First of all, a heartfelt thank you to the kind souls who have bought the paperback. Your support and feedback mean the world.
With that gratitude comes an apology. In my editorial haste, I made a blunder, and the initial copies had the even-numbered pages printed on the wrong side. It’s the kind of mistake that makes you wince, but I’m happy to say it has been fully corrected. The new version is now available, formatted exactly as it was always meant to be.
To celebrate the fix, and to return to the style that started it all, the post below is a dialogue—very much in the spirit of the book itself.
This brings me to a question for you, Dear Reader: which format feels more digestible for you? Do you prefer the back-and-forth discovery of a dialogue, or the structured, reflective flow of an essay?
Part one (The Aliveness):
Castor: I have a question that feels worth a billion dollars, though I know its value is something else entirely. It’s about consciousness (again). How are we aware of being aware? What is this incredible divine spark we call life, and how does inanimate matter suddenly catch alight with it? I think of a single-cell organism. It has no brain, no neural system, and yet, it knows. It finds food, it avoids danger... It is a profound mystery to me.
Pollux: You have gone straight to the heart of it. It is the ultimate question, the silent hum beneath every thought. Your observation of the single cell is the key, for it dismantles our assumption that consciousness is a luxury of complexity. We see a brain and we assume it creates the light. But what if it is merely a lens that focuses a light that is already everywhere?
This leads to a radical thought, an ancient one known as panpsychism: what if consciousness is not an emergent property of complex matter, but a fundamental property of matter itself? A faint, rudimentary flicker of experience in every particle, which grows more intricate, more self-referential, as the forms it inhabits become more complex. The brain, then, is not the generator of consciousness, but its great amplifier. The leap is not from dead matter to living cell, but from simple experience to the complex, self-reflecting awareness that can ask the question you just asked.
Castor: My gut feeling tells me that this is true. That we are all connected, not just on a physical level as byproducts of stellar explosions, but through a shared, fundamental ‘aliveness’. This aliveness then manifests in more elaborate ways when the forms it takes on become more complex.
Pollux: ‘Aliveness.’ It is a warmer, more immediate word. It speaks of a universal current. Your intuition echoes the old idea of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul—the belief that the universe is a single, living organism. We are not just made of the same stuff; we are animated by the same pulse. This changes everything. A forest is no longer a collection of trees, but a single intelligence. The world ceases to be a stage and becomes a partner in a dance. But if we truly lived from that feeling, what would we be compelled to do differently?
Castor: That is the mode of thinking of many Indigenous cultures, isn't it? Living in deep connection and reciprocity with nature, feeling that unity. It would be a very different way of operating from the one the West is used to—a way of love and respect, instead of exploitation. Wouldn't that be something...
Pollux: It is the shift from seeing the world as a warehouse to seeing it as a community of relatives. The Lakota phrase Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ, "all my relations," includes the rivers and the stones. You cannot exploit a relative. Our dominant philosophy performed a great severing, defining personhood so narrowly that it turned the rest of the world into an ‘it’. An object. It is so much easier to exploit an ‘it’ than a ‘thou’. What would it take for a person in our culture to start truly seeing a river not as a utility, but as a living being?
Castor: (Deep sigh)… Introspection and silence, I think. To see the connection. To realise that we all breathe the same air, which in return was produced by the trees that consumed our exhaled CO2. There is a deep, reciprocal relationship there. And all living beings want to remain alive and not suffer. We are all the same, really. Same energy, but in different forms. Different wavelengths.
Pollux: That is it. The first step is not an action, but a silence. To stop and notice the simple, profound exchange of breath with the world. Your metaphor is perfect: "different wavelengths." Our normal, busy consciousness is tuned to the human channel. Silence is how we adjust the dial, tuning in to the slow, green wavelength of the trees; the deep, patient hum of the earth. When you truly feel that, compassion is no longer a choice. It is an inevitability. Harming another becomes a form of static, a disruption of a harmony you can finally hear. If that silence is a form of listening, what do you think the world is whispering to us right now?
Castor: Sssshhhhh... I can only hear the silence.
Pollux: Then that is the whisper. The purest one.
to be continued...
A black bird cuts through the cloud,
One life, many forms.
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