From there the story moves to a middle-aged eccentric in a small town in southern Oregon who suddenly feels the need for some company to help explore a huge anomaly near the coast of Oregon. Before long, chance and serendipity bring five people and a group of star travelers together for adventures into other dimensions both inner and outer where they come into contact with various other beings, all pursuing the meaning of life and personal evolution. Adventures and insights abound around speculations on who they (read that ‘we’) are, how they and the cosmos came to be, the true nature of their reality and their ultimate destiny.
The characters' adventures include journeys through 1) the subjective nature of time, 2) parallel lives, 3) existence on differing dimensions of reality, and 4) the nature of consciousness and its possible manipulation through varying types of meditation and visualization; all of which lead the characters to unusual experiences and the need to ruminate about the physics or metaphysics underlying their experiences.
Although the book is written as a science fiction-fantasy type adventure story, many of the concepts used in the construction of the world pictured in the book come from such fields as Eastern philosophy and cosmology, Western quantum physics and cosmology and a blend of East-West metaphysics. As a result, even though Journey to Mandalam is written as science fiction-fantasy, it’s a fantasy with a foundation of real possibility in it. This ‘foundation of realism’ however, does not make the book difficult to read. In the book any difficult concepts are couched within the story in such a way that the context makes them easy to understand for those not grilled and skilled in the sciences.
Richard Bradshaw was born in San Francisco, grew up high in the mountains of Colorado, spent sixteen years in Hawaii learning the meaning of ‘culture’ and how to ‘partake’ of various other cultural realities by allowing transformation of his own. The past twenty five years he’s been teaching at universities in Japan and slowly soaking up a fundamentally different ‘reality’. Inspiration for his novels and many of the ideas found therein are a product of personal experience as a practitioner and teacher of yoga and meditation for over forty years, studies in the fields of Asian comparative religion (M.A.) and social and cross-cultural psychology (PhD.), and more informally quantum physics and cosmology.
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