Fred,

One thing to consider about energy and what is described as matter, but which I think more of as form, is that energy is inherently dynamic, while form is static. Our minds do not process the dynamic. We are like movie cameras, in that what we see is flashes of perception. Otherwise it would be a whiteout of everything blending together.

Which creates enormous confusion, as these distillations of form have been extracted from that sea of energy/noise and so they seem disconnected, when we really examine them. So we focus on/obsess over details, or patterns, like math. Which can be very informative, but it doesn’t give us that bigger picture we want. It’s like boiling a body down to its skeleton and thinking it must be the seed from which it sprang.

Money, for instance, is a contract. The asset is backed by a debt. If there was no collective obligation or promise, it would be worthless. Yet because we treat it as a commodity, the assumption becomes that it must be valuable in and of itself, rather than the larger social network that uses it as a medium of exchange. So we treat it as a signal to extract from the noise of society and the economy. Which means ever more has to be added and ever more ways to store what has been extracted. Creating an enormous metastatic financial sector that dominates society, rather than a utility to enable it to function.

We don’t recognize that flow and connectivity is what money is. We just see it as an object, a quantification of desire.

We are linear, object oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal reality, but unending growth can only get us so far, before we reach the edge of the petri dish. Then we better start learning about feedback and blowback.

Here are some of my ideas on cosmology;

https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-confessions-of-a-cosmic-heretic-5cd4c044b8ea