What makes objects useful is that they hold still. Fixed in space, they wait for us: at the dinner table, my water glass stays where it is, ready for the hand when I am thirsty. But this stubbornness has another side — and not only for objects. The same fixity runs through our mortgages, our schedules, our deadlines and obligations, until we can feel imprisoned by our own lives. Little by little, we become convinced that reality itself is crystallised, set hard and unchangeable.

We tend to forget that what we meet are not fixed objects, but fixed interpretations of an otherwise fluid world. We learned these interpretations over years, we continue building them still, and so they are ours — our authorship, though we rarely recognise it as such. If we feel trapped in our version of the world, it is only because we have convinced ourselves the prison walls are real.

At its most fundamental level, reality is not composed of objects with fixed locations, but of fluid possibilities waiting to be realised. Awareness can navigate both: the crystallised world of objects, and the fluid world of possibility, where it is most at home. And though nothing here is fixed, awareness is not vague or formless. On the contrary — it is sensitive and specific.

Awareness has an innate ability to create. It is the one designing the patterns we take for the world — the blade of grass, the sound of water, the voice of a friend, or C major. Every pattern, the beautiful ones and the difficult or painful ones alike, is written in sand by awareness, for the sake of teaching itself about itself. Each is drawn and dissolves, while the sand remains - for a while.

In this vision, the stubborn forms are in fact fugitive, and awareness is what is stable.

Its power to create extends in every direction, with astonishing specificity — including along the axis of past, present and future. Awareness creates not only time itself, but the experiences strung across our lives like beads on a thread. And as their author, it can return to any point on that thread and write it again.

One might object that the past cannot be changed — that events, once they have happened, pass into the book of history. Yet we revise the past all the time. Memory is not a photograph frozen in time but a living, evolving experience, like wine in a bottle that keeps maturing, or a tree on a meadow that grows taller every year. This is precisely the work of the psychotherapist: helping awareness return to a particular experience and form a different relationship to it — one that liberates rather than imprisons.

As awareness expands beyond the world of objects, it bathes every experience in its light. If the past can be revised, so too what is approaching — the future is not fixed ahead of us like a destination, but open, still unwritten. 

What we are shapes what we experience now. It is a little like a playwright finding each line as the actor speaks — listening to the performance to know what comes next, so that the play is written and performed in the same breath.

And none of this is done by effort. The past is not rewritten by force, nor the future summoned by will. It happens by being — awareness resting in its own nature, where everything it touches becomes possible again.

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Choose a small memory — nothing momentous. A short exchange, an ordinary afternoon, something from a few weeks ago. Pick one you can hold easily.

Notice, first, that it is not a photograph. Details shift as you look; the feeling of it now is not quite the feeling of it then. It has kept changing without your permission — like wine, quietly maturing in the dark.

Now look at the context around that memory — the space surrounding it: what came before it, what it led to, who you have become since. Watch how the meaning moves as the frame widens. Nothing about the event has changed. Only the light around it.

You have just done something quietly remarkable. You returned to the past and found it still open. This is not a technique to master; it is simply what awareness does, once we stop believing the past is set in stone.

Continuum exists for evenings like these. And in between, short reads and weekly podcasts that rekindle that eagerness and sense of play.

This letter is to thank you for following our work and for subscribing; and to express gratitude to the two founding members and two paid subscribers.

We are setting a simple aim: one open evening every month, carried by the readers of Continuum rather than by tickets alone. That takes about 10 founding members and 50 paid supporters.

This month: 4 of 60.

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Each issue from now on will carry a single line showing how close we are getting to realizing our aim. Thank you for supporting our work.

Dorian Matei

In this first episode of the Continuum podcast, Laura Lupascu speaks with Dorian Matei, author of Autobiography of Light, about awareness as the source of life: non-voluntary, continuous, already here. They explore what it means to liberate consciousness from ‘I’, why evolution is a liberation and not an achievement, and where practice and discipline still belong.

Autobiography of Light is available in print and as an ebook, with the audiobook to follow. More at continuumfield.org

The idea is among the oldest in philosophy, and Epictetus was one of the first to dwell on it. If the prison is within, the shape of the escape is less clear. Is it eradicating the ego, mastering oneself, restraining emotions, emptying the mind — or all of these at once? Whatever the aim, the route almost always passes through some form of practice and concentration, prayer, or meditation.

What follows places this voluntary effort within a wider frame, and lets the prison itself show where that effort belongs.

What is the prison?

The obvious answer is the mind, caught in its own activity, running day and night without pause. But look closer. Was the mind always a prison? 

Here is an opening. We were not born with an imprisoned mind. It took time to appear, and even then it grew slowly, over several years. The Eden we arrived in was free, open, sensitive and aware. Learning, playing, laughing, healing and growing happened by merging with whatever surrounded us, holding nothing back. Absence, disconnection and fear came later, gradually.

What is not in the prison?

Sensitive awareness comes before the mind, and gives birth to it. Its nature is to commune freely with its surroundings, touching and being touched, in constant exchange with whatever it meets. Freedom is its nature too, and nothing can imprison it. This is the awareness we were born as: non-voluntary - not willed, nor the lapse of will; it is what we simply were and still are.

The learned self — call it the voluntary self — is born of will: I can achieve this, I can control myself, I decide. It grips, steers and keeps score. Its world is effort and concentration, productive and yet confining, because wherever it goes, it casts a shadow: an involuntary self. Concentration drifts into mindlessness, achievement meets failure, pleasure fades into disappointment. Voluntary and involuntary are two sides of one coin and cannot exist without each other. 

Non-voluntary awareness is what is watching the coin.

What is the escape?

If freedom is the nature of awareness, the very idea of escape turns strange. Without something to achieve or control, effort loses its meaning. Unrestrained, awareness remains curious and playful, giving itself to each moment fully.

For awareness, evolution is not acquiring but experiencing. The struggle to achieve is a burden taken on, borrowed from the voluntary self, which lives by different rules. Guilt, regret, anger - each rests on the voluntary self's laws: I should have chosen otherwise; things should have been under control. Subtler still is the burden of the search itself: freedom treated as an achievement, the ego as an enemy to defeat, the mind as something to master. This is the voluntary self's rule laid over an awareness that never needed to escape because it was born free.

Free and fettered at once

The voluntary self can learn restraint, but it cannot be destroyed or abandoned, and neither can it be liberated. It is woven of the very rules it would have to leave behind.

Seen from here, meditation and prayer are not the way out. They are efforts of the voluntary self, valuable as any honest effort is, and bound by the same rules. Freedom was never theirs to win. 

It is not the self practising awareness; it is awareness practising its innate freedom.

As awareness manifests and experiences, it realises that the two worlds, the one free and the other fettered, are not opposed and do not compete with each other. 

What matters is that awareness releases the burdens that were never truly its own. They always belong to the voluntary self.

Small aim:

The "should" catch. Every time a should appears ("I should have said…", "this should be going better"), recognise it as the voluntary self's law and ask lightly, 

"Whose burden is this?" 

OR

Setting something down. In an ordinary moment such as putting down a cup, a bag, your keys, notice the hand letting go. It's the body's version of releasing a burden, and it happens dozens of times a day without will. Observe how to release is not an action, it is allowing another force to take over.

We cannot escape the world of objects, nor should we want to. Life here is about navigating a stable world, and there is nothing wrong with moving toward what is beautiful and easy, or away from what we dislike. Learning — recognising repeating patterns — is the source of some of our most fulfilling experiences: playing an instrument, reading a novel. Seen from one angle, life here is nothing but patterns: learning them, and then recognising them again in ever-changing contexts.

It is possible to have one foot in the world of objects we navigate daily, and the other in the fluid and undifferentiated world of awareness. Living in both reveals something surprising: they are not contradictory. They complete each other. The world of objects and the world of fluid awareness are woven from the same thread.

Living in a world of objects does not necessarily make us captive to it. It is possible to interact with water, sky, apple and friend without feeling that we own them, or that they exist to serve us.

What binds us is something else: the sense of being separate from everything around us, the conviction that we ourselves are an isolated entity, standing above the rest. This is the strange trap — it makes us kings and prisoners at once. And it rests on a misunderstanding about consciousness itself, as though awareness were a possession that isolates us and raises us above every other living thing, granting us the right to use them as we wish. Human as this feels, it is a relatively recent invention.

Look at the cultures we once dismissed as primitive — Native American, shamanic, Aboriginal, Inuit — and a very different relationship appears between people and the world around them. Their vision rests on collaboration and mutual dependence. The ‘objects’ we treat as resources — water, earth, air, rain — are held to be at least as sacred and central as we humans are. The division between animate and inanimate blurs: human, butterfly, oak, stone, wind and raven are all moved by the same divine breath, all equally essential in the weaving of the tapestry of life.

And something startling emerges: awareness is not what separates us from everything else. It is what binds us together — not only humans to one another, but every form to every other, all held in the same limitless awareness.

This is what it means to shift our attention from objects to relations. To say ‘I am here’ is no longer to isolate a point. This ‘here’ includes everything we touch and everything that touches us — and in it there is no superior and no inferior.

This expansion of awareness beyond the small circle of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ has immense implications — the first being how we stand toward ourselves. Instead of insatiable consumers, we begin to see ourselves as creators.

In the most ordinary moments — walking, feeling the wind on our face, watching a leaf fall through the air — there is an exchange. Nothing is too small or too isolated to take part in it. Each moment has something to give, and something to receive.

To see oneself as a quiet participant in the making of each moment changes everything. It restores the relationship we had as children, when life was created in the living of it.

Small aim: 

Ordinarily we take awareness to be something we possess and direct: I am here, and I attend to that. Try setting a different aim. Let awareness be the medium rather than the instrument — the water rather than the swimmer.

Sound arrives. Light arrives. A feeling rises, a thought, someone's voice. Notice how each one is already in awareness before you do anything about it. Even the sense of ‘I’ is just a part of this medium of awareness, not the originator of it. 

Notice how fluid and adaptable awareness is, and how it is able to connect sounds, objects, actions that are otherwise separated. 

To us, reality is a long list of objects. But what if reality, at its most fundamental level, is not made of objects? What if friend, apple, water, thunder is defined less by what it is and more by how it touches everything around it? What if relation is more real than things?

Our fixation with objects is responsible for much of our suffering: life is mostly an accumulation of objects we desire, and a rejection of others we don’t. By turning reality into a world of objects, we have become owners: we use or possess everything that surrounds us by default. But perhaps even more significant, this objectivization has made us passive consumers to such a degree that, for most of us, the notion of fulfillment is understood as unlimited access to possessions.

And so, we set ourselves at the center of our objectual world, kings and slaves at the same time.

We feel superior to earth, bird, tree, stone, dog, water, with the right to use them for our benefit, at any cost. What if everything was not made for us? Storms, the night sky, the sound of wind in the pines, a snowflake, first light — what if none of it was ever meant for us? What if the web of life does not hold us humans at the center?

What happens when we loosen reality from the grip of ‘I’? Then we watch everything flutter freely in space with nothing to pin it down. The dissolution of ‘I’ may be terrifying precisely because it’s liberating — when nothing is ours to hold, there is nothing to lose; and in that, a strange freedom we forgot.

It is possible to make objects recede in the background; when that happens, their boundaries start to bleed, and what separates one thing from another becomes fuzzy and undifferentiated. One may think that navigating such a world would be madness. And yet, we were born and spent years in this fluid landscape, and felt very much at ease in it; then, we learned to isolate ‘things’, to tell peach from table, and red from sorrow. This recognizing — learning to draw the outline around a thing and then matching it to whatever we meet thereafter — serves us well. But sorting was never built for accuracy, it was built for adaptability. To thrive in a flowing reality, we make the world harden into place, at least for a little while. This is what learning is: a momentary freezing, just long enough for us to respond.

And the more the fluid world we knew crystallized into objects with names, the more imprisoned we became.

If our world of cherished objects is set free, something else emerges: the way things touch one another, and are touched in return is more essential than any single object frozen in time and place. At its core, both reality and awareness are relational. Within this fluid matrix, nothing exists in isolation.

This relation is most clearly expressed in perception, which is a space of encounter; awareness and the world meet in your eye. This is where objects are born, and so to experience a shift from object to relation, we must learn once again how to perceive. 

Perception is a place where every detail of daily life, both fleeting or lasting, is meticulously crafted: the voice of a friend, the nearby bird, the warmth of the sun, the outline of a chair, the contour of love, or the boundary of fear. These are our personal constructs. We own the interpretations, being their author, but we do not own reality.

Reality, as awareness meets it, is not made of objects. It is fluid — everything blending into everything else, without beginning or end, without edges. And yet it is not blurry or vague. How can this be?

This is something we have all felt. In love, we do not separate this smile from that dress, this fragrance from that gesture; we love them, all at once. Their whole existence has fused into a single presence — undifferentiated, and yet not vague (though sometimes confusing).

We may blame the mind for turning reality into objects, but we should remember that our bodies are made to resonate with their surroundings, and this is no acquired skill: from the earliest age, the nervous system mirrors its environment — one of the first ways we ever learn. Empathy is relation felt directly: when we practice it, the space between us and another dissolves, and we feel as one.

Both body and awareness were made for this — a world where relation is more tangible than objects themselves. They do not merely cope in it; they thrive.

In a world without objects, awareness has nothing to possess, nothing to crave, and nothing to escape. Reality is fluid, and here awareness is at home, continuously practicing its innate freedom. What if the idea of an ‘objective’ reality is just a habit?

As any habit, it can be altered; one of the most effective ways to alter perceptive habits is through play. Here are two small games to try:

Where the Branch Meets the Sky

Find a pair of things near you — a cup on the table, a branch and the sky behind it. Rather than looking at one or the other, hold both at once softly; study the place where they meet: the edge where one becomes the other. Stay there a moment. Notice that the outline is not only a line which separates, but also a place which unites: they mutually define each other. When we draw an outline of a branch, we reveal both the branch and the sky simultaneously.

Who Touches Whom

Or, close your eyes, and ask a friend to place something in your hand, such as a stone or a small object; instead of naming it, feel only the meeting: its weight settling into your hand, your warmth passing into it, the quiet exchange between skin and surface. Don’t ask what it is. Notice the need to constantly move your fingers to gather information. In this process, we compare, measure and assess texture and temperature. It is from this interaction that meaning arises.