Category: Grammar

When you jump back from a shadow or gasp at a sudden loud noise, your body is triggering a biological defence mechanism designed to keep you alive. These biological survival circuits are ancient. The capacity for fear isn’t learned. It arrives already old and communicates our long evolutionary history. The feeling itself is our inheritance…… Continue reading Chapter 6 – Feeling Is Primeval

If matter is the field when it’s fully occluded with no inside luminosity, it raises another question. Your body is made of the same matter as the rock, the same dark occluded stuff, but you’re illuminated on the inside. We may not be sure if other organisms are conscious, but we know our own body…… Continue reading Chapter 5 – The Body Illuminated

This consciousness-first view doesn’t ask us to abandon what science has found. It asks us to notice the frame it arrived in. Once we do that, two things fall into place. We regain our ordinary experience of space and time and we see why physics describes matter so completely. We’ve seen that matter is the…… Continue reading Chapter 4 – Space and Time Restored

When we gaze into the night sky or watch a sunrise, we experience a resonance with the sublime beauty of nature. But that resonance is hard to find when you’re waiting in line at the supermarket or interacting with ordinary objects. Matter itself seems to be inert. If the field itself is conscious, that inertness…… Continue reading Chapter 3 – Matter as the Frozen Geometry of Light

In an experiential sense, we each inhabit our own private world. That’s not denying a shared external world or that we can’t have deep relationships with others. But think of something we all know without doubt: I can’t experience your pain. You could be in agony and I’ll feel distress because you’re suffering, but I’m…… Continue reading Chapter 2 – The Individual Self

James Clerk Maxwell’s work on electromagnetism is considered one of the most important scientific achievements of the 19th century. While we recognise its importance today, his contemporaries were slow to appreciate and understand it. One of the reasons was the difficulty understanding it within the prevailing scientific paradigm. It required a conceptual shift. Maxwell replaced…… Continue reading Chapter 1 – The Inversion

We live in a thoroughly secular age. Some of us have religion added on top, but on the deepest level we’ve all absorbed the naturalist mindset. This book is for people who appreciate the merits of naturalism but also feel its deficiency as a worldview. They sense there is more to the world than the…… Continue reading Where We Stand

There’s a feeling that most of us can’t name, a yearning you can’t silence but you also can’t satisfy. It’s like a homesickness, but it calls you back to a foreign land where you can’t find home comfort and repose. A love you feel but cannot trust. When you embrace the feeling, the intellect takes…… Continue reading Prelude