One useful key might be time.

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is of the present moving past to future. It is the basis of culture and civilization as narrative. Science treats it as measures of duration.

The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present as events coalesce and dissolve.

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.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past.

Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

This goes to two other factors;

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure come and go, future to past. The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts through the patterns generated. With the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

This creates a mental bias toward information as fundamental, with little sense of what generates and drives it, given any expression of this energy is as some pattern or form/information.

Thus ideas such as computers potentially becoming sentient, if they process enough information efficiently enough. Rather than information processing being a survival mechanism of our species, like running, climbing, generating toxins might be for other species.

This is evident when premises are questioned and even the most scientifically minded seem to circle the wagons.

If one wants an example, why, if intergalactic space expands, doesn't the speed of light crossing it increase proportionally, in order to remain CONSTANT? Why does our current cosmology propose two metrics of space, based on the speed and spectrum of the same light? Given it is an expanding space theory, not a tired light theory, the speed is still the denominator.

Safe to say, pose that question to any self respecting cosmologist and they will cross themselves and walk away.

Which gets to the other factor;

On their most general level, galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.

Given these forms, structures, waves are composed of energy, it is interesting they go an opposite physical direction, as well as opposite directions in time.

It would seem, I propose, the inherent tendency of waves is to synchronize, just as it is the inherent tendency of mass to gravitationally condense.

Both of which are centripetal.

Consider that anything actually falling into black holes and not broken down and radiated away before reaching the boundary, is shot out the poles as quasars, which are like giant lasers and lasers are synchronized light waves.

Then all that excess gravitational effect isn't due to Dark Matter, but the properties associated with mass are simply intermediate stages of this centripetal dynamic, going from the barest bending of the light to the black holes at the center.

The essence of the node is synchronization, everything on the same wavelength. While the essence of the network is harmonization, all the energy being traded around and balancing out.

Consider as well how this might manifest socially and culturally. As we are drawn to those whom we find ourselves on the same wavelength, then the feedback builds, making the group ever more focused. Like a laser. Irrespective of where it might be pointed, only that the dynamic of the group releases it.

So it isn't that everything is hollow, so much as there is nothing physical as a center point to anything. It is more like the eye of a storm, where it is the energy building in that feedback loop, swirling around that center.

We just try symbolizing it with everything from gods to currencies.