Tom Omidi Orden de los libros

Most people follow the mainstream and get dissolved within the society. They simply adopt pervasive social values and imitate one another in order to pursue their ambitions and satiate their needs for social acceptance and attention. Following this popular path feels most natural, while it also maximizes people's chances of fulfilling their collective needs for pleasure, sexuality, power, and materialism. This happens at the cost of neglecting their integrity, independence, and identity, but they do not mind. This customary life structure feels the easiest to manage for most people, anyway, because they are not usually driven by strong passions other than sexuality and materialism. Besides, they are properly conditioned and trained since childhood to follow this path. Furthermore, many role models are always around to encourage and support one another within common values and norms. Yet, this lifestyle revolves around a dysfunctional structure that people have put together recklessly and accepted its norms helplessly.We should at least know the perils of living in the mainstream. What is the purpose of taking all these rigorous steps in life so obediently without questioning our rationality and objectives? Get education, find work, make money, marry, have children, buy a house, travel, divorce, etc., all mostly in vain, as if chasing this routine life structure were ingrained in our genes.

Grasping the realm of our spirit and learning how to empower it through a personally defined spirituality is the only way to survive life's hardships and perhaps find a relatively peaceful life, too. As another natural wonder of the universe, fortunately, our urge for spirituality is deep within us like a conduit for boosting our spirits. Of course, attaining this private sense of divinity is a personal challenge, which neither religions nor scholars can explain to us or help us attain. We must set out to grasp it on our own in a hard way. Then, we can draw on this inner power and intuition to set our personal beliefs, build our identity, and keep our spirits intact. Otherwise, we would stagger along with the cocky crowd without knowing who we are and what the purpose of our living is.An inherent link exists between our spirit and psyche as well, but it must be reinforced through self-awareness and growing a personal sense of spirituality. It begins with exploring our urges, psyche, and needs, which we must tune collectively to revamp our deluded mentality about life and being. Through a soul-searching process, we must somehow come to terms with our neglected and pained spirit and feel our link to the universe. At the same time, our invigorated spirituality bolsters both our psyche and spirit to redefine and enrich our lives, as explained in this volume.

The value of a person's thoughts depends on his/her personality, primary wisdom, mood, and motives. However, we all share the same fundamental thoughts about life intuitively. They are the most primitive and instinctual thoughts (and questions) that we reflect upon regarding our existence. They are primary thoughts behind the whole philosophy, processes, and actions of life. We know intuitively—like a kind of magical power—about our need for fundamental thoughts to define life, grow our convictions, and develop a personal life philosophy. Only then, we believe, we can begin to justify our existence as an intelligent person somewhat. At the very least, we like to feel some basic senses of compassion, love, and peace in line with valid thoughts.At the same time, the miraculous, vast scope of our thoughts reflects the complexity of human nature and hints the possibility of reaching a higher level of humanness if only we understood our naiveté, sentiments, brilliance, arrogance, and ignorance that be-siege us, all at once or in rotations. We only need to know the right thoughts to make our lives meaningful.Surely, our success in life depends on our character and back-ground, but also personal efforts to control our thoughts at least thirty percent of the time. Even this minimal awareness of our thoughts is helpful for maintaining a healthier lifestyle. Yet, most of us do not know the best way of using our brains.

Darren Durant returns to Vancouver in 1988 after living in Tehran for three years and coping with the chaos of the Iran-Iraq war, including nightly missile attacks. He is eager to establish himself as a painter and find a reliable mate after an agonizing separation from his beloved wife, Erica, and going to Iran. Even the sacrifice to abandon his artistic life and work in Erica's software company as a computer technician had not saved their marriage. Bizarre events obstruct Darren's efforts to heal the scars of the war and his failures in marriage and artistic career. In particular, a seemingly haunting canvas he had painted in 1985 at the shores of the Caspian Sea keeps wreaking intricate emotional situations for him and others, especially a married Persian woman who follows him to Vancouver with fantastic dreams. In spite of his intriguing romances, Darren grapples with the dilemma of committing to someone without getting emotionally hurt again versus the chance of ending up lonely and loony like his father. All along, his lovers' rivalry to monopolize him, mixed with plots by friends and foes for baffling reasons, further complicates his efforts to settle down.

This is an abstract novel in the sense that fifteen independent tales and essays depict a commoner's unsettling fate and mind during his travels from city to city, while he staggers in the journey of life itself, satiates his curiosities, gets old, fights with his friends and family, encounters complex people and situations, and strives to make sense of it all. The stories do not follow a single plot or a sequence of related events. Instead, they follow the highlights of the protagonist's life and thoughts in a series of intriguing and spirited moments during various stages of his existence. Meanwhile, his major challenges and observations through this mandatory journey reveal the depth of psychological dilemmas and distress that most humans must endure in the new era merely as a reward or punishment for being. In particular, the effects of our shoddy relationships per se ruin our spirits nowadays, while we also wonder about our choices and the purpose of our daily efforts and ambitions. Everybody is eager to find the meaning of life these days to no avail. We can never succeed, but this lifelong novel reveals how absurd life in all stages is if we just get the gist of it intelligently.