One Hand Clapping

In One Hand Clapping, we journey from life's beginnings forward through the eons until we arrive at the stupendous capacities of our own minds, here, now. Our journey will proceed in stages which are not simply geological eras, nor successive branches on the evolutionary tree of life, but are rather stages in the slow crystallization of essences, "nature's ideas". With time, they become progressively more specific, nesting into each other like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls: being alive, being animal, being human, being a self. As we move forward through these nested boundaries, it will become clear that the human experience is special not because of any one of them, but because of the complete set.

And then, something curious will happen. When we reveal the entire matryoshka - and thus glimpse the human experience from the vantage point of nature - we will see that what makes you and me different from the rest of the world are the very same things that we contribute to its unified, eternal river of essences. What we think separates us from nature, in fact, makes us inseparable from it.