On Searching

On Searching

Dedicated to someone, anyone, who is struggling to figure out who they are. Trying to find the answer. Your search for answers doesn’t have to span the globe: it starts within you, then extends to your loved ones, and then we go towards the stars. This piece is for you, the reader. For making my ripple in time hit a little bit harder, every time an eye crosses a word.

I

What are you looking for, exactly?

Better yet, what were you looking for when you came here and read my “thoughts”?

The meaning of life? If you’ve been paying attention to the Hitchhiker’s Guide, it’s 42. If you’ve been paying attention to what I’ve been saying, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Come with me, on a trail of scattered thoughts, and let’s put the framework against the subconscious instinct we have to find, and what we may be looking for.¹

In On Rising I imagined what it might be to stand fully aligned with your Jays (every moment you feel something and lean, toward or away). Every human perspective arriving at once, like white light put back together from its colors, and the whole of you rising toward something larger than yourself.² But up is only ever relative to wherever the gravity is pulling. So rising leaves a question hanging: rising toward what? That open hand at the top of the climb, that’s the search.

So what are we pointing at, that we have this unexplainable desire to “find” someplace we call home that isn’t actually our home?

II

I circled this once before, in a small piece simply called Home.³ I drew it as a bird on a branch beside a little house in one corner, and a galaxy in the other, a single quiet axis running between them. And I couldn’t decide, then, which direction home actually was. Down into the intimate, or up into the cosmic. Novalis once said that philosophy is really homesickness, the urge to be at home everywhere, and I think the ache he meant has no street address at all.⁴ I believe the answer runs in order, exactly the order of the dedication you just read: it starts within you, then your loved ones, and then the stars.⁵ An old book can be read to say it: the Kingdom is within you.⁶

But let me shrink the lens one final time here, and ask you what the sensory organ is that you “search” with. Your eyes? That isn’t as simple as we once thought, given the way light travels through space. We really don’t know what’s going on with reality around us.

But what about the “third eye” that keeps getting hinted at through my framework? The “sixth sense”? The Quantum Lens? I’d call it a habit: holding one thing in view from several vantages at once without collapsing it to one. If it has an instrument, it’s a quiet mind, and whatever’s still there when the noise stops.

Can someone “see” Jays out in the air around them, drifting in and out of them?

Absolutely not. A Jay is made in the meeting and lived from within. And not one of the senses science currently counts (and it counts well past five now: balance, heat, pain, the body’s sense of where its own limbs are) has any way to measure one.⁷

Can you “feel” Jays?

Absolutely you can.

You feel them every time you hear a song that makes you feel like you’re special. Whatever emotion that song generates in you (happy, grateful, important), the moment you feel it is a Jay of your own. What the artist sent was a Trace: the ripple a person’s Intent keeps making long after the moment that set it going. It rode the song all the way to you.

Did either of you know it would travel through time like that? From the mind of one musician anywhere in the world, into a notebook, then to band practice, into a recording studio, onto a… weird quantum pause here. At forty-two years old, I can put any number of words in this spot. Vinyl record, cassette tape, compact disc, MP3 files, and whatever comes after.

III

I hear Jays in all the songs I listen to, because I only listen to songs I like. But I’m extremely weird though. I used to be a “big famous” DJ in my head, and I only left Kansas City to perform twice. I tend to listen to literally anything.

Literally anything? Yes. Anything.

Hip hop, country, classic rock, and here recently I’ve been getting into a lot of electro remixes of classic rock. I especially like this new wave of “consciousness-based” lyrics and quantum lenses being applied to meaning. Some of the music being created today is going to be timeless, and the artists don’t even know it.

Spent the day today at a music gathering with one of my artist friends; she doesn’t even realize her music will be anthems for our hometown decades after she’s gone. Or maybe she does.

Timeless is not a thing we achieve, it’s a feeling we have, as humans. Tapping into it, that’s another story.

How did I find my way “home”?

The same way a lot of us do. By messing everything up, and putting it all back together again. Quantum Lens out for a moment: imagine a day the world did that. Let’s zoom back into the ego I used to loathe.

My cousin Bibiana, yet again a pillar at many intersections of my life, her name resonates here in time with me. I was a young boy. She didn’t steer me wrong; she just told me to keep asking why. Or something to that effect; I can’t remember the context, but that’s what stuck. In the minutes following, I stepped in front of a mirror, looked deep into my own eyes, and asked, “Why am I me?”

So much ego in that question, but I was so young. So what did I find on my search since that day?

IV

I’ll tell you. I now have a full scientific understanding of how light lays a flat, two-dimensional image of objects all the way onto the back of your retinas, and how your brain builds the depth back in. The image lands upside down, if you didn’t know. Technically you’re always on the “bottom” of the planet from gravity’s perspective, being drawn down toward the center of it. But that’s all relative. Just remember that up is down, and nothing makes sense.

Are we crystal clear? Probably not. Took me the better part of three decades to figure out how all that works. Let’s follow the beam of light a little further.

Next your retinas send their signal onward, through a relay in the thalamus, and the first cortical stop is the occipital lobe at the back of your head. From there the picture fans out across the brain. But some of the light your eyes catch never becomes a picture. It runs straight up a short nerve tract to the hypothalamus (the “center” of the brain, from a lot of perspectives, not just the directional one) and sets the clock there that tells your body whether it’s day. And recently, using diffusion imaging, researchers traced a long fiber bundle they believe links the occipital cortex itself with the hypothalamus and its neighbors. They’ve proposed that this wiring could let an image move you before you’ve consciously “thought” about it at all.⁸ If I had to guess, I’d say that if the people who mapped that keep digging, they’ll find that most of the major parts of the brain are wired directly to the hypothalamus in one way or another.

That’s the apparatus, more or less, and yours is collecting right now. What yours brings in gets set against what mine brings in, and everybody else’s, and where they stack up the same is the ground we walk on together.

But what do I know? I’m just a guy with a theory about imaginary “time Jays” that affect our everyday lives. You’re still reading, though, so I’d better grow a bit of ego back and continue.

Before I do, sidestep the science of sight with me for a second and let’s talk about the brain’s perception of pain. Pain isn’t generated out in the extremities; it’s constructed in the brain and then referred back out to the place that got hurt. Say you get a paper cut. The nerves in your finger (nociceptors) fire their messages up the spinal cord, the brain reads them, builds the sensation, and assigns it a location: there, in the fingertip. None of that is instant. By the time you consciously feel the cut, a measurable fraction of a second has already gone by. The event is over. What you experience as the sharp now of the paper cut is a reconstruction your brain assembled from a signal that has already come and gone.⁹ You feel a stitched-together replay, and your brain hides the seam. You are living a fraction of a second behind the world, every waking moment of your life. You’re literally a time traveler.

Cool, right?

V

Nevertheless, if our own brains are reconstructing the world a beat late to make us “feel” something that has already happened to us, that replay is where I would expect Jays to live, and it makes them ever harder to trace.

The lag is measured. The Jay in it is my guess, a question someone could carry into a lab: does the felt moment line up with the stitch?

We don’t have to explain Jays. We just have to feel them.

I suspect the closest a person ever gets to real time is the moment their Jays line up, one split second at a time. Operating within the framework like some kind of “alien” to the Design: life and everything in it.

Don’t ask me how it works. I just write about it, and philosophize about what it means.

But where do they point? What’s the draw? What are we searching for?

Let’s go back to my framework itself, and talk about the greater good of humanity. In the four parts of Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence I tried to lay the floor under all of this. Together they argue that there is one consciousness, beyond perception and present within every subject, of which every mind is a perspective. They come at it from four sides: coherence assembled patiently, layer by layer; the old mythic and spiritual traditions circling the same center; resonance and frequency as the grammar by which aligned things find one another; and the proposal the last part closes on, once it has assembled the whole argument, that no one is whole alone.¹⁰ The last part proposes that an aligned person can become a binding third inside a shared mind: the middle term that holds two people together without either one swallowing the other. Simmel saw it as one possibility of the triad, Buber in the meeting of I and Thou, Peirce in the community of inquiry, Bohm in true dialogue, and we might one day test it against what Tomasello calls shared intentionality.¹¹ The phrase does a second job for me, too. Every invention is a binding third of older ideas, the way Gutenberg’s press held a wine press, cast metal type, and an oil-based ink in one frame.

When people work to help each other (not just each other, but humanity as a whole), their Jays point “outward” is the best I can put it in words. Not up; up is relative. And when they’re pointed inward, that’s the ego sucking up all of their “power,” removing the good of your Trace from the timeline.

When they point outward, toward your family, friends, community, city, state, country, and species… oh boy.

I have no words for the very brief moment I experienced it, but I’ll forever keep talking about why it made sense, if you’ll keep reading. Just know that when I say I have no words, I literally mean I have no words.

There’s no human word to describe Jays in their nature yet. I struggled even to come up with a name for them as it is, not wanting to take credit for “finding them.” Let’s face it: my theory parallels almost every other theory in reality about existence. Maybe that only means we’re all looking for the same thing.

My moment is passing, but my search will never stop. I explained this in On Learning: learning goes on at any age, and there are still so many things I need to put in this little brain of mine.¹²

My cup overfloweth. I’m grateful, and yet I search.

Keep asking why. Don’t stop. There is an answer, I promise. Be patient with yourself;¹³ for a long time humanity has had its Jays misaligned.

Humanity doesn’t have to heal, but if the reader turns a few Jays outward before this passage closes, then I’ve done my job well.

On a day you’re searching for someone to love you, just remember that I’m always here loving you with my thoughts. Hoping I can bring you joy, or that we can meet someday and you can tell me I brought you joy. That would bring me joy too.

So what were you looking for, when you came here? Maybe what I was. Each other.

Jays point out. Towards the future.

Notes

1. Plato’s Meno poses the puzzle of the search directly (80d–e): how can you look for something when you don’t know what it is, and how would you recognize it if you found it? Socrates answers with recollection, anamnesis (81a–e): the search is possible because the soul already half-knows what it seeks. Plato, Meno. The same intuition runs beneath this essay. The answer 42 is the one Deep Thought gives, after seven and a half million years, to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

2. Johnson, On Rising, imagines alignment as gathered light: every perspective arriving at once, the way the colors of the spectrum gathered again make white, and asks which way “up” is when every up points away from a different patch of ground.

3. Johnson, Home, the small illustrated piece described here.

4. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Das Allgemeine Brouillon, no. 857: “Philosophy is really homesickness — the desire to be everywhere at home.” Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia. The phrase also anchors Home.

5. Sagan, Druyan, and Soter, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, episode 1, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.” In it, Sagan calls us star-stuff, and “a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The stars at the far end of the search are also where nearly every atom of the searcher heavier than helium was made.

6. Luke 17:21, entos hymōn: “within you” in the King James Version; “among you” or “in your midst” in most modern translations, which many scholars prefer because the words answer Pharisees who had asked when the kingdom would come. The interior reading taken here is a reading, not a settled translation. Augustine gives the longing its best-known form at the opening of the Confessions, addressed to God: “our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Augustine, Confessions, book 1.

7. Physiology now counts well beyond the classical five senses: proprioception, the vestibular sense of balance, thermoception, nociception, and interoception among them. The point about what the senses register cuts against the framework rather than for it. That no instrument registers Jays is no evidence that they exist; it is what one would expect if they did not. The claim here is phenomenological, that something is felt and is worth naming, and makes no promise that measurement will one day catch up.

8. The retinohypothalamic tract carries light signals from specialized retinal cells straight to the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, which sets the body’s daily clock; it is part of no seeing. The occipital route is newer and more tentative. Using diffusion tractography in healthy adults, Kamali and colleagues traced what they called the occipito-hypothalamic/septal/BNST tract, after earlier work on a parieto-occipito-hypothalamic pathway, and proposed a role for it in visually driven emotion. Kamali et al., “Unfolding the Direct Connectivity”; Kamali et al., “Direct Visuosensory Cortical Connectivity.” Tractography suggests a structural connection. It does not establish function, direction of flow, or timing, and it carries known false-positive risks until confirmed by dissection.

9. Pain arrives in two waves: a sharp first pain carried by fast fibers, and a duller second pain carried by slower ones. That conscious perception runs behind the physical event is well supported. Libet and colleagues proposed that the brain refers the experience back in time to the cortex’s first response to the stimulus, so that the delay never surfaces. Libet et al., “Subjective Referral.” His later experiments on volition, timing the readiness potential against the felt urge to move, gave rise to a stronger reading: that decisions are made before awareness. Libet et al., “Time of Conscious Intention.” That reading is contested. Schurger and colleagues argue that the readiness potential may reflect ordinary fluctuation in neural noise rather than an unconscious decision. Schurger, Sitt, and Dehaene, “Accumulator Model.” This essay leans only on the lag.

10. Johnson, Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal One; Johnson, The Resonating Hymn of Divinity; Johnson, Frequency, Resonance, and the Architecture of Reality; Johnson, Alignment, the Triad, and the Architecture of Shared Mind. The thesis is stated in Journal One, and Journal Four assembles its argument in “The Argument Assembled.” Journal Four also proposes that a person whose Jays are aligned can serve as the binding third (“Aligned Jays and the Binding Third”) and asks whether a mind, like a color charge, has no stable existence in isolation (“Confinement as a Relational Ontology”).

11. The touchstones named here: the triad, in which a third party changes what two people can be to each other (Simmel, Sociology of Georg Simmel); the relation between I and Thou (Buber, I and Thou); reality as what a community of inquirers would come to agree on (Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”); dialogue as shared meaning flowing through a group (Bohm, On Dialogue); and shared intentionality, the capacity to hold a goal in common, as the place where the claim could be tested (Tomasello, Why We Cooperate). Gutenberg’s press adapted the screw press long used for wine and oil, and paired it with cast metal type and an oil-based ink.

12. Johnson, On Learning, reads a mind as put together the way the author learned to solve a Rubik’s Cube, one layer at a time, and holds that an old dog can still be taught.

13. In the fourth of his letters to the young poet, written from Worpswede on July 16, 1903, Rilke urges patience toward all that is unsolved in the heart: to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books in a foreign tongue, and to live them now. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

Bibliography

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pan Books, 1979.

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Bohm, David. On Dialogue. Edited by Lee Nichol. Routledge, 1996.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. Alignment, the Triad, and the Architecture of Shared Mind: The Convergence of the Branches. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal Four. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20523385.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. Frequency, Resonance, and the Architecture of Reality: A Theoretical Framework Measured by Science and Mathematics. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal Three. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20522506.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. Home. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20651121.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Learning. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20741305.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Rising. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20629373.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. The Resonating Hymn of Divinity: On the Universal Architecture of Faith. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal Two. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20512320.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal One: A Philosophical Framework for Subjective Experience, Suffering, Community, and the Nature of Meaning. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20482186.

Kamali, Arash, Farzaneh Ghazi Sherbaf, Farzaneh Rahmani, et al. “A Direct Visuosensory Cortical Connectivity of the Human Limbic System: Dissecting the Trajectory of the Parieto-Occipito-Hypothalamic Tract in the Human Brain Using Diffusion Weighted Tractography.” Neuroscience Letters 728 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2020.134955.

Kamali, Arash, Mahdie Hosseini, Anusha Gandhi, John A. Lincoln, and Khader M. Hasan. “Unfolding the Direct Connectivity of the Occipital Cortex with the Hypothalamic, Septal and BNST Nuclei of the Human Brain.” Brain Research 1817 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2023.148510.

Libet, Benjamin, Curtis A. Gleason, Elwood W. Wright, and Dennis K. Pearl. “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act.” Brain 106, no. 3 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/106.3.623.

Libet, Benjamin, Elwood W. Wright Jr., Bertram Feinstein, and Dennis K. Pearl. “Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience: A Functional Role for the Somatosensory Specific Projection System in Man.” Brain 102, no. 1 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/102.1.193.

Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon. Translated and edited by David W. Wood. State University of New York Press, 2007.

Peirce, Charles S. “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2, no. 3 (1868).

Plato. Meno. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett, 1997.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by M. D. Herter Norton. W. W. Norton, 1934.

Sagan, Carl, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, writers. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Episode 1, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.” PBS, 1980.

Schurger, Aaron, Jacobo D. Sitt, and Stanislas Dehaene. “An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 42 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1210467109.

Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. Free Press, 1950.

Tomasello, Michael. Why We Cooperate. MIT Press, 2009.

CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0009-8618-398X · DOIs MINTED ON DEPOSIT

© 2026 JAMISON TODD JOHNSON · LEGIBLE TRACES LLC