I have come to see my life as a circle, though not merely a personal one. The closing years of my life echo the opening ones with an unsettling precision, as if time has brought me back to the very place where my struggle—and the struggle of our entire species—began. At seventy, I find myself facing the same central wound that shaped my earliest years: the desperate need to speak, and the equally painful experience of not being heard.
Yet, looking through the lens of a broader philosophical awakening, I now understand that this personal wound is but a microcosm of the ultimate trauma inflicted upon the human spirit. Trauma is a universal phenomenon, yet only a small percentage of the human race is conscious of its true impact upon their lives. We believe our trauma is strictly personal—the psychological or physiological damage wrought upon us by our specific circumstances. But in the absolute, to live in a fragmented consciousness, as humanity currently does, is the ultimate trauma. It is an ancient and modern affliction, institutionalized and normalized for millennia.
My personal theme of silence and unheard cries has followed me through every stage of life. It began in infancy, deepened through childhood, twisted itself through adolescence and addiction, and eventually became the driving force behind my spiritual recovery. What has changed is not the existence of silence around me, but my relationship to it. I no longer write to guarantee an audience in a dualistic world. I write because the act of expression itself has become an instrument of survival, healing, and the realization of absolute subjectivity.
The Silence and the False Garments of Identity
Some of the deepest wounds in a human life are formed before language arrives. In my case, the foundations of my consciousness were laid in an atmosphere of distress, exhaustion, and emotional exile. As an infant, I cried often. My parents, overwhelmed and desperate for rest, wrapped me in a blanket, carried me into the garage, and left me in the family car for the night.
To a child with no language, this total isolation becomes a message about existence itself. The garage became my first emotional landscape: dark, sealed off, cold, and separate from human warmth. It taught me that expression leads to abandonment.
But looking back, this garage was my initiation into the collective human illusion. The ultimate trauma we all face is accepting an identity that the culture thrusts upon us, without proper understanding of why we have accepted it. We do not investigate for ourselves who we really are beneath the psychological “clothing” society has dressed us in. We are participants in a tragic reenactment of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” parading around in an identity spun by the charlatans of cultural conditioning, expecting to be adored by the public. But true adoration never comes, because the identity itself is a fabrication. There is always an innocent part of ourselves—the little boy in the fable—crying out from the dark garage of our subconscious, trying to call out the illusions we have accepted as our definition.
When language finally came to me at four years old, it erupted. I talked incessantly, unconsciously trying to make up for lost years, trying to prove that I existed as a separate, valid entity. But my newfound speech did not bring connection; it brought new forms of alienation.
At school, I was watched closely, judged, and silenced. A seat at the back of classroom in the dunce chair sporting the conical magician’s hat awaited me in grades 1-3. A high school teacher labeled me a “pseudo-intellectual,” turning my efforts to think deeply against me. I was speaking from hunger, not from inner security, operating under the assumption of a subject-object reality. I believed I was the subject (the speaker) desperately trying to reach the object (the listener).
This is the great tragedy of human communication. We attempt to bridge the gap between ourselves and others, entirely unaware that the gap itself is an illusion. Mystics, philosophers, and healers have long pointed to an absolute truth that underlies all our illusions, but their message falls upon deaf ears. They speak of non-duality—the understanding that there is no subject-object truth, that there is only absolute subjectivity in this universe. This means there can be no individual self. At best, there is only a collective self that sees itself witnessing life through its infinity of forms and faithfully reflected in every perception. But this truth does not bring comfort to the average human being. We would rather cling to our fragmented consciousness, shouting our individual words into the void, hoping another fragmented consciousness will hear us.
The Descent into Numbness and the Illusion of Religion
The pain of chronic disconnection, if not witnessed and metabolized, seeks another outlet. For sixteen years, I moved through the dark maze of addiction. Substance abuse became my way of managing the unbearable tension between my longing for connection and my expectation of rejection. It was my attempt to escape a life narrative that felt intolerable to inhabit.
Yet, society offers its own socially acceptable narcotics for this fragmented state. Religion was created to give hope to the eternally broken consciousness that has captured mankind. While addiction numbed my mind, religion seeks to numb the existential terror of separation. However, religion and science still promotes the subject-object relationship, though quantum physics is learning it needs to transcend that way of seeing to find the absolute version of the truth. In religion and spirituality, the subject becomes the seeker; the object becomes God, Truth, the “non-dual state,” the “ground of all being”, or the universal quantum substrate. Religion, spirituality, and even science uses these terms to bridge the impossible gap between a broken mankind and some ultimate truth or love. But as long as the duality remains—the seeker and the sought—the ultimate trauma of fragmentation is perpetuated.
Idolatry is not merely bowing to statues; it is bowing to the concept of a separate self that needs saving by a separate divine entity. By the age of thirty-one, I could no longer survive inside these arrangements. I claimed sobriety and began a profound spiritual reconstruction.
In the early years of recovery, I underwent a remarkable spiritual event. The suffocating narrative of my old life, the trauma, the self-hatred—all of it loosened. The chalkboard of my psyche was wiped clean. Yet, the miracle eventually brought its own torment, when I began to reaasemble my self with a spiritual instruction set. I had entered a new inner landscape, but I had no language for it.
I had tasted the non-dual reality, the absolute subjectivity of existence, but I was effectively mute. The slate was clean, but I had no chalk. For thirty years, I worked to develop a language adequate to my life. I wanted words not just for my trauma, but for the civilization that had shaped it. I began to see the deeper pathologies of our culture—toxic masculinity, spiritual emptiness, economic and religious domination—as symptoms of a species entirely reliant upon a fractured paradigm of reality.
When I began to write and publish my thoughts, indifference became my familiar companion again. But my friend Marty began listening. Marty, a man who often deferred into silence in his own life, reflected a broader human pattern. Many people live half-muted lives, adapting to relationships and social structures that do not truly welcome their interiority. Though they are also dressed in the Emperor’s invisible clothes, their sense of self keeps them on the sidelines of the grand parade of life, and afraid to speak their truth.
Marty and I shared from a deeper place, recognizing the collective silencing of humanity. But in 2017, a series of health crises—seizures, a dark mass in my inner field of awareness, and Marty’s brain tumor—pushed me to the edge of the abyss. The dark mass I experienced was a form of ego-death making itself known. It was the cumulative trauma that I had never known how to heal, having performed a nifty “spiritual bypass” that gave me permission to ignore it.. Ego death is the terrifying dissolution of the individual self that the fragmented consciousness fights so hard to maintain, even though its very goundation is trauma itself..
Healing the Ancient and Modern Trauma
One evening, lying in anguish, I begged my wife Sharon to speak my truth for me. She refused, out of profound love. That refusal forced me to realize that no surrogate could do my speaking. If I remained silent, I would be returning myself to the dark garage.
I began to write urgently. Writing became the central practice by which I stabilized and reclaimed myself. But here lies the ultimate paradox of the true seeker: How do we heal from the trauma of fragmentation in a world that refuses to listen? And, if I truly healed myself, who, or what, is left after the trauma and resultant fragmentation is removed?
The answer lies in transcending the need for the object. I have sometimes thought of myself as one of the least-read writers in America. Much of what I have written has disappeared into obscurity. Yet, this obscurity taught me the greatest spiritual lesson of all: expression and recognition are not the same thing.
I write because it is the antidote to my silencing, but more importantly, I write as an act of absolute subjectivity. When I write, it is not a fragmented individual trying to reach another fragmented individual. It is the universe witnessing itself. The miracle is not that the world finally listens; the miracle is that I no longer require its permission in order to speak, because there is no “world” separate from myself to grant that permission.
The direction for healing from our ancient and modern trauma is to stop looking for validation from the charlatans of culture. We must strip off the Emperor’s new clothes and stand naked in the truth of non-duality. We must recognize that the silence around us is not a personal rejection, but the symptom of a civilization that has lost the capacity to listen deeply to its own undivided nature.
So here I stand in the later years of life. Once again, I speak into a silence I do not control. But I know now that the garage, the addiction, the cultural indifference—none of these are the final word. The final word belongs to the act of creation itself, the collective self breathing through the illusion of the individual.
Can you hear me now?
More importantly: Can I hear myself now?
At last, the answer is yes,
In the absolute, there is only one Self listening.
