From Life for the Reality Impaired: The reality-impaired life is one lived in functional fragmentation and identification with fragments. It happens because human life is out-sourced. With this, we sum up the human condition and its character. Of course it will be useful to go into more detail on the implications of these statements. The rest of this book is that detail. For eons spiritual teachers have taught that there is something awry with the world in which we live-or, more correctly, the one in which we think we live. The fundamental theme of all bearers of light is: Awaken. We are asleep, the metaphor goes, suggesting that the lives we lead are but dreamy approximations or models of truth, that in fact we do not live in truth at all. In the extreme, the exhortation is more than a call to wake up: It wants us to stir ourselves from death. "Arise, o sleeper, and awake from the dead," as one writer puts it. We are so asleep that we are, for all purposes, dead. Put another way, the essential question to ask is not, is there life after death, but rather, is there life after life? Not so much, have we lived before, as, have we lived yet? We walk and breathe and act, yet sages nonetheless urge us to awaken to life. What can that mean? Ask a dozen philosophers and teachers that question and you may get a dozen different explanations, but if you're asking the right people, they're just different forms of the same answer, the only one there really is. In this book, we will explore that answer in another manifestation, one that hopes to make the answer more accessible. This book is not religious; it has no agenda whatsoever for or against any religion, it seeks in no way to examine religion as a subject, and religion is not in any way, centrally or peripherally, its theme. But you should know that this book is very definitely of a spiritual nature. We must establish how we are using the word "reality." In a nutshell, there is truth, and then there is everything most humans think or feel reality is. If a person can call something real, it almost certainly is not. Reality as most people "know" it is virtually all perception based on illusion, a sweeping and all-inclusive illusory interpretation of all they survey. It's the perception of appearance as opposed to the knowing of essence, and mistaking the appearance to be truth, rather than knowing the essence as truth. Something can be both "real" and not true. The condition of reality impairment is that of mistaking appearance for truth. There are already books in print that convey the sense of what it is to live beyond the bounds of the reality-impaired life. While to varying degrees that sense also runs throughout this book, its primary purpose is to offer help in getting from the metaphoric "here" to "there."

Introduction