Welcome to The Magical Flower of Winter. This is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it by investigating topics in philosophy and science, and by questioning our knowledge about the world and ourselves. I consider the essays published so far a first pass over a terrain of ideas that are of one whole, a whole that can be approached from a variety of directions, only some of which are attempted here. This collection is inevitably just a summary, a coda of a sort, as practically each essay is deserving of its own book or books. My approach has been to cover a vast landscape that is intricately connected, of which each piece is equally important, but the scope of which might escape most people’s attention and stamina. What I hope to have achieved is to satisfactorily sketch the outline of something larger, to give a range of viewpoints on the same underlying subject matter that in combination are able to illuminate it sufficiently for our vision to see it. I pray that my failure in thoroughness is made up for in terms of the whole that I have attempted to bring into view.