Preface

                                                 

In 2009, I experienced a psychological shock so profound that it triggered a manic episode. My attempts to come to terms with what happened was the beginning of the spiritual journey that inspired this book.

I had suddenly realized that we were headed toward seemingly certain climate collapse.  Although I was aware of the climate crisis, I had assumed, as had most of humanity, that we still had time to avert it. I had not realized that the corruption of the political process in the US all but guaranteed that the government would not do what was necessary to stop it. Without cooperation from both of the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet, saving ourselves seemed impossible.

In November of 2008, America had elected its first Black president. Like most people, I believed that meant we were making progress in creating a truly democratic government. By March, the travesty of the process of "health care reform" convinced me otherwise. Having studied the economics of health care in the US and other countries, it was obvious to me that the only result of the effort would be to prop up an unsustainable system of for-profit health care.

While it may seem obvious in retrospect, until that moment I had not fully understood that neither major party worked primarily for  the citizens of the US. Instead, both prioritized the interests of the donor class that paid for their exorbitantly expensive campaigns. I knew how many lives could have been saved or radically improved had we adopted a system of publicly funded universal health care, but that option had been taken off the table before the debates even started. Watching the process unfold, I felt spiritually sickened.

Publicly funded national health care has been shown in other countries to be the most cost-effective way to deliver care, and every citizen was guaranteed care when needed regardless of financial circumstances. It was, and remains, the obvious solution to the growing crisis in health care access and affordability.

In 2009, this non-system consumed 18% of U.S. GDP while leaving 45 million Americans uninsured. Not only was this barbaric, it was predictable that the system would inevitably collapse if left in place. The ACA merely postponed that by transferring billions of taxpayer collars into pockets of Wall Street investors.

If the government was not willing to consider a single payer system because it put private profit over the public good, how would it ever deal with the looming climate crisis, or endless war?  That would mean taking on the oil, weapons manufacturing, and banking industries.

In June, the prospect of getting any serious action from Congress on any of these issues dwindled further. That month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Citizens United vs FEC, the case that resulted in the unleashing of unlimited corporate spending to influence elections. The Court treated these expenditures as "free speech," which makes sense only if you believe that  corporations are entitled to constitutional rights, as previous Courts had ruled. Given the deference it had always shown toward corporations, the result was a forgone conclusion.





Having been forced to abandon the comfortable myth that I lived in a democracy and knowing that the future of humanity was at stake, I desperately sought a sense of control. My mind raced constantly. I was filled with incredible energy fueled by the urgent sense that I needed to do something. As I struggled to adjust to my new reality and what it meant for the direction of my life,

I found myself asking for the first time in decades whether life had inherent meaning. To my mind, belief that it does is logically equivalent to believing in the existence  of something that could properly be called "God." I didn't know what that could be, but I wanted badly to believe that all the suffering humans endure was not without purpose.

I realized that in order to justify belief in an inherent meaning to life, I had to begin by recognizing that God might exist. My task then was to find a way to think about the nature of a God that was consistent with the laws of physics. With a working conceptual model of what God might be in hand, I would then explore how it might operate in the world, and be in a position to speculate on what that implies for the purpose of existence. 


Along the way, I documented my thoughts on where humanity finds itself at this point in history, what we have to do to save ourselves, and the role of spirituality. The result is the an online "book" of essays "Stop the Madness: Diary of a Soldier For Peace in the War to Take Back America." It contains my earliest efforts to make sense of American and global politics, ethics, religion and psychology as it applied to these topics. It is still available to read online for those interested. 

The world has only become more fractured and unpredictable since my spiritual journey began, but having chosen to believe that life has meaning beyond that which we assign it, my faith has sustained me. This is not faith in any system of religious belief, but faith that humanity might still save itself from civilizational collapse, if not extinction. This will require a profound spiritual transformation on a global level. 

I have come to believe in a higher reality that encompasses the physical universe but extends beyond it. I envision it to be something we are already connected to but have become distanced from over the course of human history. 

I am not trying to prove the existence of God, or to start a new belief system. If any of the ideas presented here are original, it is because I have sought to put those of others together in new ways. This book is my attempt to explain what I have discovered in my search for higher reality, my speculations about its nature, and why that gives me hope for the future.

April 18. 2026