Note: This is not a science article, though it cites science where it helps to ground the argument. It is a philosophical inquiry written from an introspective standpoint, independent of any particular discipline, tradition, or geography. I have also explored related themes in musical form in my Tamil composition, Karpanaiye kadavul.
I. The Perennial Question
The known universe is, based on most widely accepted scientific evidence, expanding post Big Bang. However, Indian philosophers theorised millennia ago that universal contraction was the other part of the coin - as seen in the phrase "nikhila prapancha sankocha vikaasaam" in the well known musical piece, Veena pustaka dharineem of Muttuswami Dikshitar (1775-1835). At a micro level - like the universe - our knowledge is also expanding (with discoveries like over 70–90% of known matter is contained in the luminous halos surrounding stars²). However, with over addiction to smart devices, social media and over-dependence on AI, it could also speedily go into a stage of contraction. This comparison is relevant to this essay only to illustrate the similarities between the infinitely massive cosmic respiration vs the microcosmic level knowledge breath cycle.
Philosophers and contemplative traditions across cultures have long anticipated this instinct. In non-dual Indian metaphysics, Consciousness is associated with the principle of Shiva - the eternal, all-pervading witness; in Chinese cosmological thought, the equivalent principle is Yin - the receptive, sustaining pole of existence. These independent frameworks converge on the intuition that Consciousness is not a late-arriving product of biological complexity but a primordial feature of the cosmos. I cite these as cross-traditional resonances, not as the source of my argument.
II. Fundamental but not Prime Movers
Several candidates present themselves with the greatest insistence. Each is vital — yet each falls short of being the Prime Movers of the Universe.
- Consciousness: Notwithstanding the global tradition of pan-psychism and consciousness-first metaphysics, Consciousness appears to be, at root, an omnipresent witness to everything rather than an agent. As Erwin Schrödinger observed, “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. It is absolutely fundamental and cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Schrödinger’s point is that Consciousness is irreducible - but irreducibility is not the same as driving force. A witness records; it does not generate. In the vocabulary of non-dual metaphysics, Consciousness maps onto what might be called the still-witness principle - a conceptual analogy that clarifies the distinction rather than grounding it in any particular tradition. It is potential in the deepest sense - analogous, one might say, to potential energy. But potential energy accomplishes nothing without something to actualise it.
- Matter and Energy: The universal component and dynamic force. In various philosophical vocabularies the energy principle is named Shakti or Yang, both pointing to the same dynamic, kinetic pole of existence. Energy is responsible for all motion, transformation, and becoming. Yet both Consciousness (as potential) and Energy (as kinetic) require some higher organising principle to function harmoniously. Energy is the medium of change, not its author. It explains how the universe moves, not why it moves as it does - taking these shapes rather than those, at this moment rather than another.
- Truth, Love, Ethics, Righteousness, Dharma etc: Universal positive forces proposed by romantic, philosophical and religious traditions as the ground of being. All of these are emotionally appealing, but share a structural deficiency: they presuppose a purely positive foundation never counterbalanced by an equal negative force. The observable universe contains creation and destruction, order and dissolution, flourishing and extinction in equal measure. A Prime Mover adequate to the whole of existence cannot be identified with only its benign half.
- The Divine: One or more of the Gods worshipped across the world’s religious traditions. These traditions diverge so fundamentally on the form, character, and moral nature of the divine that no common description survives the comparison. Even setting aside the philosophical critiques, any candidate for the Prime Mover must be demonstrably beyond the reach of any particular cultural or historical imagination. The one convergence across these traditions - and it is a crucial one - is the shared insistence that the ultimate principle cannot be a physical entity. That negative constraint points toward the correct answer, even if the traditions cannot agree on what that answer is.
III. Beyond Relativity: Theory of Creativity
Having surveyed these candidates and found each wanting, I arrived at a bolder proposal - one that came to me as an accidental revelation in December 2022: the Prime Mover of Everything is Creativity - not creativity as a human psychological capacity, but Creativity as a cosmic ontological principle, prior to and generative of form, space, time, matter, energy, force, and every law that science or philosophy has yet articulated.
The obvious question is: “Whose Creativity?” But that is precisely the point. This Creativity is not some other entity’s creativity. It is not God’s creativity, or Nature’s creativity, or Mind’s creativity. It is Creativity itself - self-existent, self-directing, omnipresent, omnipotent. The question “Whose?” dissolves once we grasp that Creativity here denotes not a property predicated of some prior subject but the primordial subject itself.
The oldest surviving philosophical text to address this question directly is the Nāsadīya Sūkta (Rig Veda 10.129, c. 1500 BCE). Before existence and non-existence, it declares, there was tad ekam - ‘that one’ - a pure undifferentiated potentiality that ‘breathed without breath.’ The first cause it identifies is kāma: desire, creative impulse, the ‘first seed of mind.’ I cite this not as a cultural inheritance but as a remarkable ancient convergence with the thesis I arrived at independently - the oldest surviving statement that a creative principle precedes even being.
Creativity, so understood, is simultaneously source and force — designing and destroying, containing and sustaining, transcending every manifestation it produces.
Consider Einstein’s equation E = mc², arguably the most compact and powerful statement of the transformability of matter and energy that physics has produced. Even this majestic insight says nothing about which of those two states will prevail, in what quantity, of what quality, in which region of the universe, at what moment, and for how long. It is Creativity that decides these questions. More profoundly still, it is Creativity that brings into being the entire cascading hierarchy of systems - from the sub-microscopic to the super-galactic - within which matter and energy undergo their transformations.
String theory posits that the most fundamental constituents of reality are dancing, vibrating filaments within quarks, whose varying frequencies give rise to the astonishing diversity of particles and, ultimately, of matter. What determines the energetic intensity, the frequency, the pattern of these vibrations? My argument is that it is the foundational force of Creativity that invests these filaments with varying degrees of energy, setting the original parameters from which everything else follows.
IV. An Undiscovered Dimension?
From a scientific standpoint, the hypothesis of universal Creativity invites a further question: is Creativity a fundamental dimension of reality that physics has not yet formally recognised? If so, it would be something far subtler and more sophisticated than anything currently mapped in our scientific ontology - yet it would permeate every corner of the universe at every moment.
Intriguing parallels have been drawn between the large-scale structure of the universe and the micro-architecture of the brain cell: both display vast networks of nodes connected by filaments, with patterns of activation rippling through them. These are suggestive observations, and they point toward something. Yet they remain observations rather than explanatory accounts - brain cells, after all, are mortal, subject to cell death, whereas the cosmos persists. That common force is Creativity.
No existing framework - in neuroscience, physics, or philosophy - comes close to accounting for the millions of subtle mechanisms through which Creativity operates and the innumerable forms through which it manifests. The recognition of Creativity as a fundamental dimension would represent an expansion of our scientific and metaphysical vocabulary comparable in scope to the recognition of space, time, and energy as fundamental categories.
V. Creativity and Creation: A Critical Distinction
A necessary clarification: Creativity must not be conflated with the act of creation, even at the cosmic scale. Earlier civilisations associated the creative principle with divine origination - Brahma in the Hindu tradition, the generative Word in the Biblical narrative. These accounts tend to limit creativity to an initial act: something was made, and then it simply is.
But Creativity as the Prime Mover operates at every scale and at every moment, and its domain is not limited to origination. At both the cosmic and the quantum level, what we call protection or conservation, and what we call destruction or dissolution, are as much expressions of Creativity as generation itself - perhaps expressions of it at different degrees of intensity. Creativity is responsible not only for the constant production of new configurations of matter and energy but also for their conservation across time, their conversion from one form into another, and for the appearance and persistence of life as much as for its ending. Creation, conservation, and conversion are not three separate processes presided over by three separate forces; they are three modes of the single, inexhaustible activity of Creativity.
Human Scale vs Cosmic Scale: Destruction vs Transformation
This raises a profound question: if Creativity drives both the emergence of life and its extinction, both the birth of civilisations and genocides, is “Creativity” a normatively neutral designation? And if so, what guidance does the framework offer for human ethical orientation? The answer lies in the distinction of scale.
There is absolutely no doubt that at the human scale, destruction is real and irreducible. But, just as the Creativity discussed here is not at the human level but at cosmic scale, the destruction discussed is also not at the human level. At the cosmic level, there is nothing much called destruction at all - only transformation. For instance, parts of numerous dead stars have been transformed into organic living matter, including humans. What looks like destruction from within the system is Creativity operating at a scale and time horizon we are not equipped to perceive whole.
VI. The Ultimate Decision Maker
The scope of Creativity’s governance, once grasped, is staggering. It encompasses the formation, sustenance, and eventual dissolution of everything from subatomic particles to superclusters of galaxies and the black holes at their centers. It is responsible for the transport of elements - oxygen, carbon, iron, copper - across unimaginable distances, from stellar nurseries and dying stars to the particular corners of the universe where they can be reassembled into the chemistry of life.
And what of the apparently random? Chaos Theory demonstrates that, in sensitive dynamic systems, what appears to be random behaviour is in fact exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions. My argument extends this principle: every sensory experience of every individual being, in every moment, is not random in the way the universe visits it upon that being. Each experience is, rather, creatively brought to that being - shaped by Creativity operating at scales and through mechanisms that dwarf our current analytical powers.
VII. The Greatest Touch: Creativity Through Its Creatures
The universal force of Creativity does not merely operate upon living beings from outside; it manifests itself through them. In the animal, bird, insect and plant kingdoms, one finds creativity expressed at every level of biological organisation: the architectural ingenuity of a spider’s web, the versatility of a mimic octopus, the geometric precision of a puffer fish's spawning patterns, the navigational virtuosity of migratory birds like the Arctic Tern, the chemical signalling networks of mycorrhizal fungi. At the molecular level, the processes of mutation and DNA replication - responsible for the entire history of life’s diversification - represent Creativity operating through the medium of the genome. The adaptive responses of bacteria and viruses to novel threats, the highly coordinated cellular responses to specific physiological situations: none of these are adequately explained by purely mechanical accounts. They are Creativity at work in the living world.
The most remarkable touch of all is that this same universal force, operating at the cosmic scale, finds its highest local expression in the creative capacities of conscious beings. Are the innumerable stars scattered across the observable universe no more than neurons in the vast mental fabric of an Omniscient Creativity, firing at different moments and continuously transforming the universe with each discharge? The analogy is not merely poetic. It suggests that what we observe as the cosmos and what we experience as the creative act may be, at the deepest level, the same phenomenon expressed at different scales.
VIII. The Transcendental Character of Creativity
Like every genuine first principle, Creativity eludes the conceptual instruments ordinarily deployed to grasp and measure phenomena. Even from a human perspective, it is in principle impossible to determine where Creativity originates, where it resides between its manifestations, or where it goes when it unmanifests. It cannot be weighed or measured in the way that mass or charge can be. One cannot design an experiment to determine its exact position, velocity, or state - whether it is more like a particle or a wave. These are not contingent limitations of our current technology; they reflect something essential about the nature of Creativity. Creativity neither occupies space nor is constrained by time, to the best of our knowledge.
Yet Creativity is not wholly beyond apprehension. It is perceivable through the senses - one can hear it in music, see it in the visual arts, feel it in the presence of a great teacher or in the intricate beauty of a natural system. But it exceeds every sensory modality through which it is approached. It manifests as whatever quality its medium - the human being, the animal, the living system - happens to possess; yet in itself it is beyond attributes. It is entirely independent of race, region, religion, or language. Most remarkably, Creativity is independent of moral character. It manifests through beings of noble disposition and through beings of base motivation alike. The quality of Creativity’s manifestation in a given being reflects the nature of that being and may serve as a reliable pointer to it; but Creativity itself is not identical with goodness or virtue. It is a force, not a value.
IX. Creativity, Consciousness, and Will
Two further candidates deserve examination here - not as rivals to Creativity for the status of Prime Mover, but as possible prerequisites for it.
Could Consciousness be a precondition of Creativity? There is an attractive case for this view. As Schrödinger argued, Consciousness is absolutely fundamental and cannot be reduced to physical terms. How could Creativity operate in the absence of any awareness? One useful conceptual vocabulary frames the distinction this way: if Consciousness is the eternal, still witness - the pure-awareness principle - then Creativity is the dynamic, generative force that activates it. The two may be equal partners in one sense; one might argue that neither can exist without the other, that asking which comes first is like asking whether the river precedes its flow. Yet there is a further question lurking beneath this: What created Consciousness? That question points beyond this polarity to a principle that precedes even this fundamental duality - and it is here that Creativity, as the truly primordial force, reasserts its priority.
Recent research into quantum biology suggests that quantum coherent processes may operate within warm biological systems - opening the possibility that consciousness-related quantum events are not confined to exotic, isolated conditions but are embedded in the living fabric of organisms. A 2026 computational analysis has gone further still, proposing that quantum error-correction mechanisms could stabilise the superposition states in microtubules against environmental noise, removing one of the key objections to Orch OR’s biological plausibility.
Alfred North Whitehead, in Process and Reality (1929), arrived at a strikingly parallel conclusion from within Western philosophy. He identified Creativity - not consciousness, not mathematical structure - as the ultimate metaphysical category: the universal principle by which the many become one and are increased by one. Even God, in Whitehead’s system, is a product of Creativity rather than its source - a structural parallel to my argument here that consciousness is Creativity’s great product, not its ground.
Independent thinkers across traditions arrived at strikingly similar conclusions. A remarkably precise ancient synthesis comes from Abhinavagupta (Tantrāloka, c. 1000 CE): ultimate reality is Prakāśa (pure consciousness) whose intrinsic nature is Vimarśa - self-reflective, creative awareness. Consciousness does not merely witness; its very self-recognition is the creative act through which the universe manifests. Creativity and Consciousness are not two competing principles but one reality in two aspects.
What of Will? Is the intentional direction of effort a prerequisite for Creativity? Not necessarily. We have instances of people creating spontaneously, without prior intention - moments of sudden inspiration in which the creative act seems to precede and surprise the creating agent. Conversely, there are those who desire intensely to be creative but find that the creative capacity does not respond to their willingness alone. This asymmetry reveals something important: Creativity is a spontaneous force that operates independently of Will. Will may be a channel through which Creativity flows, but it is not the source.
X. Degrees and Re-creativity
Human creativity does not exist at a single level. At one extreme, the great artists, composers, mathematicians, and scientists who reshape entire domains of human understanding are widely recognised as operating at exceptional degrees of creative intensity. But even those whose working lives appear to call for little imagination will, at some moment or another, find themselves called upon to draw on Creativity - to solve an unexpected problem, to adapt to a changed situation, to find a new way through. Creativity pervades human life at every level of intensity, just as it pervades the cosmos.
What of the musician who performs the same composition repeatedly - the artist who returns, night after night, to music they have played a thousand times before? Far from being a merely mechanical reproduction, a truly living performance involves re-creativity: the work is encountered anew each time, and it is only this renewal that keeps the music alive in the listener’s experience.
Neuroscientific research has shown that creative cognition involves dynamic interactions among the brain's default mode, salience, and executive control networks, pointing to a distinctive neural substrate for originality and novelty.¹¹ A large-scale study of 542 participants confirmed that functional connectivity in this network is a direct predictor of musical creative achievement12 - with further work linking dopamine-related gene variants to divergent thinking, and jazz improvisation studies identifying the neuroplasticity that deepens spontaneous musical generation over time.
This is not merely a technical point about performance practice. It is an instance of the same principle that operates at the cosmic scale: the same forms - the same species, the same stellar configurations, the same patterns of life - are created again and again across the universe, not mechanically but creatively, each instantiation being a genuine act of Creativity at work.
XI. Creativity and Choice
A final and unavoidable question: if Creativity is the supreme driving force of everything, what remains for the individual being? Does Creativity’s omnipotence entail that every action is predetermined and that the created being has no genuine agency?
The answer is nuanced. Many creatures have been endowed, precisely through the action of Creativity, with the capacity to make choices. Choices are the crossroads of destiny on the highway of existence - they are real, they matter, and they are genuinely the creature’s own. But the capacity for choice is itself a creative endowment. It is Creativity that has brought it into being, and it is Creativity that continues to shape the landscape of possibilities within which choices are made. Agency and Creativity are not rivals; the former is a particular, wondrous manifestation of the latter.
XII. Conclusion: Toward a Science and Philosophy of Creativity
The search for the Prime Mover of the universe - prosecuted across millennia of philosophy, theology, and science - has examined and found wanting the candidacies of Consciousness, Energy, Truth, Love, and the divinely personal. Each captures something real and important about the structure of existence, but none is adequate to the full scope of what must be explained. The principle that best meets the requirements of the Prime Mover is Creativity: impersonal, spontaneous, omnipresent, beyond space and time, operating at every scale from the sub-quark to the supergalactic, prior to and generative of every law that science has discovered or philosophy has articulated.
This framework carries consequences that extend in every direction. For science, it suggests that a fundamental dimension of reality remains to be formally theorised and empirically approached. The parallels between the large-scale structure of the universe and the architecture of the brain cell, the role of quantum indeterminacy in biological processes, the inexplicable spontaneity of genuine creative acts - these may all be windows into the nature of a cosmic Creativity that no existing framework has yet adequately described. For philosophy, it invites a reconsideration of the relationship between Consciousness and Creativity, between agency and determinism, and between the particular acts of human making and the universal activity from which they ultimately draw their life. For the individual living a creative life - the artist, the scientist, the teacher, the parent - it offers a profound reorientation: what one brings into being in moments of genuine creativity is not merely one’s own production but a local manifestation of the most fundamental force in the universe.
Creativity does not await our recognition. It is already at work in the filaments of quarks, in the spiral arms of galaxies, in the structure of every living cell, in the moment of every human insight and in everything beyond our understanding. The task before minds more specialised and greater than mine is to identify ways to prove at least a few of these in quantifiable scientific terms. That undertaking, when it arrives, would mark one of the most consequential expansions of our scientific and metaphysical vocabulary.
Footnotes
[1] Aristotle. Metaphysics, Book XII (Lambda), c. 350 BCE. Trans. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.
[2] Hameroff, S. & Penrose, R. (2014). Consciousness in the universe: A review of the 'Orch OR' theory. Physics of Life Reviews, 11(1), 39–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2013.08.002
[3] Rig Veda 10.129 (Nāsadīya Sūkta), c. 1500–1000 BCE. Trans. Wendy Doniger. In The Rig Veda: An Anthology. London: Penguin Classics, 1981.
[4] Einstein, A. (1905). Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content? Annalen der Physik, 18, 639–641.
[5] Greene, B. (1999). The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: W. W. Norton.
[6] Vazza, F., Feletti, A., & Cautun, M. (2020). The quantitative comparison between the neuronal network and the cosmic web. Frontiers in Physics, 8, 525731. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2020.525731
[7] Kassen, R. (2019). Experimental evolution of innovation and novelty. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 34(8), 712–722. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.03.008
[8] De Domenico, M. & Artime, O. (2022). From the origin of life to pandemics: emergent phenomena in complex systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 380, 20200410. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2020.0410
[9] Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Macmillan.
[10] Abhinavagupta. Tantrāloka (Light on the Tantras), c. 1000 CE. See: Muller-Ortega, P. E. (1989). The Triadic Heart of Śiva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta. Albany: SUNY Press.
[11] Beaty, R. E., et al. (2016). Creative cognition and brain network dynamics. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(2), 87–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.10.004
[12] Xue, Y., et al. (2025). Associations between brain functional network characteristics and musical creative achievement. Creativity Research Journal, advance online. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2025.2465173
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