The World Is Not As We Think It Is

The world is not as we think it is. In life there is a persistent quality of misapprehension that is next to impossible to dispel. In Zen and certain mystical approaches it is dispelled by “enlightenment.” In our everyday lives it is dispelled occasionally by some sort of insight brought about by a confluence of events, usually something seemingly earth-shaking. The problem is that this enlightenment or insight is often just temporary and we forget the next day, or, like the thread of a dream dimly recalled, we lose the essence of the understanding that we had momentarily gained, and we are returned to the mundane world. The reason for this is surprising: the forces of society and the evolutionary mechanism conspire to return us to ignorance since they “want” us to do their bidding. They don’t want us to know too much otherwise we might act contrary to their needs. Consequently, the evolutionary mechanism uses hormones and brain chemistry to get you to do what it wants done. The society uses psychology, social pressure and various reward/punishment systems to get you to contribute to the success of society. The goal of this book is to help you to know NOW what I spent decades learning and to free yourself from the constraints of society and the evolutionary mechanism. My understanding comes primarily from science but also from religion, philosophy, and from personal experience.

In addition to devoting many years to the study of science (especially biological evolution) and Eastern religions, I've been a soldier, a newspaper reporter, a high school English teacher, a day trader and a poker professional. I've written literally millions of words in my career as a writer, and think of myself primarily as a writer. My work has appeared in popular publications like Playboy and Smoke magazines and in literary journals where it has won some minor awards. My novel A Perfectly Natural Act gained royalty publication from G.P. Putnam's in 1973 and was brought out in paperback the following year by Pinnacle. First Artists was considering an option on it when they went defunct. The novel would make a rather good movie. (Maybe I'll write the screenplay one of these days.) Additionally, I've written over fifteen hundred reviews (over a million words in all!) for various Web sites, most notably Amazon and the Internet Movie Database. Some of my reviews are among the best appearing anywhere (or so I have been told). Over the years I've also written about a dozen book-length manuscripts. My project now is to present perhaps half of these manuscripts before the public in book form. I am also putting together book-length collections of my reviews. I was graduated from UCLA in 1969 with a major in Political Science and minor in English Literature.