Is the soul a node, or is it an expression of the network?

As mobile organisms, the sequence of perception is a adaptation to navigation. This makes the passage of time foundational to our understanding of reality. Our cultures are narrative based and physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past, rather than the point of the present moving past to future. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as events rise and fall.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to emotions, bodily functions and the envionment, not the sequence of thought.

As dynamic process and present, the energy goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information. Signals from the noise.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in.

As the most basic expression are waves, they tend to either synchronize, which is centripetal, or harmonize, which is centrifugal. So we have nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.

While the energy might be connected and interrelated, the information is, by definition, discrete. So there is the conscious focus on the details and distinctions of the patterns, while the underlaying dynamic tends to be overlooked.

Our conscious state is that interface between the body and its world, even if our reductionist impulse is to distill it down to the locus of the brain. As a physical dynamic, the brain goes past to future, while the mind is about the events fading and organizing in its wake.

When we interact with other people, if we identify with their sense of self, it begins to become more evident with practice, as a field and area of focus. After awhile we start to surf the hive minds of the orbs of floaters and waves of other's conscious states networking with and within our own.

This can be both positive and negative, as many people will use this ability to control others, so it become a balancing act of self equilibrium against the tides of others.

The self is the compass we develop, out of that element of sentience.