Three floors, one road
The words we use every day, taken back to the texts they were born in.
At the top, the book that is coming. Below it, the two Foundations: the science and the philosophy of the One. At the base, ten monographs that take a single word — wu wei, qi, karma, dharma — and carry it back to its source, with the sources always within reach.
New book · forthcoming
Introduction and first chapter, free.
Before it is a technique, healing is an act of consciousness. This book comes out of twenty years of practice, of full rooms around the world, and of one question that never stopped returning: what actually happens when something heals? Third volume of the Ad Unum · The Foundations series.
First chapter
Guglielmo Poli
FREEAd Unum · The Foundations
The two volumes that establish what can be said, and on what evidence.
Volume One
What research actually says about matter, body and consciousness — and where it stops
The actual studies, read in full: what they show, what they do not show, and where the edge of the evidence runs today. The book that lets you answer the sceptic with the numbers in hand.
Volume Two
Twenty-five centuries of thinking about unity, read in the sources
From Parmenides to Bohm: the ideas the holistic world uses every day, taken back to the texts they were born in. With the quotations in the original and the sources always within reach.
Ad Fontes · Monographs from the sources
Each volume takes a single word and follows it to the texts it was born in: Greek, Sanskrit, Pāli and Classical Chinese printed alongside, every source checkable. And each volume closes by handing the word back to the reader. The series is complete: ten volumes.
Vol. I無為
Acting Without Forcing
“Non-action” is the rendering that made its fortune, and it is not the one the texts give. Wu wei is a way of acting: the hand that follows the grain of the wood instead of fighting it. Daodejing and Zhuangzi, with the Chinese printed alongside.
Vol. II氣
Before It Meant Energy
Before it became “energy”, qi was the steam rising from cooking rice. From there the breath, the weather, the wind of the world. From the oracle-bone graphs to classical medicine: a far more concrete image, and a far more useful one.
Vol. IIIप्राण
A Discipline, Not a Technique
Prāṇāyāma begins as a cosmological rite rather than an emotional exercise. Where modern breathwork takes another road — and why prāṇa and anima really are relatives, while ātman belongs to a different family altogether.
Vol. IVआत्मन्
Neither Soul Nor No-Soul
Max Müller never once translated ātman by “soul”, and in the whole Pali Canon the Buddha never says “there is no self”. Two symmetrical misunderstandings, rebuilt on the sources — and a Self that comes out of it much more alive.
Vol. Vदुःख
The Word That Never Meant Suffering
In the first noble truth duḥkha is an adjective, and the word for “life” never appears. The turning of a structural predicate into a heavy noun, and the measure given back to a sentence everybody quotes.
Vol. VIकर्म
The Act That Gives Form
The Indo-European root means “to cut to measure, to give shape”: karman is born in a workshop rather than in a courtroom. The “law of karma” has a precise date of birth; the ancient texts speak instead of a mind that is workable and luminous.
Vol. VIIτὸ ἕν
The Centre, Not the Totality
Plotinus uses “the One” with a caution the translations have lost. Two doctrines that are constantly confused — fusion and return — and a centre that absorbs nothing: each thing stays perfectly itself.
Vol. VIIIλόγος
The Ratio, Not the Word
In Homer λόγος occurs twice, and never for “word”. The sense that carries the whole family is “ratio”: the Greek musical intervals are λόγοι. From there to frequency is a short step, and it needs no forcing.
Vol. IXψυχή
Life, Not the Soul
Liddell–Scott denies the derivation from “to blow” inside its own entry, and Homer’s ψυχή looks more like warm blood than like breath. One word followed as far as “psychology”, and what holds a living thing together.
Vol. Xधर्म
What Holds, Not the Law
In the Ṛgveda the dhárman is a prop: Heaven and Earth stand apart because something holds them apart. Aśoka’s Greek translators chose εὐσέβεια, never a word for law. To hold is not to grip: the sentence the series closes on.
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