WHY?
For years, every day finds me on the mat, between asanas and deep breaths fading into whispered mantras, while the external world unfolds freely as it pleases. Meditation concludes my practice.
This isn’t religious devotion (which petrifies human beings), but an act of presence: a way to feel part of that cosmic breath binding quarks to constellations.
It’s within this suspended non-space, where the rational mind yields to ancient knowing, that The Song of the Last Castaways was born. And in this same space, my music emerges.
A novel that distills my essence: fascination with quantum physics revealing matter’s illusion, poetry as the soul’s primordial language, philosophy probing the invisible, and the practical mysticism I experience when a mantra’s vibration resonates deeper in my bones than my ears.
This work wasn’t crafted at a desk, it crystallized from intuitions blossomed during years of silent meditation, where Schrödinger’s equations dance with Taoist sutras.
I’ve always seen science and spirit as two faces of one cosmic coin.
Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics unveils a profound truth: Eastern mystics and particle physicists describe the same elusive reality, the former with words, the latter with mathematics.
Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland transformed this insight into a traversable bridge: boundaries like matter/spirit or observer/observed are but veils of Maya.
My novel pays homage to these explorers of invisible frontiers, weaving their legacy into a narrative where labs and temples merge. The Shiva Bridges in my universe aren’t mere quantum portals: they’re spacetime prayers, built from the DNA of monks who defied death through pure awareness. Their activation ritual, the Rite of Two Mirrors, is a potent metaphor: only by letting our shadows (doubts, fears) become fuel can we cross existence’s voids.
This holistic vision roots in David Bohm’s thought.
His “implicate order”, an interconnected whole where every fragment contains the entirety, shaped my story’s core. Eridu’s “Singing Void” is the implicate order made planet, a cosmic matrix birthing reality through vibrations. The Book of Empty Names, with its potential-names pulsing like fetal hearts, is a holographic archive of unmanifested souls.
Bohm and Karl Pribram’s holographic brain model (memories as interference patterns) inspired me to create Lyra Voss, my resonator protagonist: her body emitting photons only when lying embodies how “truths” are temporary constructs, and lies become creative acts bending light to reveal hidden patterns.
Arthur Eddington taught me the universe is “more a great thought than a great machine.” In my worlds, technology extends collective consciousness. The ‘Karma Purifiers’ that suffuse Earth’s Pod-City with ozone and synthetic incense, or the Neurosonates composed by AIs, to soothe anxiety yet amputate dreams, are the tainted fruit of a humanity that traded complexity for control.
Eddington saw physics as a “network of relations“. This is why the Consortium of Sevenfold Silences, with its dogma “Evolution is an error to correct”, embodies the ultimate lethal antithesis. They demand final answers in a cosmos of braided questions, rejecting dialogue with mystery.
Technology without sacred doubt becomes a cage.
Sabine Hossenfelder (Lost in Math) offered crucial balance.
While exposing the risks of mistaking mathematical beauty for truth, she acknowledges questions bordering on metaphysics (“Why does the universe exist?”). My novel inhabits this limbo.
The true threat isn’t Eridu (the planet feeding on existential void), but humanity’s inability to hear “the silence between notes.” So, are the Lost Colonists victims?
Hossenfelder reminds me that science, at its edges, must acknowledge the dark beyond reason’s light.
Erwin Schrödinger’s radical monism (Mind and Matter), echoing Eastern non-duality (Ātman, the individual self = Brahman, ultimate, unchanging reality), inspire me to create the SS Charybdis’ phantom passengers. Born from Shiva Bridge glitches, they “exist only when unobserved,” embodying the quantum principle that observers shape systems. Schrödinger argued consciousness is universal and singular. These passengers live this truth distortedly: their precarious existence screams of interdependence. Unobserved, they float as pure potential; observed, they collapse into ephemeral forms.
Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli’s “synchronicity” stitches together the lost colonies’ electromagnetic Songs. These hymns aren’t random echoes but synchronic messages from the quantum beyond. Pauli saw physics and psyche as mirrors, events linked by meaning, not causality. Thus, Veridia‘s reversed children’s laughter or Kaelis‘ 12-year migraine-inducing note must be “felt” with the soul, not decoded. They’re calls from where cause/effect dissolve, and only meaning survives.
I believe reality is a fractal hologram where dimensions interpenetrate.
My “extra-human beings” don’t hail from distant galaxies, they inhabit dimensional folds adjacent to ordinary perception. Crossing these thresholds isn’t extraordinary but continuous: we traverse them while meditating, dreaming, or we lose in a moment of profound creativity. String theory explores similar concepts, but I know it experientially: feeling my physical body dissolve during my meditation or yoga session, sensing vibrating energy webs.
“Thought-forms” aren’t metaphors, they’re consciousness-crystallized entities gaining quantum density. Rupert Sheldrake’s (controversial) morphic field theory resonates here: the extinct Yddra sculpted twin planets not with machines, but thought-forms focused through crystal. Eridu, the “error” 13th planet, sprang from an uncontrolled question: an unanswered inquiry made world.
I chose fragmented storytelling (“file-fragments”) because non-linearity is the cosmos’ native tongue, I describe.
Like a hologram where every shard holds the whole, each novel piece, a haunting Song recording, a neural diary entry, an Yddra myth told by an AI, must resonate alone, seeding questions, not answers.
I want readers to feel like Lyra before the Book of Empty Names: overwhelmed by mystery solvable not through logic, but inner song.
Her final choice embodies my creed.
Writing became moving meditation. Every word a mantra; every technological element (Eridu‘s question-shaped crystals, dreamdust birthing unborn worlds) emerged from deep visualization during my meditation and yoga practice and my dream-states.
This is an invitation to recognize the “miracle” in the ordinary: those dimensional passages, holographic connections, are not reserved for mystics or scientists, but they pulse in our heartbeat, in the pause between thoughts where we choose to hear the void’s subtle song holding us in existence.
For we are all “last castaways” seeking shore, and solid ground lies in that silence between breaths where science and spirit discover they are one boundless ocean.
To myself, with boundless gratitude for having journeyed this far.
Giovanni Biancofiore