Notes Along the Way: A Pilgrim's Progress

Notes Along the way is a collection of essays about life and our role in the universe. Like the programming code of a popular software application, these articles reveal life's hidden workings-the rules and regulations that create and maintain our world. Many esoteric ideas are divulged in this travelogue, but desperate times require desperate measures.

Our planet is in Kairos time: the ancient Greek expression for times of maximum danger and maximum opportunity. The dangers are obvious: our imploding environment, deepening gender inequality and economic imbalance, antagonistic race relations, and religious zealotry, among others. The opportunity, however, is not so clear. To that end, I offer a new way of seeing the world that gives an individual the possibility of transforming life's negative effect into something positive.

Notes Along the Way is similar to Meditations, in which the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius recorded his private ponderings and ideas. Yet Notes goes beyond this type of discourse by referencing a number of great religious, spiritual and world leaders, as well as ancient teachings, to propose the essence of a positive paradigm that can feed the mind and heart-and soothe the soul.

Stephen Burzi was born, raised, and schooled in New York City, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, which he studied because "literature tells the truth about history." Since graduation-alongside a continuing study of various religions, mythologies, philosophies, cosmologies, and G. I. Gurdjieff's opus, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson-he has enjoyed a long, successful, and fulfilling career supervising large-scale commercial construction projects in the New York Tristate area.