Preface

                                                 

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

That year, I 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 the one 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 had been taken off the table before the process even started. I felt spiritually sickened.

Publicly funded national health care has been show in other countries as 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.

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. The ACA merely postponed that by putting billions of taxpayer collars into private pockets.

If the government was not willing to consider a single payer system because it put the interests of Wall Street over those of citizens, 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 my heightened awareness of systemic corruption in government, I was confident that the Court would decide in favor of corporate power, as it always has. 





In abandoning the comfortable myth that I lived in a democracy and knowing that the future of humanity was at stake, my mind began racing constantly. I was filled with incredible energy, fueled by an urgent sense that I needed to do something. As I struggled to adjust to my new personal reality and what it meant for the direction of my life, I found myself asking for the first time in decades whether life had any inherent meaning. I made the decision to believe that it did.

To my mind, belief that life has inherent meaning is logically equivalent to believing the existence  of something that could properly be called "God." I didn't know what that could be, but I wanted to believe so much that 

I began to document my thought processes on politics and spirituality in an online "book" of essays titled "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 resolving to believe that life has meaning beyond that which I assign it, my faith has sustained me. Not faith in any particular religion, but faith that humanity can still save itself from what appears to be at best civilizational collapse, if not extinction. However, this will require a profound spiritual transformation on a global level. 

I have come to believe in a higher reality that, while directly connected to the physical universe, expends 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