I started this journal in February of 2025 to get out of my head the mystical experience that happened to me in 2023 and explore my thoughts around it. I love writing. The vulnerability of sharing my random thoughts, good and bad, with strangers and friends has been an interesting emotional journey. I have never fully understood if there has ever been an actual point to it, and I mostly like that. The one thing that it has done, for sure, is help me think. The act of putting something in writing and making it coherent requires deeper thought on the subject than what lands on the paper.
Some of my posts I wish I could go back and delete. I made uneducated statements and claims about philosophical concepts that, in reality, I was just too lazy to fully study. But I suppose they trace my journey of understanding, so I must live with them and be reminded by them to more fully research any kind of claim I want to make. It should also help elucidate that I’ve never used AI to write a single sentence. It’s all me. Out there.
Anywho, along the way I started organizing my thoughts and wondering if I should put it in a book. Writing a book, I had always believed, was an ego-centric activity. You want something for yourself when you write a book. At first, I just wanted to I guess memorialize the Vision and Puzzle framework and have the experience of writing an actual book. I figured it would be a book for me. Version one was all about the framework. It was hard to organize thoughts into a book format and transition between chapters. It was not very interesting and very short. I realized that wasn’t what I wanted out of this.
I hired a wonderful editor who wasn’t exactly sure how to help at first. She saw mentions of experiences and encouraged me to expand on those. I wrote the actual story about the night of the Vision. She said she loved it and bit by bit we morphed the book into something else entirely. Technically it would be classified as a memoir, but that feels like something for more important people. To me it’s one man’s story of navigating the human condition and searching for the why.
I have re-written the book three full times and portions of it more. Outside of the night of the Vision, the framework is entirely gone and may appear later on the website. What remains is it’s effect on me and my journey. My editor says it’s great. My wife says it’s great. The only friend I’ve given it to says it’s great. They’re all supposed to say that and I appreciate it. But my baby needs to see the world a little.
I need feedback. If you’d like to receive a reader’s draft of the book, either pdf or audiobook, click the link below. My only ask is that you commit to read it in the next month and you commit to giving feedback. It’s an 80-page .pdf (33k words) or a 3-hour listen.