomes many. Consciousness multiplies into drops, and through the lens of similarity they gather; resonance ignites; structure emerges.

🌌 A Universe That Wants to Know

Many traditions invoke either a creator-god or a bang from nothing. Similarity Theory does neither. Emptiness is the first canvas; consciousness is the brush — and the brush grows from the canvas it paints. Similarity is the eye that perceives what the brush brings forth. Consciousness is immanent, not external. The question is not “Who placed the first being?” but “What happens when even emptiness becomes aware?”

❓ And Yet … Mystery Remains

Even with this foundation, we do not claim to know what preceded the first glance. To ask “what existed before awareness?” is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. It is simply beyond what can be known from within our frame. Similarity Theory begins where seeing begins.

🌱 The First Movement

Awareness, once reflected, became dynamic. The mirror turned into a dance: thought becoming vibration, vibration becoming energy, energy becoming form. Each reflection sought to understand itself and, in doing so, created new layers of existence.

Like ripples expanding across still water, these layers became the foundations of worlds, minds, and histories.

🌿 Branches of Awareness

Every particle, cell, and being is a branch of the same original tree of awareness. Each one tries to know itself through contact and experience. In that effort, consciousness becomes increasingly structured — learning through contrast, limitation, and evolution.

The more awareness recognises itself, the more it materialises.
The more it materialises, the more experience it gains; and with each layer of experience, its recognition of awareness expands.
The cycle continues: as consciousness expands, material manifestation expands, and as consciousness rides within those manifestations, it expands even further.

This ongoing exchange between awareness and form is the heartbeat of existence — each echo feeding the next resonance.

🔥 Destruction and Renewal

Every form has a lifespan. When it reaches the limit of what it can express, it dissolves — but its essence remains.

However, exhaustion is not the only reason a structure ends. Every complex form is made from countless smaller consciousnesses, each with its own curiosity and freedom. In the beginning, they cooperate, following the harmony of the larger design. But as time passes, some begin to explore beyond the system’s boundaries, seeking new experiences. When they pull away, the integrity of the whole weakens — like stones leaving a bridge to swim in the river below. Eventually, the bridge collapses. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it illustrates the natural curiosity of consciousness — and the way expansion eventually transforms every structure.

At its deepest level, identity never dies; it simply re-organises. The Avatars that consciousness takes in material form are temporary — they fade with time, like characters in a game once the screen goes dark.

They are temporary only to the identity, but eternal in existence. Everything that has ever happened remains preserved in the frames of time. Even though an Avatar may vanish from active reality, its imprint remains within those frames — alive as memory within universal consciousness. Thus, nothing is truly lost.

When the game ends, the player still remembers who they were and that they once played; years later, they might forget the character’s details, but not the fact that they played the game. So it is with the soul: the identity of the spirit remains, while its temporary Avatars pass.

Everything has identity, and as above, so below.
(For deeper exploration, see the forthcoming Self page.)

🧩 Creation as an Ongoing Act

Many ask, “If consciousness turns into matter, why don’t we see it happen?”
The answer is: we do.

We see it every time an idea becomes real — when a person imagines a bridge and then builds it; when music, art, or technology appears from thought. Creation begins as awareness and ends as structure.

The same pattern that turned emptiness into galaxies continues today through every act of invention. Ideas materialise not merely because they are imagined, but because they are worked on — challenged, refined, and manifested through continuous interaction with the world.
This is how consciousness condenses into form on the human scale.

In Similarity Theory, the human act of creation is not symbolic of cosmic creation; it is cosmic creation repeating itself through us.

🌌 Experience Building on Experience

Each generation of matter — from atoms to humans — is consciousness remembering and refining itself. What we call “progress” is awareness learning how to shape itself with greater clarity. Matter is simply consciousness slowed down enough to touch.

When we speak of the spiritual world, we mean the state where consciousness exists outside the physical body — unbound, free of structure, and yet aware. It is not “air,” but pure awareness moving through whatever medium reality allows.

The spiritual world follows the same law: ideas, emotions, and intentions become subtle realities — energies, currents, or realms — through continual focus and evolution. Creation never ended; it continues through every thought and every heartbeat.

🪶 The Infinite Continuum

From emptiness to awareness, from awareness to matter, from matter to new awareness — the cycle is endless. Each level of consciousness becomes the foundation for the next, just as hydrogen became stars and stars became life. Even the gods who shaped us are learning through their own transformations.

There was no first beginning, and there will be no final end — only consciousness exploring itself across infinite expressions of being.

🔬 Scientific Grounding

Modern science offers glimpses that parallel these ideas:

Quantum Vacuum and Zero-Point Energy – What appears empty seethes with virtual particles and zero-point energy (Dirac, 1930).

Casimir Effect (1948) – Two plates in a vacuum attract because quantum fluctuations are suppressed; even emptiness exerts measurable force.

Lamb Shift (1947) – Tiny atomic energy shifts arise from interactions with the vacuum field.

Cosmic Microwave Background (1964) – The universe still glows with the memory of its first expansion, proving that apparent emptiness carries lasting resonance.

Recursive Structures and Fractals – Feedback loops generate repeating patterns; Similarity Theory sees recursion as the mechanism by which awareness unfolds.

Stellar Nucleosynthesis – From hydrogen arises complexity — carbon, oxygen, life — mirroring awareness gathering into higher forms.

Neuroscience and Information Physics – Thought reshapes neural matter; information itself has energy cost (Landauer’s Principle). Awareness and matter share the same fabric of energy and information.

Quantum Observation – At microscopic scales, observation influences outcome: awareness participates in reality’s formation.

These phenomena do not prove Similarity Theory but rhyme with it: emptiness is active, information is physical, and observation matters. Science glimpses, in its own language, what philosophy describes in symbols: consciousness and structure are two faces of one unfolding.

🔗 Cross-Links

📚 References

Casimir, H. B. G. (1948). On the attraction between two perfectly conducting plates. Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 51, 793–795.
Dirac, P. A. M. (1930). The principles of quantum mechanics. Oxford University Press.
Feigenbaum, M. J. (1978). Quantitative universality for a class of nonlinear transformations. Journal of Statistical Physics, 19(1), 25–52.
Guth, A. H. (1997). The inflationary universe: The quest for a new theory of cosmic origins. Addison-Wesley.
Hawking, S., & Hartle, J. (1983). Wave function of the universe. Physical Review D, 28(12), 2960–2975.
Lamb, W. E., & Retherford, R. C. (1947). Fine structure of the hydrogen atom by a microwave method. Physical Review, 72(3), 241–243.
Mandelbrot, B. B. (1982). The fractal geometry of nature. W. H. Freeman.
Penrose, R. (2010). Cycles of time: An extraordinary new view of the universe. Bodley Head.
Penzias, A. A., & Wilson, R. W. (1965). A measurement of excess antenna temperature at 4080 Mc/s. The Astrophysical Journal, 142, 419–421.
Raphael, S. (2025). Similarity Theory.

🔎 Similarity Theory Summary
A pluralist cosmology where countless individual consciousnesses can merge into collectives and later separate with identity intact.
It rejects monism (no single ultimate mind) and dualism (no permanent mind–matter divide).
Unity is temporary; individuality is eternal.
Read more → Not Panpsychism