How the thought for these pages began

As you read these pages you may very well wonder why spirituality was so difficult for me to see more or less even embrace. Just as a quick thumbnail backgrounder you must understand that even though my mother was not a practicing Jew, she was forced to wear the yellow star during WW2 in Austria. It was due to her ancestors as her father was actually a Lutheran. Further as my father was Catholic, I was sent to a super-max Catholic elementary and middle school where they beat us like drums at the drop of a hat. The confluence of these two factors from my childhood made me run from any spiritual thinking as that all equated in my mind to some form of requisite punishment.

I was talking with a colleague, who I have been working with for over ten years now, when they commented that in our last annual meeting I seemed like a very different person to them. This led to phone calls where my colleague wanted to understand why I was so much calmer and seemingly no longer stressed out from the work demands as I had always been. I offered that it was due to a book which I had written that in essence became a proposal for a standard model for human history. I thought it had been the understanding of the model which had changed me. During the course of the phone conversations it became clear that my change had been the result of the process instead of the understanding of some abstract model researched over a nine year period. My colleague told me that the stories in how the process had affected me were actually more interesting than the book I had written. As a result of that conversation I decided to put down into words and pictures how I came to believe that I had become aware of having grown a new spiritual outlook. This is that story.

How I came to research and write the book was a series of events which had anyone told me would have taken me on the journey that it ultimately did, I would have simply laughed in their face as impossible. It all grew out of a problem at work. I work in the I/T services industry and during the mid 1990's the work was becoming incredibly difficult to perform. New technologies were popping out of the woodwork every day which required new service approaches. Further with the advent of the Internet, the relative speed of the I/T industry was actually accelerating to speeds which were in my mind simply unsustainable. I certainly found it impossible to design services fast enough for technologies flying out of nowhere, usually from tiny startup tech companies that had no idea how sustainable their technology was more or less how to service the new stuff.

Every summer my family and I go to the beach. Though it is never a long enough vacation, it is my time to stop and think about whatever is troubling my mind. In anticipation for that summers beach vacation I went to the bookstore and bought every book I could find which related to two subjects. On the explosive growth of the Internet and the bubble which was forming, along with history books for prior ages when humanity had seen periods of insane growth. My wife has always chided me for bringing what appear like text books related to work for beach reading. She felt that I wasn't getting a vacation reading about work related topics. However my mental mind set had been that my career had been going far better than I have ever imagined it to be. Therefore it was always in mind because it was not only a very exciting time in my life but I also felt like it was so important that I could never cease focusing my attention right there. My life at that time was extraordinarily unbalanced and weighted to the extreme in work instead of family, friends, hobbies or any personal introspection.

The books on the Internet confirmed what I already had seen at work. It was completely evident that the Internet speed which everyone was then calling it was going to continue to explode for the foreseeable future. In the history area I read one particular book by Jared Diamond titled: Guns, Germs and Steel. The fates of human societies. It was the first book I had ever read which attempted to explain why the West was wealthier than any other economies in the world. Diamond's book asserted that the West was wealthier simply because we had won the industrialization race due to geographic advantage in natural food stuffs, pack animals to domesticate for work and ultimately location. In his mind it was simply the mechanics of the West being advantaged in the resources which existed and no other factor(s). Though the book was a very interesting read, Diamond's answer did not resonate with me as we could already see even then that the Fareast was industrializing very rapidly and were growing economies at a rate far exceeding any Western economies.

I did not realize it but at that moment I had actually taken my first step of the journey. The mental takeaway from Diamond's, as well as other books I subsequently read, was that these individuals were not explaining the fundamental elements for how things became what they are but rather were leaning back on the very basic supposition that we were now and always will be wealthier in the West relative to other geographic regions. The argument can be described as circular because it fundamentally states that our current wealth and power are the proof that we are special relative to other regions and peoples.

The argument also rests on the concept that the Industrial Revolution is complete. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though the Western economies are no longer powered by the smoke stack industrialization of technology, we are still very much industrializing in the current information age via increasing mechanization of machines. These machines don't always make tangible three dimensional products which you touch but rather make digital products instead. Industrialization by definition is automation and mechanization. The assumption that the industrial age was a closed chapter I not only disagreed with but also served to point out to me on a very personal level. Even though things were going extremely well me for me personally – it was not due to something that was either preordained or that my economy was the proof that my life was in some kind of functional alignment. Though it seems like a small step, which was in fact my first adult step in reflecting the research inwardly.

The history research would continue until both the economy and the world would visibly change in 2000.

In 2000 the dot.com bubble had burst and then subsequently followed by 911. The world I had been living in for the past decade featuring constant growth and vitality visibly had been altered. These events would force me to cast inward gazes not only due to the suffering which many people were experiencing but also because my professional life starkly contrasted with everything that was going on.

I was then a worldwide Vice President in one of the largest global I/T services companies in the world. My ego could not have been any more inflated than it was then. I was whisked around the world for press conferences and other executive tasks. I have included a hyperlink to one of them so that you can see the kind of work I was doing at that time. Link NetworkWorld EDS - Dell announcement. At the conclusion of a press conference at CeBIT, I was asked if I would like to be flown from the helipad on the roof of the building to the airport in Hanover Germany. When people treat you as if your time was this important it is very hard not to walk around in fog of seeming self importance. Ironically after I refused this offer I actually took the subway back to my hotel and while seated in the train car I got a glimpse of my artificial view of myself. Sitting amongst daily commuters, who were all wearing the ordinary expressions from the end of a work day, was in such sharp contrast that the image produced a kind of feeling of which I had never experienced before. It was not a pleasant feeling. It literally hurt me. On the flight home somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean the feeling formed into a thought and I realized the feeling from the train car had been a question of what reality was for me. I was feeling that I was in wrong place doing the wrong thing like a bad character from a movie which you are watching where you don't identify with the character at all. In fact you watch the movie only to see if that character ever will realize just how far off the tracks they were. I did not want to be that character. I knew I was completely out of touch with reality. I just had no idea how to fix it.

In that position I would meet with many CEO's at sumptious dinners who were very wealthy and would in fact fly their own jet as a personal hobby to the meetings, as their lives were totally consumed with their company and the workload. Whenever I sat through those dinners I again experienced the sensation that I was watching a movie and not living my own life. Many times during the dinners I would visualize myself standing apart from the group just watching what was going on. I was satisfied for the moment in that I was able to see just how unreal my life was. I felt knowing this was better than most and therefore good enough. In fact at the time I felt sorry for those people who I had reasoned were not aware of their own completely unreal existence. For that job I flew into Dallas almost weekly from my home on the east coast and stayed in corporate housing for the entire week before flying home again. For one stretch of time I was away from home every week – all week – for 6 consecutive months. That was how far disconnected I had become from the basic things life which really matter. I had several jobs in the past where this type of travel had been the norm for my life.

I am a terrible flyer and I would always take a book with me to occupy my mind to keep it off the fact that I was at 35,000 feet and moving at over 500mph with someone else driving no less. On one occasion I brought the book IBM and the Holocaust. The book described how IBM's technology had been used by the Nazis to map out where the Jews lived, went to work and went to school. At that time the Nazis were primarily tracking them as part of plans to deport them. It was only later that the horrific “master plan” would utilize this data in thier attempt to exterminate these people completely. As I was reading the book it gave actual figures and charts illustrating the use of the machines. Quite unexpectedly I came across a chart for the number of school children in Vienna Austria and I realized that count was one which included my own mother. The example was for the year and the grade my mother was in back then prior to WW2. The few stories which I had been told of her experience during the war had never really struck me before as she spun everything as positively as she could. I had been reading the book to occupy my mind because flying was uncomfortable for me. In seeing that one chart the horror of my own infalted value and importance pierced me. I may as well have been any Nazi commander back in 1939 reading those same charts as a distraction while travelling to some destination where they simply idling the way away as a distraction. I closed the book and spontaneously wept quietly. I have never been able to read another word from that book or even so much as opened the cover ever again.

After I had landed and was driving towards my office in Plano I recognized that the feelings from the subway in Germany and the flight I had just taken were from an identical source. You see both of my parents as well as my grandparents were very accomplished individuals in their own fields. They were accomplished because they used their minds but did their own work. Not simply directing others. I realized the intermittent feelings of watching a movie was as a result of my having elevated my work and an executive position along with the compensation and perks to that of a religion. My masses were in board rooms and my homilies were the presentations. I asked myself if the financial freedom was worth trading entire sections of my life in the exchange. If so could I mentally sustain myself? I knew I had to get back to a kind of work where I was doing the work and not just directing it. In my current roll there were simply too many mirrors for me to get a clear view of my own reality. Whenever the movie would start to run in my head during meetings, ego inflations and other sites of excess with my peers and the Sr. executives my skin would begin to crawl. I was just as bad as any one of my peers or the Srs. In one meeting with the CIO he remarked to me rather flatly that his people told him that I walk through brick walls. People in these positions work very hard to climb the corporate ladder and the simple fact that my peers were reporting that I was a cold machine in my relentless attack on the work presents you with an idea of just how broken I truly was.

Though I had started reading and researching for an answer to a business question, I was then seeking an answer to that question because reality as I saw it now hung in the balance. I had a strong feeling that my hall of mirrors, the movie and my growing sense of alienated self were dependant on answering this question. It had become something of a mission. Having continually run into dead ends with reading the histories I realized I was reading books on the wrong subject.

Next - finding my first puzzle pieces . . .