This book is written for people who want to pursue self-knowledge without commiting to an ideology. It is for those who have explored ideologies and recognized that they have been asked to comply with authority rather than trust their own inner compass. Increasingly, people are foregoing the hard work of personal transformation by relinquishing their sovereignty to ideologies and their authorities. These ideologies can be secular or religious, focused on everything from politics to economics. Each time a person looks to such systems rather than to his own awareness, he begins a steady process of compromise. That compromise has been made easier over the last few decades because of 4 things: 1) Society's normalization of narcissitic behavior, 2) The willingness of people to forego the work of forging genuinely intimate relationships, 3) The collective adoption of "meta-narratives" which portray a historically distorted view of human nature, and 4) A collective addiction to emotionally-based intensity as a substitute for genuine aliveness.

The phenomenological account provided in this book recounts one person's desire to honor a childhood mystical experience - not through adhering to someone else's ideas about self-knowledge, but through the directly engaging the world.