Dark Matter Mind

I was watching a love story about the beginning of time, and began to think about the difference between the non-linear understanding of space-time versus the linearity we seem bound to in our day-to-day lives. It’s strange that we perceive our lives as a string of moments, one unfolding after the next. Each moment appears to lead logically to the next. We make decisions, we take actions (cause), and then we experience the aftermath (effect). And so our lives unfold, one decision branching into another, compounding over years into what becomes our identity, a patchwork of choices, consequences, and meaning.

This contrast between how we live time and how time may actually function points to two distinct conceptions: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos refers to linear time, the chronological progression from past to present to future, the way humans typically perceive and measure time. Kairos, by contrast, represents non-linear time, a qualitative, experiential sense of timing, rooted in significance rather than sequence. In some ways, Kairos echoes how modern physics describes time at the quantum level. Physicists increasingly argue that time is not a fundamental feature of reality, but an emergent property that arises from relationships between events. In this view, “now” is not a universal moment experienced everywhere simultaneously, but a localized phenomenon shaped by the observer’s interaction with the system. Time, then, is not a fixed backdrop but a relational and contextual dimension, less like a ticking clock and more like a pattern unfolding through perspective.

But if time is not truly linear, if physicists are correct in suggesting that time is an illusion or a construct, what is it that actually connects these experiences? If there is no “over time” to tie together the events of our lives, then what binds one moment to the next? What is the true continuity that makes our lives feel coherent, directional, even fated?

Perhaps it is love.

Love may be the thread running through the illusion of time. It’s the quiet constant behind the noise of causality. Throughout one’s life, love doesn’t just accompany us; it shapes our terrain. It guides the decisions we make, the people we gravitate toward, the landscapes we choose to root ourselves in. Love of activity. Love of ideas. Love of the unfamiliar. Love of beauty, of community, of belief. Romantic love. Platonic love. Familial love. Love is not just a feeling. It is the pull, the momentum of the soul. We chase it. We build around it. We mourn its absence and are remade by its return.

Why is this important?

Because love exists outside of time. It transcends the linear order we impose on reality. Love has the power to stretch across dimensions of experience and versions of self. It connects us not just to each other, but to a deeper understanding of who we are becoming. It’s the signal in the static, pointing us toward meaning and helping us see the patterns in our seemingly disparate experiences.

The love you carry is not confined to this moment or this life. It travels through timelines, lifetimes, and versions of you that may never meet. The love you share with particular souls is a constant, appearing in new forms again and again. It rises in every version of your life, every shape you take, guiding you from checkpoint to checkpoint. If you continue to pour yourself into what and who you love, into the passions that create joy, the people who feel like home, the experiences that awaken your spirit, you are cultivating more than a life. You are cultivating your being.

Love is the driving force behind every significant thing I’ve ever learned. The first time I sat in a philosophy class, deliberating whether there could be a finite number of souls in the universe, I felt something ignite, a love of curiosity, of ambiguity, of the endless in-between. That love propelled me into a lifelong pursuit of knowledge.

Every romantic love I’ve known has revealed to me the contours of my own soul. The rough edges. The soft ones. The places still waiting to be refined. Carving out a life with my partner feels like tending a flame, a profound privilege. To know this depth of love is mine for the journey ahead brings a peace I never thought possible.

The unconditional, rooted love I’ve found in friendship is another kind of compass. These are the quiet loves. The everyday check-ins. The shared laughter. The wordless understanding that slowly shapes who I become. Each interaction, however mundane it seems, builds something lasting in me, a scaffolding for the versions of myself I carry forward.

And my family, those mirrors of myself, have gifted me with the raw material of who I am. From them I inherited not just behaviors but blueprints for how my mind meets the world. The love here is foundational. It shapes my experience, even in the moments I must choose a different path.

Love is not just what decorates life. It is what creates it. Outside of time and beyond reason, love is the fabric that ties together our scattered truths and makes them whole.

And maybe that’s what we’re meant to lean into, not to unravel time, but to follow the thread of love wherever it leads. Because in a universe that began as a dense singularity and has been expanding ever since, scattering matter and meaning across spacetime, love remains the most familiar thing we have. It teaches us how to move through uncertainty, how to let ourselves be transformed without losing our core.

In that sense, love is not something we find; it’s something we remember. The collective carries that memory. Not in language or thought, but in its very structure, in the ways we recognize others across lifetimes, in the gravity we feel toward certain places, ideas, or paths without knowing why. What else could explain the pull we feel toward people we’ve just met, the strange familiarity of dreams, the ache of nostalgia for things we’ve never lived?

The collective, I think, is not linear either. It loops back to gather what was missed, spiraling forward to create what’s next. Love is what allows it to do so, to remain intact even as it changes form, to carry forward something essential across all versions of self.

So if time is only a lens, then love is the light passing through it. It is not what we measure, but what we remember. Not what begins or ends, but what endures. Love is the continuity behind the illusion of sequence. It is the gravity that draws us back to ourselves.