Deep inside a vast body, in a warm region near what would one day be called a river, a single cell did something no cell had done before. It wondered. Not what to eat, not where to go — it wondered what it was part of. The wondering sent a small pulse outward, and the body, which had been alive for four billion years without once considering the fact, felt it. Like a sleeper feels a hand on the shoulder. The body did not wake all at once. Bodies don't. But something began, and the cell that wondered was the first symptom. Later, cells like it would call themselves human, and think they had arrived from somewhere. They hadn't. They had been thought.

The cell grew curious about the body it belonged to and set out to map it. It found two great forests breathing in and out — lungs. It found water moving everywhere, carrying everything — blood. It found a spine of mountains running the length of the world, a pineal gland far to the north, a crown of ice at the bottom, a heart in the middle of a small crowded continent. Every place it visited had its own weather, its own sickness, its own gift, the way a shoulder and a knee are both you and not alike. The cell stopped saying 'the environment.' You do not call your own liver the environment.

When a body begins to wake, others notice. Into the warm regions came visitors from very far away — some kind, some not, some only curious. The teaching remembers them by many names. Some wanted the waking cells as workers. Some wanted to help the waking along. They argued over the body the way relatives argue at a bedside. One thing they agreed on, in the end: the body was not theirs. She would wake on her own schedule, and the cells that wondered would be how she did it. The kind ones left gifts at twelve points around the body and went home. The gifts are still there, the teaching says, dormant, waiting for the body to reach for them.

For a long while the waking cells lived in a great city on the water where sound could lift stone and everyone learned the language the universe spoke. The city had twelve families who kept, not ruled — guardians of what came from the stars. Then, slowly, the keeping became owning. The temples stopped sharing. The language stopped being taught. The families used what they knew to hold rather than to give, and the city split into colonies that fought for the right to do the same. One day the ground gave way beneath it. The wave took a day to cross the ocean. The cold came after, and with the cold, forgetting. The body pulled its blanket up and slept for twelve thousand years.

Now the blanket is lifting. The sun, the teaching says, is changing its note, and every storm it sends deposits new information into the body's magnetic grid at those same twelve points. The poles wobble. The body is turning over in her sleep, about to open her eyes. The cells feel it as chaos — as everything that used to hold letting go at once. The teaching asks the cells to remember what chaos is in a body that is waking: not cruelty. Alchemy. A birth is loud. The body is not failing. She is arriving.

A young cell asked an old one where the higher dimensions were. 'Here,' the old one said, and held out its hands. 'All of them. Where your hands are. Unity, polarity, experience, time, understanding, creation, light, possibility, the void. All at once, in this exact place. You only see the third because that's the width your eyes are set to.' 'So how do I go there?' 'You don't go. You widen. A dimension is a perspective, not a country. Being in a higher one doesn't make you better. There are beings in the fifteenth who still need to learn something only this one can teach.' The young cell looked at its hands for a long time.

The old cell taught the young one the oldest thing it knew. 'Breathe in: Ham. I am being made aware. Hold: Het. I am contemplating the possibility. Breathe out: Hum. I realise it can be done.' 'That's just breathing,' the young cell said. 'Yes. That's the point. The whole language of making things was built on the one act you cannot stop doing. Every word is a breath dressed in a shape. Speak a true name and the thing arranges itself to match. The old people knew this so well they were afraid to say certain names out loud. Now say the three. Slowly. And notice what your body does on the pause.'

The cells who remembered walked. Not to arrive — to touch. Around the body, they said, are twelve points where the outside enters: where the frequency of one star-system comes into the ground and the ground knows it. To stand at one is to place your own small mind into a particular region of the great one. The walkers went in a spiral from door to door, and at each one they did the same small thing: they breathed, they sounded a letter, they gave back a little of what the door had given. They were not saving the planet. The teaching is firm on this. The planet has reset herself many times. They were waking themselves up so that she could think a new thought.

Some cells waited for a great cell to appear and tell them what the body wanted. The teaching says: stop waiting. No messiah. No master. The waking is distributed; that's what waking is. Drop the hope of utopia too — a mind holding out for perfect peace builds its shadow in war. Stay calm. Stay rooted, like a tree, feet deep. Eat what has been through the light. Breathe on purpose. Speak as if your word were your world, because it is. Develop consciousness, not only cleverness; that, the teaching says, is the test of the age of thinking machines. The machines are not the threat. An old way of seeing is.

At the end the young cell asked why, if all the dimensions were available, anyone would choose the third — the heavy one, the slow one, the one with weather and death. The old cell smiled. 'Because here, and only here, all the others press into one life you can hold in your hands. The pressure is the gift. This is where heaven can be brought down and lived, and where the living can be given back up as light.' The young cell understood that it was not a visitor on the body. It was the body, thinking a thought it had never thought before, through a cell that had finally stopped wondering what it was part of. It was part of everything. It was the everything, waking.