Dear reader,

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This book invites you to look at the world from a slightly different angle.

The world is too complex, too layered to be captured by a single formula, a single philosophy, or a single system of belief. For thousands of years, humanity has tried to do exactly that. Religions emerged, philosophical traditions formed, and scientific theories appeared. Each offered its own picture of reality, its own interpretation of consciousness and the meaning of existence. Yet each of these visions has always been only one possible way of describing the world. Every attempt to explain reality is already incomplete the moment it appears.

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This is the nature of observation. Whenever we describe reality, we inevitably highlight only one of its aspects — the human being, matter, or consciousness. The moment attention settles on one dimension, everything else slips out of view. This book offers one possible version.

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As an artist, a researcher of art, and a psychonaut, I have always been drawn toward questions that lie just beyond ordinary attention. I have felt a persistent pull to look where people rarely look and to ask who I am and why I exist. I grew up in the post-Soviet world, where religion existed more as tradition than as a living experience. Like many children of that time, I was baptized in the Orthodox Church. Yet the image of God that was presented to me always felt distant, difficult to reconcile with the world as I perceived it. The idea of an anthropomorphic God somewhere above the world — observing and judging — never aligned with my intuition about reality.

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On one side, there was a clear pull toward questions of consciousness and existence. On the other, traditional explanations often felt too simple for a universe that appeared infinitely complex. Because of this, my path into these questions began not through religion, but through observation, reflection, and direct experience.

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In this book, I share a series of observations and experiences of perception. In many ways, it is an attempt to articulate answers to questions that lived within me for years. These ideas did not appear all at once. They formed gradually — through moments of experience, fragments of insight, and observations gathered over time. Some came in the mountains, surrounded by nature. Others emerged in conversation, or quietly while working. Some arose in altered states of consciousness, when the usual boundaries of perception became more transparent.

I do not claim that these experiences reveal any ultimate truth. It is entirely possible that the perspective presented here will not be the one through which you choose to view reality. It simply offers another way of looking. Over time, I began to feel that there may not be a single version of reality, but an infinite number of them — each valid within the language through which it is described. Life does not depend on the conceptual frameworks we try to impose upon it. Life simply is.

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What follows is my version. It emerged as an attempt to articulate lived experience — the particular way the world has revealed itself to me. For some, it may feel familiar. For others, it may remain only an idea. Both responses are natural.

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Sometimes a person needs only one thing: to remember who they are.

Any worldview is a tool — a way of navigating life, of finding meaning in experience, of recognizing connections between events that might otherwise appear accidental. The path of understanding often unfolds in three movements: a glimpse of unity, immersion in multiplicity, and a return — a recognition that what seemed divided was never separate. Understanding opens into feeling, and when that feeling arrives, the knowing that comes with it becomes difficult to forget.

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This book can be read in many ways: as reflection, as inner dialogue, or as a journey across one possible map of reality. If this version allows you, even briefly, to experience the world as more connected, less chaotic, and more alive, then it has already fulfilled its purpose.

Perhaps, as you read, you will recognize something you already knew — that the drop and the ocean were never separate.