Biography:

Robert Arias is a research neurophysiologist who has worked for the past fifteen years toward developing treatments for diseases of the central nervous system. The origin of his interest in the neurosciences can be traced to the series of profound psychedelic experiences which left him, as a young man not quite twenty years of age, teetering on the edge of madness. Seeking to explain away those experiences through the insights that modern science offered into the workings of the brain, he found the mystery only deepening, his hopes for a simple explanation inexorably receding from any purely intellectual reduction. All the while, following a parallel and often complementary tract, he found himself turning with ever more conviction to the worldÆs ancient spiritual traditions. The line of questioning which was to become his life-long quest has taken him across the vast landscape of human investigation into the nature of realityûform neurophysiology to the search for the historical Jesus, from Buddhist meditation to modern physics, from Muslim political history to the role of psychoactive plants in spiritual revelationûultimately arriving at a perspective of man in relation to the universe which is, paradoxically, both primordial and postmodern. The composition of his Apology has occupied him for most of the past decade.