We’re Giving Away Copies Of My New Book, The Human Element
This giveaway is now over. But you can buy THE HUMAN ELEMENT here.
Last Thanksgiving, as I was on the second of four drafts and a deadline, my little cousin Harrison came up to me and asked what I was doing. I explained. He looked at the screen and said: “Oh, I know those kinds of books… the ones without pictures. I like those, because you can make up the pictures how you want to see them in your mind.”
I love how little kids so easily find the words we can’t.
When I was a kid, I had some weird crap happen. Have you ever had sleep paralysis? (A lot of you have, actually, because I’ve written about it before and got masses of emails from people who had similar experiences.) Alas, such is the case with this particular genre of weird.
Sleep paralysis is what happens when, essentially, your brain puts your body to sleep but not your mind. It’s medically explainable, not at all uncommon. I can pretty much guarantee you’ve known at least one person who has had one episode of it.
It’s scary. You’re awake in your body, but you’re paralyzed. It’s painful and terrible and unnatural and traumatizing. Sometimes you start lucid dreaming, sometimes you’re dreaming and you don’t realize. Sometimes you become totally immersed in a hallucinatory experience, and sometimes you let yourself just be.
It was the first time I understood that I was more than my body. Because I felt my body, and then I felt myself. I think it’s a privilege to have had that moment of realization amid panic.
So I wrote about it. I wrote a lot about it. I wrote what it meant to me and what it means to me and what happened in my life afterwards and how I took what I came to just inherently know through the simple awareness of my innermost being and how that incredible crazy weird magical fateful understanding led me here.
As with everything I do and write I hope you take from this whatever you need. I hope you find whatever you didn’t know you were looking for. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that in here you find something you always knew and felt but you’d never seen outside your own mind. — BW
“You do not have to be a deeply spiritual person to understand what the human element is, or how it applies to you, or what you are supposed to do with this book once you read it.”
This is the story of becoming, the process of actualization that we all go through, especially when we are most unaware that it’s happening. Written with striking familiarity and uncanny understanding, this book will open your heart and touch your soul by putting into words the things that are both deeply rooted and hidden in us that we miss them even when they are most transparent.
The human element is the thing that binds us, the thing we have to overcome, how we have to stop standing in our own way and let everything unfold. It is a philosophical take on what it means to overcome humanness by acceptance, initially realized through the experiences of sleep paralysis and other awakenings.