Most of the visible universe is not solid, liquid, or gas. Instead, it is plasma, an electrified, dynamic, relational medium that shapes stars, nebulae, auroras, and the vast glowing threads between galaxies. Plasma is not a passive substance but a field that responds, organizes, circulates, and transforms, as far as we understand it, according to the classical model of physics (having been a Physics and AP Physics teacher for years). When physicists describe plasma, they speak of currents, waves, resonances, and instabilities with terms that sound far closer to phenomenology’s language of relations than to the inert mechanics of early modern science.
Phenomenology, from Husserl to Stein to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, begins by refusing the notion that consciousness (which is tricky to define but something like our shaping of reality) sits apart from the world. Consciousness is always intentional, always directed toward something beyond itself (Husserl, 85). Stein emphasizes that consciousness is constituted through relational openness, such as through empathy, the capacity to be affected by the presence of another (Stein, 11). Merleau-Ponty pushes this further, describing perception as an intertwining of body and world within the “flesh” of existence, a shared field of becoming that precedes the division of subject and object (Merleau-Ponty, 130).
When one considers notions of plasma “behavior,” a seemingly strange similarity emerges. Plasma does not conform to the common image of matter as composed of isolated particles. It behaves more like a responsive, relational field. Electrical and magnetic contexts shape plasma’s identity, its form emerging from interactions. To say this is not to personify plasma, but to acknowledge that the universe described by contemporary physics is one in which relationality, emergence, and responsiveness are perhaps fundamental if plasma is the fundamental “type” of matter that is overwhelmingly the majority of the universe (which it is from our current models). Consciousness, in such a universe, no longer appears as an inexplicable anomaly but as a deepening of tendencies already present in the world’s energetic fabric.
However, this relational vision isn’t confined to the heavens. The Earth itself participates in plasma dynamics through its magnetosphere, ionosphere, lightning networks, and auroral currents, and through its relationship with our closest star (and all stars). The sky where we see these interactions shapes each night. Auroras, for example, are not merely beautiful displays but expressions of the Earth’s magnetic and electrical relationship with the Sun’s plasma wind. They are atmospheric conversations between solar particles spiraling along magnetic field lines, stirring oxygen and nitrogen into light. Standing beneath an aurora is not simply observing a spectacle (though they are spectacles to us humans!), but it is participating in a planetary form of responsiveness.
Even the ordinary sky carries traces of these deeper dynamics. Sunlight reaching the Earth is itself plasma-born radiation, the result of fusion in the Sun’s core and the turbulent churning of its convective zones. Weather patterns arise within atmospheric layers charged by solar energy. The glow of dawn, the heaviness before a storm, the electric tension in the air before lightning. All of these reflect the relational surface where cosmic plasma meets terrestrial life.
Phenomenology urges us to attend to these atmospheric experiences not as mere background but as encounters that shape our consciousness. When Merleau-Ponty writes that the perceiver “belongs to the world it perceives” (Merleau-Ponty, 240), he is naming something observable in every sensory moment under the open sky. The warmth of sunlight on skin, the shifting hues of clouds, the pulse of wind through trees… all of these are participatory events. Consciousness perhaps forms as our bodies respond to them, open to them, and in that openness.
This sense of relational becoming aligns with ancient Christian cosmologies. Gregory of Nyssa imagined creation as a ceaseless movement from potentiality into greater participation in divine life (Gregory of Nyssa, 98). For Maximus the Confessor, all creatures are logoi, expressions of the Word that holds all things in coherence (Maximus, 131). Pseudo-Dionysius described the universe as a circulation of divine energy, an endless procession and return (Pseudo-Dionysius, 71). These early thinkers saw creation as dynamic, relational, and alive. This is a vision that fits comfortably alongside a universe constituted primarily by plasma’s flowing, radiant fields.
Hildegard of Bingen’s luminous theology captures this beautifully. She writes that “all living creatures are sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance” (Hildegard, 47). Her medieval metaphor gains unexpected literal resonance when we recognize that the light that feeds the Earth, stirs photosynthesis, warms our skin, and shapes our perception arises from the Sun’s plasma interactions. The very energy that animates life emerges from cosmic relationality.
Incarnation, too, becomes newly vivid under this cosmological horizon. When John proclaims that the Logos became flesh, he is not announcing a divine intrusion into inert matter but the intensification of a relational cosmos capable of perceiving itself. Augustine’s confession that God is “more inward to me than my inmost self” (Augustine, 3.6.11) as recognition that consciousness is not separate from divine relationality but its inward flowering. Consciousness becomes the universe articulating one of its own possibilities from within.
This reframing carries practical ecological and spiritual implications. If consciousness arises from relational fields, then ecological destruction is not merely environmental loss. Ecological destruction is a diminishment of the world’s capacity for relational becoming. Every time we attend to the sky, the wind, the rain patterns, or the shifting seasons of a single walnut tree, we participate in the world’s own consciousness-forming dynamics. Ecological attention is thus not merely observational. It is devotional. It is a mode of participating in the relational depth of reality.
To think plasma and consciousness phenomenologically is to embrace a universe that is dynamic, alive, and expressive from the cosmic to the atmospheric to the intimate scale of daily life. The sky above us, the weather around us, the tree in the backyard… all of these are expressions of relational becoming. Consciousness is not the exception but the refinement of this process. Theology becomes cosmology. Spirituality becomes ecological. And phenomenology becomes the practice of learning to perceive the world as the radiant, relational field it already is.
- Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1991.
- Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and Resurrection. In The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 58. Catholic University of America Press, 1977.
- Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias. Translated by Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. Paulist Press, 1990.
- Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by F. Kersten. Springer, 1982.
- Maximus the Confessor. On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Translated by Nicholas Constas. Harvard University Press, 2014.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Routledge, 2012.
- Pseudo-Dionysius. The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Translated by C. E. Rolt. SPCK, 1920.
- Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. ICS Publications, 1989.
- Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. Harper Perennial, 1959.
- Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. Free Press, 1979.