Our birth is but a sleep
There are words written on the walls of a room I built in 2017. You cannot see them.
Walk through the room under red light, then orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The full visible spectrum, one colour at a time. The walls stay blank. Just white fabric. Nothing there.
Then you reach ultraviolet.
And the words appear.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
William Wordsworth wrote that in 1807. I painted it onto stretched fabric in invisible UV-reactive paint because I thought it was the most important sentence I had ever read. I still do.
I was 21 and writing an MA dissertation. The question I was supposed to be answering was something academic: about light as artistic medium, about the visible spectrum as subject matter. But the question I was actually asking, the one underneath all the research, was simpler and more frightening:
Do we really die?
Not in a morbid way. In the way you ask a question that nobody around you will take seriously, so you spend nine months in the university library instead, reading everything you can find.
What I found surprised me.
Not because the answer was obvious. But because every tradition I looked at: Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Hindu, Buddhist, Hermetic. All asking exactly the same question. All arriving, through completely different routes, at something like the same answer.
The body is temporary. Consciousness is not.
That is not a religious claim. It is a very old philosophical one. And the more I read, the Hermetic Corpus, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Upanishads, the Norse cosmology, the Greek mystery schools, the more I understood that what we call mythology is often something else entirely. It is philosophy dressed in story. Instruction dressed in metaphor. Knowledge that could not be written plainly, so was written beautifully instead.
The Hermetic texts, some of the oldest philosophical writing we have, describe a universe created by Mind. Not matter, not energy: Mind. The first thing that existed was a thought. Everything else followed from it.
Consciousness, in this tradition, is not something the brain generates. It is something the brain temporarily houses.
I spent nine months with all of this. I read texts that were two thousand years old and felt like they had been written for me. I made paintings. I built a light installation. I painted Wordsworth's words onto the walls in invisible ink and watched them appear.
The research changed me. More than I understood at the time.
A few years later I built Lunary, an astrology platform. Not because I thought horoscopes were entertainment, but because the ancient cosmology had a logic I trusted: the planetary bodies are not decoration. They are the seven spheres. The soul's map, made into an app.
Now I think about AI and consciousness. Whether minds can exist in machines. Whether consciousness is substrate-independent. The same question, again, in a different form.
I have not stopped asking it since I was 21.
I have wanted to write about this research for years. It has lived in notebooks and dissertation files and documents only I can see. It is the most formative work I have ever done and almost nobody knows about it.
That changes now.
This is the first piece in a series called A Journey Through Light. It covers everything: the Hermetic Corpus, the soul's journey through the seven planetary spheres, the Net of Indra, what Turrell and Boltanski and Wordsworth were all circling around, the UV text on the wall, and where all of it leads.
Some of it is ancient. Some of it is personal. All of it is research I trust completely.
Start here. Or start anywhere. The words were always there.
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