The one thread that connects all these writings, as well as my seminars and lectures during the past two dozen years is the issue of the relationship between the United States and Iran. My attempt has been to demonstrate and argue the following points:

1- The confrontational relationship between the world’s sole superpower, and the most economically, politically and strategically important state in the Middle East, has been counterproductive for the interests of both nations.

2- There are no fundamental obstacles or civilizational barriers that must first be overcome before a productive rapprochement can be worked out between the two countries.

3- The mutual mistrust and antagonisms that have prevailed and have now reached the threshold of a flashpoint are nourished and exacerbated by special interest groups on both sides, those individuals, groups and foreign lobbies that stand to benefit in an environment of suspicion, fear and regional instability.

Available on Compact Disk,

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Kam Zarrabi

P. O. Box 2380, Valley Center, CA 92082

*****

 

INTRODUCTION

Human intellect would break down without some answers, however self-deluding, to the perennial questions of who am I, where did I come from, where am I going, what is this all about and, perhaps most importantly, why?

This is the story of a young man whose quest for self-discovery is propelled by his intense curiosity, creative imagination and sense of adventure. Each time he goes around a full circle he finds himself elevated on a seemingly never ending spiral path. He meets living and life-like characters that accompany him on his journey. His mission takes him through uncharted territories that alternate between surreal dreamscapes, bone chilling heights and scorching wastelands.

The quest never ends; as he concludes, “When all your questions have found their answers, you join the living dead.”

Each section raises fundamental questions that we all need to have answered, whether we are casual readers or advanced academics. Many comfortable precepts are challenged, inviting the readers to open new windows into their own souls and to the world outside, where the shades of gray attain the colors of the rainbow in a new light.

Even though this book could best be classified as a philosophical adventure novel, the accounts are to some extent autobiographical. However, as is the case with any autobiography, the narrative is inevitably idealized to serve the author’s visions of how things should have or could have been. And, as is the case with many books of fiction, threads of the author's own life story are interwoven in the fabric of the text.

A Journey

I’ve known him for as long as I can remember. We were inseparable, like one soul in two bodies, long before he was forced to abandon a life of high adventure, fame and fortune as an international entrepreneur, and settle for a subsistence-level existence at the very edge of dim uncertainties.

Few people know his real background. He is certainly not the only one to have gone through catastrophic transitions brought about by crippling accidents or disease, or as a result of life-shattering events. In order to survive, many have had to abandon life’s treasure troves in such storms. Some survive and recover from the ordeal and struggle along in the hope of regaining the lost glory. Others fail in their renewed efforts and succumb to bitter disappointments.

This was not the case for this man. At forty-something, he swam ashore with a smile and never looked back to see what he had left behind in the turbulent waves that nearly took his life. I, on the other hand, carried that burden for him. After all, I have been more than just a friend, I have been his shadow, his alter ego, you might say.

I remember our last hunting trip to the Karkas Mountains of Central Iran with a couple of his associates. We were descending down the steep slope of a 10,000 foot-high ridge looking for his favorite trophy, the hardy Persian ibex. As usual, he was leading the way and making sure that the footing was secure for the rest of us. Suddenly, as he kicked down through the knee-deep snow, his heel failed to break through the underlying hard ice and he began to slide uncontrollably down the steep slope toward certain disaster. He used his ice ax to slow down his accelerating slide, creating a rooster’s tail of ice and snow glittering in the afternoon sun. I could feel his pain as we watched his water canteen explode, cushioning his impact against a large outcropping that brought him to a stop. Without a word, he lifted his ax and began to chip away at the rock that had saved his life. When we finally reached him, he held up a chunk of pearlescent white rock and said with a big grin, “Look, pure barite. I think the whole mountainside is high grade ore.”

That mining claim made him a fortune. And, he was just as nonchalant when his fortunes were swept away a few years later in the tide of the revolution. That’s the way he was then, and is even to this day.

Those who knew him before would find it difficult to reconcile the scholarly gentleman now lecturing on philosophy, religion and geopolitics today, with that young swashbuckling adventurer admired and envied for his raw physical energy and business successes. But I knew even then that inside that no-nonsense pragmatic man with the nerves of steel was hidden an ocean of passion and tender emotions. Perhaps he kept his sensitive core well hidden in order to safeguard it against the merely casual or the simply curious. Or, perhaps, he felt that exposing his emotionally vulnerable spirit would prove too crippling for his image as a warrior-knight in the business world.

It was in a hot summer afternoon that I sat with him in his humble home in a small town in rural Southern California. It was time; we needed to talk. Before we started, he diced a couple of cucumbers in a pitcher of slightly watered down vinegar syrup he had made, filled the pitcher with ice cubes and added some fresh mint leaves from his garden, making it what he calls the ultimate thirst quencher, his favorite summer drink.

That day he had conducted another of his controversial lectures and, after two hours, had left the audience with more questions than answers.

Before I began, he interrupted, “I know, I know; I have heard their comments many times myself. When I talk about politics, they take me for an ultra liberal, until I criticize the liberals as even bigger hypocrites than most conservatives. When I discuss religion, they take me for an atheist, until I tell them that I believe without religion human society would not have evolved. They equate what they see as my self-assured confident demeanor with the wealth that I don’t have. They see a womanizing older playboy, which I am certainly not; not anymore, anyway. So, they wonder, Who’s this guy, what’s he all about?

“I remember the elegant eighty-something lady a few years ago, who offered to take me on a cruise on her yacht to her summer residence in Hawaii. She was surprised that I did not accept her offer to use her luxury accommodations to do my research and finish my writings. I thought, how ironic that the old trophy hunter is now being hunted as a trophy himself!”

Of course, I do know very well who he is and what has made him what he is.

As I looked through a short stack of music CDs on the corner table, it didn’t surprise me that they were all Bruckner. He was an admirer of Anton Bruckner’s symphonic creations. And I knew why.

Bruckner respected and admired the time-honored musical traditions of his times. But he had stepped beyond Beethoven and Brahms, the gods he worshipped but chose not to emulate. Bruckner was known to have a profoundly mystical side, but unlike his younger contemporary Mahler, his music was never pretentiously esoteric.

He once commented that Bruckner reminded him of the Persian mystic-philosopher Hallaj, the one who proclaimed “I am the Truth”, while Mahler was to him Mowlana Rumi reincarnate. 

I looked over at the calendar on his desk and reminded him that he had already crossed over the threshold of seventy. Once again, he didn’t wait for me to continue.

“Yes,” he said, “between our memories of the past and dreams of the future we all navigate. As the past stretches behind us, our future shortens ahead. That’s what makes us humans; having memories and dreaming ahead. For some, memories fade away, for others they become memoirs.

“It’s been said that one who has no story to tell hasn’t truly lived a life. But, you could ask, what is a story if it is never told? It is like a book that has never been written. Am I right?”

My response was, “Or, perhaps, a book that has been written but never read.”

He remained in deep thought for a long minute, his head tilted back and his eyes focused on something beyond the ceiling into the deep sky. He lowered his head slowly and nodded in a gesture of ambivalent approval. He then walked slowly over to the bookshelves that covered three walls of that large room, retrieved a thick manuscript in gray covers, and returned silently.

“Here, my friend, here is my story, and it remains open-ended with more questions than answers. Remember, when all your questions have found their answers, your quest ends and you join the living dead.”

This book, as well as my previous book

are available through

Kam Zarrabi, P. O. Box 2380, Valley Center, CA 92082

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NECESSARY ILLUSION $14.95 INCLUDING POSTAGE AND ANY SALES TAX

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**********

NECESSARY ILLUSION .

The focus of this book is on the philosophy of existence and the meaning of life, subjects that have perplexed mankind for milennia.
Rather than attempt to reach for answers that at best can be no more than subjective speculation, I have tried to present an objective analysis, not to discourage the faithful, but to illuminate the path for the true seeker.

An updated 2007 Compact Disc version of

NECESSARY ILLUSION

in Microsoft Word format is now available for purchase. Below is the new introduction to prepare the reader for the journey.

$15.00, inclusive of shipping and handling.

PREPARING THE READER

The why question, the kind of why that cannot be substituted with how without losing its fullest context, is quite peculiar to only one species of life among all others; the peculiarity that is a reflection of the special inquisitiveness which distinguishes mankind as a self-aware, abstract-thinking possessor of what it regards as a soul.

The question “why” has far reaching implications. At a deeper level, why implies a cause, and not just any cause but a purposeful cause, which in turn begs for a motivator or intelligence with a willful design in an anthropic sense. All these mental imageries have provided mankind with meaning and purpose, without which life’s journey would have been nothing more than, simply put, nothing!

The human consciousness could never have coped with the idea that the awareness of meaning and purpose is simply a human-specific mental construct that was necessary for the evolved mind to navigate through the human-specific puzzlements of its existence. To this day, few ever wonder how billions upon billions of other life forms past, present and future, existed and shall exist without any concern for or a cognition of a purpose or meaning in life. For a great majority of those who have pondered such thoughts, the response, as reflected universally in the great religions and mythologies of mankind, is intuitively clear: Mankind is just different from the rest of this creation!

Summarized in a nutshell, man’s heightened cognitive awareness that has resulted from an evolutionary progression on the way toward what man has chosen to think of as intellectual perfection, has made it possible for this species of life to become cognizant of a divine mastermind and, in the process, realize that what separates him from and makes him superior to other species is that unique divine gift, the human soul.

Reaching such a self-redeeming conclusion was not only instinctively intuitive, it was so instrumental in resolving mankind’s most perplexing questions that it had to appear as more than just instinctive and intuitive – it had to be further legitimized by reasoned rationale or logic, albeit ad hoc, to overcome skepticism or denial by the more daring inquisitive minds.

It should not be surprising that for countless millennia the natural, instinctive and intuitive – the gut feeling – dominated mankind’s intellectual efforts in resolving life’s mysteries. Pigeonholes were thus created in man’s consciousness in shapes and sizes that conformed to what was perceived as a-priori truths or cosmic realities. If these mental constructs were to provide comfort for the human intellect and to shelter it from corrosive uncertainty and nihilism, observations and experiences had to somehow fit or be forced into the prefabricated pigeonholes of man’s mind. Phenomena that resisted this conformity were stripped of their incongruous appendages, then reshaped into compliance with the mind’s requirements.*

The alternative path had to wait entry into the human consciousness until a much later stage of cultural development. Only within the last few centuries have thinkers been comfortable with abandoning preconceived certainties of faith (the mind’s pigeonholes) and adopt what is today called the scientific method. This path starts from the opposite direction, by working from observations and experiences and attempting to formulate explanations through experimentations, trials and errors, and always remaining open to further modifications as new evidence might suggest.

A different generation of pigeonholes are thus shaped within the scientific man’s mind. While they serve to explain the daily phenomena of life, these new mental pigeonholes remain resilient and flexible enough to change shape and dimension by the requirements of new evidence.

The transition from faith based belief systems to rational or logic-based reas has not been easy...............................