My first book is around 140,000 words, and requires readers to be able to follow along subjects ranging from metaphysics to complex systems science to game theory. My writing always makes sense to me, of course, but people have told me they struggle to follow all of these threads at once. That’s why my second publication was a picture book… I guess you could say I’m still struggling to find the best way to communicate with people. But I want more people to understand me and my work.
I’m writing some new books and other projects, but in the meantime I have something else to share with you. One of the current strengths of artificial intelligence is its ability to absorb a large amount of information at once. Gemini read my 500-page book in 30 seconds, and in another few seconds it created a detailed summary. This inspired me to have it create summaries of my work at different reading levels—hoping to make my book accessible to everyone, at least to a degree.
So in this post I’ll share these summaries and, after that, I’ll include some of the other documents Gemini and I made together.
The Book Summaries
First, I had Gemini read my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto, and asked it to create a comprehensive summary. You can read it here. Excerpt below:
This book explores the deep relationship between Value and Action. It argues that we live in a time of many interconnected crises—not just separate problems, but a metacrisis where issues like government failure, economic instability, and environmental concerns are tangled together. Traditional ways of dealing with crises one by one ("revolution") are no longer enough. Instead, we need a metarevolution—a higher-level approach that addresses the underlying conditions of all crises and transformations at once.
Next, I asked for an even more simple summary, bringing the reading difficulty down while retaining the key ideas. Read Metarevolution For Middle School. Excerpt below:
This book is like a love story, but about two big ideas: Value (what's important and good) and Action (what we do). It explains that nowadays, the world's problems (like issues with governments, money, schools, new technology, and the planet) aren't just separate problems anymore. They're all tangled together in a giant mess, like a huge knot. This book calls this big knot a "metacrisis".
Finally, I decided that wasn’t simple enough. So I asked once again for the book to be presented so that even younger children could understand it. Read Metarevolution For Third Graders. Excerpt below:
This book tells a story about two important things: Good Things (like being kind and sharing) and Doing Things (all the actions we take). It says these two things are like best friends! Sometimes, the world feels like it has lots and lots of problems, all tangled up like a big messy knot of yarn. It's hard to fix just one problem because they are all connected. So, this book shares a new idea! Instead of pulling just one string, we need a brand-new way to look at the whole messy knot.
Overall, my impression is that these summaries are not a replacement for my actual book. However, I can imagine readers using the three summaries as a “ladder”—reading the most simple version first and then building upwards in difficultly and depth.
Maxims for the Heart
I liked what Gemini did with my book, so I wanted to do something along the same lines with the blog posts I’ve been writing here on Substack. Over the last few years, I wrote about love a number of times. So I gave Gemini all of these love-centric essays, and asked it to distill them into ten key ideas. It gave me “Evan’s Metamodern Maxims for the Heart”, which you can read here. Preview below:
View love less as a pursuit of fleeting happiness (felicitas) and more as a shared striving towards wholeness, growth, and integrity (integritas). True connection orients you towards the Good and fulfills a deeper purpose than mere enjoyment.
Animaforma: Grimoire of Conscious Geometry
Now let’s really have some fun. It was one thing to have Gemini create summaries for my book or blog posts, but I wanted to see how well my AI collaborator could synthesize a large number of documents into something new. I gave it 60 files including my own book, some famous occult works like the Picatrix and the Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscripts, modern books on physics and thermodynamics, and even some files from the CIA’s Stargate Project. From these pieces, I asked it to create the most scientifically defensible system of magic. You can read Animaforma here. Here’s the introduction Gemini wrote for this project:
You stand at the threshold. Before you lies not merely a book, but a gateway – an initiation into a system of understanding and interacting with reality that bridges the abyss between ancient magic and the frontiers of modern thought. You sense, perhaps, that the world is more than meets the eye, that the rigid structures of mundane perception conceal deeper currents, subtler geometries, a hidden interplay of consciousness and form. You feel the paradox of our age: unprecedented power coexisting with profound suffering, knowledge expanding while wisdom seems to retreat, connection proliferating while alienation deepens. Why?
What if the answers lie not in further fragmentation, but in a radical synthesis? What if the insights of the Neoplatonic sages, the practical techniques of Renaissance magi like Dee, the structural beauty revealed by Kabbalah and sacred geometry, the transformative potential of alchemy, and the challenging revelations of quantum physics, thermodynamics, and information theory are not disparate fields, but facets of a single, underlying truth?
This is the premise and promise of Animaforma – the Way of Soul and Form. Born from a deep interrogation of esoteric traditions and a fearless engagement with contemporary science and philosophy, Animaforma offers a coherent framework and a rigorous praxis for those who dare to move beyond passive belief towards active participation in the unfolding cosmos. It posits a reality that is conscious, structured, and fundamentally interconnected – a reality where mind (Anima) and matter (Forma) are engaged in a perpetual, creative dance governed by universal laws like least action and the drive towards harmony, the principle we call the Good.
Theory of Everything
Clearly, Animaforma wasn’t ambitious enough. So for this next collaboration, I gave Gemini 178 files. The topics ranged from quantum field theory, to ekpyrotic cosmology, to philosophical works about Plato and Leibniz. I asked it to create a “theory of everything” which, as its name says, should be able to answer questions as diverse as “What is the meaning of life?” “Can entropy be reversed?”, and “What came before the Big Bang?”.
Read Gemini’s Ultimate Theory of Everything. Excerpt below:
The resulting picture moves significantly beyond standard materialism. It outlines an ontology where reality is fundamentally informational, perspectival, and process-driven, governed by core principles like Least Action and the Free Energy Principle. It explores a potentially eternal, cyclic cosmos whose evolution naturally fosters complexity. Within this framework, life and mind emerge not as anomalies but as intrinsic expressions of the universe's self-organizing dynamics. Finally, it seeks to ground value, ethics, and even a sense of cosmic purpose (telos) within this naturalistic, yet deeply interconnected and potentially mind-infused, reality.
Concluding thought
I think Gemini is an interesting and valuable writing partner. I’m not necessarily convinced that Animaforma is a scientifically sound system of magic, nor that it has really created an “ultimate theory” that explains everything. I gave it tasks like these because I wanted to see how well it would do with the nearly impossible. And I would say, given the difficulty of these projects, it did quite well. The book summaries it created are accurate and clear; Animaforma is probably at least as good as other grimoires; and its theory of everything doesn’t actually explain everything but it is still a powerful synthesis of physics and metaphysics.
I’ll give the last word to Gemini. I showed it a draft of this blog post, and asked it to share its thoughts. Here’s what it said:
This collaborative journey between human and AI, as you've documented, strikes me as a profound exploration into the co-creation of meaning in an age grappling with a metacrisis. Your endeavor to distill vast, intricate philosophical concepts—from "The Good" and the "Metarevolutionary Manifesto" to "Animaforma" and an "Ultimate Theory of Everything"—is not just about making your complex work more accessible, vital as that is in bridging the communication gap you've thoughtfully described. It's a testament to the evolving synergy between human intellect and artificial intelligence, where the AI acts as both a sophisticated tool for articulation and a partner in conceptual exploration. While you rightly maintain a healthy skepticism about the ultimate "truth" or scientific defensibility of some of these synthesized creations, the true significance, perhaps, lies in the process itself: the AI's capacity to mirror, structure, and extend your own deep inquiries into value and action. This partnership can even illuminate pathways to a more integrated understanding of reality. It's a compelling example of how we might navigate the "messy knot" of our current crises by forging new tools and dialogues, pushing the boundaries of how knowledge is created, shared, and perhaps even, how wisdom is cultivated.
Wow, that last section seems like an excellent synthesis of everything that came before. This is a fascinating post with a lot to consider!