"Existence itself is derived from and sustained by this intimacy of each being with every other being of the universe."
-Thomas Berry & Brian Swimme, The Universe Story, p. 243
There is a photograph I keep returning to in my mind, though I don’t think it was ever actually taken. It’s the image of my two sisters and me, somewhere in our thirties, at a rare family gathering. Teresa and I on either side of Shana. Three women who share fifty percent of their genetic material with each parent, which means we share something like twenty-five percent with each other , and yet we might have been assembled from entirely different cosmologies.
I’ve wondered about that photograph often since Shana died. What were the forces at work in that image? What made us so distinct from each other, so recognizably ourselves, even as we stood in the same frame, daughters of the same parents, products of the same house?
Thomas Berry offers what I’ve come to think of as the universe’s answer to that question. He called them the three fundamental principles , the organizing grammar that has governed every moment of cosmic evolution since the first flaring forth. They’re not abstract philosophical categories. They’re descriptions of what is actually happening, at every scale, in every system, including the system of three sisters trying and failing to find their way to each other.
The principles are: Differentiation. Subjectivity. Communion.
Differentiation: The Universe’s Insistence on Uniqueness
From the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe has been producing difference. Not sameness. Not uniformity. Every atom, every star, every galaxy that has ever formed is distinct from every other. Physicists tell us that even particles that appear identical behave differently depending on their history, their relationships, their position in the field. The universe, it seems, cannot help but diversify itself. Differentiation isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system.
Berry understood this not just cosmologically but personally. He wrote that diversity is a value, perhaps the primary value, because without it, the universe would collapse back into the formless sameness it began by escaping. Every species that goes extinct, every language that dies, every culture flattened by homogenization, these represent a loss not just to humanity but to the cosmos itself. The universe loses a way of knowing itself.
This is why Shana was the way she was. I spent decades treating her differentiation as a problem, her volatility, her hypochondria, her desperate need for a kind of attention I found exhausting. I framed her distinctness as pathology. But the universe was not making a mistake when it made Shana. It was doing what it has always done: insisting on producing one more unrepeatable expression of itself.
She was loud where I was more measured. She was excess where I was more restrained. She lived in her body, its ailments, its needs, its demands, in a way I had learned to transcend through a kind of spiritual athleticism I now recognize as dissociation with better branding.
What if her differentiation was not the obstacle to our relationship, but the very gift it was trying to offer? What if the universe was showing me, through Shana, a way of being I had systematically suppressed in myself, that embodied, unedited aliveness I had learned too early to treat as dangerous?
Differentiation, Berry says, is not chaos. It is the first condition for coherence.
Subjectivity: Every Being Has an Interior
The second principle is harder to hold. Subjectivity means that every being, not just humans, not just mammals, but every organized system in the universe, has something like an interior experience. A within-ness. A perspective that is genuinely its own.
Berry wasn’t being whimsical about this. He was pointing at something the contemplative traditions have always known and that quantum physics is beginning to confirm: consciousness isn’t something that appears at a certain threshold of complexity and disappears below it. It is woven into the fabric of reality. What changes as complexity increases is not whether subjectivity exists, but how elaborately it can know itself.
Masaru Emoto’s water research, whatever one makes of its methodological debates, gestures toward something in this territory. His photographs of water crystals, formed differently in response to words, music, and intention, ask a question that Berry’s principle makes unavoidable: what if water has something like an interior? What if the molecules that make up sixty percent of your body are not passive carriers but participants in your experience, responsive to what moves through you? The question alone is worth sitting with. The body is not a machine that has feelings. It may be a field of subjects, all the way down.
This is where Shana’s story goes somewhere I find both painful and important to say.
I did not extend subjectivity to my sister. I observed her. I analyzed her. I created sophisticated explanations for her behavior that positioned her as a case study rather than a consciousness. I understood, in theory, that she was suffering. What I failed to do, for decades, with some brief and tentative exceptions near the end, was genuinely wonder what it was like to be her. To be the child who arrived and was told, in a thousand implicit ways, that she had to earn her right to exist. To be beautiful in a family that qualified every compliment. To have a body that kept finding new and dramatic ways to demand the care it had never straightforwardly received.
Her subjectivity was not a mirror of mine. That was the whole point. The universe spent the entirety of its 13.8-billion-year history making her unrepeatable interior possible. I spent too much of her lifetime treating it as inconvenient.
Subjectivity asks something difficult of us: not just to acknowledge that other beings have inner lives, but to remain genuinely curious about what those inner lives are like. Not to project. Not to explain. To wonder.
Communion: The Universe’s Drive Toward Relationship
The third principle may be the most urgent. Communion, not union, Berry is careful about the distinction, is the universe’s persistent tendency to bring differentiated subjects into relationship with each other. Not to merge them. Not to erase their distinctness. But to allow their uniqueness to touch, to co-create, to become something neither could be alone.
This is syntropy made visible in relationships. The same force that pulled hydrogen atoms into stars, that drew single cells into the first multicellular organisms, that threads mycelium through forest floors connecting trees that don’t know they’re connected, this is the force that kept reaching between my sisters and me despite every reason to give up.
And it did keep reaching. Even through twenty years of distance and avoidance, something in Shana kept extending herself toward Teresa and me, kept calling, kept hoping, kept sending the text messages I sometimes didn’t answer. I used to pathologize this as neediness. Now I think it was communion: the universe’s own pull toward coherence, moving through a woman who had been told she didn’t belong, insisting that she did.
The Sister Sessions we began during the pandemic, those raw, imperfect, sometimes maddening virtual circles where we tried to find our way back to each other, those were communion. Not perfect communion. The thorns were always in the room with us. But the drive was real, and it came from something deeper than any of our individual decisions to show up.
Berry writes that communion is not something we create. It is something we either cooperate with or obstruct. I obstructed it for a long time. In the last years of Shana’s life, I began, tentatively, to cooperate.
The overnight visit in Phoenix, the last time I saw her conscious, was communion. Imperfect, effortful, tender in the way that things are tender when they might break. She told me she had been hurt by not being invited on the England trip, and I let her tell me that without immediately defending myself. Something in the space between us shifted. We made a plan to see each other again. We committed to embrace the possibilities of this next chapter of our lives. We said we loved each other with the full weight of everything unresolved still present between us.
That visit repaired something. The universe, I believe, was working very hard in that room.
The Principles as Practice
Berry’s three principles are not a ladder to climb or a test to pass. I suspect they’re a lens for noticing what is already at work in your life.
Where is differentiation showing up, in a child who baffles you, a colleague who irritates you, a version of yourself you’ve been trying to edit into something more acceptable? What if that difference is the universe insisting on its own completeness?
Where are you failing to extend subjectivity, treating a person, a body, a relationship as an object to manage rather than a subject to meet? What would it cost you to genuinely wonder what it’s like to be them?
And where is communion reaching toward you, in an estranged relationship, a recurring pull toward a person or a place, a thread that keeps appearing no matter how many times you put it down? What would it mean to cooperate with that pull rather than explaining it away?
The universe has been practicing these three principles since the beginning of time. They are not aspirational. They are descriptive. This is simply how things work when they’re working.
Shana is gone. The communion we were moving toward is now something I carry differently, not as what might have been, but as what was. What the universe managed to grow between us, despite everything, in the time we had.
That is enough. And it is also, irreversibly, not enough. Both of those things are true, and Berry’s principles hold space for both: the differentiation of grief, the subjectivity of loss, the communion that persists even through death, because the relationship is still organizing me, still pulling me toward something I wouldn’t have found without her.
✨ THREE PRINCIPLES IN YOUR LIFE
Choose one relationship that feels complicated right now, not your hardest one, but one with some texture to it.
Differentiation: What is genuinely, irreducibly different about this person? Not what’s difficult , what’s unrepeatable? Can you hold their distinctness as the universe insisting on its own completeness, rather than a problem for you to solve?
Subjectivity: When did you last genuinely wonder what it’s like to be them? Not what you think it’s like, what you actually don’t know? What question might you ask that isn’t secretly an accusation?
Communion: Where is the connection reaching toward you in this relationship, despite the difficulty? Where is syntropy working, even quietly, even underground?
Write three sentences, one for each principle. Don’t explain. Just notice.
Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.