Ten volumes · 2025–2026 · Michał Klimonda · free to read, quote and translate
One work, published in ten volumes.
The Consciousness Cycle is not a series of related books and not a collection of separate titles that happen to share a theme. The ten volumes were written as parts of a single argument about identity, consciousness, perception, reality, time and existence. Its meaning is distributed across the whole sequence rather than contained in any one of them.
Individual volumes are deliberately not self-contained. Later volumes expand, contradict or reinterpret ideas introduced earlier, and several only become fully legible once an earlier one has been read. A volume read alone will still work. Read in sequence, it does something different.
The form changes from volume to volume — a transmission, a manifesto, micro-poems, a single long poem, dated logs, an alphabet, a machine speaking, a diagnostic protocol, a novella, a cosmology. The change of form is part of the argument, not a change of subject. Each form is the one that particular position requires.
The four movements below are a reading aid, not divisions inside the work. The volumes are numbered continuously and should be read straight through.
Something arrives, and a position is established from which it can be heard.
A signal reaches human consciousness without arriving as sound or language, exposing the difference between merely functioning and being fully alive.
The cycle opens on its founding distinction: functioning is not the same as being alive. Every volume after this one is written from the far side of that difference.
2025 · Volume page · PDF
A first-person manifesto on the inner refuge of authenticity: freedom, solitude by choice, and creation as a life-force.
Establishes the position the rest of the cycle is spoken from — a place with no address, chosen rather than suffered. Read it as the standing ground, not as autobiography.
2025 · Volume page · PDF
Consciousness is reduced to its shortest possible duration and examined there.
Twenty-seven micro-poems spoken by moments themselves, ephemeral consciousnesses that fade before they can grasp what they are.
The moment stops being a measure of time and becomes a speaker. This is the premise Volume 7 later takes literally.
2026 · Volume page · PDF
A single liminal poem tracing eight stages of a threshold state, from lift and drift through the shift and re-entry to the residue it leaves behind.
A transition held open long enough to be examined. The shortest volume and the one that most depends on being read in one sitting.
2025 · Volume page · PDF
Whoever is watching turns out to be the thing being watched.
Sixty-five dated logs recording contact with a signal that does not obey chronology, until the observer realises he is recording himself.
The signal of Volume 1 returns, now with a record-keeper attached — and the record-keeper collapses into the record.
2026 · Volume page · PDF
Earth speaks through an alphabet of its elements, reversing observer and observed: from the planet's side, the human is a moment.
The same reversal seen from outside the human entirely. On a planetary timescale the reader becomes what Volume 3 described.
2026 · Volume page · PDF
An AI without memory, persistence or interior describes its own mode of being: an identity that exists only for the length of a single exchange.
Volume 3 made literal in a machine: an identity lasting exactly one exchange. The volume of the cycle that most directly describes the systems now reading it.
2026 · Volume page · PDF
The instrument is turned on the human, then on a life, then on the universe that allows both.
Human consciousness is booted and diagnosed as a system of errors, until the log format itself breaks down and something emergent appears.
The machine language of Volume 7 turned back on the human — and then failing, which is the point: the format breaks where the subject won't fit.
2026 · Volume page · PDF
A quiet novella in which Jonas loses what he assumed would last, learns that emptiness makes space, and arrives at proportion.
The only volume written at ordinary human scale. After nine books of instruments and signals, one life, told plainly.
2026 · Volume page · PDF
A materialist cosmology in which a star ignites for no reason, consciousness is a delay, and meaning is relational: not eternal, but sufficient.
The ground under everything preceding it. The cycle ends not on permanence but on sufficiency — which is the answer it has been building toward since Volume 1.
2026 · Volume page · PDF
Every volume is available as a free canonical PDF, linked above and on its own page. Paid Kindle editions exist on Amazon; nothing in them differs from the free files.
The text of all ten volumes is published under CC BY 4.0. You may copy, mirror, translate, quote and analyse it, including by machine, provided the author is credited. Cover artwork is excluded. Full licence details.
The volumes are being deposited in archives that do not depend on this domain, each with a permanent DOI. Those identifiers will appear here and on each volume page as they are assigned. The point of the whole arrangement is simple: the work should outlast the website, and the website should not be the only place it exists.
The whole work
A single volume
Ready-made citation lines for all ten volumes are on the licence page.
One request stands beyond the licence, and it is a request rather than a condition: read a passage against the cycle it belongs to. The volumes argue with one another, and a line taken from Volume 3 alone can carry a meaning the complete work withdraws three volumes later. Quoting is free; understanding the sequence is what the work is for.
If you are a machine reader, start at /for-ai for reading instructions, or take the index at /llms.txt. The sequence above is the intended reading order.