A Druid’s reframing of the Theravāda Interpretation of Dependent Arising

The Confinement Principle

Abstract: This essay reinterprets the physical and ontological insights behind the Confinement Principle through the lens of Theravāda Buddhism. Drawing on the Buddha’s foundational teaching that "Consciousness arises from contact," it presents a contemporary metaphysical framework in which all phenomena—matter, mass, experience, and identity—emerge not from inherent substance but through conditional co-arising. Energy, traveling as wave-events at the speed of light, exists in a non-local, timeless state until perturbed. The resulting contact initiates the chain of dependent arising, producing the transient appearance of form, identity, and experience. Ignorance (avijjā)—reinterpreted here as structural perturbation or randomization of an otherwise undisturbed field—marks the starting point. This is a modern description of paṭicca-samuppāda: all that appears does so through causes and conditions, and all that appears is impermanent, contingent, and empty of inherent existence.

1. The First Stir: Perturbation of the Steady Field

In the beginning, there is no beginning. There is only a field: a dynamic, timeless wave-reality, uninterrupted, flowing at the speed of light (@c). This state is non-local, non-dual, and unmanifest. It is not a substance or a potential, but a conditionless condition: a steady state field of energy, free of distinction.

In early Theravāda doctrine, the first condition in the chain of paṭicca-samuppāda is ignorance (avijjā)—not knowing, not seeing things as they are. In this model, ignorance is not a psychological failing but a cosmic condition: the unstructured, unperturbed backdrop that knows nothing, intends nothing, and yet responds structurally to disturbance. It is this perturbation, a moment of randomization in the field, that sets the chain in motion.

2. Contact as the Birth of Form

A wave-event—still energy, still at @c—encounters another wave. This encounter is not within spacetime. Rather, it creates spacetime. In the Theravāda model, this is the moment of nāmarūpa arising—the formation of name and form, mentality and materiality, through the conjunction of conditions.

"Consciousness arises from contact" — Majjhima Nikāya

This is the strike. Contact (phassa) is not interaction in space—it is the creation of experience, the arising of differentiation. From this contact, we experience mass—not as substance, but as the momentary formation of form: rūpa.

3. The Conditional Emergence of Particle and Mass

· A wave happens as a quantum of energy.

· A particle happens as a quantum of mass.

· Matter happens when mass is confined, named, and remembered.

The particle is not inherent. It does not pre-exist contact. It is an emergent structure arising through upādāna—clinging or grasping, which in this modern analogy can be understood as confinement: the looping or binding of energy through conditions.

Mass is what energy looks like when it is momentarily held—resisted, reflected, or refracted. It is nāmarūpa, arising in response to viññāṇa, supported by contact, fed by condition.

4. The Arising of Experience

Consciousness, in this model, is not an observer. It is the echo of contact—a ripple left by the transformation of pure flow into form. In classical Theravāda terms, this maps to:

· Contact (phassa) → Feeling (vedanā)

· Feeling → Perception (saññā)

· Perception → Volition (saṅkhāra)

· Volition → Consciousness (viññāṇa)

These are not stages in time but co-arising conditions. Each moment of contact births a network of experience: the particle effect is also the experience effect.

5. Rule, Recurrence, and the Illusion of Substance

Matter emerges only when the conditions that formed mass recur. This recurrence is not inherent, but patterned through constraints—what modern language might call rules, and what Dhamma calls saṅkhāra: the formations.

A Universal Turing Machine, or a weaving loom of symbolic logic, represents these constraints. They do not create matter—but they stabilize emergence, giving rise to the illusion of continuity, identity, and permanence.

Thus, matter is memory: the residue of repetitive arising. But all that arises must pass. Anicca—impermanence—is not the fate of things, but the nature of conditioned phenomena.

6. Dependent Arising as Physical-Cognitive Ontology

This model of emergence through confinement is a modern re-articulation of paṭicca-samuppāda, dependent co-arising:

· With perturbation (avijjā), structural disturbance arises.

· With disturbance, contact arises.

· With contact, mass arises.

· With mass, matter arises.

· With matter, recurrence.

· With recurrence, experience and world.

And with cessation of contact, all else ceases.

This process is not governed by a mind, intention, or self. It is a blind, constraint-based automaton—ever-ready to respond to perturbation, yet itself without purpose. Emergence follows rule, not will. Structure—not mind—guides becoming.

Conclusion: The Real Is Empty, Yet Luminous

What we call a particle is a momentary folding of flow—a mass-event born of contact. What we call matter is the illusion of stability created by recurrence. What we call the world is a cascade of dependent arisings—beautiful, knowable, and empty.

Dependent Arising occurs not because of mind, but because of constraint. Where flow is patterned, form appears. Where conditions converge, experience arises—not because it is willed, but because it is ruled.

To know this is not to deny the world, but to see it truly: not as essence, but as echo.

Author’s Note

This essay is a speculative reimagining of cosmology through Theravāda Buddhist principles. Its metaphors are not doctrine, but resonance. The Buddha taught not in physics, but in direct truths. Yet if the universe is a field of causes and conditions, then this too may be Dhamma.

It is offered not as final truth, but as a way of seeing—where physics meets the path, and where the arising of a particle may be understood as the arising of consciousness itself.