The Feedback Loop: Why the Universe Responds to a Coherent Mind

Physics and physiology working in synchrony.

Thank you, Peter Cummings!

Peter Cummings, MD
Dec 06, 2025

For most of my career, I believed the story every scientist inherits, the one designed to keep the universe manageable and the human mind safely contained. Reality, we were told, is fixed. Consciousness is a byproduct. The world unfolds in perfect indifference to whatever thoughts or emotions flicker through the skull. It was a comforting cosmology because it required nothing of us. The observer was irrelevant. The inner world held no jurisdiction over the outer one. Reality was immune.

Yet the deeper I went into neuropathology, the more anomalous the cases became, and the harder that story was to maintain. The brain did not behave like an engine producing consciousness. Near-death states did not resemble simple electrical decline. Astronauts in microgravity described shifts that matched no known neurobiology. Some patients with catastrophic injury remained aware in ways that should not have been possible, while others disappeared into cognitive silence despite minimal anatomical damage. The data refused to shrink to fit the model, and something beneath the noise began revealing itself with increasing insistence.

If consciousness is not generated by the brain but shaped by it, then the universe is not indifferent to consciousness. It is entangled with it. And if consciousness is a field phenomenon rather than a localized artifact, the question is no longer whether consciousness affects reality. The real question becomes what exactly the universe is responding to when it responds to you.

Coherence, Collapse, and the Real Signal

The common myths misunderstand this entirely. The universe does not respond to thoughts alone, beliefs alone, or the scripted optimism people rehearse in moments of desperation. It does not respond to intermittent desire or the forced positivity people perform when they feel powerless. These are surface artifacts formed only after consciousness has already collapsed into the narrow channel we call experience. The universe responds to what precedes that collapse. It responds to coherence, the state in which consciousness aligns across all levels of the self before the brain filters it into awareness.

Coherence is not poetic language. It is physics and physiology working in synchrony.

To understand this, we can think of consciousness as having two primary states. The first is the coherent field state, which is expansive, nonlocal, and integrated, and which interacts with reality in ways our narrowed awareness rarely perceives. This is consciousness before the brain compresses it, before sensory boundaries limit it, before emotion fragments it, and before memory constrains it. The second is collapse, the version of consciousness we experience as the ordinary self. Collapse is shaped by biology, filtered by the nervous system, and narrowed into a local identity.

Collapsed state

Most people live entirely from the collapsed state, unaware that the coherent field behind it is the real signal the universe receives. The mind may insist on wanting one thing while the deeper coherence state broadcasts something entirely different. When those layers contradict one another, reality reflects the contradiction. Noise scatters probability. Coherence shapes it. Internal misalignment is not a psychological flaw. It is a physical interference pattern.

The Emotional Signature as a Carrier Wave

Every emotional state carries a distinct oscillatory signature. Fear fractures coherence. Shame collapses it inward. Anxiety introduces jitter. Grief widens the field but destabilizes it. Awe expands it with symmetry. Love produces the highest coherence biology can sustain. These signatures operate in the coherent state long before they appear as feelings the conscious mind can name. They create the carrier wave through which consciousness enters the field.

The universe does not respond to the story you tell yourself. It responds to the pattern beneath that story. Contradictions do not merely weaken the signal. They cancel it.

The Consciousness Field Equation

The model that emerges can be expressed almost like an equation:

Consciousness = field potential × coherence × direction of attention.

Continues at https://astromd.substack.com/p/astromd-part-v-the-feedback-loop

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