A Wake in Life Looking for God

This book is illustrated using more than seventy pictures that I created during the past twenty years. I discovered one day that I was manifesting in a reality of atoms, that I did not create, as a conscious self-aware human experiencing life through perceptions created by cognition using a body-brain. The human was living machine made of atoms that it seemed I controlled using just my thoughts. I became curious about existence and explored the reality of atoms using my thoughts. My life is not like yours. I began life in a slightly used 14-year-old body. The body and its former consciousness fell through a false floor of leaves at a cliff edge onto rocks some 40 feet below. It was 1964. Science had yet to fully understand head trauma and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. The body survived. The consciousness, the personality called Tom did not survive. I am what emerged. A consciousness with a personality that other humans called Tom. Unlike the original, I did not get the training typical of a newly emerged human consciousness. Everyone assumed I knew all those things. I didn't. I was a child in a 14 year old body. Nobody knew that including me. Much the same as any child with an emergent consciousness takes years to develop, it would take me years to develop my sense of self. I had no way to know what I didn't know. I read books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. Regardless of what I read, I still did not know better despite being constantly reminded that I should know better. It would take six years for me to learn that I have no memories before age 14. This book is my story told in two parts. The first part is told as it happened without knowing how it might end. The second part is looking back and knowing what happened. My life and experiences may seem unbelievable or the result of an over-active imagination however, they are just as real as the flowers, the trees, the humans, and all the other things I have known in this reality. While looking for God, I discovered an unknown and unknowable thing. It seemed to be an artifact that was designed for some purpose, that somehow involved me.