While I was reading the third volume in the Conversations with God trilogy - the text that discusses highly evolved extraterrestrial civilisations - it occurred to me to imagine how a society would function without currency. Not just money, but any means of commercial exchange of goods. Because the idea is so far removed from our current situation, I also tried to envisage how such a transformation could take place.

This was the trigger that led me to examine various aspects of our society, much of which we take for granted and simply assume that it is the best or the only way that it can be. These notions eventually found their way into writing.

As I was busy revising my belief system at this time, the numerous misgivings about my old views that kept surfacing also found their way into the text. It felt entirely appropriate at the time that they should do so.

Eventually I took a break from the project (my attention is cyclic in nature) when it was mostly finished. I came back to it once I was largely done letting go of my old worldview. Reading my old misgivings now no longer made sense as I was past dealing with them. For this reason I decided to remove them from the text as much as I could while keeping the plot believable, and rewrite parts of it to make it more accepting of differing points of view. This also enabled me to return the focus to social transformation that originally spawned the work.

The end result is a book that merges ideas from many different fields and articulates them from the perspective of an advanced extraterrestrial being - one who comes from an environment sufficiently different from ours to be able to evaluate them critically without presuming their validity, no matter how self-evident they may appear to us.