About Pagan Road

This book presents the inaugural claim to our emotional autonomy, igniting a profound, self-centric paradigm shift that challenges civilization’s 5000-year addiction to beliefs. The survival of humanity is at stake. By breaking free from our addiction to beliefs, myths, blind subservience and surrender to anything that moves, we shed the social clothes that keep us  hidden, rendering us unrecognizable as we walk on the face of the earth. In doing so, we are compelled to confront our emotional core, where deep inside lies the individual autonomy and independence our civilization has never seen. 

 

This book highlights our compulsion to internalize and become addicted to beliefs, such as religion, mythology, political and intellectual ideologies, and social disciplines. However, its purpose is not to engage with or debate these beliefs but to examine the mechanisms through which they are internalized. By understanding these processes, this book seeks to reveal how they undermine the emotional constitution and autonomy of individuals. Therefore, this book is not about religion, nor does it engage in religious rhetoric, or make claims about the divine nature of religious proclamations. However, when necessary, I will not divert from exposing the implausibility of certain man-made promulgations of faith. This is done solely to clear the path and guide conversation to the deeper, more essential issues at hand.

 

This book is not about religion, myths, beliefs, or intellectualized social disciplines, which are often peripheral, of marginal survival value, and more often detrimental to the human condition. It is about what matters: reclaiming our emotional self and rescuing our intuition from 5000 years of suppression and condemnation.  It is a book about 5000 years of emotional occlusion—though forgive me for not having been there throughout its entirety.

 

This book, above all, is about our continuing state of emotional orphanhood. It explores how our addiction to beliefs and mythology serves as proof of this haunting state of emotional homelessness. Beliefs and myths are merely a fragile decoy, exposing the persistent absence of our emotional foundation over the past 5000 years. Just as mathematical logicians use scenarios to ground their arguments in provable contexts, I use our dependency on beliefs and mythology as a framework to validate my thesis. Without examining the damaging effect of these constructs, discussions about our emotional state risk being dismissed as mere conjecture. But if you skip this commentary, you may misunderstand the purpose. Beliefs are not the focus of this book; they are simply a means to illuminate the far-reaching effects of civilization on individual emotionality. By the time you’re halfway through reading, and you feel surrounded by all things emotional, it will become clear that this book has never been about beliefs—and you’ll begin to realize we are not in Kansas anymore. This is the place where academics and scholarly-minded readers, who seek intellectual resolution should make a U-turn and find something else to read, and where individuals guided by their emotional curiosity, will begin to find the comfort of the deeper emotional domain.

 

The central theme in this book is the inexistence of an individual emotional foundation throughout the entire human civilization. While history is filled with displays of emotional intensity—some genuine, but many choreographed dramatizations marked by plenty of screaming, crying, and dying—what remains missing in either case is the emotional foundation needed to provide perspective, grounding, stability, and a deeper connection to reality. An emotion can be extremely intense and lead to wars and death, but if it does not reflect a deep, enduring, sober reality, what is it? In 5000 years, this foundation has never existed, does not exist, and has never been acknowledged by society as something that needs to exist.

 

Beliefs are used as a framework to illustrate and expose the concept of the vacuous emotional self, bringing to light the monumental damage this void has inflicted on civilization and bringing it to public trial.

 

This is not an intellectual book. However, I have to invade the intellectual sanctuary erected by disciplines such as philosophy and psychology to reclaim all the notions long misappropriated by them at the expense of our inarticulate surrender. I am a soldier of fortune making incursions on foreign soil, parachuting to set foot into the enemy territory of intellectuality with just enough time to rescue the hijacked treasures that belong to us, then flee. I am not an intellectual.  As a chapter in the book, I introduce "Philosophical Joe", my alter ego—someone who knows how to scrap with anything intellectual—intellectuality being utilitarian and territorial by definition, yet never ensnared by the lofty sanctuary of pompous intellectual reasoning. If, like me, you are not an intellectual but still feel compelled to use your unkempt remnants of sapience to take on an intellectual’s posturing—tearing their arguments to pieces with nothing but your teeth—be sure to spit out the carcass when you are done, before it ferments.

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This book is not about providing self-improvement recipes, tickling you on the belly, or standing on a pulpit to preach, inspire, and motivate thy kingdom come.  If I were to make a list of all the things I would like to be, a preacher would be number 1001, right after dying young for failing to follow my intuition.

 

This book is personal. There is a je ne sais quoi, anecdotal personal tone engraved in the book. After all, everything in the universe is personal—the impersonal being the most personal. After all, if we walk the earth one foot in front of the other, we are leaving a trace, and that makes us storytellers, so how can we not be? We can divide the world in two halves in any which way we want—young and old, northern and southern, friendly and unfriendly. We can also divide it into self-improvement recipe givers and storytellers, and I am not a recipe giver.  

 

At its core, this book is about drawing the battle lines between intellect and emotion: the biggest confrontation in human civilization.

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PRS and the War of Attrition

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In our consumer-oriented society, quality is measured by popularity in every segment of life, including books. Establishing a book in the social but paradoxically private conscience by its unique indelible signature, requires a long war of attrition.

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While I was writing this book in 2024, I renewed my vehicle license by changing its plates, as I always like to see what strange combination of randomly assigned letters and numbers I will get.  I found the sequence of my new plates to be even more obscure and insignificant than before. Then a year later, after I finished the book, I noticed that the letters on my plate, PRS, were the initials for this book’s title. The probability of having this match with these three letters is one in 17,576. Given that it has been pronounced that I shall never match one single digit in a long winning lottery number, it leaves me with no choice but to honor this probability as beyond a reasonable coincidence. Someone had embraced me, unnoticed on account of my self-absorbed absenteeism, and took notice of my book, wanting to affirm its eventual rightful place in society. The actual affirmation may come in a few  years, or perhaps long after I’ve stopped soiling the sole of my shoes. But if we set aside our tiresome reverence for the sequentiality of time, we might simply say: what will be is—and summon that affirmation now.

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On God's Shoulders

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