An inquiry on how meaning organizes human experience
The Physics of Meaning is a long-form intellectual project exploring how meaning functions as an organizing force in human consciousness, culture, and collective reality. It brings together insights from psychology, mythology, cognitive science, and systems theory to examine how belief, time, identity, and symbolic structures shape lived experience.
Temporal literacy is a core capacity within The Physics of Meaning: the ability to perceive and work with time as an organizing force in human experience, rather than treating it as a neutral backdrop or abstract resource.
If The Physics of Meaning examines how meaning functions—how belief, identity, symbols, and attention organize consciousness and culture—temporal literacy names the specific skill of recognizing how time structures those processes.
Temporal literacy involves the ability to notice:
how attention is pulled forward or allowed to settle
how responsibility migrates or lands across time
how unfinished experience accumulates or resolves
how systems externalize cost into the future or absorb it in the present
In a temporally literate frame, time is not merely something that passes. It is something that shapes perception, behavior, and ethical responsibility. When time collapses, fragments, or is indefinitely deferred, meaning thins—even when belief remains intact.
Temporal literacy allows individuals and systems to distinguish between:
urgency and importance
preparation and arrival
adaptation and care
continuation and coherence
This capacity is not about productivity, optimization, or time management. It is about containment: the ability to let experience complete, consequences arrive, and meaning stabilize rather than constantly resetting.
Within The Physics of Meaning, temporal literacy functions as a diagnostic and orienting tool. Without it, people internalize structural failures as personal inadequacy. With it, responsibility can be located accurately, and care can be organized without collapse.
Temporal literacy is a perceptual and ethical skill.
And once developed, it changes how meaning is experienced, distributed, and sustained—at the level of the individual, the culture, and the systems we live inside.
The Physics of Meaning is an ongoing research and writing project.
At the center of this project is the Inner Gravity Theory, developed by Rebecca Sutter.
The Book
The Physics of Meaning
The Physics of Meaning is a book-length inquiry into how meaning functions as an organizing force in human experience. Rather than treating meaning as subjective interpretation, cultural ornament, or philosophical afterthought, the book approaches it as a structural phenomenon—one that shapes attention, identity, time, relationship, and collective reality in ways that are felt long before they are articulated.
Drawing from psychology, mythology, cognitive science, systems theory, and embodied experience, The Physics of Meaning examines how humans orient themselves within the world through symbolic structures that behave less like beliefs and more like forces. Meaning, in this framework, is not something we simply assign to events; it is something that exerts pressure—pulling perception, behavior, and identity into patterned form.
The book explores how these patterns emerge, stabilize, and collapse across multiple scales. At the personal level, it examines how identity forms around internal narratives and how crises, trauma, and developmental thresholds disrupt inherited meaning systems. At the cultural level, it analyzes how myths, institutions, technologies, and shared stories function as collective organizing centers—and what happens when those centers weaken in times of rapid social and technological change.
Central to the book is the concept that modern life is marked by a growing mismatch between complexity and coherence. As traditional narratives lose their explanatory power and information accelerates beyond the capacity of linear interpretation, individuals and cultures increasingly rely on symbolic cognition to maintain orientation. Rather than framing this shift as regression or irrationality, The Physics of Meaning treats it as an adaptive response to structural strain within contemporary meaning systems.
The book introduces original theoretical frameworks—including the Inner Gravity Theory—to articulate how belief, attention, and symbolic investment shape lived reality. It examines contemporary phenomena such as trauma discourse, technological acceleration, AI as cognitive mirror, and the fragmentation of shared narratives, not as isolated trends but as symptoms of a deeper reorganization in how meaning is produced and held.
The Physics of Meaning does not offer prescriptions, manifestos, or easy resolutions. Instead, it provides language for understanding what it feels like to live inside a system of meaning that is actively reconfiguring. It is written for readers interested in psychology, philosophy, cultural theory, education, and the lived experience of navigating a world where inherited frameworks no longer fully apply.
Ultimately, the book argues that meaning is not disappearing—it is shifting its structure, sometimes faster than human lives can comfortably hold. And understanding that structure is essential if individuals and societies are to remain coherent, embodied, and agentic during periods of profound transition.
The Physics of Meaning & Temporal Literacy
The Inner Gravity Theory
How Meaning Organizes Consciousness and Collective Reality
The Inner Gravity Theory is a conceptual framework for understanding how meaning organizes human experience—psychologically, culturally, and collectively. It proposes that belief is not merely something we hold, but something that holds us: an organizing force that shapes attention, identity, and the realities we inhabit.
At the center of the theory is a simple structural claim: meaning functions like gravity. What is believed to matter gains weight. What gains weight bends perception, behavior, and shared reality around it. Over time, these gravitational centers stabilize myths, identities, institutions, and social worlds.
The Inner Gravity Theory integrates insights from myth studies, cognitive science, depth psychology, and systems theory to explain how symbolic centers form, how they weaken, and how new ones emerge during periods of cultural transition. It reframes myths and prophecies not as stories or predictions, but as orientation technologies—symbolic architectures that help individuals and societies maintain coherence when inherited narratives no longer suffice.
Developed in response to contemporary conditions of narrative fragmentation and technological acceleration, the theory offers a language for understanding symbolic saturation, collective pattern-seeking, and the reorganization of meaning in the absence of a unifying myth. It also provides a framework for the intentional design of future symbolic systems that integrate embodiment, interiority, and technological intelligence without sacrificing human agency.
The Inner Gravity Theory is intended for scholars, educators, clinicians, artists, and cultural thinkers working at the intersection of meaning, identity, and collective reality.