“Human survival in our fragile future will depend not only on our ability to create peace between human beings. It will also depend on our ability to make peace with the problem of human existence.”  — The Cosmic Ocean

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THE COSMIC OCEAN: New Answers to Big Questions

2015, Prospecta Press

AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Cosmic Ocean shares the treasures I have extracted from trauma. To explain how these treasures—which take the form of timeless truths—can help us solve our personal, national, and global problems, this book uses personal stories and extensive research to journey through time, around the world, and into every facet of the human condition.

To survive and progress as a global human family, we need a paradigm shift that can transform our understanding of peace, justice, love, happiness, and what it means to be human. But to create such a massive paradigm shift, we must voyage far beyond sound bites. We must look deeply into the nature of reality, resisting the dumbing down of information that has become so common today.

To help create this paradigm shift, the following chapters explore diverse subjects such as empathy, rage, nonviolent struggle, war, beauty, religion, philosophy, science, Gandhi, the Iliad, slavery, human sacrifice, video games, sports, and our shared humanity. It is important to understand these subjects, because to effectively wage peace we must strive to increase the quality and quantity of our understanding, just as generals who wage war strive to increase the quality and quantity of their soldiers.

Understanding allows us to humbly recognize truth. Every human community—including our global community—needs truth, because peace and justice are built on the foundation of truth. When we extract truth from trauma, we can uncover a road that leads to hope, happiness, and human survival.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE: The Human Condition

PART ONE: Our Primordial Past

1. A Dark Night Filled with Predators

2. Poseidon’s Wrath

3. Tools Made of Flesh, Blood, and Bones

4. Soldiers as Christ Figures

PART TWO: Our Fragile Future

5. Beauty and Belonging

6. The Sanity of Humanity

7. Sailing the Night Sky

8. The Mystery beneath the Waves

Note on the book cover image: From the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna, Italy, this is a sculpture of Neptune (Poseidon), the mythological god of the ocean, underneath the full moon. This image of an ocean god surrounded by the cosmic moonlit night depicts several themes from the book, such as humanity’s primordial past, Poseidon’s wrath as a metaphor for humanity’s struggle against nature’s destructive forces, finding light in darkness, and the transcendent mystery that underlies our internal and external universe.