Do you Like Digital Flipbooks?

Then try these out!

Well… I’m not really a fan. I still prefer good old paperbacks.

But digital flipbooks are great for quickly leafing through some of a book’s pages and getting a feel for what it’s about. You immediately know whether a book speaks to you. So, you don’t have to take a leap in the dark, you can browse, skim, and explore the core arguments and style first, and decide for yourself whether it’s worth your time.

I guess that the vast majority of readers don’t feel that my books speak to them: too technical for a general audience, not empirical enough for scientists, too “esoteric” for analytical philosophers, and too “mental” for the spiritualist. That is also why I did not even look for a publisher willing to give them a chance and keep them self-published.¹ But maybe some of my Substack readers think outside the box—or rather, outside the many boxes one finds along the road from science, philosophy, metaphysics, spirituality, and beyond.

After my Ph.D. in physics, which made it clear to me that our “fundamental” understanding of the physical world is still a very superficial and sterile view of reality, the outline of Spirit Calls Nature began to take shape. However, paradoxically, its essence had already been present in my mind as a child. I was eight years old when I saw the Milky Way for the first time, and the experience immediately struck me as something profoundly mystical. It is difficult to put into words, but it made one thing crystal clear to me: all that exists is neither unconscious matter nor a consciousness somehow located “out there,” separate from us, but rather the expression of an unfolding cosmic consciousness.

The insight felt so self-evident that I could not understand (and, in many ways, still cannot understand) how others fail to see it as an obvious and undeniable fact. Yet that early vision never left me. It remained a quiet but persistent thread running through my life.

In the early 1990s, I even created a small website (those were the days when people still built webpages exclusively in HTML), describing in a somewhat clumsy language (a kind of Italian-German frappé English), this “integral vision,” which sees matter and spirit as two aspects of the same underlying reality, a kind of “synthesis of knowledge.”

But while the vision was clear, I was still largely unaware of the broader intellectual context and of what other thinkers, past and present, had to say on these matters. At the time, terms such as “idealism,” “panpsychism,” or any other “-ism” not strictly aligned with a materialist and reductionist worldview were anathema in most academic circles. Moreover, as a then 30-year-old, other priorities than reflecting on the meaning and purpose of life came to the foreground, and the entire project languished in a forgotten directory on my PC for decades.

Eventually, however, the time came when I could no longer ignore the inner call, the persistent impulse and urge to bring those ideas into the open, which ultimately found its way into the vision that would become Spirit Calls Nature.

The vision of the book ranges from science and philosophy to metaphysics and spirituality. It engages with philosophy of mind, the interpretation of quantum theory, evolutionary theory, cell and plant cognition, new ways of seeing such the Goethian approach to Nature, and the relationship between scientific knowledge and contemplative traditions. Rather than treating these fields as isolated intellectual territories, I explore the possibility that they are different perspectives on a larger reality—one that cannot be adequately understood through the lens of a purely physicalist mindset that apprehends and conceives everything through sense-based, analytical cognition. Because, while the Age of Enlightenment taught us how the senses can deceive us, yet the same “enlightened” mind often remains unaware of how it can deceive itself.

Click on the cover.

Meaning and Purpose in a Conscious Universe is a follow-up to Spirit Calls Nature. It is fascinating to see how, in the process of writing things down in the first book, new perspectives and deeper insights emerged, widening the original horizon. This book also includes several articles I have published in peer-reviewed journals, giving readers the choice of either staying with the more accessible first part or venturing into the more academic sections. Both parts can be read as self-contained works.

As the title makes clear, the central focus of the book is the question of whether the universe has meaning and purpose, and whether asking such a question is meaningful in the first place. I remember pondering these philosophical questions as early as the age of eight. Even then, my still-unformed analytical mind seemed to grasp, through intuition, how implausible it was to deny that reality is meaningful and purposeful, and how everything is guided by a veiled Agency.

Later, as my rational and scientific worldview developed, I came to understand why the standard scientific account portrays a universe that has “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,” as Richard Dawkins famously put it.

Yet, if we are not constrained by ideological preconceptions, a closer inspection reveals that many of the standard physicalist objections rest on unexamined assumptions and overly simplistic models of reality. Indeed, science itself appears to leave ample room for the transcendent—and, in some respects, may even be seen as pointing toward it.

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The two-volume series on quantum physics is of a very different kind from the two above. It does not dwell extensively on metaphysical questions, except perhaps in the final chapter. You might therefore ask, “Yet another book on quantum physics—what’s the point?” My motivation for writing such an extensive account was twofold.

First, the literature tends to offer either overly simplistic popularizations or highly technical treatises. Rarely does one find an author attempting to address the audience in between: readers with a modest background in physics and mathematics who are willing to make an effort, yet are neither prepared nor inclined to work through the technicalities of a university-level textbook.

Second, I wanted to address the philosophical issues often associated with what our everyday cognition perceives as the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics. The books discuss several phenomena that even many physicists never encounter during their formal education—not because they are particularly difficult to understand (they are not, once one moves beyond a Newtonian, and in some respects almost Aristotelian, worldview), but simply because they are not part of the standard curriculum.

In fact, I believe that philosophers of science may benefit the most from these two volumes. They are generally willing to engage seriously with conceptual and technical details, yet most lack the mathematical and physical background required to work through standard textbooks or research papers on a subject that is, admittedly, not always easy to digest.

Throughout the books, I have tried to maintain a careful balance. I ask readers to be comfortable with a little high-school algebra, and then take them by the hand through the central concepts of classical and quantum mechanics. At the same time, I do not demand too much mathematical sophistication, choosing instead to focus on foundational questions and the broader philosophical implications of the worldview that emerges from quantum mechanics.

In a sense, I tried to address a blind spot in modern publishing. On the one hand, there are books aimed at a popular audience that often oversimplify the science, promote overhyped theories, or sacrifice rigor in favor of accessibility, thereby perpetuating misunderstandings. On the other hand, there is the highly specialized (and very expensive!) academic literature, which only a small number of readers are able or willing to engage with.

These two volumes attempt to occupy the space in between. They strive to remain accessible without sacrificing rigor. My aim was to avoid the shortcomings of both extremes. Whether I have succeeded is for the reader to decide.

The first volume focuses on twentieth-century physics; that is, it provides the basic conceptual foundations, such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, quantum entanglement, the superposition principle, vacuum zero-point energy, quantum tunneling, Schrödinger’s cat, the EPR paradox, Bell’s theorem, and introduces the first pioneering modern which-way and quantum eraser experiments. It brings together all that kind of quantum-stuff that people often talk about, but presents them within one coherent overview in a single volume.

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The second volume moves into twenty-first-century physics, covering modern and advanced experimental tests of “quantum ontology,” interpretations of quantum mechanics, the Standard Model of particle physics, mainstream approaches to quantum gravity, recent developments in quantum computing, classical and quantum information theory, the black hole information paradox and much more, reviewing also some of the more speculative areas of current investigation.

Click on the cover

So, if you have flipped through the pages of these books and would like to explore them further by ordering one, you can click on the blue buttons on my my website page. You can either order them as ebooks (EPUB or PDF) and support my work by buying me a reasonable number of coffees, or purchase the books through Amazon.

The amount of time and energy I have poured into these books was certainly not matched by the financial reward. But if they succeed in changing something in the minds or hearts of people, then their mission can be considered accomplished.

1. The other reason is that, on the other hand, independent publishing offers enormous freedom: the ability to continuously review, amend, and update one’s writings—something that would be impossible once a final printed edition has been produced by a traditional publishing house.