Consciousness of the Real — Author's Notes — Sylvain Lebel

I am neither a trained philosopher nor a professional physicist. I am a 58-year-old man with no formal academic education, living with type 1 bipolar disorder. In other words: I am an autodidact, driven by an irrepressible need to understand what underlies reality, and shaped by states of consciousness that have profoundly transformed my perception of the world.

This condition, which hampers me in many ways in everyday life, has also granted me access to what some call mystical experiences or altered states of consciousness. These inner states have allowed me to glimpse what I have named THAT — a fundamental, unique, and dynamic substance that gives rise to space, time, matter, consciousness, and everything we call "real." This primal perception is not a belief: it appeared to me with the same certainty as the change we all perceive. Guided by these experiences, I undertook to draw the metaphysical, then physical, then cosmological consequences from this one certainty: something changes.

My path is not a mere intuition. It is based on a long sequence of deductions, comparisons, and modeling attempts that I pursued alone, using the tools of a rigorous imagination. While it is true that I have not received classical instruction, I have found my orientation through another kind of balance: that of the three spiritual sensibilities I've learned to recognize within myself — the conservative, the socialist, and the liberal — which, when held in balanced tension, offer a more just and complete vision of reality.

It is this inner balance that, I believe, has enabled me to perceive a more accurate image of THAT, one not filtered by the dominance of any single sensibility. Yet this same harmony also deprives me of the power each sensibility grants to those who fully embody it. For instance, I perceive less clearly than the conservative what tradition protects, less vividly than the socialist what injustice destroys, and less intensely than the liberal what freedom liberates. I have my strengths, but I do not have theirs. And perhaps that is what makes me messy, uncertain at times, hesitant in how I express my ideas. But I strive to transmit what I have seen, to the best of my abilities.

I do not claim that everything in this model is correct. There are inconsistencies, gaps, raw intuitions. But I believe the whole outlines a coherent cosmology, rooted in a metaphysics of change, and that it may enrich our understanding of the world — or at the very least, invite us to look at it differently.

I offer this thought as one might offer a manuscript found in a bottle: not as an absolute truth, but as a sincere effort to connect the intuition at the heart of things to the complexity of the real.

I have devoted half of my life to this work. I will now rest.

— Sylvain Lebel