Excerpt from the Book

CHAPTER ONE: BORN IN DARKNESS

IN THE BEGINNING we are conceived in darkness. With eyes sealed shut we enter the world with a scream. For some of us suffering begins in the womb, and for others it begins when we take our first breath. Then we open our eyes and see our first view of the world. It is then that the building of our worldview begins. Every experience, all the information we acquire, all the things we are taught, begin to shape how we see and understand the world. When we are young we rely on the adults to introduce us to the world and protect us from evil and suffering. However, grownups can be quick to let us down. We trust that we will be taken care of and sheltered from the world and all the suffering it offers. But this does not happen.

As we grow older and begin to think about the world, we ask questions. We seek answers but are given superstition, hypocrisy, data or ignorance. Our worldview is thus informed and takes shape. We are told lies, and partial truths, and brick upon brick is laid until in the end we are sitting in a room without windows, staring at a cold stone wall.

Our worldview, which is the framework by which we see and understand the world for our lifetime, is based on a few simple questions. They can be found in the upper left corner of a painting by the Paul Gauguin. The painting depicts women in various stages of life with a blue statue of a god or goddess in the background. Scrawled in the upper left corner of the canvas are the following words: D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. This translates as: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin was wrestling with the three fundamental questions that all humans end up asking: Where did I come from, what is my purpose, and what will happen to me when I die? These questions of origin, purpose and destiny are fundamental to human thought, and the worldview that we form in childhood and throughout life has at its core, answers to these three questions.

We ask because we need to know. For some of us finding answers is life or death. And we continue to receive hypocrisy, confusion and ignorance for answers. In the end, the room we eventually find ourselves in is a panic room of despair called Nihilism. Being in darkness we seek peace but cannot find it. We seek comfort but there is no one to console, because we discover everyone is sitting in their own dark, lonely, cold room.