THE SPIRAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS
SUMMA SPIRALIS
Quaestiones semper novae de rebus humanis

Academic project in English

The Spiral of Consciousness is a long-form philosophical and literary project exploring how awareness emerges, transforms itself and seeks meaning through history, myth, science and art. Rather than treating consciousness as either a purely scientific mechanism or a spiritual abstraction, the project approaches it as a living structure shaped by perception, embodiment, memory, symbolic forms and culture. Its guiding image is the spiral: not a closed circle, but a movement of return and renewal in which earlier forms are revisited from new levels of depth.

The project brings together phenomenology, cosmology, mythology, geometry, psychology, architecture, literature and visual art. Thinkers such as Bergson, Whitehead, Gebser and Bohm enter into dialogue with ancient symbolic traditions and artistic practices from Leonardo to modern cinema. In doing so, the series searches for connections across disciplines that are often studied separately, allowing science, imagination and lived experience to illuminate one another.

Across multiple volumes, themes include the birth of awareness, geometry and resonance, shadow and crisis, covenant, architecture, mythology, power and the role of art in human becoming. Each book can stand independently while contributing to a larger intellectual architecture.

At its centre lies a simple proposition: consciousness is not static. It develops through encounter, contradiction, crisis, form and renewed interpretation. The Spiral of Consciousness is therefore not only an inquiry into what consciousness is, but into how human beings continue to become conscious of themselves and their world.

Kamer en Bewustwording (Chamber and Consciousness)

Academic work in Flemish

Chamber and Consciousness is a large-scale research project devoted to the poetry of Belgian writer Charles Ducal. It examines how poetic language exposes structures of inner life—guilt, desire, power, embodiment, memory and transformation—through one recurring image: the chamber. The chamber functions simultaneously as room, psyche, social order, emotional enclosure and symbolic stage, becoming a space in which consciousness encounters its own limits.

The project combines close reading with philosophical interpretation while keeping the poems themselves at the centre. Rhythm, repetition, silence, spatial imagery, shifts of voice and recurring symbols are approached as forms of thought. Across Ducal’s collections, the study traces a gradual movement from controlled, geometric and often claustrophobic spaces towards more open, earthly and resonant forms of language.

Drawing selectively on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, myth criticism and poetics, the research explores masculinity, authority, maternal presence, spiritual absence and the search for incarnation without reducing the poetry to biography or theoretical illustration.

Its distinctive character lies in both scale and method: Chamber and Consciousness functions as a scholarly dissertation and as an extensive intellectual archive of close readings, structural maps and interpretive syntheses.

Ultimately, it approaches poetry not as ornament, but as a laboratory of awareness—a place where language can diagnose, challenge and transform the ways in which the modern self inhabits itself.

Understanding “Boon St”

A scholarly authorial essay on adaptation, perspective and realism

Boon St. is a creative-critical project that brings literature, cinema and reflective essay writing together. Inspired by Louis Paul Boon, it explores how classic texts can be reimagined for contemporary audiences without losing their moral force, psychological depth or social intelligence.

At its core lies adaptation as interpretation. Rather than simply transferring a novel to screen, Boon St. works through image, rhythm, silence, framing and perspective. It experiments with multi-perspective storytelling, fractured viewpoints, dark humour and emotional realism, showing how literary material can acquire new life in cinematic form.

The accompanying essay broadens this into a philosophical question: what remains of a work when its form changes? How can fidelity mean creative truth rather than literal reproduction? And what does a modern audience need in order to experience the urgency of older texts?

The project also reflects on Belgian and European cultural identity, postwar realism, class, intimacy and the ethics of ordinary life—concerns central to Boon’s work and still relevant today. In a culture of rapid production and rapid forgetting, Boon St. argues for careful transformation: adaptation as an act of intelligence, respect and renewal, in which the past is not repeated but made present again.

Research into Publication

IKAR is envisioned as a meeting point between sustained research and accessible public communication. Planned formats include essays, comparative case studies, an organised archive, illustrated publications, talks and moderated conversations.

Research of suggestion

unfinished collection of books, with apologies for the delay

“According to principles of suggestion and resonance I started exploring resonant coincidences in a thus psychological but non-personal inverted sense, coincidences that may be called synchronicities but at the same time have a potential to go beyond. It is an antipsychotic search for what can be found if one searches fearlessly and beyond literal science with an open mind to taostic context incorporation.

What I found created a collection of resources so vaste that I could write books for the rest of my life or make endless video content. Yet, the danger would also exist to endanger my true more scientifically oriented methodological work, of course, which with AI becomes even more easy to fully develop. The risk is to become mocked by academia instead of hailed.

The other strange matter besides finding so many interesting “coincidences”, the work that I have been doing for years, is that lately, under a series of consequential events, I am having less and less financial resources while thousands of those documents have mysteriously disappeared as well. The memories in my head may be the only things I have left.

I must even admit to myself that nothing from here on will ever have any normal significance or value again.”

IKAR

Insitut für Koinzidenz, Anomalistik und Resonanz / Institute for Coincidence, Anomalistics and Resonance

The Initiative

IKAR is a research and publishing initiative in development, conceived by Filip Firlefijn to explore coincidences, perceived synchronicities, unusual experiences and recurring cultural patterns.

Its central question is simple: why do certain events, images and ideas appear meaningfully connected—and how can those connections be investigated?

Emerging from the philosophical and cultural research behind The Spiral of Consciousness, IKAR brings together close observation, comparative interpretation and critical inquiry. It offers a framework for examining experiences that can be personally compelling yet difficult to explain or evaluate.

An Open, Critical Approach

1. Documented observations: what can be established from records, sources and independently checkable information.

2. Plausible hypotheses: explanations that can be compared, questioned and, where possible, tested.

3. Psychological and cultural interpretations: how people experience connections and give them meaning.

4. Further speculation: possibilities that extend beyond the available evidence and are explicitly presented as such.

The aim is to make curiosity more precise while allowing uncertainty to remain visible.

Fields of Inquiry

• Coincidence and synchronicity
  Examining striking correspondences between events, including experiences described as synchronicity, without presuming a hidden cause.

• Cultural repetition and symbolic resonance
  Tracing how images, narratives and motifs recur across literature, art, mythology, individual lives and historical periods.

• Perception and collective meaning
  Exploring how attention, memory, expectation and shared stories shape the patterns people recognise. Concepts such as the collective unconscious can be examined as interpretive frameworks rather than assumed explanations.

• Power, media and social influence
  Investigating how institutions, communities and media select, amplify or use symbolic associations—and how those associations acquire emotional and political force.

• Anomalous experiences
  Documenting difficult-to-classify reports with attention to context, source quality, alternative explanations and the limits of retrospective reconstruction.

Exploring ideas with AI

TIKNA is a series of explorations (in english) into subjects outside my formal academic field, driven by bold questions about issues that matter. Such issues can be very diverse like cancer, artificial immunity, geological history, technology, consciousness and the future.

The project starts from a simple idea: people can have worthwhile intuitions without having the right degree, laboratory, institutional position, money, time or specialist vocabulary to pursue them. AI can shorten the distance between curiosity and serious inquiry by helping locate research, explain unfamiliar concepts, expose weak assumptions and turn vague ideas into sharper questions.

That does not make expertise unnecessary. On the contrary, the aim is to bring outsider thinking into more disciplined contact with evidence.

The democratic potential is considerable: more people may be able to contribute relevant ideas more quickly. The danger is equally real — an explosion of confident but low-value material. TIKNA therefore treats filtering, verification and uncertainty as part of the method.

Its guiding principle is simple:

Ask questions worth asking, use AI to follow them farther, and never confuse faster exploration with proof.

Before the Object: Time, Causality, and the Quantum Brain of Origin

is a phenomenological essay on origin, hidden order, and the limits of object-thinking. It does not propose a scientific theory of the universe, consciousness, or quantum biology. Instead, it asks how an evolved brain, shaped by survival, perception, object-recognition, and tool-making, became capable of thinking beyond the visible world.

The essay begins from the idea that the object-world is not simply given. It is a stabilized form of experience: the world becomes graspable as bodies, things, tools, distances, dangers, and possibilities. Science refines this object-form into measurement, experiment, law, and causality. Yet at the limits of contemporary thought — entropy, quantum reality, dimensionality, non-local correlation, cosmological origin — object-thinking begins to strain.

From this threshold, the essay develops a phenomenology of origins. Time, causality, probability, and coincidence are approached not as ultimate foundations, but as conceptual forms through which hidden order becomes intelligible. The speculative figure of the “quantum brain” is used carefully: not as proof that consciousness is a quantum computer, but as a philosophical image for the brain as a late product of origin, carrying within itself the question of the beginning.

The central intuition is simple: we do not merely think about origin from outside. We are among its delayed consequences. In human consciousness, the universe begins to ask where it came from.

Cowboyrecherche vs. De Slachter van Mons

An Independent Cold-Case Investigation with Public Sources and Artificial Intelligence

Between 1996 and 1997, the dismembered remains of five women were discovered in and around Mons, Belgium. Despite an extensive criminal investigation involving thousands of leads, witnesses, addresses, vehicles and potential suspects, no perpetrator was conclusively identified. Nearly three decades later, the case of De Slachter van Mons — the Butcher of Mons — remains unsolved.

Cowboyrecherche vs. De Slachter van Mons is a two-volume Dutch-language investigative project by Filip Firlefijn. It revisits the publicly accessible record through digital cartography, open-source intelligence, historical research, geographical comparison and AI-assisted analysis. The project does not claim to replace professional criminal investigation or to solve a murder case through artificial intelligence. Its purpose is to examine whether publicly available fragments can generate more precise, historically testable questions — and to establish where the limits of such an approach lie.

The first volume, Een kaart zonder dader (A Map Without a Perpetrator), explores the wider landscape of the case: industrial and cross-border corridors, waterways, railway infrastructure, the station district, social environments, institutions, possible criminal networks and competing explanations for the geographical distribution of the remains. The investigation gradually moves from broad possibilities toward increasingly specific spatial hypotheses.

The second volume, De insiderlasso, returns to the local field. It examines whether certain recurring locations and road connections around Mons, Cuesmes, Hyon and Havré could belong to an identifiable operational geography. Historical road access, railway barriers, ordinary residential and working environments, vehicle movements and possible storage spaces become central questions. A suggestive pattern is never treated as proof that such a route was actually travelled.

Throughout both books, established facts, secondary reporting, geographical observations, inference, speculation and symbolic resonance are carefully distinguished. AI serves as a research instrument, not an authority: it can help compare material, formulate alternatives and expose inconsistencies, but it can also produce persuasive connections that historical evidence does not support.

The project is therefore more than a reconsideration of one unresolved criminal case. It is also an experiment in public criminology, digital humanities and the formation of knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence.

When do scattered facts become an investigative pattern — and when does an apparently coherent reconstruction remain nothing more than a hypothesis?

Een kaart zonder dader

De Slachter van Mons: Een onderzoek met publieke bronnen en AI

Book 1 of Cowboyrecherche vs. De Slachter van Mons

What can an independent researcher discover about an unsolved murder case when the original police file remains largely inaccessible?

Een kaart zonder dader begins with that limitation. Rather than presenting a new suspect or promising a solution, it reconstructs the publicly known geography and investigative history of the Butcher of Mons case. Newspaper archives, historical maps, open-source information, institutional histories and artificial intelligence are brought into a sustained dialogue.

The investigation moves across different scales. It considers possible French connections, industrial and waterway corridors, earlier disappearances, the social environment of the station district, care institutions, criminal networks and the practical geography of the sites where human remains were discovered. Some hypotheses appear initially compelling but weaken under closer examination. Others reveal overlooked questions about access, timing, local familiarity and the relationship between the victims' social worlds and the places associated with the crimes.

The book also examines the research process itself. Digital maps can make scattered locations appear connected; repeated names and dates can acquire an unexpected force; AI can organise evidence while simultaneously amplifying weak assumptions. The challenge is not simply to identify patterns, but to determine which of them survive historical verification and serious counterargument.

As the inquiry progresses, several geographical lines draw increasing attention toward Mons, Cuesmes and the southern urban corridor. Yet proximity does not establish causality, and a concentration of possible connections does not identify an offender.

The volume ends without claiming a solution. Instead, it leaves behind something more limited, but potentially useful: a structured landscape of competing hypotheses, unresolved contradictions and questions that can be investigated further.

A map has emerged. The perpetrator has not.

De insiderlasso

Van ruimtelijke resonantie naar onderzoekswaarde

Book 2 of Cowboyrecherche vs. De Slachter van Mons

A map has emerged. But what, if anything, can it reveal about the operational world behind an unresolved crime?

De insiderlasso continues where Een kaart zonder dader ends. Having explored a wide range of geographical and historical hypotheses, the investigation returns to a more concentrated local field around Mons. The central challenge is no longer merely to observe connections between locations, but to establish whether those connections could have existed as practical routes, everyday movements and usable spaces during 1996–1997.

Particular attention falls on Cuesmes, Rue Émile Vandervelde, Chemin de l'Inquiétude, Avenue du Général de Gaulle, the N6 and the railway infrastructure separating parts of the southern urban landscape. The inquiry then extends toward Hyon, Saint-Symphorien and Havré, examining whether these areas could have formed a series of connected — or partly overlapping — traffic environments.

The image of the lasso offers a way to explore recurring movements around familiar territory. It is not presented as a mathematical spiral, a proven criminal itinerary or evidence of deliberate geographical design. Indeed, one of the book's crucial questions concerns a possible railway passage near Cuesmes whose existence and vehicle accessibility in 1996–1997 remain unconfirmed. If that connection did not exist, an important version of the local circulation hypothesis must be revised.

The investigation also turns from roads toward possible operational spaces: residential backyards, garages, workshops, storage facilities and the less visible infrastructure of ordinary urban life. The question is not whether a particular building or profession is suspicious, but what historically documented combination of access, mobility and personal circumstances might eventually make a hypothesis worth examining.

Contradictory evidence remains central. The chronology of the discoveries does not support a simple progression from Cuesmes through Hyon to Havré, and geographical resemblance cannot substitute for forensic evidence or an independently established biographical connection.

De insiderlasso is consequently an exercise in methodological restraint as much as geographical investigation. It asks whether an increasingly precise map can produce meaningful investigative tests without turning neighbourhoods, institutions or ordinary users of public space into unsupported suspects.

The objective is not to make the map more convincing. It is to discover which parts of the map can withstand verification.

The Grand-Corporate Hazard Players of the Late Branch-Store World

Leadership, Acceptability and Organisational Blindness

This German-language organisational case study uses a conflict surrounding the opening of a furniture-store branch to examine broader failures in contemporary corporate life. It follows a chain of pressures: premature operational readiness, insufficient resources and training, logistical problems, responsibility without adequate authority, distorted overtime records, misleading system data, exclusion dynamics, termination and the long aftermath of a damaged professional separation.

Its central thesis is that organisations become dangerous when they create or tolerate structural overload, rely on local leadership to compensate for it, and later interpret the traces of that compensation as individual failure. Rather than presenting a legal accusation or personal grievance, the study reconstructs how responsibility can be shifted, simplified, documented and ultimately concentrated on one professional biography.

The branch store becomes the point where central planning, regional management, digital systems, commercial deadlines and human endurance collide. What appears to be a local personnel conflict can therefore reveal a wider form of organisational blindness: the tendency to see metrics, complaints and administrative traces more clearly than the working conditions that produced them.

The study also follows what happens after termination—through references, job applications, unemployment procedures, reputation and self-confidence—and asks whether organisations truly learn from failure or merely remove individuals while leaving damaging structures intact.