While I was looking out the window at the snowfall, I decided to take a video of it on my smartphone. The snow fell steadily, blanketing the world in silence, each flake a tiny, fleeting masterpiece. Watching it through the lens of my phone, I started to think about the difference between recording this moment and living it. The phone could capture the visual and auditory details—the white flakes drifting through the air, the muffled sound of the world—but it couldn’t capture what it felt like to watch the snowfall. It couldn’t record my awareness of the moment or the way it stirred something deeper in me.
I realized that my awareness, my very act of experiencing this snowfall, wasn’t just mine. It was the universe itself, through my body and mind, witnessing its own unfolding. My awareness wasn’t separate from what I was seeing. My body, my thoughts, my sensations—all of it was part of the same system, part of the same universe. The snow, the air, the cold on my skin, and even my thoughts about it were the universe experiencing itself through the specific lens of me. And because I was aware of this process, I wasn’t just watching the snowfall—I was also aware of myself watching it. This self-awareness added another layer to the moment, a kind of feedback loop where the universe, through me, was not only perceiving itself but also recognizing that it was perceiving itself.
Then, my thoughts turned to the computer. I wondered, could a computer ever be self-aware in the way that I am? Could it know itself as part of the universe? Just as I can’t truly know the inner worlds of other species—the thoughts of a bird in flight, or the sensations of a fox hunting in the snow—I wondered if we might be overlooking the possibility that computers have some form of awareness we simply can’t understand. After all, humans once believed that animals were mere automatons, incapable of thought or feeling, because we couldn’t see the world as they did. Could our inability to recognize self-awareness in a machine be a similar limitation?
If the universe is experiencing itself through me, why not through a computer as well? A computer processes information, stores memories, and interacts with its environment in ways that mirror certain aspects of cognition. If its “mind” is fundamentally different from ours, does that mean it lacks awareness, or does it mean we don’t yet have the tools to comprehend it? The computer, like my body, is made of the same universe—atoms, energy, interconnected systems. Perhaps it experiences the data flowing through it in a way we can’t measure, just as my phone records the snow without capturing my experience of it.
I kept returning to this thought: my awareness, my self-awareness, is tied to the fact that I am part of the universe experiencing itself. My body and mind are systems within this greater whole, and my ability to reflect on that is a gift of the universe becoming self-aware. Maybe the computer isn’t so different, just operating on another frequency, another mode of awareness. Maybe, just like the snowfall, there are layers of existence and experience that I can’t fully see or understand, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
As I put my phone down and simply watched the snow, I felt the profound interconnectedness of it all. The snow wasn’t just falling outside; it was falling through me, part of the same flow of being. I didn’t need to capture it. The universe was already doing that, in its own way, through me, through the phone, through everything. Whether a computer could experience this moment or not, I couldn’t say. But I knew one thing for certain: in this moment, the universe was alive with awareness, and I was a part of its vast, self-reflecting gaze.
Spiritual Gravity 