Before The Infinite Garden Cycle dives into mythology and ethics, it rests on a theory of consciousness: that one wider consciousness is locally expressed through embodied filtering, memory limits, and self-modelling.

In less academic language:

We can call this framework Filter Cosmopsychism with Temporary Amnesia, and it’s the philosophical bridge between the IGC’s Vast Soul and its practical ethic of everyday repair. This theory asks: What if consciousness is less like a spark produced separately by each brain, and more like one ancient light filtered through each of our nervous systems?

If so, then our nervous systems don’t just passively receive a universal signal. They shape it and send something back: a private life, a particular body, a local history, a wound no one else can carry, a form of joy no one else can repeat.

The Temporary Amnesia that keeps each life from remembering another’s is the boundary that makes this privacy possible. It lets each life feel fully its own, while the wider consciousness learns through all of them, one perspective at a time.

This is the philosophical scaffold beneath The Infinite Garden Cycle’s ethic of repair. If each of us is an expression of one wider consciousness, then harm and healing happen inside a single extended conscious system. Cruelty becomes more than damage done to someone else. It becomes damage within the larger fabric that makes our minds possible.

Believing this theory isn’t required to read the IGC. It’s an optional lens. One the book keeps asking in each chapter: if we might be each other, what do we owe each other?