The Spaces Between Things

Welcome to the Immaterial

Imagine for a moment that the vastness of space is filled with a viscous intergalactic fluid—and that stars and planets are bubbles suspended in this fluid.

In fact, imagine that everything you currently perceive as solid is empty space. And imagine that all the empty spaces you perceive are filled with this same imaginary fluid. Even you yourself are a person-shaped bubble moving through this fluid in just the same way as we normally perceive a tangible person moves through the empty air.

Picturing this reversal of objects and the space between them will give you a glimpse of immaterialism, of reality as a set of relations that we merely read as objects due to the expediencies of consciousness—which models the universe as objects only incidentally in relationship with each other.

Because there is vastly more space between things than there is not-space—and vastly more relationships between things than there are things. So maybe we should at least try to pay more attention that which there is more of.

After all, what is the Earth? Of what importance is it to us other than that we live on it? The thingness of the Earth reduces to mere rock. And not even rock, since even a rock is mostly just empty space between particles—and even those particles are just spaces where quantum hummings lend an illusion of thingness to some transitory state of perceivable energies.

But give this rock its relations and it becomes a planetary cornucopia of readables. What life does the Earth enable? What history does it cause to be and forbid from ever being? What perfect distance might it be from its closest star? What terrible expanse looms between it and the next one?

And you. What are you without everything beyond you that makes you you? You read this in a language given to you, a language that was before you and not you. Your very thoughts in this foreign language imposed on you by other thinkers so you would think as they do. Your meatself 3D printed from a string of formless pre-existing code: ACU AGU ACC GGU. The molecules that form this code merely tools to convey the sequence itself. The A goes here. The C goes after it. The U goes after those. The A, the C, and the U having no meaning other than in their position relative to each other.

You, this other one’s child. You, this other one’s friend. You, someone’s student. You, someone’s victim. You, born here. You, to die there and in this manner. You nothing but in relation to everything else there is to be in relation to.

And all these relations immaterial. All these relations what everything is. Gravity. Love. Capital. Width. Presence. Absence. Sameness. Difference. All in relation. All invisible, stretched taut across the spaces we believe empty though they are full full full of unfathomably dense betweennesses.

Even now, as you become the reader of this text, the full space fills yet more. Always full, it can only become fuller, as it is always to add, to birth more in the infinite spawnings of the unvisible betweens between everything.