What you are about to read cuts as close to the nerve center of all human misery as can be conveyed through words.

Each person who reads this will identify with it as he flashes upon his own experiences. No one has at any time written such words. You have not read this anywhere, yet you will mysteriously and instantly recognize what is said, proving the omniscience and ever-presence of Truth.

And it just may be that the power of it will overwhelm you and save you from your suffering.

Unfolding before your eyes in just a few pages is the root of all sickness and suffering—even war itself.

And no matter how many times you read the same words, they will take on new meaning, new depth, and encompass more relationships and expose more human folly.

It is too much to expect words alone to express all I want to say. Your own mind must go beyond the horizon of the written word.

And, if it please God, the Spirit will witness and interpret in such a way as to free you once and for all from your enslavement and compulsions.

"There is in all of us an unhealthy need for something or someone to stimulate and excite us..."

There is in all of us an unhealthy need for something or someone to stimulate and excite us, to make us feel alive and happy.

As we grow older, ordinary stimulation from people ceases to be enough and we look down to the world of beasts and drugs (and other poisons) to turn us on or off.

There is no depth to which a depraved man will not sink for escape and for excitement. To escape (through excitement) is to lose awareness, and to lose awareness so as to relieve guilt is to let something unspeakably evil enter, take up residence, and act as a parasite on your soul.

We cling to what corrupts us, and as we draw security from it, it draws life from us.

At this point, that thing in you wants to make you drop this article as if it were a hot coal, as if the spirit of this book were a demon.

But if you are blessed, the real you—now a prisoner of the passion and the poison—beckons you to read on. No matter what the pain or the price you must pay, in a wordless way it says, “Read on.”

As every slave has a need, so every master has a need to be needed. In his psychotic state, the victim’s need cries out to be fulfilled by the reinforcing love of the tyrant who created it.