Choosing Life

1. Bios (βίος) — Biological Life

The measurable, biological life. It is the one that instruments can quantify. It belongs to time, to evolution, to fragility. It belongs to the cosmos, for it is cosmic energies that create forms, not the parents. Strictly speaking, Bios refers to intrauterine life — a matrix that focuses cosmic energies on a precise point: the material body.

2. Zao (ζάω) — Animated Life

Once expelled from this little paradise, the Bios body must successively learn how to meet the outside world. To avoid disrupting this learning process, it has not yet developed self-awareness — making it voluntary, cooperative, almost docile. This does not prevent, of course, outbursts of wild emotion — like rolling on the floor, much like a Chinese robot that also lacks self-awareness. This phase lasts as long as it lasts — let’s say between 3 and 5 years.

3. Psyché (ψυχή) — Inner Life

The living, moving soul. Psyché feels, doubts, dreams. It is the inner voice, sometimes wounded, sometimes lucid. This stage fascinated the 20th century, which sought to reduce life to psychological trauma. The first manifestation of the psyché in a life coincides with the first conscious memory — and thus allows for the emergence of self-awareness.

4. Zoé (ζωή) — Essential Life

Life as a world expressing itself through every form — whether dust, galaxy, or being. Zoé teaches that life and form are inseparable, that each form carries its own inner representation of a world, a pure force, unalterable as long as the form exists.
For a shaman, it is enough to identify with any form to travel into this multiverse, breaking free from the collective human universe shaped by the fear of exclusion. Zoé does not die. It mutates with the body at the moment of decomposition. It enters every created object and shows that human consciousness has nothing special except believing it holds a monopoly — because it can speak. But in truth, Zoé is that absolute, omnipresent presence that nothing interrupts.

5. Poïesis (ποίησις) — Creative Life

The life that creates words — but not for communication (what a waste!). Instead, to learn how to shape, with this virtual and extraordinary clay, entire worlds from nothing — or almost nothing. A few letters, preferably consonants over vowels — but let’s not quibble. Poïesis gives form, generates, transforms. It is the source of all living creation, visible or invisible.

6. Agapè (ἀγάπη) — Life as Bond

Unconditional love. Agapè unites without possession, connects without expectation. It is life as it flows freely between beings — the unbreakable bond that returns to catch us in our fall, ongoing for the past 10,000 years. Agapè is centered neither on me nor you, but on the connection itself:
Here, form is still present. You and I still exist, but we’ve become observers — not of each other, but of the magic threads of Ariadne that link us and now guide our actions. Agapè no longer needs form — though form remains — and no longer needs speech, unlike Poïesis. It is pure bond, uniting opposites. It is the neutral ground we’ve been seeking.
I would define it like this: in the intimate union of two souls, a third principle appears — discreet but powerful — an egregore that transcends duality and animates their actions.

7. Gnosis (γνώσις) — Life as Knowing

Lived, interior knowledge. Gnosis cannot be learned — it reveals itself. It is resonance, silent recognition. It is omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence within a framework that transcends form, language, and bond. It transcends Zoé, Poïesis, and Agapè — which themselves had already transcended Psyché, Zao, and Bios. This forms a pyramid, solidly grounded.

8. Kenosis (κένωσις) — Life Emptied of Self

To extend the metaphor, all seven manifestations of Life do not float in a void — or perhaps precisely that: they float in the Void, the unmanifested, which each of us names differently. This unmanifested is now being born within each of us.
It is the union of the unmanifested and the manifest.
It is what is to come.