A businessman who never stopped asking a spiritual question
Adam Fleck
I have spent most of my life looking for the thing underneath everything else.
Growing up, I had every reason to feel secure. My father was a builder in the truest sense — a self-made entrepreneur who created successful restaurant chains from scratch, by force of personality and an almost reckless confidence in his own vision. But financial losses and illness cut that story short. He died while I was a student at the University of Colorado, before he had enough time to find the answers he was looking for.
I inherited that search.
After graduation I went to work for a construction company, learned their systems, and discovered I had a knack for technology. That eventually led me into a career as a business systems consultant — work that carried its own satisfactions but never quieted the underlying question.
I never stopped looking. Not in any obsessive way, but the question remained open, the way a window left ajar will let a little air in no matter what else is happening in the room.
Then came COVID.
I watched the pandemic move through the world and found myself less focused on the virus itself than on what it revealed. Here was a global crisis that demanded a coordinated response, and we could not coordinate. We could not even agree on what was true. The fracture was not new — it had been widening for decades — but the pandemic made it impossible to look away from.
That was the question that finally pushed me to write. The answer I kept arriving at, through years of reading across science, spirituality, ecology, neuroscience, and philosophy, was that the root problem is disconnection. Not disconnection as a metaphor or a feeling, but as a fundamental misperception about the nature of reality and our place in it.
I want to be honest about something. I did not particularly want to be the author of this book. Writing a book is, in some ways, an act of ego. But I kept arriving at the same conclusion, and eventually it seemed more honest to say it plainly than to keep circling it privately.
I am not a scientist or a theologian. I am a businessman who has spent his whole life asking a spiritual question, someone who watched his father search for answers and inherited that search. This book is the result of that inheritance — a synthesis of what I found, offered to anyone else who is still looking.
"If any part of your life has left you wondering why everything feels so fragmented, and whether there is a different way to understand what is happening to us, then this book is meant for you." — Adam Fleck, Preface