About V.J.

Who am I?

A good question and the main theme for every single character in the book and this world.

I am born in 1965 of an artist family.

When I was twenty, my idea of reality was turned upside down. Like in the book, I met a holy ascetic on a high meadow in a remote Himalayan valley. I stayed with him for a month. He barely spoke. Against my instinct I left. Not knowing his name, it took me thirty-two years to find him again. The quest he initiated in me, took me through the worlds outside and inside me. I became a student of philosophy, religion, and culture a painter, a journalist, a writer, a designer, and an alternative practitioner. I lived in Egypt, India and Denmark and traveled the world. The story is an allegory for that search, but this is not a book about my life. Finally, I returned to another Himalayan master, to study consciousness and its source. This is where I wrote this novel, which at its heart is a story of the multiplicity of this world and the longing for the Oneness it springs from.  A fictionalized story introducing the ideas of non-dual philosophy (a vision of oneness) into a dualistic(fragmented) world. Writing the book took me back to the source of the story.


Why Did I Write This Book?

The story wrote itself and I was pulled in. Having studied Sufism, Buddhism, Pharaonic philosophy, psychology, and Indian philosophy, as well as the languages, histories, religions, and arts of the cultures I lived in, I wanted to write a book for the world, about the world. And by the world I mean the human being and his relentless, earnest but often headless search—a search in which most people don’t pause to ask themselves, “Who am I? What is this world? What am I searching for? And is it found where I think it is?”.