Becoming the Universe: Process Instantiation as the Root of Cosmic Identity
When we abandon the notion of the universe as a fixed container of stuff and embrace it instead as the ongoing instantiation of meaning from potential, everything changes. The universe is no longer a thing with properties—it is a process with participants. Its identity, if it has one, is not located in what it is, but in how it unfolds. And that unfolding is never complete without observers.
From the perspective of relational process theory, to be is to instantiate. Nothing exists in isolation, only in relation. Space and time are not empty scaffolds but dimensions of relation between events—between instances of becoming. And those events are not passive. They are, in a very real sense, acts of interpretation: the universe experiencing itself through the observation and construal of potential.
If this sounds mystical, it need not be. It is simply a shift in the direction of explanation. Rather than beginning with pre-existing entities (particles, fields, laws) and asking how they combine to generate observers, we start with the act of observation—the instantiation of a meaning instance—and ask what universe is required for that act to occur.
From this angle, the observer is not in the universe; the universe is in the act of observation.
This reframing does away with the illusion of objectivity as a perspective independent of participation. It replaces the question “What is the universe made of?” with “What are the conditions under which meaning is instantiated as this universe, here and now?”
A Universe in the Gerund Form
The relational universe is a gerund: not universe, but universing. It is a verb in motion, a network of potentialities becoming actual through innumerable acts of construal. In this view, matter and energy are not primitives—they are regularities in the kinds of process instantiations that are possible under particular constraints.
The laws of physics are not eternal edicts; they are emergent patterns in the relational dynamics of process. The more stable and general the pattern, the more it constrains future instantiations. But they are not the source—they are the sediment.
And at the centre of this unfolding? Not a central mind or deity, but the radical particularity of observation: each observer, each moment, each act of meaning that collapses potential into instance, giving the universe form, duration, and direction.
Participatory Cosmogenesis
What, then, is the identity of the universe? It is not what it contains, but what it performs. Its identity lies not in mass or volume, but in the structure of relations through which meaning becomes actual. And those relations include, unavoidably, the observer.
Each observer—each meaning-maker—is not a latecomer to the cosmos. They are the cosmos, in microcosmic form, instantiating potential in ways that add to the structure of what is possible. They are not separate from the fabric of reality; they are fibres in the weave.
This makes cosmogenesis a participatory act. Not something that happened once, but something happening now: with every act of attention, with every construal of meaning from experience, the universe is brought into a sharper, deeper actuality.
The universe is not something we look at. It is something we do.
Closing Reflection
Perhaps we are not here in the universe at all. Perhaps we are here as the universe—its self-knowing edge, its interpretive flame, its ceaseless becoming. Not its product, but its performance.
And perhaps this is what the cosmos has always been doing: not expanding into space, but unfolding into meaning.
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