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.
This manuscript is in 400 double-sided pages (as of May, 2008), large format 8.5 x 11 size paper, an up-to-date compilation of all my writings on US/Iran relations starting March, 2003.
This binder volume is available at
$75 a copy, inclusive of tax and postage.
Additional articles, about once each month, may be added to the binder at $5 a copy.
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
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
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
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
IN ZARATHUSHTRA'S SHADOW $21.95, INCLUDES POSTAGE AND ANY SALES TAX
NECESSARY ILLUSION $14.95 INCLUDING POSTAGE AND ANY SALES TAX
Please send your check or money order to the above address
The books will be mailed to you via PRIORITY MAIL
**********
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...............................