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| Itzhak Bentov, Jacobo Grinberg and Donald Hoffman—three explorers of the boundary between matter, perception and consciousness. Conceptual illustration. |
A fever vision, three revolutionary theories, and a disturbing possibility: what if space, time and the world we perceive are only an interface?
I did not see stars.
I did not see galaxies scattered across an empty universe, nor planets moving obediently around distant suns.
I saw worlds inside other worlds.
They appeared crowded together, translucent and strangely alive—like microscopic eggs, biological cells or enormous bubbles pressing against one another. Each seemed to contain a complete universe, with its own space, its own movement and, most remarkably, its own flow of time.
Inside one of them, someone was playing a guitar.
The scene did not appear to belong clearly to either the past or the future. It simply existed there, whole and self-contained, continuing inside its own temporal bubble.
The experience occurred during a fever, when the normal boundaries of perception had become unstable. Yet the image did not dissolve like an ordinary dream. It remained with me as a question that refused to disappear:
What if the reality we experience is only one of countless windows through which consciousness observes existence?
Years later, I discovered that this strange vision intersected almost perfectly with the ideas of three thinkers who approached the mystery of reality from radically different directions:
- inventor and mystic Itzhak Bentov;
- Mexican neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum;
- cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman.
Bentov described nested, toroidal universes clustered together like frogspawn.
Grinberg proposed a universal informational lattice from which perceived reality emerges.
Hoffman argues that space-time and physical objects may be nothing more than an evolved user interface, concealing a deeper reality composed of networks of conscious agents.
The similarities are extraordinary.
But similarity is not proof.
A personal vision cannot, by itself, establish the structure of the cosmos. It cannot prove a new physics or demonstrate that consciousness has travelled beyond the brain.
It can, however, become the beginning of a serious investigation.
Before the Mystery: What Can Fever Do to the Brain?
An experience can be completely real as an experience without necessarily being a literal photograph of an external world.
This distinction matters.
The brain does not function like a passive camera. It does not simply record a finished reality and display it internally.
Instead, perception appears to be an active process of construction. The brain continuously combines incoming sensory information with expectations, memories and predictions about what is most likely to be happening.
We do not merely see the world.
We experience the brain’s best current model of the world.
Under ordinary conditions, sensory information corrects this internal model. But fever, inflammation, dehydration, metabolic disturbance, certain medications or severe sleep deprivation can weaken the usual balance between internal prediction and external input.
Attention may become unstable. Memory fragments may enter perception. Time may feel distorted. Geometric structures, faces, presences and entire scenes may appear with overwhelming clarity.
Clinical research associates fever and acute illness with delirium in susceptible individuals. Studies of delirium also suggest disruption in the normal integration of large-scale brain networks.
This offers a plausible biological explanation for vivid fever experiences.
Yet explaining the mechanism does not automatically exhaust the meaning.
To say that music is produced by vibrating strings does not explain why a melody can make someone cry.
Likewise, identifying the neural processes associated with a vision does not tell us why the mind organised that vision specifically as nested universes, each carrying its own moment in time.
Perhaps it was entirely a neurobiological construction.
Perhaps it was a symbolic expression generated by the unconscious mind.
Or perhaps altered states reveal something about reality that ordinary perception filters out.
The last possibility remains unproven.
But it is precisely the territory explored by Bentov, Grinberg and Hoffman.
1. Itzhak Bentov: Universes Floating Like Frogspawn
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| Autonomous toroidal universes clustered like cosmic cells—a conceptual interpretation of Itzhak Bentov’s visionary cosmology. |
Itzhak Bentov was an inventor, engineer and unconventional explorer of consciousness.
He was not a professional cosmologist in the modern academic sense. He did not build his model from astronomical measurements or accepted cosmological equations.
Instead, he approached altered states with the imagination of a mystic and the instincts of an engineer.
In A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness: A Cosmic Book on the Mechanics of Creation, Bentov describes a visionary journey through levels of consciousness, cosmic structures, creation and the void.
His universe is not a lifeless container filled with separate objects.
It resembles a living, circulating organism.
The Universe as a Torus
A torus can be imagined as a ring-shaped structure through which energy, matter or information circulates.
Movement flows through the centre, expands outward, curves around the surface and returns again, creating a continuous cycle.
Bentov imagined individual universes as self-contained toroidal systems with:
- internal circulation;
- polarised centres;
- ascending levels of refinement;
- distinct rhythms of time and vibration.
In some of his diagrams, seven levels are repeated across seven larger stages, forming a structure of 7 × 7, or 49 universes.
At certain thresholds, luminous interference patterns appear, sometimes associated with the Hebrew letter Aleph. These patterns function symbolically as organising principles of consciousness.
The most striking moment comes when the visionary traveller passes through the boundary of one cosmos.
Beyond it lies not empty space, but a dense cluster of other universes pressing against one another like frog eggs.
Each is complete.
Each contains its own world.
Each possesses its own internal time.
From inside one universe, time appears absolute and continuous. From a larger perspective, however, many different temporal streams could theoretically be observed simultaneously.
This image comes remarkably close to the fever vision of translucent bubbles containing separate moments—including the living scene of someone playing a guitar.
Bentov therefore provides the architecture of the vision: an organic cluster of autonomous worlds, each carrying its own circulation and temporal rhythm.
Could the Universe Actually Be Toroidal?
A necessary distinction must be made.
Toroidal and other compact topologies are genuinely studied in mathematical cosmology. A toroidal universe would not necessarily resemble a physical doughnut floating inside a larger space.
Instead, the geometry could be finite while lacking an ordinary boundary. Travelling far enough in one direction might eventually return an observer to the original location, much like moving beyond one edge of a digital screen and reappearing on the opposite side.
Cosmologists have searched the cosmic microwave background for signs of compact topology.
So far, no confirmed evidence has shown that our observable universe has the specific toroidal structure imagined by Bentov.
Therefore:
A torus is a legitimate mathematical possibility. Bentov’s conscious universes clustered like eggs remain a metaphysical and visionary model.
The two ideas may resemble each other, but they are not scientifically equivalent.
A Holographic Cosmos
Bentov also described reality as holographic: each part reflects or contains information about the whole.
Modern physics includes a holographic principle, developed through research into black holes, entropy, and quantum gravity.
However, the holographic principle in physics does not prove that every human mind contains the entire universe, that consciousness can instantly alter cosmic events or that spiritual experiences provide direct access to fundamental physics.
The similarity is intellectually stimulating.
It is not confirmation.
Bentov offers a powerful symbolic map, not an experimentally verified map of the cosmos.
2. Jacobo Grinberg: The Lattice from Which the World Emerges
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| Consciousness interacting with a fundamental informational structure—a conceptual illustration inspired by Jacobo Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory. |
If Bentov provides the possible shape of nested universes, Jacobo Grinberg attempts to describe the invisible medium from which perceived realities might arise.
Grinberg was a Mexican neurophysiologist and consciousness researcher who developed what he called Syntergic Theory.
Its central proposal was radical:
The familiar world does not exist in its perceived form independently of the nervous system.
Beneath ordinary reality, Grinberg proposed a fundamental informational structure called the Lattice.
The Lattice was described as a pre-spatial field containing vast potential before objects, distances and forms emerge as we know them.
The brain, according to this theory, produces an extraordinarily complex neuronal field.
The interaction between that field and the Lattice generates perception.
A table would not simply exist exactly as we see it.
Colour would not be a complete property of an object independent of perception.
Three-dimensional space would not necessarily be an ultimate container.
All of these would arise through the encounter between a deeper informational structure and the activity of the nervous system.
Reality as Participation
Ordinary perception stabilises the world.
We see a body as a body, a wall as a wall and time as a continuous sequence.
We do not perceive the microscopic fluctuations of matter. We do not directly observe the neural calculations that produce colour, depth or movement.
Grinberg proposed that highly coherent states of consciousness could alter this stabilising process.
Meditation, shamanic practice or unusual spontaneous states might reduce the separation between the observer and the Lattice.
Consciousness would no longer merely receive an already completed world. It could participate more directly in the organisation of experience.
Modern neuroscience does show that meditation can alter the activity and connectivity of brain systems involved in attention, self-referential thought, salience and cognitive control.
This supports the idea that contemplative training can change how the brain constructs experience.
It does not prove the existence of Grinberg’s universal Lattice.
The Transferred Potential Experiments
The most controversial part of Grinberg’s work involved experiments in which two people interacted and were then placed in separate, shielded rooms.
One participant received visual stimulation while electroencephalographic activity was recorded from both individuals.
Grinberg and his collaborators reported that, in some cases, the unstimulated participant showed electrical patterns resembling the evoked responses of the person exposed to flashes of light.
These signals became known as transferred potentials.
The researchers interpreted them as possible evidence of nonlocal correlations between brains.
Later experiments by other groups also reported certain unusual correlations between the brain activity of physically separated participants.
However, the effects were generally small, inconsistent and difficult to reproduce.
This evidence must not be exaggerated.
A statistical correlation between two EEG recordings does not automatically demonstrate:
- telepathy;
- transfer of meaningful information;
- quantum entanglement between brains;
- or the existence of a universal consciousness field.
Such conclusions would require strong and repeatable effects, rigorous protection against artefacts and independent replication across multiple laboratories.
For now, the results remain controversial and inconclusive.
They are more than mythology because experiments were conducted and measurable signals were reported.
But they are far less than an established scientific discovery.
Grinberg therefore provides the possible field of vision: a deeper informational matrix whose local distortions might generate different experiential worlds.
3. Donald Hoffman: Reality as an Interface
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| Space, time and physical objects as elements of a perceptual interface—a conceptual illustration inspired by Donald Hoffman’s theory. |
Donald Hoffman begins from a very different position.
He does not start with mystical visions or shamanic traditions. His work emerges from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, mathematical modelling and the philosophy of perception.
His fundamental question is simple:
Did evolution shape perception to reveal truth, or to support survival?
These are not necessarily the same objective.
An organism does not need to understand the ultimate structure of reality. It needs to detect food, danger, shelter and reproductive opportunity quickly enough to survive.
A simplified and even inaccurate representation may be more useful than a complete but computationally expensive one.
The Desktop Interface Analogy
Hoffman compares perception to a computer desktop.
When we drag a blue folder into a bin icon, we do not believe that a tiny blue folder physically travels into a small metal container inside the computer.
The icon hides electrical circuits, software processes, binary operations and hardware architecture.
It does not reveal the truth of the machine.
It provides a useful interface.
In the same way, a red apple, a chair, a body or a planet may be perceptual icons created by evolution.
Space-time itself would be the desktop on which these icons appear.
This does not mean that physical objects can simply be ignored.
A warning icon may not resemble the underlying software failure, but it still carries real consequences.
Similarly, a moving train may be an interface object, but stepping in front of it remains fatal within the rules of that interface.
Do We Really See None of Reality?
Hoffman sometimes makes the striking claim that we perceive effectively “zero per cent” of reality as it truly is.
This should not be misunderstood as a literal scientific measurement.
No experiment has compared all of ultimate reality with human perception and calculated a result of exactly zero.
It is a philosophical conclusion Hoffman draws from evolutionary models: if perception is optimised primarily for fitness, then the structures we perceive need not resemble the structures of reality itself.
This conclusion remains disputed.
Critics argue that fitness and partial truth are not always opposed. Accurate information about the environment can often improve survival.
They also question whether mathematical simulations justify the much stronger metaphysical claim that space, time and physical objects bear no resemblance at all to fundamental reality.
Hoffman’s theory is therefore mathematically informed and intellectually provocative.
It is not the settled conclusion of evolutionary biology.
Conscious Agents
Hoffman’s theory goes further.
If space, time and physical objects are not fundamental, what exists beneath them?
His proposed answer is: conscious agents.
A conscious agent can be described, in simplified form, by:
- a set of possible experiences;
- a set of possible actions;
- rules connecting experiences to actions;
- and probabilities connecting actions to new experiences.
These dynamics can be modelled through Markov processes, in which the next state depends probabilistically on the present state.
In this framework, consciousness does not emerge from matter.
Matter and space-time emerge as representations of interactions among conscious agents.
Particles, bodies and physical processes could therefore be data structures or projections through which deeper conscious dynamics appear inside the space-time interface.
The crucial word is could.
Mathematics can demonstrate that a system is internally coherent.
It cannot, by itself, prove that the assumptions of the system describe reality.
A perfectly detailed map can still represent an imaginary country.
Trace Logic and the Limits of the Claim
Recent work involving Hoffman and collaborators introduces a mathematical framework sometimes described as trace logic.
It explores relationships between Markov kernels and observer-dependent perspectives. An observer is treated not as something entirely outside a system, but as a structure embedded within it.
This work is intriguing.
However, it has circulated as preprint-level research and should not be presented as an accepted derivation of special relativity or proof that consciousness creates space-time.
A true physical theory must do more than suggest mathematical similarities.
It must produce precise predictions, agree with existing measurements, distinguish itself from competing models and survive independent testing.
That process has not yet been completed.
Death as Removing the Headset
One of the most powerful interpretations associated with Hoffman’s theory is the suggestion that biological death may be comparable to removing a virtual-reality headset.
If the body is only an avatar within space-time, then destroying the avatar would not necessarily destroy the conscious agent beyond the interface.
This is a profound possibility.
But it remains a metaphysical interpretation, not an experimentally demonstrated conclusion.
The mathematics of conscious agents does not currently prove that personal memory, identity and subjective continuity survive biological death.
The theory may leave room for such survival.
It does not establish it.
Hoffman therefore provides the possible rule of the vision: each bubble may represent a distinct perceptual interface or experiential dynamic generated from a reality deeper than space and time.
Three Paths to the Same Edge
Viewed together, the three systems appear to form a single map.
Bentov provides the architecture:
nested and autonomous universes, each with its own temporal cycles.
Grinberg provides the field:
an informational Lattice from which different realities emerge through interaction with consciousness.
Hoffman provides the interface:
observer-specific worlds generated from dynamics more fundamental than space-time.
The convergence is impressive.
But the three thinkers do not automatically verify one another.
Bentov relies heavily on visionary experience, symbolism and analogy.
Grinberg proposed a neurophysiological theory and conducted controversial experiments.
Hoffman constructs evolutionary and mathematical models.
These are not three independent replications of the same scientific result.
They are three different intellectual journeys that arrive near a related group of ideas:
- perception is not a transparent copy of reality;
- the observer participates in experienced reality;
- space and time may not be fundamental;
- reality may possess levels inaccessible to ordinary perception;
- consciousness may play a deeper role than conventional materialism allows.
Modern consciousness science itself has not reached a final answer.
Leading theories continue to compete over where consciousness comes from, how it relates to brain activity and which neural processes are necessary for subjective experience.
The absence of consensus does not prove the radical alternatives.
It does show that the central mystery remains open.
Not Living Proof, but a Living Question
It would be tempting to call the vision of nested universes proof that Bentov, Grinberg and Hoffman are correct.
That would be premature.
A private experience cannot establish cosmic structure.
It cannot confirm that consciousness travelled outside the body or entered a deeper informational field.
But the experience can be considered at three different levels.
1. Phenomenological Truth
The experience happened as an experience.
It possessed structure, intensity, emotional force and internal coherence.
It therefore represents a genuine event in consciousness, regardless of the final interpretation.
An inner experience can be real without being a literal image of an external place.
2. Neurobiological Truth
The brain can generate vivid, immersive worlds when its ordinary processes of integration are disrupted.
During fever, altered attention and predictive processing may combine memory, emotion, spatial imagery and symbolic material into a complete temporary reality.
This is a credible explanation.
Yet all human experience is mediated by the brain—including the experience of reading these words.
Showing that the brain participates in an experience does not automatically prove that the experience is meaningless.
3. Ontological Truth
The most difficult question is whether the vision corresponded to something existing independently of the organism.
Did consciousness perceive a hidden level of reality?
Did the brain translate inaccessible information into the familiar biological imagery of cells, eggs and bubbles?
Or did it generate an internal metaphor for simultaneous streams of time?
At present, there is no reliable method for choosing with certainty among these interpretations.
The responsible position is neither mockery nor blind belief.
It is disciplined openness.
Why Bubbles?
The sphere is one of nature’s most fundamental forms.
Cells, droplets, planets, vesicles and many microscopic structures become rounded because of pressure, surface tension and energy efficiency.
But the bubbles in the vision were not merely objects.
They were temporal worlds.
Each contained a complete moment.
The person playing the guitar was not a frozen photograph. The event appeared to continue within its own domain.
This changes the meaning of the vision.
Time was not perceived as a single universal river carrying all events forward together.
It appeared as a local property of each world.
From within a bubble, every being experienced its own present.
From outside, many different presents could be observed simultaneously.
Bentov might describe them as cosmoses with individual rhythms.
Grinberg might interpret them as adjacent configurations of the Lattice.
Hoffman might understand them as distinct perceptual interfaces or experiential networks.
Neuroscience might argue that the brain transformed an abstract concept of simultaneous temporal processes into a spatial image that could be experienced.
All are interpretations.
None is yet the final answer.
What the Evidence Supports—and What It Does Not
There are strong reasons to accept that:
- perception is actively constructed by the brain;
- acute physiological states can alter attention and experienced reality;
- meditation can change the function and connectivity of certain brain networks;
- toroidal spaces can be studied mathematically in cosmology;
- unusual correlations between separated EEG recordings have occasionally been reported;
- natural selection prioritises useful behaviour rather than philosophical access to ultimate reality.
It has not been demonstrated that:
- the universe consists of 49 conscious toroidal cosmoses;
- Grinberg’s Lattice exists as an independent physical structure;
- two brains communicate through quantum entanglement;
- fever visions grant direct access to cosmic dimensions;
- space-time is merely the interface of conscious agents;
- trace logic provides a complete and verified derivation of relativity;
- personal identity survives biological death;
- Bentov, Grinberg and Hoffman are describing exactly the same underlying reality.
This distinction does not weaken the mystery.
It protects it.
A mystery does not become more profound when unsupported claims are presented as facts.
It becomes more profound when we honestly identify the boundary of knowledge and look directly into what remains unknown.
Perhaps Reality Is Not What We See, but What Allows Us to See
Human beings make assumptions without noticing them.
We assume reality must resemble our experience of it.
We imagine that, even if every conscious being disappeared, the world would remain colourful, audible and divided into familiar objects exactly as it appears now.
But colour is an experience generated by a visual system.
Sound is an experience produced from variations in air pressure.
Taste does not float invisibly inside food. It emerges through interaction among molecules, receptors and the nervous system.
Perhaps space, time and objects are similar.
Perhaps they are extraordinarily effective tools of navigation rather than the final substance of existence.
Bentov asks us to imagine moving beyond one universe and discovering countless others.
Grinberg asks us to look beyond the perceptual hologram produced through the brain.
Hoffman asks us to search beneath the icons of the space-time interface.
Science has not confirmed the destination of these journeys.
But neuroscience has established one unsettling starting point:
The world we experience is constructed.
Once this is understood, the question is no longer whether an interface exists.
The question is how much it conceals.
Conclusion: The Observer Outside the Bubble
Perhaps I did not see the architecture of the universe.
Perhaps I saw the way a fevered brain attempts to represent infinity—transforming levels of reality into bubbles, time into scenes and simultaneity into neighbouring worlds.
But perhaps this explanation is not the whole story.
Altered states may not provide perfect photographs of hidden realities. They may instead offer imperfect translations.
Just as dreams transform emotion into people, landscapes and events, the mind may transform structures beyond ordinary representation into organic forms it already understands:
Eggs.
Cells.
Spheres.
Networks.
People living inside their own present, unaware that they are being observed from beyond the boundaries of their time.
Perhaps the deepest question is not whether those bubbles were “real” or “unreal”.
Perhaps the question is:
From where was the observer looking?
If every world possessed its own space and time, then the perspective capable of seeing them together did not belong entirely to any one of them.
Was it a temporary construction produced by the brain?
An imagined position created by consciousness?
Or a brief opening beyond the interface?
We do not yet know.
And perhaps this is the deepest meaning of unlearning: to abandon both the certainty that reality is exactly what it appears to be and the temptation to call every astonishing experience an objective truth.
Experience deserves to be heard. Claims deserve to be tested. Mystery deserves to remain alive.
Suggested references
1. Itzhak Bentov — A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness: A Cosmic Book on the Mechanics of Creation.
2. Itzhak Bentov — Stalking the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Consciousness.
3. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum — works on Syntergic Theory and the structure of experience.
4. Grinberg-Zylberbaum, Delaflor, Attie and Goswami — “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain: The Transferred Potential”.
5. Wackermann, Seiter, Keibel and Walach — research into correlations between the electrical brain activity of separated human participants.
6. Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality.
7. Donald Hoffman — “The Interface Theory of Perception”.
8. Hoffman, Prakash and Prentner — “Fusions of Consciousness”.
9. Hoffman, Prakash and Chattopadhyay — “Traces of Consciousness”, preprint.
10. Karl Friston — research on predictive processing and the free-energy principle.
11. Raphael Bousso — work on the holographic principle.
12. Planck Collaboration — investigations of cosmic geometry and topology.