This essay reveals how our brains adapt to painful situations by taking comfort in illusions. By finding fulfillment in beliefs and dreams, we have "normalized" a way of life that is not sustainable. Our eventual survival requires a way of life based on intimacy. Finding comfort in the moment, we would no longer be dependent on dreams, and thus also on the "truths" by which we hope to realize themChilling in parts, bittersweet in others, 'Life and Death on the Tracks' is a dark short story that documents an ageing train driver's slow demise and the troubles of his anguished wife. Harold has spent his entire working life on the tracks and once his railway line runs into financial trouble, so does Harold. The decline of the railway line unnervingly and unceasingly goes hand in hand with the decline of the man. When the inevitable comes to pass and the line closes for good, the seriously ill Harold goes missing. Mary struggles in the wake of her loss, unable to properly grieve. Adding to her distress, rumours emerge of a ghostly presence roaming the railway tracks in the days and weeks following Harold’s disappearance. Reported sightings of an ethereal figure standing on the footplate of a phantom locomotive cannot escape Mary’s attention, and although she initially attempts to dismiss the rumours as wild speculation, a product of vivid imaginations, an all consuming doubt remains. The story climaxes as Mary decides that she must know the truth behind Harold’s vanishing act. Mary’s last act is to head down to the railway line as she must investigate the supernatural rumours for herself.

The Brain Virus is a short book that explains how humans became infected by a simple idea that changed what we value, thus, transformed how our brains process information. Our resulting unhappiness has us seeking self-help through books and therapy. But we aren’t the problem. The problem is modern cultures based on values inspired by the brain virus—cultures that we don’t emotionally understand.The Brain Virus—What Our Brains don’t want Us to Know, is a short book that proposes that the human race has been infected by a “brain virus,” and rendered ineffective, just as computers are when infected by a computer virus. Humans are not emotionally equipped to be happy when we can’t be true to ourselves, yet that is the cultural circumstance our infected brains have inflicted upon us. We spend our lives trying to get right with life, by searching for happiness in religious beliefs, social and economic status, self-help teachings, meditation, and countless other things. Despite our efforts, things never quite feel right. The problem is, we are born to be expressions of life, not of the modern human cultures we live in. So, how could life possibly feel right, when subject to cultures based on values that are an affront to life? Our infection has gone unnoticed, since it began affecting human brains 10 to 20 thousand years ago—for two reasons. First, no one could have imagined, until the computer era, how intelligence can be rendered dysfunctional buy a simple bit of code—or, in the case of the human brain, a simple idea. Secondly, by the time we became aware that such infections can occur, human brains were universally infected, making the attitudes and sensibilities displayed by infected brains seem normal. There’s no antivirus program for the human brain, nor is there likely ever to be. Disinfection is a matter of comprehension, not of intent. Recovery requires that we first comprehend how our brains became infected—that is, how a simple idea transformed what humans value, and thereby radically changed how our brains process information. With that comprehension, disinfection is a matter for each subconscious mind, in its own time, seeing through the illusion that sustains the virus. This won’t be easy. Unfortunately, infected brains love the brain virus for the same reason addicts love an addiction—because of how it makes us feel. Indeed, when under its influence, we love the brain virus more than we love ourselves, the people around us, or the habitat that sustains us. Only uninfected brains value interdependent relationships above wealth and privilege. Seeing through the illusion that grounds the infection is the perquisite, if we are ever again to know the love for one another that is essential to our happiness, and to our species’ eventual survival.