I think we can all agree that there are things in this world that we don’t understand. Weird alien sightings, the concept of “vibes,” magnets — all things that scientists spend years studying and don’t come to a definite conclusion about.


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One of those things, unbelievably, is the sun. Yes, despite lording over us with a tyrannical reign, there are still some questions that linger about our beloved star in the sky. Specifically, is she mad at me?



You might be thinking, “Wait, the sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma; surely that means it doesn’t have feelings!” Well, you’re right, but some academics who’ve spent far too much time in the library are now insistent that not only the sun, but everything around us may be imbued with an inherent consciousness.


This theory, called panpsychism, recently got a boost from an article in Popular Mechanics detailing the work of, among other scholars, Rupert Sheldrake, PhD. Per Popular Mechanics, Sheldrake believes that “it is an irrefutable fact that not only do we humans have consciousness, but the whole galaxy has consciousness too.”



“Consciousness does not need to be confined to brains,” Sheldrake told Popular Mechanics. “The link between minds and physical systems seems to be through rhythmic electromagnetic fields, which of course are present in our brains. They are also present in and around the sun, and these could be the interface between the solar mind and the body of the sun.”


Right, so… I mean… Wait, what?



Regardless of whether you see this as nonsense, a serious field of study or just something fun to talk about after several vaporizer pulls, it feels like you would need a substantial amount of evidence to claim that the sun can feel when my brain goes into overdrive after too many White Claws.


Thankfully, despite what all the media is claiming about this, that’s not actually what Sheldrake is saying. In his 21-page paper on the topic that I read because I apparently have nothing better to do with my time, Sheldrake opens by saying that the sun is “obviously not” conscious “from the point of view of mechanistic materialism or physicalism.”



“Anyone who supposes that the sun is conscious is making a childish error, projecting anthropomorphic illusions onto inanimate nature. The fact that children often draw the sun with a smiley face shows that this idea is literally childish. The very question is ridiculous,” he writes in the first few paragraphs.


Instead, it’s a large theoretical paper that simply argues that all the universe’s various systems are interlinked, a claim that many of us have previously come to by doing a little foraging for the right colored mushrooms. As a result, the sun may be responding to various pulses from the universe — in turn, forming its own kind of consciousness that could include different conceptions of “experiences, feelings, desires, memories, imaginings and intentions.”



“[The sun’s] choices may include an influence on the numbers, locations and activities of sunspots, the timing and directions of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and the coordination of granules and supergranules within the surface layers of the sun, as well as the flow patterns within the inner regions of the solar body,” Sheldrake writes. “All these activities in turn affect the reverberating acoustical vibrations within the body of the sun, which in turn set up rhythmic patterns in its electromagnetic fields.”


*bong rip sound* Hell yeah, brother!


To answer your fears, the sun is probably not mad at you — which probably makes you feel a bit better about showing it your asshole all these years.