HoloSutra
The thread that holds the whole together
A Sutra is a thread. In the Vedic tradition, sutras were compressed formulas — entire systems of thought held in a single line, so dense they needed a lifetime of commentary. Holo means whole.
HoloSutra is my attempt to find the threads that hold the whole together.
Is there a common principle connecting a metabolizing cell, a thinking brain and a contemplative state? This is the question beneath all my questions. Everything I write here circles around it.
I have always sensed a unity beneath the different shades of life. And like a child, I never stopped asking why. Not because I expect a final answer — answers fence in a piece of reality. Questions open it up. The same question, asked in a different moment, yields a different landscape.
Some of what you’ll find here are long essays that follow an idea to its consequences. Others are field notes — a connection glimpsed while reading a paper, a doubt I haven’t resolved, a moment in the lab that shifted something.
In 1944 Schrödinger asked what life is. Eighty years later, the question still burns. We now know that life rests on a paradox: processes that remain in balance precisely because they never stop. A spinning top that holds its form only as long as it keeps moving.
In the research I am conducting with Marco Cavaglià, Jack Tuszynski and our collaborators, we believe this moving balance stands on three things. Energy, Mass and Information. EMI.
Einstein showed us that energy and mass are bound together. Landauer showed us that information is not free — encoding it, maintaining it, erasing it costs energy. Every act of information is a physical act. Energy writes onto mass. Mass holds information. Information shapes what energy does next.
Three elements, irreducibly entangled.
A thread that connects.
A Sutra.
And like a fragment of a hologram that contains the entire scene, these relationships between Energy, Mass and Information are not found only at the level of the whole. They recur at every scale — from the molecular to the cognitive to the contemplative.
We believe EMI can offer a common language to describe consciousness, cognition and behaviour as one continuous process. A continuous dance made by steps that resonate across scales and orders of magnitude.
This is not just a scientific model. It is a lens. And this newsletter is where I hold it up to the light.
Is this the thread that holds the whole together? I don’t know yet. But the top keeps spinning.