My most cherished possession are two little fellows. They represent the Irish God Cernunnos: The Lord of the Wild (The Horned God). He is often depicted sitting among animals, holding a snake and a torc (a symbol of a completed circle/knot).
Cernunnos is the god of Recurrence. He represents the fact that even if the individual deer dies, the deer-ness is remembered by the forest and lives on for every generation, a being not a becoming.
The Torc is the stable knot. It represents the satisfaction of a relationship. A good gift for a good life.
They look a little eastern, but the link is in the mind, most people know the Kama Sutra as a guide to intimacy, but its name reveals a deeper secret: Kama is desire, and Sutra is the thread. It teaches that our lives are a ‘weaving of desires.’
In the architecture of the mind, desire is the tension that allows a knot to be tied. Without the pull of wanting to understand or connect, the strands of information would just slip past each other. Nature traps the passing second into a permanent knot, then laying it sideways into a vast, interconnected tapestry. It proves that to remember is not just to look back, but to navigate the sutras, na snáithe —the sacred threads of desire—that we have already woven into the fabric of our lives.
The human mind is a weaving loom, you can’t create a pattern by just laying strings side-by-side; they’d fall apart. You need a three-part mechanical action to “trap” the thread into a structural relationship. The brain has three layers the Warp (Input), layer 4 of the brain acts like the stationary vertical strings. It holds the raw data in place. The Shed (The Crossing), layers 2 and 3 act like the “heddles” that lift some strings and lower others. This creates the over-under gap, the crossing, where the relational knot is formed. And finally, the Weft (The Lock), layers 5 and 6 act like the shuttle, passing the thread through that gap to lock the pattern into a stable attractor.
The Sideways Expansion
To create a masterpiece, the weaver doesn’t stay in one spot; they move the shuttle sideways. Our brain organizes these 3-layer knotting stations, called Cortical Columns side-by-side across the vast surface of the cortex. This creates a Latent Space Tapestry. Each column is a vertical knot-tying machine, but they are all connected horizontally. This ordered grid allows the brain to map out the entire 3D world on a sheet without the feedback signal ever getting strangled by a vertical mess.
When Nature wants to remember, it doesn’t just save a file. It performs a mechanical act of weaving. It uses the 3-layer depth of neurons to tie the knot and an infinite sideways expansion to organize the map. Our memories aren’t just data points; they are the physical texture of a tapestry, woven one knot at a time.