Note in a Bottle

Preface
Just imagine for a moment you have been living here on planet earth for some 70 years and you have enjoyed a full and adventure-filled life, and you have somehow, by various means found in your mind a place of peace, of contentment: of a comfortable sense of self-fulfilment, and a deep understanding of the world you live in and how it works.
Looking back, and knowing you will not be around forever, you realize that this mindset took a very long time to craft, and it was hard won: a shame it would be if you did not document your journey and share it, perhaps with your grandchildren, perhaps with certain friends or, for that matter, anyone in the wider world who might benefit.
Such describes the set of my mind as of this writing.
But there is more.
Besides a great deal of reading and research, I found that fortunately over the years in my careers as a writer, broadcaster, educator and innkeeper, I found some deeply knowledgeable accomplices in my quest for understanding: a good many of them. These were people from all walks of life and from many corners of the world: some professional, some who had taken too many wrong turns and learned from that, some just innately wise, and some who found their path to contentment buried deep in the fields of misfortune.
I learned a lot from these people: such is the subject of this book.
Some forty years did I spend off and on, endlessly and obsessively dogging the facts of these people's lives, probing their minds, following them as far as I could persuade them to lead me down the path of their spiritual evolution. Some shared their thoughts eagerly, some were reticent. But all those who had reached a place of mindful peace had one thing in common: they wanted to share their joy: to document their spiritual travels, their quests: to reveal their “secrets” although what is often called a secret today is little more than common sense. Which is what in the end provides the building blocks for the foundations of this book.
Over those years I took note of everything I heard and experienced, and over a period of the last ten years, with grandchildren and later a larger audience in mind, I gathered all the shards of wisdom I had found and, beginning with my own earliest memories, strung them as pearls on a string in a logical and sequential fashion just as they unfolded for me. These facts, values or ideas I then held up against the mirror of history and the writings of the world's great teachers so I might set them securely in a place of significance.
And that, friends old and new, is what you will find in the pages of this book.
And why “A Note in a Bottle?”
Because in our busy, noisy, information-soaked, worried world, overrun as it is with the voices of hucksters selling their phony dreams and materialist longings, we have come to live over the past number of years in what author Chris Hedges calls, “an empire of illusion.” Many of our longings, our values, our self perceptions have been artificially induced and serve not our interests, but corporate, political or religious ones.
By contrast, what you will find between the covers of this book is real.
Read if you will. It is, after all, just a note in a bottle. And you never know what kind of treasure you might find when a little package like this drifts unexpectedly into your life.
The adventure begins when you turn the page.
Blessings be,
Ron MacInnis
Woodside, Nova Scotia, 2014