Preface

In 2005, my life cracked open. Not in triumph, not in disaster, but in

something far stranger an experience that nearly destroyed me and,

paradoxically, set me on the path to writing this book.

I hadn’t asked for it. I wasn’t searching for enlightenment. I was just

another divorced man, stumbling out of a loveless marriage, chasing

freedom, chasing fun, chasing distractions. And for a while, it felt like

escape. Until, as life often does, it dropped me into a hole so deep I

thought I would never crawl out.

Her name was Kimberly. Seven weeks. That’s all it lasted. Yet those

weeks consumed me more completely than the years of my marriage

ever had. I thought I had found heaven; instead I found something darker.

When it ended abruptly, inexplicably I unraveled. Obsession, despair,

physical anguish that had no visible wound. It was as if my brain itself

had turned against me.

​

It happened one night when the forces of the universe seemed to conspire

to rewrite my very being. It was Good Friday, the air thick with meaning as a

super moon rose over the ocean, pulling the tide into a furious rhythm

against the shore. The Vernal Equinox had brought the Earth into perfect

balance, every element poised between light and dark.

​

Kimberly was beside me. The room shimmered with that rare kind of

love-making that feels like electricity and prayer, like fire made of light. And then

everything stopped. My brain simply… shut off. Not death, but something close to it. A blackout of thought. A drifting into blackness where, for an instant, I touched something vast and wordless, as if I had brushed the fabric behind existence itself.

​

When I came back, the world was the same, but I was not.  Whatever happened was too much for that relationship as it ended that night. One instant heaven, the next hell. 

From that moment forward, my life became an interrogation. What happened? Why had my own mind betrayed me? Why do humans all humans do the things they do? Why can we suffer so intensely from things that leave no scars? Why do we fight, enslave, betray, and slaughter one another, generation after generation?

The answers did not arrive overnight. They came in fragments. In the pounding waves of a surf session where survival itself forced me to think differently. In yoga halls and pujas where strangers whispered words that soothed a broken heart. In late-night conversations with friends and teachers who looked at me with skepticism, then, sometimes, with the silence of recognition.

Layer by layer, like peeling an onion, I began to see. Not just my own failures, but a pattern bigger than me, bigger than any one of us. A hidden logic running beneath history, beneath religion, beneath politics. An operating system older than our conscience, more ruthless than any tyrant, cleverer than any prophet. A system that drives survival, directs behavior, blinds us to the miracle of our own bodies, and whispers us into war.

I call it the WAR BRAIN.

The WAR BRAIN is why leaders become puppets, why tribes turn into nations, why religions sharpen into swords, why technology blooms from battlefields. It is why I could lose myself so completely in another human being, why heartbreak could feel like annihilation, and why recovery felt like revelation. It is the code that has always been running in the background of humanity unseen, unacknowledged, yet inescapable.

This book is my attempt to explain what I’ve learned in the twenty years since that night. Not as doctrine. Not as certainty. But as a map drawn in hindsight: of wars, of inventions, of loves and losses, of why humans act against their own survival again and again. It is not a history book. It is not philosophy. It is an attempt to strip away illusion and stare at the machinery itself.

Failure was my teacher. Pain was my tutor. What follows is the lesson: humanity is not free, not yet. We are pawns in a game we do not even see. But perhaps, by recognizing the WAR BRAIN, we can at last begin the long, impossible work of transcending it.